Playboy was one of the magazines in my youth that taught me the subtle art of escaping discomfort, confusion or just boredom while fantasizing about — and later masturbating to — beautiful women. (I think it was for so many of us.) It was one of the first places I learned: Women take away pain. Which was a belief system I carried into my forties.

A beautiful 2D woman in a magazine is one thing, but making a human being into a receptacle for your pain is quite another. And that’s what I did, unknowingly, in relationships: I projected a savior narrative onto the women I dated, became disappointed when they couldn’t live up to it, and then blamed and often punished them for it.

The first time I saw this pattern clearly was in the Sierra Mountains in 2019. I’d just been through another brief-but-high octane romance and wanted to skip town for a while. So I signed up for a wilderness fast and found myself totally isolated on a mountainside far from civilization with nothing but a sleeping bag and four jugs of water.

It was there, in beautiful, terrifying stillness, where I discovered my true baseline without women: restlessness, anger, fear, regret, shame, grief. Decades of painful — and unaddressed — emotions. And I began feeling them in a deeper way. It was a process that would take me many years and become my book Hating Women, which is out now.

Men are getting widely spotlighted in the news and in our relationships these days for our struggles. But most men of the men I’ve had the pleasure to know in my life are good men. They don’t want to hurt women. They want to do their best in relationship. But because we’re taught as boys — implicitly or explicitly — that women are a salve for pain, we often use women in exactly that way without knowing it: we take our unprocessed hurts we haven’t dealt with, and show up asking the women we love to hold them for us. And that is something that needs to change in order for our relationships to flourish.

Men have to own, sit with, and heal their pain — both alone and together with other men. And we can’t do that until we create the conditions for that pain to rise. We can do that by cutting distractions. We can do that by sitting in silence and tracking what sensations arise in our bodies. We can do that by getting together with other men and being vulnerable. We can do that by not asking yet another relationship to hold what we haven’t faced.

For me, those four days spent in silence in the mountains didn’t cure me. They just showed me the work I had ahead of me when I returned to my life. The practices I needed to put in place. The ways I needed to slow down and be more present. The efforts I needed to make to focus on myself and my own healing instead of charging head-on towards another woman I was hoping would save me.

For me, that work has taken a while.

Sean

It’s such a trip.

I remember when this book was an idea I had on the way home from the grocery store. Now it’s this cool thing that’s being released into the world.

The book tells the story of my dependency on women: for safety, validation, relief. And the rage, grief and self hatred that lived underneath it. It also explores how modern men are more dependent on women than ever. (And yet will do practically anything to avoid facing it.)

Forty years ago, Men’s Movement writers like Robert Bly and Sam Keen spoke openly about the importance of men of all ages coming together to initiate each other into embodied manhood, cutting the symbiotic cord with our mothers and other women, and finding a home and safety within our own male skin. It was only from this place, they said, that a man could step into his fullest power in life and create lasting intimacy in relationship.

It’s clear to me now that this message was ahead of its time. Things hadn’t gotten dicey enough in the late 1980s and early 90s for men, or between men and women to force men to step up and tackle the tough road of initiating each other on a mass scale. Women hadn’t raised their standards. Personal growth and mental health weren’t buzz words. 80-90% of suicides weren’t yet male. Plus, the rise of the internet (and porn) in the coming years gave us more ways to dope, distract and disembody. We continued to get further from the sacred nature of male presence, and from the ancient practices that once turned boys into men.

So here we are in 2026, and men of all ages continue to struggle — both in their relationships with themselves and with the women they love. Something has to give. Men need a path to follow to heal.

Most self help and men’s work books tell the reader how to go from feeling stressed and stagnant to aware and alive. But the authors rarely lay out the blood and guts of their own journeys.

This book doesn’t play that game.

In this book, before I make any recommendations as to how you might walk this path, I show you how I walked it.

I show you my own healing, step by step.

I show you how my life changed as I went inward, reconnected to my body and my buried emotions, and sought guidance and initiation from mentors and guides.

I show you how all of my relationships shifted as a result of this work.

I don’t preach to you from a pulpit.

I take you on the ride.

If you’re someone who has been following me or my work, please consider ordering a copy of the book for yourself (and perhaps for a man you know who could use it).

I look forward to sharing it with you so soon-

Sean

I can’t tell you how long it took me to distill my experiences — and the experiences of hundreds of other men I’ve met — into this one paragraph.

I just couldn’t seem to understand why my life seemed to be this constant performance for women: obsessing over my appearance, trying to make myself as attractive or desirable as possible, always worrying if I was pleasing her, trying to avoid conflict, dancing around my shame. I was never present — with myself or with my partner. I was defensive and protected. And I was always picking women to date who I had to chase or perform for to hold onto.

It was exhausting.

Everything began to shift for me over the last couple years. I found myself in a series of relationships where I, quite painfully, watched myself performing. I watched myself be in almost constant states of self betrayal to keep these relationships going, to appear like I was okay with things I wasn’t okay with. Finally, last fall, I was out on a walk in Los Angeles, and I had an epiphany. For all of the previous year, I’d been lying to myself — and to my partner — in order to hang onto a relationship. And I couldn’t do it anymore.

I came home, ended the relationship, and several days later was driving towards a new life. Something had cracked. I knew the performance was over. Then came six months of grief. In hindsight, I realize I was grieving for all the years I’d been performing for women. Going against my intuition, my deeper knowing, just to secure the safety of a woman’s approval. It was the healing of my mother wound in real time. And it was gnarly.

In time, I began to see this performance went so much deeper than women. This was a performance I had been doing for the world. See, when a boy doesn’t go through initiation, when he doesn’t have healthy, non-judgmental, loving male mirroring around him to reflect his true self back to him, he never learns who he actually is. His life becomes a performance. He gets the job he thinks supposed to get. He lives in the place he thinks he should live. He makes friends and dates women who feel familiar to his system, where there may be chemistry or proximity, but no deeper connection. Meanwhile, beneath the surface, he’s suffering. Playing a role he created to survive as a child even though he’s now a man.

So many of us do it. So many of us get stuck in performance. Which then begs the question: Okay, so what do I do to get out of it?

Well, the whole performance begins from a pure place: We need nurturing and care to survive. And we see that by pleasing women, we get nurturing and care. We secure safety in an uncertain world. (That’s a smart move as a kid. So we can be gentle with ourselves as we unpack our strategies.)

But becoming an solid, reliable, trustable man means we stop seeking safety outside ourselves (from women, from work, from status or possessions) and start creating it within. How do we do it? We reconnect to our bodies.

See, in order to perform all these years, we had to disconnect from our bodies and their constant feedback and wisdom. We flew up into our heads and lived through strategizing, avoiding all the pain we were carrying. And once a man begins reconnecting to his body, the pain is the first thing he meets. It’s not fun. For many of us, it’s usually decades of emotions we’ve never felt or experienced. Sensations and memories we tried to bury. But if we keep going and stay diligent, something miraculous happens:

With every sensation rediscovered, with every reconnection made, we feel safer within. More solid. More anchored. And when we feel anchored within ourselves the performance starts to unravel. Why? Well, because we come to know, deep within our physical body, that we’re safe. We know no matter what happens out there, we’re good in here. This changes a man’s life forever.

I’ve come to believe that the greatest currency in our ever changing, wacky, and uncertain world is a man’s anchor to himself. With his center intact, he becomes free, he becomes a leader, he becomes a safe space for relationships, and he becomes the kind of man who begins to magnetize and attract the very things he was always chasing and trying to perform for.

If you’re a man who feels listless, thrown about by the breaking waves of work, relationship and this wild ride here on earth, I feel you. And I might ask you to consider what your life might look like from a place of safety and solidness within. Who would you be? How would you live and love? What might you create? What legacy might you leave?

Sean

But I’m realizing something now:

Doing the work isn’t the hardest part.

The hardest part is learning how to actually live after you’ve done it. After you see your patterns. After you understand where they came from. After you’ve felt the grief, the anger, the truth of your life. After you’ve had the breakthroughs.

Then what?

Truthfully, no one really talks about this part. There’s a lot out there about awakening. About healing. About transformation. About facing your shadow. But very little about what comes next. It’s kind of the part after the proverbial hero’s journey. When a hero isn’t a hero anymore. He’s just an ordinary guy again. His life is quiet. Less dramatic. Less identity-driven. Less charged. And, in a lot of ways, harder. Because now, he doesn’t get to hide behind not knowing: he knows when he’s abandoning himself. He knows when he’s chasing something to fill a void. He knows when he’s overriding his body. He sees it happening in real time. And that’s where the real work begins.

This phase isn’t about digging deeper. It’s about living differently. Day to day. Moment to moment. In ways that don’t look impressive from the outside; It’s saying less when you used to over-explain. It’s not reaching for the next thing when you finally feel good. It’s staying in your body when energy rises instead of discharging it immediately. It’s telling the truth without trying to control the outcome. It’s staying in your center and not not speeding up just because life is happening quickly around you.

And because this phase is about living differently it requires different skills:

Not insight. But containment.

Not expression. But direction.

Not intensity. But stability.

For the last six years, I thought growth looked like feeling more, saying more, doing more. But now I’m realizing growth looks like being able to hold more—without needing to act on it, explain it, or turn it into something: To feel desire without chasing it. To feel emotion without spilling it. To feel energy without burning through it.

This phase is where a lot of men get stuck: They do the work. They wake up. They see clearly. But then they fall back into the same patterns — just with more awareness. Because no one taught them how to live from that awareness. No one taught them how to build a life that doesn’t require escape. How to relate without losing themselves. How to move at a pace they can actually sustain. How to receive the things they once wanted… without collapsing or overwhelming their system.

That’s the work now. And it’s less about becoming someone new. (Or tapping into your innate, authentic self.) You’ve done that. This is about not leaving the self you’ve uncovered in the moments that matter.

And here’s a secret I’ve discovered lately: when I don’t leave myself there’s no aftermath: There’s no high to come down from. No crash to recover from. No sense that I overextended or gave something away. Just a quiet feeling of:

“Yeah. That was right.”

And that’s been a new kind of compass. Not what’s exciting. Not what looks good. Not even what feels intense. But what I can live with — in my body — after the moment passes. This kind of life doesn’t look dramatic. It doesn’t create big spikes of aliveness. But it builds something else. Something steadier. Something more real.

