The weight. The texture.

If you’re in a coffee shop, can you smell the beans?

Hear the machine grinding and spitting and frothing?

I won’t presume that anyone’s actually talking, but maybe the taptaptap of a keyboard.

Can you feel the weight of your own head, the tension in your neck muscles? Your posture, at whatever angle your back is hunched, or spine stacked? The unconscious balancing act of your body in space.

If you’re like most people, this list will do one of two things: annoy you, because your brain has already registered that it knows something about all of these and is working on more important things; or, it might help you drop your awareness into your body, as the yogis and somatic folks like to say in “mindful” whisper-voice.

Try it, though: Feel your feet on the ground. Your clothes against your skin. Temperature of the air.

Try, as an experiment, scratching your sternum lightly. Right in the center of your chest, with your fingers.

Which do you feel? Your sternum, being scratched? Or your fingers, dragging across the fabric of your shirt, or skin? Both equally? Which hand do you use?

A lot of men don’t feel anything - ever. I’ve worked with combat vets who report that they literally cannot feel anything in their bodies. Totally numb.

And it makes sense. When it becomes unsafe to live in our bodies, we leave, disconnect, dissociate.

Like when an IED blows up the vehicle you’re driving and now two of your buddies are dead.

Or, slower, over time: when your dad withheld love so much and so often you learned to treasure the scraps. You contorted yourself to gain his approval, maybe followed a career path you convinced yourself was right but you knew wasn’t.

Or when the kids at school taunted and hurt you so badly that you retreated into the safest place you knew of: into the computer.

Why feel, anyway, when it’s easier just to think? It’s safer up there, more socially acceptable to live in the head. Just figure it out. Be productive. Become a whiz at the latest tools. Talk the talk. Get promoted. Make money. Why question the mechanisms that have kept you alive, safe, approved of?

To question something, to most men, is to doubt it.

You don’t question the mission, you don’t question the captain.

Instead, you defer.

That’s how so many of us were trained to relate to leadership, whether others look to us or we look to them.

Back to all those subtle lessons where you learned to override your own sensations. You learned to think that what others thought was more important, more worthy, more right. Their judgement was better, their opinion more valuable. You were told we were too “sensitive” by men (and women) who perhaps thought that feeling and action were mutually exclusive.

“Put a cap on those feelings, and do the job.”

“It’s business, not personal.”

Here’s the problem most men have with feeling: they don’t know how to value what it offers them.

When we’re taught to value things that live on the surface of life: wealth, status, fitness, looks, success, we miss out on the opposite pole: depth, meaning, purpose, connection, aliveness.

Then at some point we’re faced with something that lives on that mysterious, far end of the spectrum—for example, the subtle sensation of the breath brushing past your upper lip, a woman’s orgasm, or her rage, if you’re lucky—and we’re baffled.

Mystified.

Offended, even.

We try to make sense of it. Instead of feeling it, we try to solve it.

Just like when your partner is feeling something and you try to fix it instead.

But what if being alive wasn’t a problem to be solved?

I used to think, so what. I’m just in a body. This is just me moving through the world. Why does it matter what I feel while scratching my own chest? There are more important things to pay attention to.

We naturally move toward the sensations that feel good and away from the ones that don’t. Feeling full. Feeling clean. Feeling well-fucked, or freshly worked out. Feeling like somebody you respect trusts you. The little dopamine hit when someone likes your post or hands you a compliment or pays you for the thing you’re proud of making. None of that’s a mystery. Everybody chases pleasure and avoids pain, or thinks they do.

Here’s what most men get backward.

We’ll take on enormous discomfort for years without blinking, as long as it’s the culturally acceptable kind. Eighteen-hour days building a business. Compromised health. Compromised relationships. Kids delayed for the right time, and the right time somehow never quite arrives. We justify the grind with the story of the magical, eventual payoff, the x-figure exit - something that makes the cost make sense.

A man ignores his wife for twenty years while the business flourishes. He calls it sacrifice up until the day he realizes what it has actually cost him.

But ask that same man to sit in an uncomfortable conversation for ten minutes, to feel a feeling that isn’t sanctioned, and he’ll do almost anything to leave the room. Say it’s a waste of time. Close the door. Go quiet. Ghost the one who said the true thing. Or get big and loud enough that the other person backs off first.

We sabotage the relationships we actually want to protect, because the discomfort of two opposing things being true at once is too much.

In fact, culture has rewarded us for walking away. Celebrated the man who dumped the “complicated” or “dramatic” girlfriend.

The culture of individualism instills a need for freedom so deep that a man never crosses the threshold into a version of himself where carrying and fulfilling his agreements and responsibilities and tending his tangled web of relationships feels like the best use of his freedom.

Even the argument of individualism vs. collectivism is too often framed as a binary, one-or-the-other, holier-than-thou philosophy.

Both have merit. Both are true. Both have costs.

Overwhelm can be a sensation too. It just feels like too much, and the body reacts the same way it does to the hot stove: pull back, shut the door, get out, distract, video game, masturbate. Sooth the system back to stasis.

We chase happiness the same confused way. Feel something uncomfortable, decide you’d rather feel happy instead, and go looking for it like it’s a place you can arrive at and stay.

That’s not how happiness works. (Sorry, optimizer bros.)

You let the uncomfortable thing move by feeling it instead of shoving it down, and happiness shows up for a while.

Real talk: happiness, in its true emotional sense, never lasts. Forty five seconds, maybe, and then you’re back to baseline, whatever that is for you.

Emotion is like electrical energy.

In a clear system, stimulus arrives to the body through the senses, activates a sensation, which triggers a preference, an emotion, then we respond to the emotion with action.

powers what needs powering, and then it’s onto the next stimulus response.

Some men run naturally cheerful, and sadness catches them off guard when it comes. Some men run naturally melancholy, and happiness passes through quick, welcome but brief.

Nothing here is malfunctioning. That’s just you having a human experience.

Every emotion has a sensation underneath it, its own specific texture. The more familiar you get with that texture, the more precisely you can name what’s happening in you.

Once you can name it, you can know something else: this is temporary.

Not as a way to rush past it. Not as some trick to make it leave faster.

Just true, the same way every other sensation you’ve ever had was also true—and also passed.

The pain might last the rest of your life. Your life is temporary. Both things are true.

So get curious instead of just enduring. Feel the biggest thing first, whatever’s loudest, then let your attention drift toward the quieter sensations underneath it, and watch them change. Because that’s most of what living is. Things changing and moving around, all the time, whether you’re paying attention or not.

Might as well pay attention.

Sensation is the raw material. What we do in reaction—and response—to our sensations reveal where we’re at in relationship, and also offers valuable information about how—or if—they want to be in relationship to you.

THE PRACTICE

You’ve done this a million times. But how many times have you paid close attention?

Put your phone down. (Maybe read the rest of this first!)

Sit, or stand. Breathe.

There’s no wrong way, no right way.

Notice the rise and fall of your chest or belly. Stay here for a few minutes.

Notice as your brain chatters.

Notice your hand wanting to reach for your phone as soon as you get bored.

Tension in your shoulders? Stomach growling?

Whatever it is, just notice.

Thinking? Just notice.

Stay for a few minutes, until you feel complete. Notice how the feeling of completion arrives. Don’t think about it so much as notice how it feels.

That’s it.

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No windows. No wifi. He didn’t design the space. It slowly built itself, one brick, one locked door at a time, every time something happened that was too dangerous to feel.

Most men have one. A client of mine once called his a ‘bunker’. A friend’s husband called his a storm cellar.

The latter was a surgeon. Transplant medicine. The kind of man who held other people’s lives in his hands for a living. His wife told me that when they’d experience conflict in the marriage, the fight itself wasn’t the hard part.

The hard part came after, when he’d shut down and the thing would disappear behind a locked door. “That stuff’s in the storm cellar,” he would say to her.

That’s how she knew the conversation was over.

He held that door shut for decades.

Once he retired, it became clear to her that her husband no longer felt that his life had purpose.

His career was his entire sense of self. Once it was gone, all that his former status held up disappeared.

Had no desire to travel, play golf, enjoy life.

Alzheimer’s moved in. Blood pressure climbed. Cholesterol climbed. Heart attack. The medication schedule took more and more of each day.

She told him, “I see what you’re doing to yourself.”

He died early.

Who can say whether the storm cellar or its contents was the cause, but when a second stent was installed in his left anterior descending (LAD, aka the ’widowmaker’) artery, his wife was struck by the similarity between how he shut down their conversations and how his heart had betrayed its own purpose and physically closed off to life.

It’s late. The kiddo’s in bed. In between kids shows and riding bikes and yard work and feeding this little beast, I’ve been thinking about how these pieces I want to share with you fit together.

But I’m solo-parenting this week, and unwilling to hide away to “do my work” while he wonders where his papa is. And had to clean the kitchen before writing.

