three practices for men who have bodies and souls
don’t try to calm it down
A blackbird lands on a man's leg. He is on his phone. A little girl calls for her father from the fountain. The bird shits on the man's leg.
The man does not notice. He is scrolling, head sunk in front of his body as if on a guillotine, eyes squinting to read.
The bird hops off his leg onto the concrete.
The man looks up to see that his daughter has fallen into the fountain, and, as he stands, smushes bird shit into his jeans with his palm.
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Each moment of your life calls for your awareness. The difficult moments ask for you to stay with them, to feel the thing that you'd rather avoid. Culture swoops in to offer a thousand glittery, chemical-fueled ways to escape.
My only invitation is for you to cultivate your awareness such that you can actually choose where you direct your gift of conscious awareness, instead of doing what most men do: ping-ponging between stimulus, reaction, and distraction until the moment you die.
The viral, addictive story of masculine disconnection is always just one breath away from being rendered utterly false and useless.
In this post, I'm going to offer three practices for every man whose soul is calling him to step deeper into life, to engage rather than distract, and how to reap the powerful rewards of opening.
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I've participated in many impactful containers over the years, from rites of passage ordeals and psychedelic ceremony to trauma therapy, sexual intimacy workshops and wilderness immersions.
The men's container I offer blends the most meaningful pieces of these trainings and practices. There's just one requirement to engage with the work: a willingness to get uncomfortable. A willingness to look at things within yourself that you've been avoiding.
What men often need more than any ritual or ceremony is to simply be met in the present moment.
One practice—one massively disruptive technology—stands the test of time: men sitting together outside.
THREE PRACTICES
Staying Present
I cannot overemphasize the importance of staying present. It is the only thing that will bring you meaning in this life, the only thing that will make your relationships thrive, and the only thing that will prevent you from dying with regrets.
Think about the birth of your first child. Falling in love. That time you thought you'd die. These moments ask us to wake up to everything alive around us. Most people carry a handful of memories of times they were fully present, and they cherish them. This awareness is available to you all the time.
One singular moment from my first ayahuasca ceremony sticks with me: a woman lying belly up, spine arched in some Exorcist pose. The facilitator held his hand over her belly, not touching, just hovering.
I remember the facilitator's voice saying, "don't try to calm it down. Let it do its work."
Don't try to calm it down. Stay with it. Refuse to flinch. Open your heart. Again and again—even when it breaks—open.
Listening to Inner Wisdom
I guide men toward the wisdom that still lives in our bodies, in our relationships to things and other people and animals and the land.
When I'm really paying attention, I can hear it, whispering. It says:
don't worry about publishing one post every week.
make the time to hang with your child instead of chasing money.
open your heart when you most want to close up.
It says, if you want to share the true essence of your work, stop filtering your voice through AI. Even if it saves time. Especially if it saves time.
To me, it says, slow down.
If you listen to what your deep wisdom knows, what does it say?
Embracing Discomfort
We live in a culture that caters to pleasure, satisfaction, numbness. It trains us to deal with its overwhelm by wasting away our vital life force energy, instead of building it up.
Why would you choose conscious awareness, anyway? It's a lot of work to stay open, awake, aware. It's just so much easier to dance the tangle and fray of outrage and unexamined belief.
But something unique happens when we slow down and start to pay attention to our breath. A capacity appears that did not seem to exist before. An ability to name your fear instead of caving to it. An ability to stay, and open to possibility.
That's where the magic is. That's where the medicine is. That's where the deeper presence can be found. That where the better sex comes from. That's where the deeper relationship lies. That's where the money flows.
Many of the men I speak with are anxious about the state of the world. I think that's what's being invited of so many of us: stay with it. Refuse to flinch—but instead of shutting down or putting up the wall, open your heart, and breathe deeper.
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But please, don't take my word for it.
So let's try a simple experiment:
Consider the big powerful abundant thing that you want.
Name it aloud. Write it down.
Sense into where that thing lives in relation to you now.
What does it feel like it might take for you to access it?
Ask yourself, what am I willing to lean into, in order to get that thing?
This exercise invites you to practice all three skills: staying present with your desire, listening to your inner wisdom about what's calling you, and embracing the discomfort that might arise when you consider what it will take to achieve it.
(This isn’t the only type of discomfort you can lean into, but studies show that when there’s a personal reward on the far side of a hard thing, you’re more likely to succeed.)
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Please expect to see some changes here starting this summer. I'm going to slow down my post rate and offer more depth, more stories, more ways for you to engage.
I commit to spending more time in silence and to pause using AI to produce my work here. I want to write again. I want you to trust that what you are subscribing to is thoroughly human.
I'm also going to reduce the monthly subscription price to Into the Fire to $5 per month. I'm up to my eyeballs in subscriptions, and imagine that you are, too.
Consider it a token dropped into the wishing well of your life.