I’m still interested in "the work.” I always will be. I love when men dig deep and face their shadows. I love the fireworks and high drama of the inward journey. But that isn’t my reality anymore. What is my reality is what comes after that work: How to live. How to love. How to lead. Without falling back into the same loops. Without abandoning myself in subtle ways. Without creating a life I then need to recover from.

It’s a different kind of work. Quieter. But, for me, more honest than anything I’ve done before. And I’m looking forward to sharing more about it here in the coming months.

Sean

The reality, though, is that while my life is, to paraphrase an oft-quoted AA term: “beyond my wildest dreams” these days compared to how it was ten or fifteen years ago, I’ve also discovered the sobering truth that doing the work to fully inhabit our bodies is actually just the beginning, not the end of the journey.

Next comes learning how to live, love, and lead after we’ve opened up.

It’s different — living wide open. Feeling everything. I’ve likened it at times to wearing noise cancelling headphones for thirty years and then taking them off; life is loud. And I’m as sensitive as I remember being as a kid before I put on the standard issue male armor that gets given to all of us around age 4 or 5.

Now, it goes without saying that the temptation will be huge in this sort of fragile space of re-inhabiting the world as an embodied man to want to go back to the familiar: back to our coping mechanisms, back to the ways we turned down the volume, so to speak, back to the safety of our armor, addictions, relationships or habits that kept us seemingly safe. Many men do this. And this is precisely what leads to a feeling of stuck-ness, of being perpetually on the threshold of our new lives without stepping fully in.

Guiding men through this transition out of the “healing cave” and back into the world to live, love and lead feels of great importance to me. Thanks to men’s work’s widespread influence, there are so many aware men out there these days in this space. And if you identify as one of them, here are five touch points that might be resonating for you these days:

Containment vs. Expression

When we first get into feeling work, life is all about expression: it’s how raw, how real, and how vulnerable can you be. It feels amazing, because, as men, we’ve usually stuffed our full truth down for decades, but after a while, I notice for most men, the constant vulnerability runs its course. We feel quieter and more solid within. There isn’t as much to say or process externally. Life becomes: How can I hold more energy, and release (or leak) less? And how can what I do share be more intentional? That’s containment. And it’s a daily practice.

Stability vs. Intensity

When we’re numb, intensity equals aliveness. But when you’ve excavated your inner world, life feels alive enough without extra stimulants. I’ve found that people, places and things that once gave me that charge of intensity I wanted and needed now often feel unnecessary or out of alignment. Instead, I’ve sought out stability, which is a foreign feeling after chasing highs for so many years. It’s quiet at first, and tempting to want to return to the feedback loop of the intensity. But more solid. Again, this is a daily practice.

Pacing in Relationships

Relationships, for me, used to be one of my main sources of intensity; I’d meet someone, and often rush into intimacy (whether physical or emotional, friendship or romantic) before I actually knew who that person was. These days, I’m letting people reveal themselves and their motivations over time and letting myself do the same. I’m creating more space between interactions to integrate, and finding it’s so much clearer who I want to be spending time and exchanging energy with. This is a daily… Oh hell, fine, these are all daily practices. Maybe that’s the point.

Living vs. Escaping

The reality of embodiment is that life can actually get harder before it gets better. So, I’m finding one of the most important tools in my belt these days is simply the practice of learning to stay with it. To not check out. To not run for something to mask the overwhelm, but to meet life where it’s meeting me. This is an underrated skill (and a huge one) for men. Can we be with whatever life is showing us right now without checking out or falling into old patterns?

Being Seen Without Collapse

Going into a year where I am going to have my first book in the world has me thinking a lot about visibility. In the past, I could have bypassed the stress of being seen by distracting myself in a thousand ways, but doing this process embodied and aware is a new game. I’m learning (slowly) how to have success without sabotage, and how after I post, or reveal myself, there is often a nervous system crash to work with. I’m also learning that I can move with this dance, and not let it overwhelm me — the goal is to move slowly and intentionally enough so that I can remain steady as I move towards my goals and desires. This is valuable for any man who has done “the work”, but wants to live it through each day.

The reality is, we’ve done all done our healing work with the goal of being able to enjoy and show up for our lives more. To create intentional relationships with people, places and things and to be able to have time and energy for them. And yet, we often feel “stuck” at this stage of the game, because we aren’t sure what to work on, or where we’re heading. We know more “healing” isn’t the answer. We want to step out more into the world, yet we also often feel hesitant. This is where clarity and some focused practices can really help.

If you’re a man who is at this stage of his journey and looking for accountability and support, I have spots open for 1:1 work this spring and summer.

Sean

Having grown up in coastal Maine, there was something immediately familiar about Coperthwaite to me: he looked like a lot of the older “Downeast” men I knew in my youth: the wild, white hair, the chino paints, stained from the day’s work, and the fraying L.L. Bean Oxford. He could have been my grandfather. But it was something much deeper than his appearance that grabbed me: Here was a man whose very life and existence served as a stark contrast (and protest) to the world he saw around him: a world falling further and further into the grips of wounded masculine traits: consumerism, materialism, and productivity-as-worth, and farther and farther from the simple pleasures of the land, of honest work, creativity, joy and rest.

Coperthwaite’s example found me at a perfect time. Admittedly, I’d been in a multi-year dialogue with myself around existential quandaries such as: How do I define success? If you strip away all the conditioning I’ve received from my family and my culture, how do I actually want to live? What is my soul (not my mind, not my ego, not comparison) calling for?

I think these inquiries are a fairly regular symptom of midlife. We used to call them a “crisis”, but anyone who has had one knows this crisis — when understood and made sacred — can function as an awakening. When a man hits midlife, after so many years of doing all the things ‘out there’ he’s told will create fulfillment (promotions, money, sex, material goods, familial obligations, religion, wellness and optimization) and still something isn’t satiated, it is only natural that he begin to go deeper into himself for answers.

My own path to this crossroads — like so many others — has been a path of elimination, of checking boxes. Living in Manhattan in my twenties and writing at GQ, I once helped drive the wounded masculine machine: encouraging men to shop, travel, drink, eat, earn, and fuck their way to happiness, as I was attempting to do. While fun at times, and wildly intriguing, that path wasn’t the answer, and so I moved to California and tried another go, but this time cloaked it in spirituality and personal growth. That wasn’t it either. And the dissolution of my life in LA over the past several years led me deeper into myself once again, into my body, and into the truths hidden there I had been glossing over for decades.

What I’ve discovered, like Coperthwaite did, is that for human beings these deeper needs tend to be really quite simple. They don’t require much money, they don’t require lots of material things, or technology, or achievements. They’re the same basic needs that make any animal happy: good food, sunshine, natural beauty, connection and play with other beings, and a sense of purpose or a mission to get up for each day.

That’s it. And it would be an easy enough transition into this simpler way of being if not for the deeply embedded cultural and bodily programming we receive that tells many of us this simple existence isn’t enough. That our lives are defined by what we produce, what we acquire, and how impressive we are to others. I don’t know about you, but for the past few months (years?), I’ve had zero desire to strive. And I’ve had to work through guilt and shame that has arisen with that awareness. Even more intense than the guilt have been the fears. Mainly: If no one sees me achieving, than who am I? Am I a man? Am I worthy? Will it be enough? Will I have what I need?

I’ve thought often of Coperthwaite during these inquires. I’ve pictured him whittling away at a spoon on his homestead, or fixing a handmade chair, or opening a book while eating a simple meal by candlelight; his very life an example that a man exists outside of what he achieves and even outside of who he — and everyone around him — has thought him to be.

Coperthwaite, amazing as he was, probably took his simple life as protest too far. His hermit existence meant he wasn’t able to pass along his message in the exact way he — or the many people who looked up to him — might have wanted. To put in the language of a recent piece here, he may have stayed too long at the monastery. And I think he knew it.

But his concept of life-as-protest seems more critical than ever right now in our drastically changing times. If you haven’t noticed, something is shifting in our world: The wounded masculine promises we have been sold as being able to deliver us to safety in the Western world aren’t delivering, and our collective hunger has grown to insatiable levels as a result. For some — the Diddys, the Trumps, the Epsteins — this hunger grows to violent proportions; resulting in a void that nothing can fill and that harms whatever stands between it and its next fix. But every Western man has it, this hunger. No man is above it. It’s imprinted on us by a society created on greed and driven by lust: for money, for power, for relevance, for the sort of “ultimate, continuous orgasm” — to use Robert Moore’s and Douglas Gillette’s term — of upward mobility, success and dopamine that we’re convinced will bring us safety, stability, and peace.

This lie is what every single man must face head-on within himself if we wish to shift the direction of our society. And it’s not glamorous work. To stare directly into the ways our own wounded male conditioning is affecting us and the people closest to us is the most avoided form of shadow work. Because it involves looking at our relationships to the most vulnerable parts of us: our grief, our pain, our shame, our rage, our inadequacies. How have we hurt ourselves? How have we neglected ourselves? How has this pain been projected onto those around us (even subtly)?

Any man who traverses these dark inner waters will come to find that, as he connects to himself and his needs in a deeper way and begins to heal from a lifetime of neglect, he begins to fall away, even subtly, from the mainstream pace. He needn’t fight it. (Though he surely will.) It happens naturally. Upon asking ourselves the deeper questions, we all undergo a sort of dark night of the soul or ego that makes it hard if not impossible to participate in the wounded masculine lie in the same way we have. We shift. We simplify. We become less wasteful. We cease blindly moving through the rat race, and start considering how we can create a more intentional life. This life we create becomes its own protest.

I believe this transition many of us are craving in our world happens one man at a time, in this fashion, and no quicker. And it will take decades. It is, after all, hard to leave behind the promises we were made, and our attachments to them. It requires pain, and outrage, and grief, and everything we’re seeing on the world stage right now. Like any lie, it requires coming out of denial before it can begin to shift. We must accept the problem fully, which appears to be happening in an unprecedented way this winter. Things have to change. We know that now. There is no going back.