So here I am, one a.m., cold feet on the floor, mind clear-ish, body groggy.

This is for you, brothers.

I know the bunker from the inside out.

I was under four years old when I watched my father hit my mother. I don’t remember all of it. I remember trying to make it stop. I’d sit under the comforter on their bed and cry as he put his fist through a mirror. I’d do anything to pull his attention off her and onto me.

Beyond my dad breaking one of my toys once, it never really worked. He didn’t stop hitting her.

After my brother was born, something in me changed strategy. I stopped trying to stop it outwardly and started stopping it inside my own body instead.

Literally.

I stopped pooping. Whenever the urge arose, instead of heading for a bathroom, I would cross my feet standing up and squeeze my butt muscles until the urge passed. Maybe I thought somehow that by stopping it in my own body, I would stop it out there, too.

While it began as a simple physical tensing up when my parents fought, it became what I called my “habit.” When other kids wondered what I was doing, I tried to shrug it off, but it got awkward sometimes:

“…but it’s a green light, kid. Time to walk across the street…”

I developed a condition called encopresis, not uncommon in (mostly) boys with similar backgrounds.

The thing about energy is that it wants to move. When too much electricity builds up in one spot, it starts fires. Sometimes I went two or three weeks without pooping. Even now I remember the painful feeling of fullness, bloat, intestinal congestion, whatever level of hell where feverish traffic jams last for eternity.

My body was on fire. My dreams were scary, my unconscious telling me in no uncertain terms what was happening inside. I wound up in the hospital getting my stomach pumped more than once. Days of enduring tubes shoved through both my nostrils, getting fed through an IV, unable to swallow. Harrowing trips to the bathroom in the humiliating gown. Drinking mineral oil like fruit juice.

Sores on my knuckles and elbows bled. A split lip that didn’t heal for years.

After the divorce, my mother continued to choose abusive men.

The violence got turned on me instead of her. The adults in my life did not like having to deal with me and my shit.

I’ll spare you the details. (But if you’re curious, go here.)

That’s the ironic brilliance of early survival strategies - the ones that stuck really did work once upon a time, often in ultra-specific ways. The problem is that they tend to last a lifetime.

From there it was a psychiatric hospital. A boys’ orphanage. A therapeutic foster home.

I was building a bunker the only way a boy knows how. Lock it, hold it, don’t let it move. Get strong and grow silent. Don’t tell anyone. Except the women who thought that if they carried my secrets, I’d love them more.

It stayed locked for a long time.

In my twenties, psychedelics cracked the door. I eventually got to meet everything I’d locked away down there, and more.

Remember that scene from Hamnet? When Will Shakespeare, the new father, sits at his desk going a little bonkers in the candlelit dark, and cries, “I am a violent and dangerous man!”

I laughed hard at that scene. Like, tears and sore smile muscles laughter. Trying to get air laughter.

Because that was me.

I was afraid of myself for a long time.

I was afraid for the people who loved me.

I was afraid of losing touch, of being so immersed in the pain and shame of who I was made to believe I was that I feared doing some terribly, profoundly stupid things and not realizing it til afterward.

I feared most that monster I’d long-suppressed would wreak havoc outside of my body and hurt others.

It was the same exact code that been installed so early. The same reason I had put up DEAD END signs in my gut. The same fear to which I had surrendered the basic functions of my body for a good chunk of my childhood.

At the core of it, it was the fear of feeling something that was just … deeply uncomfortable to feel. Felt like death.

It was shame.

Too many men die with their shame unexamined.

Too many of their loved ones suffer under its power.

Its influence has literally changed the course of history many times over in heartbreaking ways.

Is now, presently, if you catch my meaning. Tell me you don’t see wounded boys leading nations.

calls shame a ‘dirty fuel’ - it can propel the plane, but it’s a turbulent ride.

Shame makes winning feel like losing, care like betrayal, love like poison.

What changed everything for me was going back into the pain, into memories of abuse I did not want to return to, into the humiliation of being the third-grader who tried not to but sometimes shit his pants at school.

Feeling - slowly - the shame, the hurt, the resentment, the denial, the fear. All of it. Learning to let it exist. At first, it’s a wild animal. Then it’s not.

On a mushroom journey with a group of men I love and trust deeply, I found that little me again, the one who’d strategized so hard to survive, and I gave him his fucking choice back.

I’ve got this now, boy-o. You’re okay. I’ve got your back.

There’s nothing in me that I’m afraid of anymore.

Nothing.

I offer that story as proof, not a warning.

Opening the bunker won’t kill you.

You don’t have to trust me on that.

Never opening the bunker, on the other hand, might kill you.

Either way, I can guarantee that keeping it locked up has already caused harm you didn’t mean to cause, and if you knew it was happening at all, probably felt powerless to change its course.

Not facing the bunker costs your freedom. Traps you in patterns that feel too big to change. Keeps intimacy at a distance because those closest to you choose to respect you by not acknowledging what it costs them.

It’s not just your private little bunker.

How you deal with your shit affects other people.

We’ve finally cracked the code on how to help men get free of the bunker.

We’ll dive into the details of that later.

I had a client once, an older man, married to a woman for forty years before he came out as gay. He had a bunker “like Fort Knox.” It took a few psilocybin and MDMA journeys for him to reach the point of just being willing to knock on the door.

He said, more than once, that some part of him knew that if he never opened it, it would be the end of him.

He kept knocking. He’s built a life now full of the kind of emotional connection he spent decades convinced he wasn’t allowed to want. A group of men he practices with, goes on retreat with, calls friends in the real sense of the word.

None of that was available to him while the door stayed shut. He was numb, living at the surface of his life, because what was hiding underneath was everything he was ashamed of. Which was everything.

There’s a Damien Rice song I think about a lot, It Takes A Lot To Know A Man, where he points to the archetypes men are forced to embody and combat in our lives, and what happens in the wake of those confrontations.

For example, what we end up doing with the part of us that could do harm.

The part that’s trying to protect everyone by keeping the door locked. It’s all electricity. It wants to move.

Knowing a man, really knowing him, means conjuring the courage to acknowledge all of these parts exist, and to meet them.

I wish I didn’t have to clarify this part:

It’s on the man to do this work, to know himself first. Not the woman.

That the bunker exists is almost irrelevant. Everyone’s got one. What I fear is watching a man hold it tighter than he holds his own life, tighter than the people he loves, until it takes him the way it took the surgeon.

I’m not telling you to throw the door open tonight. That’s not how it works, and anyone selling you that result is selling you something that will just add to the bunker’s security system rather than soften it.

What I want for the men who were never given a single tool for this immense work is freedom.

What I want for their women is freedom.

There’s a door available to each of us that leads to that outcome.

It’s not easy, but it won’t kill you to knock.

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Last winter, I spent a couple hundred hours making a guide for men. I called it BOWING IN. It offered frameworks, re-writes, and practices on some of the most difficult topics in men’s lives: work, money, fatherhood, intimacy, death, purpose, the whole bit.

The feedback was consistent: it’s too much, Sean. And it goes over the heads of men who are just starting along their journey of opening their eyes and minds, personal development, relational vitality, whatever they’re calling it these days.

I want to meet men where they’re at, so I’m putting that whole project aside and returning to the beginning of my own path. I’ll share the skills and practices I learned that helped me become less of an arrogant, self-centered asshole.

Over the next many posts, I’m going to offer tools and resources for you to come home to yourself, that you might feel clearer, more purposeful, more skillful and attuned in your relationships. Like you belong, like you’re acceptable, lovable, worthy, deserving, and trustable.

All those things that most men would never admit to wanting more.

But this isn’t therapy: there’s nothing fucking wrong with you.

You are whole and complete as you are, right now, in this moment.

Most of the problems I see in working with men 1:1 are capacity issues. Even the big stuff can be worked and changed with practice and skill. It works best in connection with other men who are asking deep questions and sticking around for the answers. Bring these to your men’s group, a trusted friend or mentor, or the husband of your wife’s friend that you respect.

If you build these skills through practice, you will hate and criticize yourself less often, and possibly love and accept yourself more. When you build the relational skills through practice, your relationships will be a million times better.

You’ll feel attacked less often when women talk about how they feel about men. You’ll be more trustable to women because they will be able to see that you are in relationship with the parts of yourself that you once hid from. The men in your life will trust you more. Not because you saved each other’s lives, but because you stopped saving each other from the things you were scared to feel.

I don’t give a shit if you arrived here from Silicon Valley or the North Slope, from an aircraft carrier, a mega-yacht, or a crabber out of Dutch. You might have been on the front lines of combat, EMS, law enforcement, or spent your life in the trades.

What you do and what you have does not matter here. What matters is who you are. Not just in your own head, but in the lives of others.

If you’re a man, more connects you and I than either of us has been taught to believe.

If your hackles are up but you’re still reading, this is for you, brother.

We start with the thing that connects us to life, and to each other: the breath.