I’ve been grieving a lot the past few months as I continue in my own evolution out of the wounded masculine programming I inherited and into a life that offers more peace, stability and sanity. After almost a decade in California, I moved back to New York last month — a turn of events I didn’t see coming. I live in a small house ten minutes from the Hudson River surrounded by woods. I see deer every morning, and take long walks on the snowy trails by my house. I work only a few hours a week and spend most of my life in solitude, like Coperthwaite, as I find big soul shifts like this one tend to occur most effectively when a man has a lot of time to be with himself.

It’s a slow pace. But I’m coming to understand that much magic is available in the slowness. Yesterday, I fell asleep on a bench in the winter sunlight for an hour, and awoke with a huge grin on my face. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so relaxed. On other occasions, I’ll break out dancing, or singing, for no apparent reason. Some animal part of me is happy in this new simplicity. And my body is adjusting, slowing down as the dopamine levels off, as I kick intensity and constant pursuit as a way of being. As I cease filling my moods with something outside myself: a person, a purchase, a scroll, a distraction.

I’m no Coperthwaite, by any means, but it feels like I’m on to something. An experience of living that feels balanced, good to my soul, more regulated each day. An existence measured in small, quiet moments, and private joys. I don’t intend to stay this isolated forever, but this feels like the appropriate place to be right now. This life, this experiment of stillness, this reckoning with myself and my shadows in a radical way, is my offering to a world in flux. A world ending one era and beginning another. And if you believe, like I do, that outer change begins inwardly, than you’ll probably agree that our lifestyles — and the intention they’re rooted in — have more power than we think to shift things.

Sean

We grieve. We rage. We tell (and feel) our familial stories. It’s intense, and electrifying, and catalyzing. It’s like we’re thawing out after years of being frozen. And if we keep going, we become expressive again. We become wild again. We become relational again. We get to truly know ourselves: our dreams, our desires, our truth. We, in many ways, return to our fullest selves.

And it feels amazing to be seen in that fullness.

This integration of a man’s feminine aspects tends to be a lengthy process — often a decade or more — depending on how deep his shadow with the feminine is (including letting go of his addictions). And, as we heal, express, and balance out our feminine and masculine energies within, we become emotional adults. This is cause for celebration. The healing worked. However, there is usually a point where a man wakes up one day after years of sharing, processing, and spending a lot of time feeling seen, felt, and attuned to, and thinks: “I think what’s needed to be said has been said for now.”

So begins the next stage of a man’s growth. And it’s the stage where we withdraw from the world we’ve come to fully inhabit. The primary question being:

Who am I if no one is reflecting me?

This time is highly disorienting, mainly because for the whole of our “healing” years we’ve been getting nearly endless reflection: from coaches, from therapists, from clients, from fellow journeymen and women. Maybe — more than likely — we’ve even become obsessed with or dependent on the reflections we’ve gotten. After all, we’re evolved men now. And evolved men are rare. The world (and especially women) tend to respond well to our newfound ease with intimacy. And it’s quite easy to get attention at will. That’s why this stage feels quiet: We’re letting all of that go temporarily in the name of evolving yet again. Why? Well, by the old wisdom: This is the threshold where we become true leaders. And any man dependent on reflection for his self worth does not a true leader make.

Like with practically all thresholds, in centuries past, there was a ritualistic practice of this: in midlife, after a man had proven himself in a trade, in battle, in business, he would often go to a remote location away from his family, from his well earned station in society. This was especially common with royalty, or with men tapped to hold major government positions. They’d enter monasteries. Go into the wilderness. Travel to far reaches of the known world. And there, in solitude, watched over only by a few elder men or no one at all, they’d suffer a major ego death. Old identities would dissolve. Sexuality and desire would reorganize. Boredom, grief, and fear would emerge. And since the man who was entering this phase typically had no idea how long it would last (he’d only re-enter the world when called back to his new post), he really had to surrender to it. It’d be easy to call this time extremely not fun. Except, like all thresholds, the pain had a purpose:

Preparation.

I saw a great Hollywood depiction of this worldly withdrawal stage recently in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, where Jeremy Allen White brilliantly plays a 32 year-old Bruce Springsteen, retreating from his newfound fame after “The River” tour to hole up in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey, where he writes Nebraska. During this reclusive period, Allen White-as-Springsteen spends long hours alone, confronting his demons, confronting his past. And he goes all the way in. He pulls back from practically everyone in his life, he puts out an album that he felt compelled to make — but that his studio was adamantly against releasing — and does not tour it. He, at the apparent height of his powers, goes dark.

But something magical happens in that darkness. The same thing that happens to any man during this phase, should he lean in fully: Springsteen discovers a deeper calling. He faces his grief. His power and presence consolidate. He lets go of control. And BAM, the next time the world sees him, it’s Born in the USA.

Now, I’m not saying that every man who withdraws from the world will become a rock star, but what I do believe is that this time in solitude prepares us in an unprecedented way for our deepest calling. Our soul’s calling. And soul’s callings aren’t up to our families, not up to the people around us, not up to our followers on social media. They’re not even technically up to us; they’re something planted so deeply in us, in our DNA, that we can’t help but come back to them again and again in our quietest moments. Moments that a man can enter only when under specific conditions: Rest. Repetition of schedule. Simplistic living. Minimal contact with other human beings. Detached from the noise of his daily life and responsibilities. Something happens to a man in that space, and it’s something that can’t be put into words. It’s a gathering. It’s a releasing. It’s a confrontation that happens when we aren’t reflected by anyone by ourselves.

Only a full commitment to such a time will unearth this next era of our lives. Only solitude will prepare us. Only a detox from the intensity and dopamine driven pace of the modern world can reveal the important role that lurks below the surface of every man who has already come this far. (And believe me, if you’ve made it to this threshold, you do have a deeper calling here. The work that got you here isn’t for wussies.)

This stage won’t be easy. Both the logistics of the endeavor and the endeavor itself. In fact, it may take some strong support to pull off. (Springsteen had it in Jon Landau.) But what’s the alternative? In this one life we have guaranteed to us, we owe it to ourselves to remember (or discover) what’s truly important to us, face it, and offer it to the world when it is time.

“Sean, what do we do after we heal?”

The question stopped me in my tracks. It felt so expansive, so vibrant. I’d been having similar thoughts lately, and so Jared’s question went straight to my heart and guts. Last year was a huge year of completion for me. The last nine years of my life have been intensely inward and largely — if I’m being honest — focused on my own suffering. It was as if I arrived in California from New York in 2017 and the universe said: Okay, bud, time to go down the rabbit hole. And I did. And in those nine years, I feel confident that I addressed the majority of my childhood trauma, eliminated the reliance on many of my addictions, and managed to write a book about how other men can tackle their versions of those challenges, too. It took enormous time, energy and focus, and now I’m waking up here in the desert every day feeling pretty fucking light.

It is totally surreal.

I have to admit, I got very familiar with suffering. I got used to looking for the next thing to uncover, work on or tweak. I got used to spending most of my day endlessly analyzing myself and helping others analyze themselves, locating what was “wrong” and what they needed to do to fix it. Healing and fixing became cozy places for me. Familiar places. Places I, at times, thought I might just build a house in and stay for a lifetime. But holy shit, when Jared said that, he snapped me right out of it:

“What do we do after we heal?”

It’s clear that the time for full-time healing for me is — after nine years — over. Now, by that I certainly don’t mean that I’m perfectly healed, or that I don’t have things to work on. I obviously do. If you read this Substack regularly, you know that. I’m a work in progress, like all of us. But what I mean is that the shift has finally happened in my life where my main focus is no longer on self help, or self scrutiny or survival.

My main focus is shifting back to living.

And I’ll be honest, I’ve been “healing” so long, I kind of forget how to just live. I feel a little bit like a guy who has been sprung from prison after a long bid. Or a monk who came down off the mountaintop and found himself in the middle of lower Manhattan. There’s life going on here. What the hell? What do I do? Where do I jump in? Where do I put my hands? I’m scared.

What’s reassuring to me in this disorientation is a skill and an understanding I’ve picked up over these last nine years: I needn’t go any further than my own body, and the wisdom held there. One of the benefits of healing all this trauma over the past decade is that I now feel quite in synch with my body, and I’m able to tune into what feels good and what doesn’t feel good, so as I navigate this fresh feeling world, I know what’s a Yes and what’s a No most of the time. I know if a particular person feels energizing, or draining. I know if a decision feels light in my system, or heavy. I know if a town or city feels like it has something to offer me, or if I can just keep on driving through. I have a built-in GPS it took me many years of rewiring to get to function properly, and that’s beautiful.

But even knowing that, it all can feel overwhelming: I can do anything, so what do I want to do? Where do I want to live? How do I want to spend my time? What do I want my contribution to the world to be?

I was fed a post on social media the other day by a young woman in Paris named Laura Van Overveld. It said: After Self Help is Eros. I loved that. She defined eros as the force that makes us lean forward towards something. Not erotic, necessarily. But just where our fire goes. Self help is inward, she said. Eros is outward. Eros moves us out into the world with curiosity, passion, and zest. “What we really want after an era of self-help,” she wrote, “is to be turned on again: by life, by other people, by possibility.”

Yes.

That’s how I’m feeling these days. My fire is back. My passion is here. That’s one of the gifts I’ve found of the work of embodied initiation I wrote about a couple days ago here. Heal your wounds, work your process, and you get your fire back. Redirect your rage and get it burning cleanly and clearly again and you feel your desire come online. Let go of what you need to let go of, and resentment fades. Then, if you’re like me, you wake up one morning in Palm Springs, feeling, for the first time in a long time: LFG.

It’s only the beginning of this new chapter. The flame is still gathering fuel, no doubt. But the fact that Jared and I are sitting at this table every morning covered in piles of fruit certainly doesn’t feel like a coincidence: the world post-full-time-healing — as I’m seeing it — feels ripe and abundant, it feels optimistic, it feels like anything is possible. Not in some childlike fantasy of a perfect world. But in a way that feels like: Hey, we’ve lived through a decade of the toughest shit life can toss at us. We’ve looked our shadows square in the face. What is there to be afraid of? It’s holding both the joy and the pain as equal. It’s imagining that after so much personal and collective anguish there can be a period when the body says: I’m good. You’ve worked this well enough. Let’s go have some fun. Let’s go re-engage with the world we left behind all those years ago. Let’s go get our hands dirty, make some mistakes, and redefine how we want to live.

I’m curious if anyone reading this resonates. Are you also coming out of a period of intense healing and self focus and burning to reconnect and reengage with the world you left behind? Are you tired of living online, disconnected, dulled, and feeling the call to connect up close, viscerally, sensually? Are you fatigued by the drudgery of finding things about yourself to fix and instead want to redirect your focus into living more fully? Into being turned on by life again?

If so, I’m with you. Awake. Aware. Fired up and surrounded by fruit.

It is a ripe, clarifying time.

Some days, my body is very aware that something is missing, even if my mind can’t label it. Some part of me doesn’t have the thing it wants, thinks it needs, or is familiar with. There is a void. If I had to equate my body’s sensations to an event, it would be, as I told my therapist the other day, a child who lost its mother.

It’s Freudian, for sure, but it’s so real. I’ve spent time feeling into my childhood lately, and thinking about how, after my parents got divorced and my father moved out, my mother was my lifeline. It was absolutely essential for me to orient to her, to clock where she was at all times, because if she went missing, too, I was fucked.

This survival orientation for boys with our mothers is a normal occurrence. All children are attached to their mothers. We need their bodies, their nourishment, their care. But this healthy physical and emotional attachment to our mother — in ancient times — would always be interfered with by a deliberate act, around the time of puberty or earlier, a rite of passage where a boy would be removed from the comfort of his mother and other women and ushered into manhood by elder men: he’d be taught responsibility, trusted with masculine secrets, spoken to about how to interact with women, initiated into his own expression, desire, power and vitality. He’d also be tested physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Often painfully so.

Basically, he’d be given an embodied primer on being a man — often over many years — and then be expected to go act like one.

Since these rites of passage rarely happen today, and boys are left largely unsupported through their most formative years, young men tend to stay attached to their mothers and women as their main source of validation, safety and emotional regulation. Add to that that online pornography, which is the main way a lot of boys cope with the trauma of an unsupported puberty, only intensifies our attachment to women as soothing and relief. I have met so many men like myself over the last decade who have told me: “I have no idea how to function without a woman.” “The loneliness is too much.” “I don’t know how to take care of myself.” I don’t know where I’d go for support/love/sex/relief.” “It would just feel like something is off if I didn’t have someone.”

Picture a giant umbilical cord that never gets cut, and you have a pretty good idea of what’s lurking under a large portion of the male collective in 2025, after so many generations of young men living through unsupported puberties and without initiation. Without being too grandiose, it’s become an epidemic. What I hear a lot out there in the men’s community is: Men need other men. Men can’t rely on women alone for support. Men need brotherhood. All true. But there seems to be little discussion of the actual bodily or somatic rites of passage that need take place for men to dissolve this psychosomatic umbilical cord that keeps us hooked to women-as-comfort and relief and turns us into embodied, sovereign men.

Now, you may be wondering: Okay, but what’s the problem? Why is it bad that I need a woman for regulation, or to feel okay about myself, or to take care of me? Why is it a problem that I need porn to relax? Or that my system feels “off” if I’m not being desired, or needed? Those are valid questions. And the answer is that: While it’s not “bad”, per se, it’s definitely negatively impacting your relationship(s).

No evolved woman wants to be a physical, emotional, or spiritual mother to a grown man. It kills a relationship. (The same way men serving as a constant emotional or energetic support for a woman kills a relationship, although it’s probably less common.) Check out social media these days and you’ll see thousands of videos about women griping about caretaking for the men in their lives. That’s an obvious one.

But what happens inside our own, male bodies, and how that impacts our relationships is the piece that interests me the most. See, though most men aren’t conscious of this somatic attachment to women as relief, our unconscious is very aware of it. We know, deep down inside, we need something (or someone) outside of ourselves for regulation and safety. And it makes us feel weak. And since most men grow up believing weakness is a death sentence, we start either subtly or overtly taking our helplessness and frustration out on the women around us, punishing them for this perceived inner weakness, or we just flat out start hating ourselves for it. The former causes more damage in relationships than we even know. Men feeling powerless is a recipe for rage, control and domination. And men have felt powerless over women for a long time. Meanwhile, the latter is where the high substance abuse and addiction rates show up. The burnout and depression and overwork. The suicide percentages that are startling high. Men — feeling powerless over their perceived weaknesses— grind themselves into the ground. They self destruct.

“What’s going on with men?” is the hot question of the moment. And I believe it ultimately boils down to this: Because of our particular conditioning (or lack thereof) many men feel consistently helpless and underdeveloped within, and because we grow up believing any weakness is horrible, we walk around mired in shame and self hatred. And it’s that self hatred that ends up hurting us — and our relationships — in one way or another.

The antidote to this epidemic of self-hatred in men is not an easy fix, by any means, but it is relatively simple: We have to cultivate solid inner structures in men, reconnecting them to their bodies, their emotions, their vitality, and ultimately, the full truth and expression of who they are.

The best way I’ve seen and experienced doing that is through the lost tradition of an embodied rite of passage into manhood. We each need the time when an older, caring man or men steps into our lives, offering time, support, presence, and interest. A plan for us. This ideally happens at an early and formative age, but more likely happens these days in a man’s thirties, forties, or fifties. Which means that by the time a man reaches this point, he has much to unpack, and many defenses to topple. That’s why this initiation needs to be activating: as in, not just mental, not just concepts or talk or advice. It needs to focus on the body, and the trapped energy and trauma held in place there that all men carry. It must dive deep beneath a man’s coping mechanisms, to the soft, tender, fragile emotional material, his “feminine” qualities, and set them free.

This intervention almost always involves discomfort: uncomfortable conversations and self-confrontation, physical tests of discipline, stamina or commitment, emotional tests of revisiting and integrating long repressed trauma. This is where a lot of “men’s work” thrives.

But this initiation also needs to involve touch, play and tenderness. Physical closeness and affection with other men. Tousling hair, rubbing shoulders, hugging, holding, sharing. This is the male healing of the “feminine” wound. Most men do not know how to function without a woman, because we don’t know how to be tender with ourselves. To be our own caretakers. To befriend and express our own desires in a clear, clean way. When men show us care, physical touch, and tenderness, when they are kind and respectful with our bodies, emotions, and souls, we slowly learn how to do this for ourselves, which is the way we cut that psychic cord of attachment to women-as-safety, and begin to source our own safety and solidness within.

That’s the space I’m reporting to you from now. And, like I said, it’s a rich space. I’m finding a lot of my life force returning, and as it does, I’m filled with insights about how much time, energy and effort I’ve spent orienting to women over the course of my life as a means of perceived survival. It’s been an identity I’ve worn for nearly 40 years. And with its loosening, a fresh, foreign energy is returning. I look back at all my relationships to this point and think: Damn, I wasn’t coming to this union on solid ground, looking for a partner to add to my already wonderful life. I was looking for someone to smooth the edges of my insecurities, or put me in touch with love or desire or tenderness I’d long ago repressed or cut off. I was looking for relief.

I think as men we need to know we can thrive on our own, that we can create a full, meaningful life without a woman, in order to eventually come together in our fullness with a partner. Yet, so many men today don’t have that opportunity. We are never initiated, and so we end up trying to be solid for a woman (or children, or a family), before we know how to be solid on our own. We end up trying to know and love women before we know and love ourselves. And it doesn’t work.

The ancients were on to something. The physical placing of a developing man in a space where he would learn about himself and about manhood is a necessary step for a man to create a solid, sovereign identity. To know himself inside and out. One thing I’m positive about is that I could never have arrived here in this place in my life without the support of so many other men, guiding me, holding me, and initiating me through the last decade of this journey. (Women have, of course, supported me endlessly, too, often in different ways.) In ancient times, a boy’s training to become a man would often span the entire length of his puberty: from, say, 8 years old to 18, or even longer. So, I’m reminded that this initiation journey we go on to become men is not an event or a weekend retreat, it is a long process. One that requires a re-prioritization of time and resources for many men. A true commitment to self alongside the commitment he may have already made to others.

It’s a steep hill. But that’s the climb. One thing I’ve learned on this journey into manhood is that there is a big difference between knowing something, and embodying it. You can’t just ask a man to “open up”, or “be more confident”, or “be emotionally available to women” and leave it at that. You need to initiate him into these expressions. And that’s our work. Slow, intentional, and deliberate work. Work that takes place through the arduous and enlivening process of switching our focus from the external familiarities we’ve known to the internal depths of ourselves: our emotions, our bodies, our pain, our joy—building a loving, fortified inner structure for ourselves alongside other men that we can take out into the world and into our relationships.

And until we address this dire need for initiation on a large scale, our world will continue to ask: “What’s going on with men?”

Now, I’ve had other addictions and coping mechanisms: I’ve been addicted to alcohol, cocaine, shopping, cigarettes, porn, sugar, my smartphone, etc. And many of these addictions I was able to let go of or shift my relationship to. In my experience, a person lets go of an addiction when they a) build enough capacity to be with/transform the underlying pain that the addiction was soothing and b) shift their life enough so that checking out in their go-to ways isn’t as appealing or necessary. As I’ve done my healing work, and integrated trauma, many of my addictions have naturally fallen away. I’ve seen this happen with my clients, as well. As they get healthier and their lives come into more alignment, the ways they coped tend to fall off, too.

Love addiction (and its twerpy little cousin codependency) have hung on insidiously for me, though. There were years — even when my love life was really unmanageable — where I just simply believed nothing would ever be different. (Looking back, maybe I didn’t want it to be?) I’d never be able to be alone with myself, or have true intimacy with someone else. I’d never be able to stop the pattern of seeking safety in romance. I’d always feel powerless.

But then last year happened.

I believe 2025 began with a sort of divine intervention. At the end of 2024, I got approached by a publisher about writing a book about healing from love addiction (which, serendipitously I’d already been writing a version of for years, and — surprise, surprise — couldn’t really finish). And, because, you can’t write an effective book about healing an addiction you haven’t actually healed (people write those books, but you don’t want to read them, trust me…) I was presented with a sort of cosmic reckoning: Get a handle on this now, Sean, or this book is going to be rubbish.