The First and Last Thing

What a poet’s stray line, ten days of silence, and a scraped-up four-year-old taught me about the practice you can’t skip

It’s six o’clock on a Sunday and I’m doing the dishes.

My son is out back with a scraped-up elbow from a scooter crash earlier today.

I just got back from a commercial fishing season in Alaska that was everything but a total failure.

The finances are uncertain right now.

The rest of the summer looks packed, planned out on the hopes of a successful catch up north.

All of it is right here in front of me. All the anxiety, the gratitude, the fear, the wisdom, the irritation, the abundance. I’m doing my best to do the dishes just for the sake of doing the dishes.

I spent twenty minutes scrolling Substack Notes, reading brilliant lines from writers who clearly have the kind of quiet, uninterrupted hours I don’t have right now.

I have a four year old.

I don’t get to sit around doing things like completing thoughts, let alone composing cleverness consistently enough to get noticed.

If anything, that’s the trade I’m making in this season of life. A lot of my energy goes straight into this kid, and the rest goes into staying functional enough in the adult world, the money world, the whole grinding machine, so I can keep feeding him and building the life we want.

I wrote a piece recently about a weekend with a hundred and forty men in the woods, about two women who walked into our circle and asked whether we could even have a real conversation about power and gender without falling apart.

I wrote it the day before I left for Alaska. When I read it again a month later, it said everything I’ve been trying to say for years.

There was nothing left to preach. No more judging to do. The work ahead was clear: men wanted to know what they could do to gain a seat at the “table” where we can start to talk about creating real change in the world.

So let me go back to the beginning. Before the woodshop. Before I understood any of this. I was fishing, just starting to notice the trauma I was hauling around, the reactivity, the way I kept jerking my marriage around because I couldn’t commit to it or to myself.

A slam poet named Buddy Wakefield once mentioned Vipassana meditation in one of his poems, sometime back in the mid-2000s. It stuck. I looked up the center he’d written about, a Vipassana hall in Washington state, and I went and sat in the same room.

Ten days.

Twelve hours a day.

No talking.

No phone.

Nothing to do but pay attention to breath and sensation.

I did not get enlightened.

I’m not qualified to teach that technique and I won’t pretend to be.

There are people who’ve given their whole lives to it, and if that path calls you, go find them.

What I learned, the thing I am qualified to point to, is smaller than enlightenment and somehow more useful.

I learned how to pay attention.

I felt the texture and depth of my own breath for the first time.

The stretch of my ribs as I inhaled.

The air leaving my nose as it brushed my top lip.

I started to see the pattern of stimuli to response:

sound enters the ear → the ear, a transducer, translates acoustic vibration into electrical current, sends it to the brain → the brain fires a reaction → a physical sensation arises → judge the sensation as good or bad, feel some emotion about it → react to the emotion → repeat forever

Your breath is one of the first places your body tells you what’s already happening.

Big inhale, you need more oxygen.

Shallow and fast, you might be scared.

Long and slow, your system is telling your heart it can slow down too.

Deep and steady, you’ve got room.

Capacity.

This isn’t a theory I picked up from a book, though the researchers who study the vagus nerve have spent careers mapping the thing your body just knows.

In men’s work, I learned an exercise that taught me this in the body instead of the head. It’s an advanced-level practice, but I want you to know what’s possible here.

Two men stand facing each other.

Eye contact the whole time.

Breathe together, big and fast, for a whole minute.

Both of you breathe out as far as it goes and hold it.

Dignity in the posture.

Relax the shoulders.

You hold while the body starts to panic, because that’s what a body does when it needs oxygen

Your face begins to tremble

Your mouth wants to open on its own

Your lungs beg

You will yourself to stay, to match the man in front of you, staying present while physical sensations begin to gnaw

It’s not some mind over matter thing. We’re not demolishing fear.

We’re learning its texture, and noticing what’s also true alongside it.

The more you notice what else is true when fear in in the body, the more capacity you develop.

Learning how to stay with the discomfort and choose, on your own timing, when to let the breath in, ever so slowly, all the way in.

Hold full.

Breathe again, slow, again from choice this time, not because the lungs demanded it

Keeping the heart open, purpose aligned, while a stranger’s eyes hold yours.

Training the body to be witnessed, in fear, learning, and presence.

Training the mind to relate to fear in a dynamic way instead of being ruled by it.

Capacity offers optionality.

Optionality is the ability to choose a creative response over the impulsive one.

Capacity is a trainable practice.

When my son fell off his scooter today and scraped his elbow and cried the way a four-year-old cries when the world has betrayed him, I didn’t try to shut it down, assure him it was okay, or tell him how brave he was being.

I got down, put my arms around him, and breathed. Slow, audible, the kind he could feel as much as hear. I told him I was here. “You were going really fast,” I said, and then you fell, and that hurt your elbow!”

I told him that I wasn’t going anywhere.

Then I called his mama, who brought the car and the first aid kit.

Because breathing only does so much in an emergency.

But the breath is what kept me connected to him instead of just managing my own anxiety, fear, or embarrassment. It’s what helped bring him back from wherever pain that big takes a four-year-old.

That’s the whole practice, as far as I can tell. Breath is the first thing you do when you arrive on this planet and the last thing you’ll do before you die.

Everything in between is training for doing it on purpose instead of accident.

Some people spend their entire lives just focusing on their breath.

I often tell the men who come to my retreats: “if all we did was sit and breathe together, that would be enough” - a teaching I heard from one of my teachers, Eli Buren.

For our purposes here, paying attention to the breath is where the work of the integrated, cultivated man begins, but not where it ends.

In the next post, we’ll build from here.

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If this material landed for you: Bowing In is a guide for men cultivating purpose, depth and relational vitality in their lives. Not for the faint of heart. The guide is the map. If you want a guide for the territory, apply to work with me 1:1.

Bowing In

1:1 application

The gathering is called Manifest. The people who produce it are friends of mine, and I believe in what they are building. We took risks together. We shared our hearts. We did some powerful work. An elder indigenous storyteller and activist, Chiyokten, blessed the space many times over, guiding us to connect deeper with the land and its stories. We held elder councils that included Kétu Oladuwa, a man who spent five years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. A retired army ranger taught combat skills and fighting fitness, as well as how to show respect to children.

There were five sheep, and a group of us learned to slaughter them. We sang gratitude and grief together as the knives cut the throats. We cleaned the hides. We took the animals apart with our hands and tried to stay in our bodies the whole time, tried not to disconnect from the life we were ending.

Most of us have only ever met meat under fluorescent light, wrapped in plastic, severed from the creature it came from. Our culture keeps death at a distance. For a few hours, we closed that gap, and the meat nourished the lot of us for the weekend.

I came to run a workshop on regulating the nervous system. On leaning into discomfort, holding paradox, noticing the first flickers of activation. On increasing the window between stimulus and response, and how to stay in your body when the wave wants to wash you away.

Most men think that healing is in the big cathartic release. But feeling your repressed anger for the first time—even when witnessed by a group of caring men—doesn’t accomplish what most of us would like it to. Ejaculation doesn’t heal sexual trauma. Expressing your emotions like a rocket ship may produce good feelings of joy and connection, but it often just blows out your nervous system.

Regulation is about staying aware as activation goes up, then you can bring yourself back home to center, to ground.

Cathartic release is a pressure relief valve. You close the valve, go home, and the tank re-pressurizes because the patterns beneath the big feelings haven’t changed.

Maybe you’ve seen videos from Sacred Sons events. Heard about the big psilocybin journey where dude lost his mind or met god. It’s not that those aren’t powerful, potentially life-changing experiences. But without embodied practice over time—in the kitchen on a Thursday morning, at work receiving hard feedback, in conflict with the wife—these experiences become more like memories of carnival rides than the great realignment they felt like in the moment.

I did not expect the gathering to teach me what it taught me.

On one of the days, two women from the community walked into our container for an other-than-male council. They came with an intention to talk about gender healing. They did not come to lecture or to blame. They came to ask questions and to talk and perhaps to see whether we could listen, hear, and hold what they said.

The first question was simple. Are we even able to have a conversation? Are we able to approach the subject of gender, of power, of what men carry and what men have done, without falling apart or shutting down?

They were careful. They did not tell us what to do. In fact, they refused to tell us what to do, and put up a boundary when men continued to ask them, what can we do?

They said, we are not here to hold you. We are not here to make you feel better. And we are not here to tell you the truth, because the truth requires a trust and intimacy we have not built yet.

What came back from the room was scrambled.

I felt it in my own body first. There was so much shame in that space, and mine was part of it. Man after man reached for the same move. Just tell us what to do. Give us the assignment. Many said some version of I am a good man, I am already doing my work. There was a posture in it. A wish to be approved of. It sounded, and I felt this in my own chest, like a boy asking his mother to confirm he is good so the discomfort of self-doubt and shame can stop.

The women would not give us that.