So I started writing. And writing, as it always does, called me into deeper layers of truth with myself. You can’t bullshit the page. It’s right there. And on every revision, every round of edits, the truth was lurking, waiting for me to get my head out of my ass and see things for what they were: Much growing as I’d done over the past decade (since the worst years of my behaviors), I was still operating in an old, familiar pattern. Still seeking relief — if only subtly — in women. I had, in fact, met my then-partner while I was still reeling over my previous relationship, which meant I had never sat long enough in the space between lovers, partners, dates, fantasies, to truly get to know myself away from relationship and to establish new pathways in love. I’d only known who I was as a man through the eyes of a woman. So, as painful as it was and has been, I said Goodbye to my partner I’d been seeing for two years back in October, and entered into another intentional period of aloneness.

It hasn’t been easy so far. So much is coming to the surface in the empty space. I’m about two months in, and some days are startlingly long. The loneliness that comes on can be startling. The cravings intense. I’ve taken breaks from dating before, “Women Fasts” as they’re commonly called in men’s work. But what I’m learning now is that, even on those breaks, I was still often energetically attached to a person from the past (an ex, a lover, a parent, a fantasy of how things could have gone) and/or attached to the hope that a lover would come along in the future to save me. And even that seemingly innocent hope that love was right around the corner could keep me from the deeper recesses of my own truth.

Love — as I’ve known it — wasn’t something that was sourced within. It was a hunger. A reaching. A void. And I’m realizing, again, in this sacred time, that no woman can fill this void. She can soothe it, sure, but she can’t take it away. That void in me is fertile ground and mine to address. And now is the time. In a conversation with one of my mentors, John Lee, a couple weeks ago, he asked me: “Bud, do you think you can go a year without dating this time?” I didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” I told him. But since that conversation, the reality of that declaration has sunken in. It’s not so much about the time itself, but about the deeper level of acceptance that I am finally here, finally willing to face these deeper layers of myself that relationships have covered up. That’s a win. I have the capacity for it. But it still scares the shit out of me. The thought of life without a partner, without intrigue, without sweet feminine energy coming at me and soothing all those sore or uncertain or fragile spots within, that can still send my body into fear and constriction some days. But so far, I’ve been mostly able to be with that when it happens, too.

Ultimately, though, this exercise is so much less about giving up romance and so much more about gaining a relationship with the ‘Me’ that appears in the absence of fixating on a partner. I don’t know that guy very well. But I’d like to. And from what I’ve seen so far, he’s got some juice. He’s got some wisdom and some vulnerability and a lot of untapped power and creativity. He’s pretty free. And one of the spaces I’d like to let him rip is here. I’d like to give him carte blanche to write as freely and openly as ever about love, dating, and romance and what he’s experienced over the last twenty years in the hopes of feeling into, understanding, and continuing to shift these patterns. I’d like to let him fly his freak flag in the hopes that maybe it might help other people to feel a little bit more free and freaky discussing this stuff, too.

I guess, if I look back, it makes sense that I’d end up as the guy writing about love and relationships. Honestly, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather write about. Love is the best. Hell, even in the most sideways moments of my at-times chaotic romantic past, there’s never been a single moment when I’ve ever thought about giving up on love. I’m just evolving, just changing my approach:

I’m not lookin’ for love, but working with what’s already here.

As a writer, I live for these moments of raw inspiration – a literal high five from the muse! – so I went home, and I did what I was told, as crazy as it sounded. I started to write. I recalled that dark, hazy scene in New York, and then another, and then another. Scenes of desperation. Scenes of addiction. Scenes of utter heartbreak and relational chaos. And with every scene that was flowing onto the page, I came more and more out of denial:

Wow, I thought, I have a truly fucked up relationship to women.

In the coming weeks, it was obvious to me that this was what I needed to write a book about: A memoir where I would explore, vulnerably, why all my relationships with women seemed to go awry. The questions I had were many: Why had I mistreated women? Why had I become addicted to sex and romance? Why did women both intrigue and frustrate me so much? The answers, at least in the early going, were few. Still, I sent the first batch of memoir pages to my old friend Sean Manning at Simon & Schuster, and asked him what he thought. “Interesting direction,” he told me. “Keep writing, you’ll figure it out.”

So I kept writing. A couple years went by. And though my fortunes with women didn’t change all that much in the immediate – in fact, in 2022, and most of 2023, they seemed to be at their absolute, rock-bottom worst – I was beginning to grasp the “Why” of it all. I was beginning to get answers. That is, after all, why I write. To reveal. To clarify. To, as Joan Didion quipped, “find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, and what it means.”

I was also, through the willingness to examine the darkest corners of my psyche, beginning to heal: My awareness was growing. Buried emotions were surfacing. I uncovered an early childhood filled with fear, and an attachment to women as safety. I saw a reliance on porn – that epidemic of a nervous-system-soother for men – and a longing for a missing father that couldn’t be filled, no matter who loved or desired me.

All of this trauma, as I would discover, wreaked havoc on my romantic life. Through my work as a men’s coach, I’ve come to understand that practically everything that is chaotic or out of order in our lives has its origins in trauma. And if we can turn towards that trauma — slowly, and deliberately — and heal it from its roots, the tides will eventually turn. And that’s what happened as I wrote, worked a diligent process in coaching and therapy, and got more, real-time relational practice— I began to have breakthroughs: I mended old wounds. I found more safety within myself. My addictions faded away. And my relationships — both with myself and with the women in my life — became more honest, authentic and fulfilling. Now, I am both excited and humbled to announce that my book, Hating Women: A Memoir of Male Rage and Recovery is coming into the world next July.

I’ll admit, I had some major resistance to the title. It really fucked with my ego to admit to myself that I had, in my confusion and anger, behaved hatefully towards women for many years—especially, because I fancy myself such a caring and compassionate person. (Most of the time.) But writing into that title – which I’m convinced my intrepid editor, Hana Park devised as some diabolical tool – made me dig even deeper and get even more real with myself. It made my skeletons dance, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw. And I think it produced a pretty hopeful– and helpful – book.

In addition to my own story, the book offers a roadmap that men can follow to heal their relationships — both with themselves and with women. It guides the reader to explore oft-overlooked familial trauma, and addresses the conditioning that boys and young men receive, beginning at an early age, to repress anything too “feminine” within themselves, including our own vulnerability. It shows how the online porn epidemic indoctrinates us to use women as relief, and how this dependence — and the accompanying rage and resentment that accompanies it — follows many of us into adulthood, and how these patterns need healing and integration. It also, I hope, validates women in their experience, and leads to vulnerable and necessary conversations between men and women, breaking down the sizable walls that have formed between us, keeping us from deeper intimacy and greater progress.

The last and hardest detail of this brief story of my book’s origins is that it involves the death of the most loving and supportive partnership I’ve been in to-date: My girlfriend of two years and I chose to go our separate ways recently. She was instrumental in this book coming together. I could not have written it — in this way — without her. And I believed, at many times throughout its writing, that our relationship was the happy ending at its culmination. But life had other plans. She and I always joked that I had to become the man this book needed. And I have some work left to do to become that man. Work I intend to start immediately.

Okay, that’s enough from me. My one ask, if you’ve made it this far, and if you’ve enjoyed and gotten something from my writing through the years (especially my explorations of men and women, relationships, and trauma) please consider pre-ordering my book, here, here, here or wherever you buy books. I’m told that preorders are important to help the book make certain bestseller lists, and making these lists, of course, gives the book a chance to get in more people’s hands. Since I have a small platform, I need all the help I can get!

Thanks for your ongoing support and consideration. If you’ve been reading this Substack for the last four years, than you’ve helped contribute to this book, too. Every comment, like, and forward helps. So I thank you. I look forward to sharing this book with you very soon.

Sean

Two years ago, during the summer of 2023, my world as I knew it collapsed. It was a classic “dark night of the soul” (or ego), and one of several I’ve been through over the last decade. But this one hit especially deep. Over the course of a few months, I took leave of my home, my community, many friends, and my romantic relationship. I hit the road in an attempt to perhaps postpone (or expedite?!) the inevitable, but the inevitable happened anyway.

An old version of me died.

Now, life has shown me that every time I endure one of these dark nights of the soul, my life is about to be upgraded. I’m about to come more into alignment: becoming less of who I thought I needed to be, and more of who I actually am. There are perks to this new alignment, undoubtedly. But, let me tell you, it doesn’t feel like alignment at the time. It feels like what it is: A death. It’s hard, and painful, and grief stricken. And the more I fight it, the more I tend to suffer.

Life, after all, wants me to break down.

Life wants me to surrender.

Because it’s only in the breaking and the surrendering that something newer and truer can emerge.

I’ll admit, even two years later, I’m not fully sure what that new thing that’s emerging is just yet. There are glimmers of it. Slices of promise. Relationships with startling new depth. Projects with new zeal. A fire rising up from my deepest recesses that feels potent at times, scary at others. There are hints in the ether. But no concrete answers.

In fact, the space feels uncertain, liminal. Like both a beginning and an ending at once.

It’s funny, because if I look out at the world at large, at the people I love, and at the communities I follow, we’re all seemingly in the same spot at the moment if we choose to see it. Earth itself feels like it’s having a dark night of the soul. One of those chapters where the way we did things before cannot continue, and yet, the new hasn’t fully presented itself yet. We’re being asked to hold simultaneously the grief of the old version of who we were (and perhaps the frustration with our current situations) and the promise of what we could be if we step into the unknown. We’re standing in the ashes while staring at the plans for a grand, new building, scratching our heads like: “Can I really build that?!”

The answer, of course, is Yes. We can build it. But not overnight. This is a long game. And not without support and a willingness to consistently remind each other and keep each other accountable to those dreams.

That’s why I’m writing today: to remind myself — and us — that in the middle of a “dark night”, progress is all about small steps. Leaps are futile. Leaps land us in hot water. Dark nights demand we look no further than today. No further than to the next right-feeling, intuitive action that serves to align us more with the person - or thing, or planet — we are becoming.

So in that spirit, I’m curious: what’s that small step for you today? What’s your edge? Where is the invitation to step a little more into the person you’re becoming, and sacrifice a bit more of your ‘previous self’ on the altar of what was?

For me, it’s all about speaking up lately. Not being passive. But being active in my willingness to put my energy out there. I’ve been in hiding too long, worried that I’m not polished enough, or that I have one more thing to heal, or to integrate before I can share the next iteration of my work — or myself — with the world. I’m worried I’ll be messy. When, in fact, messy — at least in my experience — tends to produce better results. God knows, we’ve all tried to be polished. We’ve all tried to be invulnerable. We’ve all hovered over ‘Send’ in a thousand collective ways.

How has that worked out?

So take it slow. Let it build. Feel it through. Let it settle. Ask for help. Say one thing you might not have said before. Feel one feeling an old version of you might not have felt. Take one risk. Then rest, and do it again tomorrow.

This is the dance of dying. And being reborn.

Let it be messy. Let it feel awkward.

Let yourself be in transition. Day after day after day.

Til you wake up one day and look around to see yourself standing in a room with a new view.

Sean

The thing I’ve probably struggled with the most in life is being satisfied with where I am. I’ve almost always wanted to be somewhere else, or wanted other people to be somewhere else. But something about right here, right this moment just never seemed good or perfect or safe enough to relax into.

That’s been changing lately for me, though. I’ve gotten a little more okay with it. Okay with making peace with the person I am right this moment, instead of trying to be a better version of me. Okay at letting other people be the way they are instead of needing to change them to feel safe or content.

It’s a work in progress.

I’m writing right now from a little brick house in Pinehurst, North Carolina that belongs to my partner’s uncle’s mother. It’s in a neighborhood that you have to be over 55 years old to live in, and we’ve been here, housesitting, since May 1st. All year, we’ve been bouncing around North America — Colorado, Baja, Mexico, the Hudson Valley, trying to find a new place to live. Yet, nothing is really sticking yet.

Our home is a work in progress.

I don’t like Pinehurst. I might have enjoyed it years ago when I played golf, but now I find it heavy and lacking spark, a place people go to retire and give up. So, needless to say, it ain’t perfect. And some days I get frustrated. I ask myself: What are we doing here in this place we know we don’t like? Well, the answer is saving money. The house was free as long as we needed it. And we’re strapped.

Our finances are a work in progress.

Every morning, I spend a few hours working on my manuscript. It’s a book to help men heal trauma, specifically around the feminine and women, and become more loving, more noble men. It’s pretty awesome, and I can’t believe a big publisher is paying me to write it. But some days, like today, I get really stuck, and frustrated, because it isn’t clicking the way I want it to.

My book is a work in progress.

A handful of times a week, I jump online to coach one of my amazing clients. We connect and talk, and I hold space for whatever is coming up for them at the time. Often, they are struggling and wishing something could be different than it is. Often, they are uncomfortable.

My clients are works in progress.

I’m sure you’re seeing the same trend I am here. My country is a work in progress. Our world is a work in progress. My hair is decidedly a work in progress. (No good ‘cuts happening in this town.) My relationship is a work in progress.

I’m a work in progress.

And why would it be any different? Life never stops coming, after all. I guess for most of my life I’ve just one of those folks holding onto the illusion, probably conjured up decades ago as a kid being raised in an uncertain household and an uncertain world, that if I could somehow make everything certain or perfect, I’d finally feel safe and okay.

Something about this year broke me, though. In the best way. Turns out when so many things feel so uncertain all at the same time it has forced me to make new peace with what is right now. To find safety and contentment anyway. Right here. In the middle of it. In the middle of the work.

It’s been a work in progress.

So, I’m here, in this sweet, grandmother’s home where the closets smell like moth balls and where there isn’t a Whole Foods within fifty miles. (Erewhon is but a hazy, lusty memory.) Can I find peace anyway? My finances, my career aren’t exactly where I wish they would be. Can I be patient with myself, anyway? Can I be patient with my partner, and myself, and our relationship as it deepens and we both face new challenges and opportunities as a result? Can I love my clients exactly as they are without needing them to have any specific result? Can I accept everything just as it is and know I’m good and safe regardless?

There’s a Japanese maple tree staring back through the window at me and a slight breeze rustles its brown-red leaves. Across the street, there’s an elderly woman behind the wheel of a blue Jeep Cherokee attempting to back a U-Haul trailer into her driveway, and struggling. The air conditioning vent is on full blast above me and blowing my long hair into my face, tickling my nose. I’m trying to find the right kicker for this piece, and can’t find it. But I am feeling okay. Better than okay, actually. I would say I’m quite good.

Works in progress.

Luis’s work with men centers around the teenage years, offering what he calls a sort of “second puberty.” The idea being that puberty (which typically ranges anywhere from ages 10 or 11 to 20 in boys) tends to be the most challenging time in a young man’s life: a time when our rapidly changing bodies, and an onslaught of testosterone, energy and desire, is met by an equally-as-confusing lack of support, education or male rites of passage that can hone and support these shifts. There is very often no one directly guiding us or informing us what it means to go from boy to man, and as such, many of us deal with these challenges solo: Either literally alone— sequestered in our rooms, doing whatever we can to escape our confusing realities for stretches at a time: eating, scrolling, playing video games — or behind various masks, the ‘acceptable’ male versions of ourselves that keep us safe, make us likable, or help us to survive.

The loneliness and isolation many young men experience in their formative years takes its toll. And, naturally, we look for ways to take the edge off. Porn tops the list. It’s a no brainer, really: we’re increasingly horny, porn is freely available online, and its existence gives us license to explore sex and our desires in the privacy of our own rooms and worlds, free of judgment. With time, masturbation tends to soothe the sharp edges of many boys’ lives. Porn becomes the place we go to blow off steam. To escape into fantasy. To feel wanted and desired, and to live out the scenarios we imagine for our future selves without the risk of rejection. It’s a gift, in many ways, but this pattern also has big downfalls.

For one, porn paints a less-than-helpful picture of intimacy. It reduces sex to a formulaic, controllable act that always ends in orgasm (and relief). Meanwhile, sex and intimacy with a partner isn’t formulaic at all. It’s a tangle of emotions, and energies, a dance with another human being that invites us to connect in a deeper way, which can be confusing after years of using orgasm as a tool to disconnect.

Secondly, for many guys, porn becomes a go-to distraction from all the big emotions we aren’t processing in those years. Again, not inherently a bad thing at the time: we fail a test, we go to porn, we get dumped, we go to porn, we’re bored, we fire up porn. But that also means that all those feelings we don’t feel remain stuck inside our bodies, unprocessed, which can lead to epidemic male problems down the road: depression, anxiety, chronic illness, and addiction.

In my early to mid-thirties, when I first became aware that I was using porn, dating and romance addictively, and as an escape from my feelings, I made an almost immediate connection between a lack of orgasms and anger. I found that when I wasn’t having sex, dating, or using porn regularly, my fuse was markedly shorter. (Other men find the same thing when they stop, say, drinking to excess, or binge eating, or working twelve hour days.) Without my go-to mode of soothing, I’d blow up at the smallest relational or life snafus. Or spiral into bouts of self destruction and hopelessness. Even suicidal ideation.

Over the past decade, I’ve come to understand that during our healing journeys, we must re-experience and integrate the feelings we never processed from our younger years, which means that we moonlight as those younger selves for stretches, too. Becoming aware of — and shifting — my patterns around porn use and casual sex meant I, at least emotionally, turned into a teen again: Suddenly and explicitly my dad was a dick, nobody understood me, the world wasn’t fair, and I craved a magical woman to swoop in and save me from it all. It was like listening to an early Pearl Jam record very loudly all the time.

As I allowed and processed my adolescent rage — and the grief and pain underneath — at times, it felt like a full time job: I boxed my pain out, screamed it out, wrote it out. I also did less-than-helpful things like take it out directly or indirectly on friends, partners, and clients who were acting even vaguely like my parents, or even, at my parents themselves on many occasions.

All in, I see now that I was really hurt for nine or ten years — about the length of my actual puberty, which makes sense. I suppose I had to re-live those years in real, emotional time, as I worked on shedding the layers of coping mechanisms that had kept them at bay. Meanwhile, Luis and his wonderful team serendipitously arrived late last year, towards the end of that decade-long unearthing, offering me the gentlest place to explore my puberty-age self yet. In fact, it’s been in this group of tender, warm-hearted men that I’ve been reminded of what most teen boys are starving for most of all:

Love.

It’s been in a truly loving and non-judgmental space that I’ve been able to continue the process of dropping any remaining masks I’ve been wearing, expressing the feelings underneath, and applying the slow, soothing balm of care, deep listening and attention I craved decades ago from my father or another older man to myself. And as I have, that teenage boy —the one who felt so misunderstood, so unseen and unheard, so overwhelmed, and who turned to porn (and anything else he could get his hands on) to quiet those feelings — feels increasingly less alone, which changes how I show up in the world. In fact, the more I heal my teenage self, the more I act like the guy I’ve always wanted to be: gentle, yet firm, soft yet decisive, strong, yet tender.

All in, these past six months have made me a better partner, and a better friend. A better coach and a better citizen. A better man, undoubtedly. Which is the payoff for any man willing to take a long, hard look into his teenage years. Robert Bly used to write that most men never make it out of adolescence. And I believe that’s because we’re simply not given a safe, compassionate space to explore the most misunderstood, formative years of our lives and bodies, learning instead to isolate and self soothe, setting up lifelong patterns of disconnection and disassociation. Meanwhile, the medicine, of course, for this disconnection is reconnection: to our bodies, to our emotions, and to other men, where we can work to heal these wounds in a place that can reflect and champion us, offering us that second puberty — a chance to feel supported, seen and cared for this time around.

I invite any man who is feeling stuck or confused in his life right now to dive into the wisdom of his puberty years. Start with an old photo, a song, a story, a movie, or a memory, and take it from there. Immerse yourself in the cacophony of feelings of being young, vulnerable, and craving guidance or initiation on how to become a man. Allow yourself the full range of your desire, your hunger, your passion. And let it relight any flames that may have been extinguished in trying to become a certain type of man instead of remembering the man you always were.

Sean

Sometimes, these locational check-ins are more meaningful than others. Such was the case for me on a recent trip to Punta Lobos, a gorgeous hiking trail and cliff overlooking the ocean in Todos Santos, Mexico.