When they pointed us toward books, newsletters, toward voices that were not white and not male, toward writers like Toi Marie.* men still asked, but what do we do. Most of those questions were not really questions. They were a request for relief. Tell us we passed. Tell us we can stop feeling this.

Later, around the fire, after the women had gone, I read a poem and said out loud what I had been feeling. I imagined two women walking into a circle of a hundred and forty men ten thousand years ago. I felt into the long history of that, the patterning underneath our species.

One of the men challenged: This is not ten thousand years ago. This is now.

He was right. It is 2026. We do carry more consciousness than our ancestors did. We have, at the very least, a little more room in our nervous systems between what happens and how we respond. We have more tools. We had every reason to do better in that room. And when these two women asked whether we could even begin, our bodies answered no. They felt it. They told us afterward that the space did not feel safe enough, did not feel brave enough, to risk the truth. So they kept their truth. They did not hand us their burden. We had not earned it.

There is a line from Robert Augustus Masters’ book To Be A Man I keep returning to.

If we don’t recognize and have some degree of intimacy with whatever in us can dehumanize or abuse others, however “civilized” or “rational” its demeanor, we pose a danger not only to ourselves but to others, no matter how nicely we generally behave. What really matters here is not so much the presence of this inner darkness, but the kind of relationship we choose to have with it.

The relationship. That is the whole thing.

I have tried for years to open conversations among men about power, and most men do not want it. They cannot find themselves in it. They have been trained to believe they are worthless, unworthy, not enough. So when someone says the word privilege, it lands on a man who already feels powerless, and he feels only attack. He goes quiet, or he gets defensive, or he disappears into shame. I understand the reflex. I feel it too. I have learned to get curious about it instead of certain.

Here is what I have found. The work begins in the body. It begins with noticing the early stages of activation, with the breath, with reaching for resource. With what doesn’t change. The things that stay solid whether or not the room is safe. Gravity. Sunlight. Water. The garden. Whatever lets you feel the worth of being alive. God, if that is your word for it. The infinite, if that is.

But the body is not the end of it.

A man can be beautifully regulated and still be blind to the water he is swimming in. Conversations between men and women are not going to move until we can see that water. Until we can let the word patriarchy mean something other than a personal accusation.

Aaron Johnson of Dark and Tender, spoke at the event about the interlocking structures that hold the thing in place. We have to be able to see those structures in order to enter the conversation, in order to gain a seat at the table.

Maybe it starts as nothing more than intellectual understanding. That is fine. Intellect is a doorway. The room is somewhere past it. We have to grow enough spaciousness inside us to let two diametrically opposed truths sit together at once.

The structure of oppression is real, and your pain is also real. Both, at the same time.

The healing asks us to see the power dynamic and to see our participation in it. Not only our own. Women uphold this thing too. It does not run on one gender. They have simply adapted to a different slot in the hierarchy, and they carry their participation differently. None of that lets men off the hook. It means the work is shared, and the first move is ours, because we have been the ones least willing to make it.

The first move is to listen. To really listen. To shut the fuck up and stay quiet long enough for something true to arrive. To get curious about the other-than-male experience instead of rushing to fix it or defend against it.

We have disconnected from the Earth so completely that we can know what our extraction is doing to her and keep going. We can hold the data about what is being destroyed and feel almost nothing. That numbness is the same numbness that lets us stay disconnected from the feminine, from the source of life itself.

Every person on this planet came through a woman’s body. No man excepted. The first woman did not come from a man’s rib. Until we can honor that, not by lifting women onto a pedestal but by meeting them as human beings, we stay split from life.

I am not even reaching for equality or equity in this moment. I am reaching for something more basic than that: Human connection.

This work will not be finished in my lifetime. Even if every man started today, we would not see the end of it.

And still I keep at it, because of something I trust about people. When a human being is in a relaxed state of awareness, when there are options available beyond fight and flight and freeze and fawn, when there is real choice and agency, we move toward life. Toward reverence. Toward wholeness, curiosity, calm.

That is the direction we drift when we are not afraid.

The trouble is that we live inside a culture of threat. So many of us are scanning for danger all the time, certain that survival is on the line. We believe the political divide is coming for our children. We believe the economy could fall tomorrow, so we had better grab ours and get out.

We prop up systems that give us nothing and take everything, systems crumbling underneath us, and we keep extracting anyway. We are overwhelmed and frightened and lost, and we cannot say so out loud, because we are busy trying to be men.

The real act of being a man might be the opposite of all that rushing. To connect. To be patient. To stop assuming we are broken and in need of fixing, that anyone is broken and in need of fixing. To be present, to make room for what wants to happen, and to humble ourselves in service to it.

Which brings me back to the woods.

If men’s work does not seek to make us gentler toward the women in our lives, gentler toward our children, if it does not point us toward a healthy elderhood and an honest line of transmission between generations, then I do not know what we are doing. That is the point of it. It is the only point I can find.

And the how is not complicated, even if it is hard. We pay attention. We get educated. We go looking for our blind spots. We look for the water we have been swimming in our whole lives, and we let ourselves see it.

I am not interested in wokeism. I am not actually trying to wake anyone up. But if something in you is trying to wake up, why not see if it’s okay to let it?

This is the work in front of us.

The work is to re-connect.

• * Check out Toi Smith, Audre Lorde, Leticia Nieto, and bell hooks’ The Will to Change for more. If you’re a podcast listener, look for hosts who are not male and not white. Can you name one? I couldn’t.

A note before you go.

This Wednesday, July 1, I will be a guest on a Global Social Witnessing call with the Pocket Project, alongside Matthew Green of / and Pamela von Sabljar. The title is From the Epstein Files to Inside the Manosphere: Tending to Fractured Gender Relations. It is the same territory this piece has been circling. We are not gathering to fix anything or to hand anyone their assignment. We are gathering to witness together, to resource ourselves, and to stay present with what is hard to look at.

8:00 PM Berlin time, which is 11:00 AM Pacific. Held in English and German.

Register for the call here.

If this material landed for you: Bowing In is a guide for men who’ve decided to stop going it alone in the dark. 49 frameworks across 8 domains. Built to be returned to, not completed. The guide is the map. If you want a guide for the territory, apply to work with me 1:1.

Bowing In | 1:1 application

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Dear Z.,

You’re three, fiercely. (Or, as you say: fluwee!).

I’d like to share a story with you from my own life, in service to you, if or when curiosity arises, knowing something deeper of me than just the roles and patterns we’re building with one another in real time.

Love you, kiddo.
Papa Sean

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When I was 23, my elder cousin, Rich ‘Doc’ Holliday, sat me down in his gun room. I was visiting his home in Nikiski, Alaska, where I’d moved with your Oma Karen and Uncle Christopher ten years before. The gun room, where he re-used fired casings to make new rounds, was the bedroom in which I’d slept as a kid.

Rich was an old-school roughneck who’d worked on Alaska’s North Slope in the oil fields for decades. He was a kind and caring father, and, I think, a thoughtful, deeply-feeling leader who lived perpendicular to the stereotypes of his industry, while able to connect with his comrades in the field.

I was fresh off my first season of commercial fishing, about to head to Iceland, and after that, I had no idea. The road was calling, and I intended to follow it.

While I don’t remember the specific details of our conversation, I do remember that Rich gave me his time that day. We sat together in his room, talking, for what seemed like hours. Near the end of the visit, Rich offered me two gifts: a Pelican Stealthlite 2400, a neon-yellow torch that was submersible and nearly indestructible, and a Gerber folding knife with a camouflage handle and non-serrated blade. It was not so unlike the black Benchmade Griptilian that I carry in my pocket now.

The names of these things might mean nothing to you, but as a former Boy Scout and a devoted outdoorsman at the time (at least in my mind), they represented a quality to me of which I wanted, one day, to feel worthy.

Like many young men setting out on exciting, uncertain journeys, I was unprepared for the toils ahead. I was grateful for the gifts, but didn’t yet understand the deeper value they would begin to offer over time. I was also resentful that I felt obligated to carry what were now redundant supplies in my already-heavy backpack, which contained everything I owned.

I carried the knife clipped on the inside of my left pants pocket through many months around Iceland, and through the UK, where I walked across Scotland, then hitchhiked around Ireland.

I returned stateside penniless and stayed for a while with your great-grandmother, Rose, in Massachusetts, then drifted down to Florida, eventually back to Alaska, where, the next summer, in Bristol Bay, near the summit of Mt. Cinnabar above Lake Aleknagik, I joyfully catapulted myself from a boulder into a snowfield.

In my exuberance, I did not realize until later, when we’d returned to the boatyard in Dillingham, that the knife had fallen out of my pocket, probably as I tumbled down the snow drift.

I was distraught. I begged my skipper to let me return to the mountain, but the salmon had begun to charge up the Nushagak River, and we were fishermen.

Though I returned to fish Bristol Bay every summer for the next twelve years, and many times returned to Aleknagik, I never again climbed the mountain, and never saw the knife again.