Two years ago, I came to Todos for the first time, on the heels of an intimacy retreat in Cabo San Lucas with my former coach. On that retreat, I’d spent the week having a confronting, come-to-Jesus with my romantic life and my relationship to women. The consensus? I was afraid of being alone, and using women to escape facing myself in a deeper way. And this pattern was keeping me from the kind of quality relationship I knew I wanted to be in. At the time of the retreat, I was in a relationship that was driving me crazy back home. But I was terrified to leave her and face the void.

All this new information was hard to stomach. Especially after a week of eye gazing, cuddle puddles, and intimacy practices surrounded by happy couples. Toss in a few grams of psilocybin chocolate and you can imagine how my psyche felt on the other side of the retreat, my rental car hurtling along Mexican highways towards a small town called Todos Santos for a week of rest and integration, accompanied by a young woman I’d met on the retreat. We were friendly and flirty, yet reserved, given my relationship status. But I certainly enjoyed the feminine attention and open, flowing conversation we shared. Meanwhile, the town, which translates in English to “All the Saints” had a potent affect on me, too. The combination of the silence of the desert and the powerful ocean waves were a pairing I’d not seen exactly in this way before, even in Southern California. It’s as if a world class surf break washed up on the shores of Joshua Tree National Park. Not to mention, the warm sunshine and the powerful “dreamer” energy of the place made anything feel possible.

One afternoon, my traveling companion and I scaled the cliffs to the top of Punta Lobos, and watched the whales breaching down below in the blue water. We talked and laughed, and took photographs of each other posing on the cliff. When I look at those photos now, I see a boy thoroughly enjoying the last gasps of his naive and immature approach to relationships and to women. The tough look on my face is cosplay at best, cautiously hopeful. Like I’m trying to convince myself that the months that follow will not be as bad as part of me knows they will be.

In truth, they were worse. I would return from Mexico, end my flailing relationship and launch into what would be perhaps the most challenging spring and summer of my life — grappling with the pain of letting go of the umbilical cord that women had provided me for decades — after which I’d wash up onto the beaches of Todos Santos again, in December of 2023, still grieving, but feeling mostly on the other side.

This painful descent into the “female wound” work that would take all of my attention and effort over 2023 is a process that I do not hear enough about in men’s circles. I hear plenty about the father or masculine wound, and the impact the lack of male guidance, initiation and rites of passage has on young boys, but what about what happens as a result of that absence of trustable men? What about how young boys enduring a groundshaking and vulnerable hormonal shift during puberty (read: tons and tons of testosterone and no information about what that means or how to work with it) are left without guidance about their changing bodies and increased arousal, and instead find refuge in coping mechanisms like pornography to help them through the pain and discomfort, only to end up equating sex — and women — with relief.

I see this again and again in my coaching practice: Men who are — despite our purest intentions — using women as relief for the overwhelming nature of life. The life we were not prepared adequately for when it mattered, and left to navigate mostly on our own. The life —and relationships— that demand things of us that we cannot give, because we have not learned how to give those same things to ourselves: time, care, and attention, namely, and instead spend our days in patterns of self-soothing, hoping our coping mechanisms will fill an ever growing void.

This un-fillable void impacts our relationships in endless ways: leading us into relationships we wouldn’t otherwise be in, hurting our partners, hurting ourselves, all as a result of a cruel intergenerational cycle, and a lack of education in learning to face the big feelings that lurk beneath the surface of every man’s skin.

On that trip here in December of ‘23, admittedly, I did not dare climb to the top of those cliffs at Punta Lobos. I was too busy inside those lurking depths of myself. It was not a time for visions or expansion. It was a time for healing.

So, it was an extra special moment to return to those cliffs several afternoons ago for a hike during the sunset, taking in the whales and the blue water, and reflecting on the journey that has transpired for me. My girlfriend was back at the house working, our wonderful and ever-deepening relationship representing one of the gifts of these last two years of digging into myself. The cliffs were quiet. I sat down on a rock, and stared out at the sea. Pulling my phone from my pocket, I scrolled back through my photos to find the pictures of last time I was here—as that cautiously optimistic boy about to be initiated into his next layer of manhood. I found them, and, staring at the time stamp, I was shocked to find that the date of the photos was February 24th at 5:15pm, the exact same day, and just minutes from the time, as two years ago.

So yes, the cycles of life. How they move and ebb and flow and deliver us to places we’ve been before, but as different people. And this hike in particular, this place, and this moment on the cliffs represented for me a new level of compassion and understanding for how difficult and rewarding and ever ongoing this road to becoming an integrated man truly is. I felt in that moment in Punta Lobos proud of myself. Proud of my clients. Proud of any man being willing to look at himself in this way. It is not light work, but it is worth it, for moments like these. When there is no one around but me — the very thing I was once so afraid of — and I’m celebrating a quiet, private victory that surely tops any achievement out there in “the real world.”

It is these moments I’ve come to live for. These moments that have come to matter. When it’s just me with me, and I can say: Good work, my man. I see you.

Sean

P.S. What cycles are ending for you right now as we approach springtime and a new year is blossoming? What can you celebrate as achievements - both inner and outer wins - from the past two years? When’s the last time you revisited a place that is meaningful to you, and how did you feel while you were there?

First, watching my girlfriend’s beloved, longtime cat transition in September was both heartbreaking and beautiful, and confirmed many of my speculations about the interconnectedness of life and death, and that we are all just souls with bodies.

And second, nurturing an ongoing relationship with one of the resident cats at Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn reaffirmed a powerful lesson in surrender.

A quick story on the latter: visiting the magical Deetjen’s property in May, my girlfriend and I were positively stalked by a small, gray and white cat we nicknamed Clarence. Clarence—whose name we would later find out is Stella—is über cute, and our obsession with her grew over our days there. (So much that we even let her in our room one night to cuddle with us by the fire, a strict No-No.) Upon returning to Deetjen’s in December, we immediately scoured the property looking for her, but to no avail. Our heads hung. What if we came all the way out here again and didn’t get to spend time with her? After making a hard-to-swallow peace with the situation, we resumed our activities, which included sitting by a magical, sunlit stream tucked back into the redwoods off Highway One. And it was one afternoon, while sitting there happily by the stream, that Stella appeared.

For the rest of our days on the property, the same dance occurred. Every single time we craved Stella’s presence, she was nowhere to be found. But the moment we let go, fully accepting the reality that we would likely drive back to Los Angeles without seeing her again, there she was. My partner nailed it when she said: “We have to stop looking for her, so she can look for us.”

Whew. What a metaphor.

Is there anything you’re looking for? Like, first-thing-on-your-mind-when-you wake-up-last-thing-on-your-mind-before-you-drift-off-to-sleep, looking for? Like obsessive spinning thoughts looking for? Like, think-you-can’t-live-without looking for?

If you’re anything like me, you’ve had a lot of these attachments over the course of your life, ranging in size and importance. And they’ve probably driven you at least a little insane. I know I could get hung up on something as small and trivial as an unreturned email or a pair of perfectly faded vintage jeans on eBay for days and weeks on end.

The biggest one for me over decades was love — specifically an amazing and deeply fulfilling romantic relationship. I was so attached to finding the perfect woman: courting obsessively, scrolling hungrily through dating apps, scanning every room I walked into for a beautiful face, that much like Stella, “the right one” never appeared. And even if she had appeared, I was so attached to holding onto her I would have very likely pushed her away anyway.

As men, I believe we’re inherently wired to seek things. (Call it our “hunter” DNA.) But this gets beefed up by the cultural onslaught of messaging around acquisition equalling happiness: Find a beautiful partner — it’ll make you happy. Score the high paying job = happy. Find that house or car or acquire viral fame = happy, happy, happy.

For many, this hunting becomes obsessive, a sort of hypervigilance that hijacks our energy, our attention, and our sanity and often results in burnout, stress, anxiety, and illness. It also — perhaps most importantly — keeps the very feeling we’re seeking away.

So what to do about it?

When I first went down the spirituality rabbit hole a decade-or-so ago, the idea of letting go was tossed around a lot. “Just let go and be present, man.” “Let go and let God.” “Let it go.” I heard these phrases so much. And no doubt they were well intentioned. But when you’re grinding your teeth at night thinking about the money you need to make, the car you need to drive, or the person you just absolutely need to love you back, those mantras do little good to quell the upswell of anxiety. They’re like tossing a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.

What I’ve found is that truly letting go of our fixations goes much deeper than an affirmation, or a self-help concept. If we really want to let go of something, we have to let it go physically, like actually let it go with our bodies, giving ourselves the felt experience of dropping the thing we’re so fixated on and letting it fall from cold, dead hands, if only for a few moments.

When I got fed up after years of obsessive dating and filling the proverbial void with women, I physically removed myself from the scene of the crime: I left my home in California, drove across the country and camped out with my parents for a while. This space I created by physically changing my environment forced me to deal with the absence of the very thing I craved and the uncomfortable feelings that void created. And by facing those feelings, I found I could live — and even come to thrive — without the thing I felt so attached to. A few months later, when I wasn’t looking for her, my partner appeared.

Another example: For eight or nine years, I’d been obsessed with publishing a book with a major New York publisher. I replayed the fantasy scenario in my head several times every day: I would sign with one particular, very fancy literary agent and he would lead me to a seven figure advance. Teeth grinding. Obsession. Sleepless nights. And surprise: No book. This year, though, I finally grew weary of the constant chase and the rollercoaster of feelings attached to it. I reluctantly shelved the memoir I’d been shopping around, stopped writing, and took a couple months to sit with the acceptance that maybe this book would never happen. It was painful as hell. Probably even worse than when I took that break from dating. Yet, a couple months later, a big publisher in New York reached out to me. Reached out to me. And offered me a book deal.

(Stella.)

Seeing this happen over and over again in my life, and in my clients’ lives, I have come to believe that letting go — if we can truly embody it — is one of the most powerful and advantageous positions on earth. Joseph Campbell’s famous line comes to mind: “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” Exactly. While we remain in a position of seeking, the things — and the life — we seek often remain elusive.

But if we stop actively chasing after and fixating on the things we think we need to be happy and safe —whether that is love, or money, or career validation — and create space for the discomfort to bloom, on the other side of that discomfort is opportunity: Those things we once looked for can begin to look for us.

And they just might find us, too.

Sean

I packed up my truck two Mondays ago in Los Angeles, and began driving northeast towards my buddy Robert’s place in Lafayette, CO, just outside of Boulder. I’d been itching to get out of LA for awhile and was excited to be back on the open road. I spent the night in Utah, and woke up Tuesday morning to news of the Palisades Fire blazing. It felt surreal to be looking up at the perfect blue sky outside my motel room, faint snowflakes falling, while hearing of the horrors happening in the city that I’ve called home since 2017.

All last week, the news just seemed to get worse. Friends in my former community of Topanga were among the ten-thousand-or-so LA’ers who lost their homes. Other friends in the Palisades and Pasadena were dangerously close to the same fate. Over half of the folks I know in the city are still evacuated. It has not been the start to the year anyone was anticipating, and yet, here it is.

Watching the mountainsides and neighborhoods of LA burn I’ve been thinking a lot about death. Not physical death, per se, although there sadly have been lives lost to the flames, but metaphorical death. Endings. Old plans and old stories going up, literally, in flames.

The last time I was in this guest bedroom in Lafayette was October of 2023. It was a very difficult time for me. I’d just crisscrossed the country twice after leaving my home in Topanga in September. Robert offered to house me for a few weeks. I took him up on it. And I spent my time here grieving my old life in the Canyon, grieving a relationship, grieving the losses of people I once thought would be “my people.”

My truck was, at the time, filled with objects from my Topanga place, which I carted up to the guest room to make it feel more like home. And when I left several weeks later, heading back to LA to let another layer of my former life go there, I thought I had grabbed everything, but I hadn’t: last Tuesday evening, I walked up the stairs to the cozy second floor room to find a half-finished candle on the desk. My candle. Maison Louis Marie, Bois de Balincourt. The sole remnant left from my little house in the Canyon. I torched it up, and the earthy smell rising to my nostrils took me immediately back in time, to another life, surrounded by people lost to the recent past, many of whom I was now watching and communicating with through my little phone screen as they reckoned with the chaos of the fires back home.

As that candle burned, and the fires burned back in LA, I grieved and reflected on the time that had passed since I was last here in Colorado: fourteen months that have felt, at times, like a long, drawn-out Goodbye to Los Angeles: to the different eras of my life there, and the person I was in each of them. All through my life, I’ve left places. I think most of us on a deep and intentional soul’s journey are familiar with leaving. We leave because we shift, we change, we audit, we outgrow. We are on a path to reclaiming the truest and most aligned versions of ourselves, and as we get closer to that truth, we shed things, places, people and old versions of us. It’s as inevitable as the weather.

I remember ending my decade-long relationship with New York in 2017, and how difficult that was. How, like any powerful and transformative breakup, it required years of different phases of letting go. Years of returning to a city that no longer felt like mine to find there was still another subtle speck of grief I had yet to turn over. And Los Angeles, surely, has been and will be no different. This was a city that held me during some of the deepest phases of my inward journey. A city that healed and rehabilitated me with its relentless sunshine and strong ocean breezes. A city that opened me to new levels of love, passion and purpose. And a city that, especially after the sweeping carnage of last week, no longer feels like the city I once called home.

For so many in LA, last week marked a major death. Whether it was a home lost, possessions, treasured landmarks, memories, or hope for the future, something, for everyone, was reduced to ashes. And my heart feels deeply for all those who experienced such a loss.

My old candle, too, after several days of burning, is now gone. A physical representation, perhaps, of the loss that’s been occurring inside me for a while now. And in anything lost, there comes the inevitable-albeit-fragile flicker of something new. It is perhaps still too early to speak of such things (surely there is grief left to feel for so many, me included), but I’ve never been someone who is shy with pointing out that even the biggest deaths — especially the biggest deaths — offer the chance to, when we are ready, and as the many layers of feeling move through us — rebuild anew.

Outside the window, as I write this morning, Lafayette is under six inches of fresh powder. The sun is rising in the eastern sky, searing through the clouds and revealing a bright day. Amidst the wreckage of what was, I feel the surge of new possibility. It will take time. It will be at times disorienting, as all new beginnings are. It might be frustrating. It will most certainly be messy.

And yet, here it is.

And here we are.

Sean

P.S. I’m curious: What is your experience with loss or endings? How do you handle Goodbyes? What are you leaving behind — whether by choice or by circumstance — as the last calendar year ends and a new one begins?

Happy New Year, and, first off, my deepest apologies for my absence here. (Especially to those of you who are paid subscribers to this newsletter.)

I hit a point of burnout and reckoning last year, and took the final two-or-so months of 2024 to go inward, disconnect from work, and many of my worldly responsibilities to slow down, and reflect, in the hopes of both gaining clarity and choosing a path forward. I never want my self worth to be defined by my output, and there were some big patterns around performance and seeking external validation I needed to disconnect from to move forward in a more sustainable and aligned way.

When I look back at last year, I’m grateful for so many things: ample time to really slow down, take stock and relax (a luxury, I’m aware), a wonderful relationship with my girlfriend that influences me in innumerable ways, and the opportunity to do meaningful work with men.

But perhaps the biggest thing I’m grateful for last year was something really uncomfortable:

2024 called me out.

I can just about pinpoint the moment it happened, too. And it was spurred on by a great convergence of events. The first obvious catalyst was being several months into a committed relationship with a woman who, through her devotion to love and to me, calls me forward to be the best man I can be. But then three events happened in succession that would shake my foundation even further: In May, all within a matter of weeks, I began a leadership training program with the wonderful Trevor Spring and his team at Sonz Youth, I went to Joshua Tree to lead a second men’s retreat with nine of my clients, and I watched the coaching group I had been a participant in for the last two-and-a-half years experience, what I would deem, a crisis of leadership.

The combination of being in a new space with a teacher I greatly respected as an example of conscious manhood, while simultaneously watching another mentor slip into wounded masculine traits, and then seeing my own blind spots and limitations while leading a men’s retreat, had me thinking a lot about leadership in the weeks and months to come. What are the qualities of a great leader? A great man? How do I want to show up in this world?

Eventually, all my thinking gave way to a clear concept:

Noble Masculinity.

All my life, beginning with my obsession with King Arthur and his Round Table of knights at the tender age of 4, I’ve been in search of noble, masculine energy on a planet that sorely lacks it. As many of you know, my father’s suicide nearly 20 years ago and the events that followed were my first real rock bottom with the wounded version of masculinity: It fractured my trust with men and with myself, it sent me down dark alleyways of addiction, escape, delusion and pain.

In the decades following my father’s death, though I thought of myself as a good person, a decent example of manhood, I was the very embodiment of wounded masculine energy: I controlled or manipulated others, I regularly displayed a lack of self responsibility or ownership for my actions, I was driven by my ego and external validation, I numbed out with addictions, I was afraid of being vulnerable, and unable to be truly present to anything or anyone, because of the pain stored in my body. I was also constantly using and disrespecting women and the feminine.

This chasm within myself between the man I wanted the world to see me as — trustworthy, honorable, worthy of praise — and the man I actually was behaving like — an angsty teen in a man’s body — caused an incredible amount of anxiety, and required layers and layers of denial and ego protection to maintain through the years—layers that peeled off, month by month, year by year, once I began my healing journey in earnest in 2015.

2024, however, was a confrontation that took me by surprise. Mainly, because I had to admit to myself that even after seven or eight years of “men’s work,” and five years of coaching other men, I still struggled with displaying many of these qualities in my day-to-day life.

Humbling.

This spring, spurred on by that great convergence of events — I experienced a sacred duty, much like a knight’s oath, in fact — rising up within me and calling me forward like never before. I looked around my life and saw, for the first real time, things I wanted to defend and protect and provide for: I have an amazing woman by my side, I have men who trust me with their growth and development, I am deep in talks with a big publisher about writing a book about my journey into manhood.

It’s time, I realized — painfully — to stop messing around and begin to walk the walk—to address the remaining blind spots and show up the way I want to in the world: as a noble man.

So, in October, I reluctantly stepped back. Re-assessed. Went silent. I knew my message was changing, and I knew I had new things to say, but I wasn’t ready to say them yet. Things needed time to marinate and integrate.

In my empty hours, I conducted a sort of study in masculinity: I watched endless “masculine” movies — where knights and soldiers and warriors fought and died for causes bigger than themselves — and I inhaled books by men I respect. I let myself experience a return to innocence, and to that four year-old boy, obsessed with a sacred version of masculinity he knew existed in his bones, but couldn’t find many representations of in his own life for many years. Slowly and as patiently as I could, I put together the pieces, and daydreamed about the kind of man I wanted to become.

If you’re a man reading this, have you been on a similar journey? Did 2024 raise any questions for you about the kind of man you want to be? Do you find yourself questioning your choices, feeling split between the masculine roadmap you’ve seen laid out for you, and another — perhaps more sacred — masculine roadmap that may be unfolding within?

If so, know you are not alone. There are more men doing this work than ever before. But in terms of the collective, we are a small fraction. There is much work to be done, no doubt. And many hands are needed.

The past few years, as I’ve gotten deeper into my own heart and deeper into the hearts and minds of men through coaching, it’s become clear to me that the general listlessness of the modern male always comes back to a lack of quality guidance when it matters most. The male experience is one of, from a young age, always looking for guidance and for guides, and so few of us truly find guidance and male wisdom worthy of devoting ourselves to. So rare and few are the noble men walking this earth, men we need now more than ever:

Men who communicate clearly

Men who self-inquire regularly

Men with connection to their emotions and attunement to the emotions of others

Men with reverence for the feminine and women

Men who take full responsibility for their actions

Men who have a connection to something greater than themselves, a mission, purpose or sacred duty

Men who champion and initiate other men without judgment, control or dominance

Men who love, who stand in the world with an open, courageous heart

This is the kind of man I have been striving to become over this last decade, and that I want to continue to help other men become, as well. And I know it’s going to take work. I know it’s going to be confronting at times. I know it’s going to provide endless tests. But I believe it’s the only way forward for us and for this planet. The world needs noble men. And I — more than ever — intend to be one of them.

Who’s with me?

Sean