Whenever I again saw that mountain, it invited me to snap back to the present moment, to become more aware of the tools and gifts I carried—within and without.

The torch has stayed with me. For three years it has been your toy. Though the xenon bulb has long burned out, perhaps I can order another from some archaic warehouse that carries pre-LED light bulbs.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been inexplicably carrying the lightless torch in my day bag. I felt that this thing, which had illuminated some of the darkest moments of my life, had completed its purpose. I considered passing it along in some way that might help me avoid the heartache of direct disposal.

There is something in me that deeply values emptiness. It manifests as an impulse to get rid of possessions no longer in active use, or to compulsively empty the bulky contents of our basement. Where some people feel full and content after shopping and buying things, I feel bloated, exhausted, obligated.

Emptiness to me feels like freedom. It creates space for more love, connection, movement, and breath.

So, the other day, I walked to Heart Coffee, stopped by a little free library on the way, and set the neon-yellow torch inside, with thanks and a blessing for whomever came upon it. In that moment, I realized I was completing a cycle. The knife was taken by circumstance, but the torch I could release with intention, having absorbed its true gift.

As I walked to the coffeeshop, the memories began to flood in. when I returned to my tent at Sandwood Bay in NW Scotland after an exhilarating but tiresome 20+ mile day trip to Cape Wrath in savage Highland winds, that torch was the only light I could find, indeed the only light for miles. Later, when my car broke down one February night in Alaska, that torch helped me find the phone number of someone who could help, and kept me from freezing.

Indeed, the torch continued to shine into darker moments: as suicide became the most attractive life path I could at that time imagine, under a bridge in Eastern Europe, tucked inside my sleeping bag on a midwinter hitchhiking trip, I flipped the toggle on/off/on/off/on, bright light flashing point blank into my eyes, perhaps to see if there was anything worth anything in there—

No, the true gift was not the objects, despite their literal and metaphorical utility to shine awareness into dark places and to cut through obstacles, bullshit, and superficialities.

The gift, as I can only see it in retrospect, was of Rich’s time, attention, and love in a moment when a young and clueless me needed it most.

He did not offer me platitudes, or try to save me from my fate. He could not have known what was in store for me. But that experience became a blessing in my life that continues to pay dividends.

It offers me a template for how to be in the world as a man, a father, mentor, teacher, and guide. Also, a reminder of what it was to be a young man, setting out on an exciting journey into the unknown.

It is a reminder to lean into those moments, to offer value but not advice, connection and care without condition, and to really let go, and allow what wants to happen, to happen.

This is what men can offer one another. It is what elders can offer youngers: to give time, attention, care, curiosity, gifts and blessings without taking, needing gratitude, or holding too tight to anything at all.

So I share this story with you, not just as a tale of objects lost and let go, but as a promise of the time, attention, and presence I hope to offer you throughout your life.

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A dear friend, a facilitator, a men’s work leader I trust, invited me to follow a thread that was alive in the room after a ceremony we’d shared together. My heart was open. The images came in on their own.

This is what came.

I was led to the inmost shore of a remote Scandinavian fjord. Autumn sky, grey and heavy. I walked ashore from a frigid sea.

Although I was a visitor to this land, it felt like home.

A man stood not far from the rocky beach, facing away from me. His gaze, despite the steep cliffs before him, was cast downward. He was in grief. He stood to lose something precious. In his desperation, he had prayed for help.

I began to understand myself to be his descendant, sent from some distant century, unsuspectingly, to answer.

Without acknowledging me, he turned and walked toward a stone house a few hundred meters away. I followed. I seemed to be floating rather than walking.

A saddened woman sat outside the low door.

Inside, embers in a fireplace dimly lit a breathing creature on the bed. A boy of eight or ten, beneath a bear skin. Pale. Feverish. Shaking.

All at once my role revealed itself. They wanted their boy to live. For whatever reason, I was the one who had shown up.

I added wood to the fire. Set the small window ajar. Closed the door. Offered water to the boy, who drank some. The low house heated up like a sauna.

I have little medical training. But I sensed that the boy’s body was fighting infection, and I knew that for most of human history, that was often a death sentence. Lacking knowledge of herbs or other remedies, I took a chance on heat helping the fever do its work.

I sat in the fire with him for a long time.

Eventually, perhaps miraculously, the fever broke.

The man went inside as I left. The woman, now standing, bowed her head slightly to me.

I returned to the shoreline and walked slowly back into the sea.

When I opened my eyes, I understood something that had never occurred to me before, not even during powerful psychedelic journeys.

Our ancestors are not the only ones available to us in times of need.

We spend a lot of time in ancestral work asking those who came before us for guidance. Praying to the wise and well amongst the dead. Consulting what was left behind. It’s good work. I’ve done it myself and felt something real shift in response.

But the journey showed me a different direction of travel. The man on the shore didn’t look backward. He prayed forward. He called out across time toward someone who hadn’t been born yet. And something came.

I didn’t arrive with answers. I arrived with a fire, some water, and the willingness to stay.

That was enough.

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If this material landed for you: Bowing In is a guide for men who’ve decided to stop going it alone in the dark. 49 frameworks across 8 domains. Built to be returned to, not completed. The guide is the map. If you want a guide for the territory, apply to work with me 1:1.

Bowing In | 1:1 application

Not “came to me” like a revelation. More like a tap on the shoulder. The words surfaced the way they sometimes do when things get quiet: what doesn’t change.

That phrase has been my touchstone for a while now. I use it when I’m flooded, when the ground feels unstable, when I need to find something solid underneath whatever’s moving. And in that moment, sitting outside in the middle of an unexpected family event that had pulled me under the night before, it worked. I felt the mountain. I felt the ground.

And then I remembered I was supposed to be leading a men’s group.

Not in an hour. Right then. Eleven in the morning. I looked at the clock. It was 11:10.

I grabbed my phone and got word to them as fast as I could. I wasn’t in a state to show up for it, and they’d already started without me. A group of men who had shown up, on time, for something I had agreed to be part of, and I wasn’t there.

I want to be precise about what happened inside me when I realized that.

In the past, that kind of lapse would have lit me up with shame. I know that version of myself. Years ago, I got fired from a woodworking job I loved. I’d put my own construction debris in the work truck the night before, showed up late, handled it badly. I knew it was wrong while I was doing it. I dissociated anyway because I didn’t know what else to do. And when it cost me the job, I really came down on myself. Hard. The kind of hard that doesn’t help anything and just makes the next mistake more likely.

This time was different. I felt the lapse. I felt the broken agreement in my chest, the weight of having let people down. But I didn’t spiral into it. I just... held it. And then I went and did what needed doing.

I’m not saying that to show off my equanimity. I’m telling you because I genuinely wasn’t sure I was capable of it until it happened.

And I think that’s what years of this work actually looks like: not the absence of mess, but a different relationship to the mess when it inevitably arrives, when the mistake gets made, when the lapse in judgment or attention knocks you sideways.

The following Sunday, I came back to lead the group.

I could have opened with an introduction. My background, the work I do, the frameworks we’d be exploring. I could have apologized briefly and moved on, which is the move I’ve seen plenty of leaders make. Quick acknowledgment, pivot to content, everyone pretends the air is clear because nobody wants to be the one who slows things down.

I didn’t do that.

I opened by naming what happened. Directly. No defense, no over-explaining. I said: I agreed to be here last week and I wasn’t. That matters to me. If it had an impact on you, I want to make space for that before we do anything else.

A few men said they hadn’t been there either. One said the conversation that emerged in my absence had been unexpectedly rich. Another said he appreciated the opening even though he, too, hadn’t been there. The room settled in a way that I could feel, something cohering that I think wouldn’t have been there if I’d just glossed over the thing.

What I said to the group afterward was something I’ve found to be true over years of sitting in circles and leading them: the most healing moments in this work don’t always happen inside the curriculum. They happen in the margins. In the lunch line at a retreat. In the moments before a session starts, or in the goodbyes afterward. In the repair that nobody planned for but somebody needed.

The agenda brings men together. The relationships we build are the skin in the game, the connective tissue that builds resilience for the harder moments, and makes the celebrations richer.

I’ve been slowing down my posting here recently. Spring showed up and life reorganized itself around that, as it does. Going forward through the end of August, I’ll be posting twice a month rather than weekly. Slower. More room to breathe between pieces. That feels right for the season.

In the meantime, I’ve paused paid subscriptions through the end of August. Enjoy your summer. Thank you to each of you for your support - it really, really helps.

If you’ve been here, thank you for staying. If you’re new, glad you’re here.

There’s more coming. Just at the pace the work actually asks for.

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If this material landed for you: Bowing In is a guide for men who’ve decided to stop going it alone in the dark. 49 frameworks across 8 domains. Built to be returned to, not completed. The guide is the map. If you want a guide for the territory, apply to work with me 1:1.

Bowing In | 1:1 application

I got mad. I grew up without a lot of food, and wasted food still hits something old and tight in me. I put him at the table, looked at the avocado on the floor, and ate it myself. Scraped it up and put it on my plate. Didn’t want to waste it.

Something opened up in that moment.

I’ve been holding my heart wide open for years because I see how deep the wounds are in men. I know what it costs to carry all of it unexamined. I’ve done enough of my own work to understand the landscape. And I’ve devoted a lot of myself to holding space for men who are navigating their own darkness.

But I’m raising a high-needs boy whose tonsils are fully inflamed right now, which means he hasn’t been able to breathe properly for a long time. I’m working in a cabinet shop. I’m seeing coaching clients. I’m building internet things I don’t know how to build. By the end of most days there’s not a lot left.

So when I ate the avocado off the floor I realized: I don’t need to save everyone. I don’t have the space for that right now. And honestly — at some point, men are just going to need to grow up. If they want to smash their avocado into the kitchen floor, let them eat it.

In men’s work we spend a lot of time on what we never received. Actual fathering, for example.. Deep witnessing from elder men. Rites of passage that mark important thresholds. Examples of men who were humble and powerful and kind and capable and open-hearted and decisive — sometimes all at once, sometimes as the moment required.

We also spend time on what we learned that needs unlearning. The misogyny. The entitlement. The fear of humiliation and shame that drive so much of our violence. The fragility and strategy and armor that parade as strength and status.

But there are things we learned as boys that are still relevant. Basic things. Things that didn’t require a men;’s retreat or a deep psychedelic journey to remember.

Don’t bully people smaller than you. Don’t be a dick to people who intimidate you. Stand up for the underdog. Stand up for what you believe even when it’s unpopular. Do the right thing when nobody’s watching. Take responsibility for your actions. Stop making excuses. Ask for help.

And learn to juggle.

Seriously. It’s good for your brain.

It’s hard to keep the candle burning for the big vision sometimes. This four-year-old takes most of my jet fuel. Working toward a future that features men who are awake to their hearts, kind, considerate, humble, and who know how to take risks well — who know how to lead others through uncertainty, repair wounds, make good food, build quality things, fix things that are actually broken, and empathize with the rest, and yes, make money — scaling that vision requires fuel I don’t always have at the end of a long day.

When I sit down at night like this, my brain scrambles. Things fall out that I want to say but think maybe I shouldn’t. Forgive me if I repeat myself.

If you ever question whether you’re worthy of being called a good man, you probably are. The ones who never question it are usually the ones to watch out for.

Stop fucking around. Stop blaming women for your problems. Stop defending bastards who don’t give a shit about you. If you‘re lonely and hurting and playing video games and smoking pot and addicted to porn, and mortally terrified of change, guess what? No one’s coming to save you.

Take the risk. Ask for help. Do the hard thing. Meditate instead of playing video games.

I was going through some things in my basement the other day and came across the sophmore school photo of my best friend at the time. He took his life two months after the photo was taken. The grief I carried from his death kept me from doing the same a bunch of years later.

Crawling out of deep dark moments like that is hard. But when there’s enough propulsion in the form of meaning, emerging from the cave is almost inevitable.

But you know what’s harder?

Enduring the mundane routine of life, day after day, month after month. Waking up. Kids, breakfast, shower, driving, work, driving, dinner, bedtime, work or chill or both. Get up and doing it all again, over and over and over.

Remove the connection with other humans from that cocktail and add a bunch of coping mechanisms and dopamine deficiencies and you’ve got a molotov.

So what to do?

Deal with it. Show up for the small moments, even when it’s hard.

I’m talking to myself here.

Think for yourself. Actually—don’t just think for yourself - think critically. Ask real, penetrating questions. Look for patterns. Lean into what’s uncomfortable. Stand up for what you believe. Don’t be a bully.

Not every lesson we learned as boys is irrelevant.

Some of them are exactly what’s needed right now.

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If this material landed for you:

Bowing In is a guide for men who’ve decided to stop going it alone in the dark. 49 frameworks across 8 domains every man passes through: work, money, body, relationships, intimacy, brotherhood, fatherhood, purpose. It’s a guide built to be returned to, not completed. To bow in is to acknowledge our intention, to honor our practice, to respect the work itself. A gesture of humility and reverence before the work begins.

The guide is the map. If you want a guide for the territory, apply to work with me 1:1.

I’m bringing it to What Doesn’t Change for two reasons, one more selfish than the other.

The selfish one: I want you to know who I am and where I come from. When I talk about men learning to wield power and masculinity with more capacity, attunement, and agency, I want you to know the ground I’m standing on when I say it.

The deeper reason is a direct message to the men who have gone through hell — in many cases much worse than my own experiences — and who are still choosing life.

Brother, you are not alone. You are not crazy for following the call toward stillness, toward your center, your intuition, your wisdom, healing, love — whatever you choose to call it.

There’s a world in which the stories we carry, to which we’ve been at times fiercely loyal, no longer bear the same weight. It becomes possible to identify less with them and more with who you are now.

The thought of that kind of freedom can terrify at first.

The courage required is already within you. You’re still here.

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For most of my life, I didn’t want kids because I feared I would be a father who beat his child, screamed in their face, and poured bleach in their underwear when they soiled themselves. I feared that I would have become like my mum’s boyfriend when I was eight years old, who demanded I count aloud each violent impact he made upon my body. I feared that I would have, like him, rubbed a child’s nose in their own shit, and insisted they clean the hallway floor from sunrise until midnight without eating that day or the next.

Or, like my own father, I might have simply disappeared, moved a thousand miles away unannounced, only to let my family know where I was once I was established with another family, with no intention of returning.

During a powerful psilocybin mushroom journey a few years ago, I viscerally felt the impact of how those experiences had shaped me. I felt the grief and loss of who I might have become, had the men in my life sought therapy or a men’s group. I felt the red-hot pain that had arrived to my body by blood and hand, and the cold dissociation that I’d employed to escape it. During that journey, I spurned to perpetuate that suffering, even if it meant never having kids.

Deep down, I wanted to be a father. I wanted the opportunity to do it better: to be present with my child in a difficult moment, and instead of trying to make it better, to empathize and love them up with every cell in my body. I wanted to joyfully hold the hand of my little one—as I did a few days ago—as we walked to a blueberry bush together, and witnessed in delight as he picked a berry, put it in his mouth, squealed, and picked another.

My path became clear: I had to learn to be with myself in the quietest, darkest moments of shame and self-hatred. Also, to interrupt the patterns of violence and disconnection by orienting toward the core of my suffering, getting curious about it, noticing the sensations and emotions, and learning to trust that it would—eventually, inevitably—change.

For most of my life, my survival strategies were so entrenched that all I could do was push people away, sabotage my and others’ relationships, and hate myself for existing—so much that I badly wanted to die. I felt as if I had nothing to live for. Had my best friend not taken his own life when we were teenagers, I may have, but I knew the other side of that grief too deeply to inflict it upon anyone else.

In 2011, having realized that suicide was a clear ‘No,’ I slowly began to open to life. I was a commercial fisherman in Alaska, and the summer following my not-suicide, I met my now-wife at a dusty airport in the tundra next to an oceanic river.

This woman saw me clearly, even as I hid beneath my masks. She challenged my integrity and the ways that I said I’d shown up in past relationships. I was turned-on by this because it revealed something of her true depth. It also became clear that, together, we had experienced almost every toxic father archetype you could imagine: absent, addict, abuser, abandoner, emotionally unavailable, dead.

Although being around her made me want to be a better man, I felt helpless to the fate of fulfilling each item on that list. I began to search for healthier male role models.

Finding few on the sea, I became a woodworker, and found my way to cabinetmaking. Something about the need to be present, thoughtful, and precise around sharp blades in service to others felt important. I slowly found mentors in men whose ways of being invited calm, thoughtful relationships. Carpentry developed into a deep practice for me, which helped to support our family for years.

As we deepened into marriage, my wife nudged me toward men’s work, though I waited to engage until I was ready. Excited and scared of what I’d find, I attended men’s rites of passage workshops, wilderness immersions, and sat weekly in small groups for years. I learned about accountability, integrity, internal clarity, and (as if practicing for fatherhood) living from a deep sense of purpose, even in the face of discomfort or conflict.

It soon became important for me to discern the nature of the men’s work being offered by individuals and organizations. Male-exclusive spaces are, by definition, patriarchy, so I began to ask myself questions like: is this group or teacher able to meet me where I’m at? Do they welcome questions, doubts, my full expression? Or do I need to contort myself in order to fit their definition of a ‘man’?

I recall one weekly meeting early on where I just couldn’t wipe an ingratiating smile from my face, even as someone spoke of a particularly painful experience. There was a volcano of anger bubbling under the surface for me. A man in the group offered his truck cab as a place for me to let fly for a few minutes. I gave hell to the seats and dash. The physical release felt great, but more powerful was being witnessed by others who neither feared my expression, nor sought to change it. The shit-eating smile vanished, and I was more able to be present with others after that.

This was just one of dozens of nuanced experiences where I felt my mind and body re-wiring around how men can show up for each other in more dynamic ways than fist bumps and intellectual banter. It was also a meaningful drop in the bucket of learning to trust men again.

I began to dive deep in other ways. Psychedelic medicine journeys revealed in terrifying, numinous clarity the depth and breadth of the inner work before me. Vipassana meditation taught me to track my reactions to stimuli and bring equanimity to difficult moments. Somatic therapy—and MDMA—helped me to feel safe within myself for the first time in my life.

Although I am grateful for the re-parenting that came from choosing a healing-oriented relationship with my wife, my ongoing relationship with a Hakomi therapist has helped relieve my wife of holding the burden of my emotional work and wounding, freeing her to mother our child instead of my own inner little boy.

My personal work eventually shifted into supporting others on their own healing paths. Many men I’ve worked with report reconnecting to their own inner wisdom, self-love, and empathy. They re-discover their essence beneath layers of conditioning, patriarchy, colonialism, and disconnection. I am passionate about exploring the intersection of men’s work and psychedelic work through a somatic lens. I lead an annual Fatherhood retreat in this vein, as well as other containers where participants can go as deep into their work as feels right for them.

These days, I feel free and clear in a way that I could not before have imagined. The overwhelming trauma fog has lifted from my body and mind, and I spend most of my moments present in the here and now, even when the little one screams and bites and thrashes about. I am aware that fatherhood may get harder as he grows into the ages at which my own trauma intensified. And I know in my heart of hearts that I’ll be okay, and that I’ll have space for him.

I’m grateful to report that I am a father who gently and respectfully changes his son’s diapers, repairs when I’ve reacted, and prioritizes my kiddo when he calls for connection. I am doing my work so that the pain I experienced does not continue, that something more healthy and vibrant can take its place.

The work is never quite complete, nor is this journey easy. Thanks to Kevin for holding this container for all of us. We’re not meant to do it alone.

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If this material landed for you:

Bowing In is a guide for men who’ve decided to stop going it alone in the dark. 49 frameworks across 8 domains every man passes through: work, money, body, relationships, intimacy, brotherhood, fatherhood, purpose. It’s a guide built to be returned to, not completed. To bow in is to acknowledge our intention, to honor our practice, to respect the work itself. A gesture of humility and reverence before the work begins.

The guide is the map. If you want a guide for the territory, apply to work with me 1:1.

No one is coming to save me.

Not a political shift. Not a market correction. Not a cultural pendulum swinging back toward something more familiar. Whatever the world is headed toward right now, I’m letting go of hope that it will resolve in my lifetime. And sitting with that — really sitting with it, not as a catastrophe but as a fact — revealed some things.

More committed. Less in my own way. Less holding back.

Men are in a collective rite of passage right now. I hear a lot of conversation in this space about how sudden it feels, how unprepared we are, how destabilizing.

I want to offer a different frame.

This has been building for a hundred years.

The suffrage vote. First wave feminism, second wave, third. Joanna Macy’s Great Turning. Decades of women organizing, writing, refusing, building — slowly, persistently shifting the weight of a world that was arranged almost entirely around male comfort and male power. The percentage of women attending and graduating universities. The sustained cultural shift that #MeToo inspired.

If we weren’t prepared for this moment, it’s not because it came without warning. It’s because we weren’t paying attention. Or we were, and we hoped it would stop.

The doubling down we’re seeing from men right now — the Tates and the Trumps and the deportation rallies and the book bans — I don’t read that as strength.

I read fear.

When people are confident and clear in themselves, they don’t start wars.

I read about extinction burst recently and my neurons went off like fireworks. Finally, a name for a thing I’ve been seeing and talking about for years: when a behavior stops getting the same level of attention or reaction, it increases exponentially just before snuffing out. The suffering of an addict is greatest during withdrawal. What looks like a surge of power is often the last gasp of something losing its grip.

The discomfort men are feeling isn’t caused by immigrants or feminists or trans women in sports. It’s muscle atrophy. A sliver in the finger of someone who’s never worked with wood hurts like hell. That’s not the sliver’s fault. That’s just what happens when skin that’s never been tested meets something sharp.

There’s a common belief — held by women and men alike — that men just don’t know how to grow up. I used to bristle at that. I don’t anymore.

Author put it plainly in a recent Substack Live with : something in the architecture of how we raise boys keeps them in an extended adolescence. We haven’t built the structures that initiate men into actual adulthood — the kind of maturity that gets forged through sustained suffering, through being asked to carry something heavy for a long time without being rescued from it. Women have been living that initiation for generations. Not by choice. By necessity.

Add in the conditioning of the rugged individual, which leaves a lot of men stuck in a toddler’s logic: there are only three cookies left and I have to get mine.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s a developmental gap. And at some point the most useful thing we can do with that truth is stop denying it, stop reacting to it, and start stepping into the becoming that we’re being called into.

That’s what the grief is for.

What I haven’t heard enough of in this conversation is grief.

We need to slow down and feel the losing. Before the reframes and the techniques and the new stories and the powerful embodiment work — grief comes first. And not everyone in the world is going to hold space for men processing the grief of losing power we’ve held for a thousand generations. That’s not cruelty. That’s just reality.

This is work we have to do together — as men — in order to get to the other side of this loss. Because collapse doesn’t get us there. Man-sized tantrums don’t get us there. And loyalty to what’s already obsolete definitely doesn’t get us there.

If you’ve ever been on a sinking boat — I have, more than once — not sinking is just the first step. You check your vital systems. Make sure everyone aboard is safe enough. Make necessary repairs, clean up the deck, look at the horizon: get help, go home, or go back out.

When you’re on a boat with a mission, you don’t accomplish anything unless you risk not knowing. You have to set the net in order for fish to find it. And there might be no fish. So you pull it in, reconsider your position, listen to your intuition, and do it again.

Before you look up at the horizon, you have to find the ground.

I mean that literally. Sit on the earth. Pick up the soil and rub it between your palms. Touch plants. Lie down and look at the stars. Find a moment of awe and stay for a while. Breathe it deep into your lungs.

Then feel the clicks in your knees as you kneel down to pick up a ball at a family barbecue while the kids squeal and the people chatter. Notice that you’re here. That this is real. That whatever is happening out there, this moment is also happening.

For generations, women have been carrying something that wasn’t theirs to carry. The emotional labor of keeping men stable. The management of male fragility. The careful navigation of a world where their dreams and bodies and ambitions were subordinate to ours by default.

They’re putting it down.

Not all at once, not everywhere, not without cost. But the direction is clear and it’s not reversing. Women are learning — have been learning, are further along than we are — that they can survive and thrive without organizing their lives around male need.

So what happens when the hand lets go of the bike?

We learn to ride. We fall. We lick our wounds and get back up. We build muscles that haven’t been needed in a very long time. And somewhere in that process, if we’re paying attention, we look at what women have been navigating for a hundred generations and feel something other than resentment.

Something more like: oh. I get it now.

From there, we learn to regulate our nervous systems, care for the kids and the house with the same perfectionism with which we approach work. We develop capacity to reduce our reactivity, allow for discomfort. We develop an awareness of our wounds and places our egos grasp for identity and attention. We learn to navigate our emotional and spiritual realms with humility and grace.

We learn how to do these things together with other men.

Surely, you’ve seen comedian Ron Pearson describing the increasing complexities of a man’s life through juggling.

It lands because it’s true: we get a job, learn to make money, get into a relationship, learn about that, have kids, learn even more, buy a house and need to become plumber and electrician and carpenter, learn even more, and then the wife wants more attention, wants us to be more masculine and sensitive, and we’re juggling all of these clubs, and where is the time to pick up another?

But the thing he’s missing is that there doesn’t need to be more time. There needs to be more skill, more resilience, more awareness, and more support.

The clarity that came through for me recently, the thing that’s been brewing for weeks and finally found words, is this:

I’m taking actual stock of the fucks I have to give.

And there aren’t as many as there used to be. Not because I care less, but because I’ve chosen to focus what I have. My marriage. My son. My community. The work I actually believe in.

I’ve been looking forward at my death more than usual lately. Not morbidly — more like using it as a compass. When I get there, it’s going to feel better to have gone full force on what I actually believe in than to have held back waiting for conditions to improve.

Conditions are not going to improve in the way I used to mean when I said that.

The world is uncertain and loud and the gas is $7 a gallon and the fabric that was supposed to hold is fraying at every edge. And somehow, paradoxically, that’s made it easier to get clear. If this is it — if no one’s coming, if it’s not going back — then what matters most is not a difficult question anymore.

It’s obvious.

The men I’ve watched do this work — really do it, not just talk about it — arrive at something similar eventually. Not resignation. Not despair. A kind of focused aliveness. The competitive posture drops. The grasping softens. They stop trying to win a game that was always going to leave them empty even if they won it.

They start playing a different one.

The rite of passage is real. The discomfort is real. The grief of watching something familiar change beyond recognition is real.

And it’s been a hundred years in the making.

The question isn’t whether it’s happening. The question is what you’re going to do with the fucks you have left.

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What Doesn’t Change prepares men for what’s coming by connecting them to what’s been here all along. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work finding more men.

If this material landed for you:

Bowing In is a guide for men who’ve decided to stop going it alone in the dark.

49 frameworks across 8 domains every man passes through: work, money, body, relationships, intimacy, brotherhood, fatherhood, purpose. I

t’s a guide built to be returned to, not completed. To bow in is to acknowledge our intention, to honor our practice, to respect the work itself. A gesture of humility and reverence before the work begins.

The guide is the map. If you want a guide for the territory, apply to work with me 1:1.

They’ve been piling up for years. Ideas, frameworks, stories from Alaska and men’s groups and retreats and years of working with men one on one. The neuroscience behind body-based therapy modalities, the nervous system frameworks that help heal trauma, lost cultural traditions in whose absence men suffer, how we relate to death. The full arc of what I’ve seen, what I’ve learned, what I keep returning to.

Writing a book seemed like the natural next move. I love writing. And there’s real material there — like so many substacks, enough for several books.

But I have a four-year-old who is currently on a “stupid papa” kick and who I am trying to be genuinely present for. My wife is in a PhD program. I run two businesses. The idea of spending the next two years editing this smoldering pile into a publishable manuscript, finding an agent, navigating the world of publishing — I couldn’t see it. Not right now. Not at this stage.

So I sat with a different question: what’s the most useful thing I can offer men right now, given the constraints of their lives and mine?

Because here’s what I keep seeing. Men come to this work - to groups and retreats, to 1:1 containers — with compromised attention, fractured time, and a phone that is simultaneously their most powerful tool and their most reliable escape route. The book that sits unread on the nightstand helps no one.

I wanted to meet men where they actually are.

Bowing In came from that question.

The title is a martial arts term — the ritual acknowledgment before training begins. The bow isn’t ceremony for ceremony’s sake. It’s the moment you cross the threshold from ordinary life into a container that asks something of you. Attention. Presence. Commitment to what you said you were here for.

It represents the quality of a relationship. The prayer before a meal. The breath before a difficult conversation. The texture of the ground under your feet on a morning walk.

It’s an invitation to notice all the layers — without getting so lost in contemplation that you forget to act. Because action is always required. Even if that action is stillness and silence.

That’s the spirit the guide is built in.

Forty-nine frameworks across eight domains of life.

Work and money. Relationship and intimacy. Fatherhood and leadership. Body, practice, and food. Mind, Heart, Inner Realms. Community and brotherhood. Spirituality and connection. Death and purpose.

It’s not a program or a course. It’s not a book you read front to back. Might be a curriculum. I’m working that one out.

It’s a guide. Something you pick up when a specific thing is hard. When the relationship is strained and you can’t figure out what’s actually happening. When your relationship with your body has been off for months and you’ve tried the obvious things. When you’re not sure if what you’re feeling about your work is burnout or misalignment or just a hard season.

One man told me the Body, Practice, and Food section worked him harder than he expected — he’s carried a lot of shame around staying fit and eating well, and seeing it laid out without judgment gave him something to work with.

Another man nearly put it down when he hit the “Nothing to Fix” and “Not Broken” frameworks. He’d been operating for years on the assumption that he was permanently damaged, that any growth work he did was damage control rather than actual change. He sat with those frameworks for a while. Something shifted.

Not fixed. Not transformed overnight. Just, a little more willing to consider his own wholeness.

That’s what I built this for.

This guide is not for men who think introspection is an obstacle to progress.

It’s for the man who suspects there’s more available to him than what he’s currently living. Who’s done some work, or is ready to start. Who wants something concrete to hold rather than another podcast to listen to on the commute.

Something to return to. Dog-ear. Put down and pick back up when a specific domain of life is asking for attention.

Ten years of work. Forty-nine frameworks. Eight domains. $49.

Get Bowing In here.

And if you’re ready to work directly — to bring this material into your actual life with support:

Apply to work with me 1:1.

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They called it “sleep content.” A French lawmaker called it what it is: an online rape academy.

The Telegram chat group CNN documented had nearly a thousand members. Men from Poland, Spain, West Africa, the United States. Sharing drug names and doses. Sharing videos for feedback. Livestreaming the assault of unconscious women for $20 a viewer, cryptocurrency preferred. One man described shipping sedation liquids worldwide, promising that the target “won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything.”

These aren’t men on the dark web. This is a website with tens of millions of monthly visitors, a core American audience, and a legal architecture that currently protects it from consequence.

I want to be honest about my first response when I heard this.

It was relief. A pulling away. That’s not me. Those aren’t my friends. The men I know wouldn’t do that.

I sat with that response for a while. Because I know what it means.

In the new Netflix film Nuremberg, an American psychiatrist spends thousands of hours with Herman Göring and the Nazi high command in the months before the trials. He gets to know them. Becomes something close to friendly with some of them. Studies them with the clinical attention of someone trying to understand something the world desperately needs to understand.

His conclusion, which he carried for the rest of his life and which America largely refused to hear when he took it on book tour, was this:

These are not exceptional men.

These are any of us.

He said this not to excuse them. He said it because it’s the only honest thing to say. And because it’s the only observation that leads somewhere useful. If atrocity requires monsters, we can relax. There are no monsters in our neighborhood. If atrocity requires ordinary men operating under specific conditions, with specific unexamined material in their shadows — that’s a different conversation. A harder one. One that implicates all of us to some degree.

America didn’t want to hear it. The book failed. We prefer the distance.

Here’s something I’ve observed over years of sitting with men in hard rooms.

When something doesn’t land — when a charge doesn’t fit, when someone tries to psychoanalyze you and they’re simply wrong — there’s no energy in the denial. You just say no and move on. The accusation slides off because there’s nothing for it to grab.

When something touches something real, something in the shadow, the response is different. The resistance is loud. The righteousness rises fast. The distancing move is immediate and emphatic.

That’s not me. I would never.

I’m not saying everyone who feels relief at their distance from this story is hiding something equivalent. That’s not what I’m saying.

I’m saying the relief itself is worth examining. The speed of it. The certainty.

Because the shadow doesn’t announce itself. That’s the whole point of shadow work — the material that operates below awareness, the conditioning that runs without being seen. The men in those chat rooms were someone’s neighbors, colleagues, partners, fathers. Some of them are probably in therapy. Some of them probably consider themselves to be good men.

The question isn’t whether you would do what those men did. The question is, what have you not looked at yet? What lives in you, conditioned by the same culture that produced them, that you’ve managed not to see because you haven’t needed to?

I’ve noticed something in the men’s work world this week. Silence. The facilitators and teachers and coaches who position their work as the answer to toxic masculinity — myself included in some ways — haven’t said much. I found almost nothing from the major voices in this space addressing the story directly.

That silence is worth noting.

Not to shame anyone. But because the men’s work world has a particular responsibility here. We work with the shadow. We talk about integration, about bringing the unconscious into consciousness, about the material that runs men without their awareness. And when the most extreme documented expression of unexamined masculine shadow lands in the news cycle, the response from our corner is apparently to keep posting prayers and relationship tips, and the importance of “erotic magic.”

The dojo is the world. That includes this.

I don’t think most men are capable of what those men did. I genuinely don’t.

And I think it’s a mistake to believe that makes us exempt from the work of looking honestly at what we carry.

The same culture that produced a thousand-member chat group teaching men to drug their wives also produced the man who rolls his eyes when his partner tries to tell him something hard. The man who has never once examined what he was taught about women’s bodies and who they belong to. The man who has consumed pornography without ever asking what the woman on screen was experiencing or who she was before the camera found her.

These are not the same thing. They exist on a spectrum. And the men at the far end of that spectrum were once, in some sense, at the near end.

The work is looking at where you are on it. Without the rush to reassure yourself that you’re nowhere near it.

The fabric our grandparents and great-grandparents wove after the Holocaust — this will never happen again — is fraying. The men in those chat rooms are evidence of what happens when the shadow stays in the dark, when cruelty finds community, when the distance between ordinary and monstrous closes without anyone noticing.

We’ve got work to do.

It’s not an accusation. Just honest assessment.

The men who do this work know what it costs to look. They also know what it costs not to.

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If this material landed for you:

Bowing In is a guide for men who’ve decided to stop going it alone in the dark. 49 frameworks across 8 domains every man passes through: work, money, body, relationships, intimacy, brotherhood, fatherhood, purpose.

It’s a guide built to be returned to, not completed.

To bow in is to acknowledge our intention, to honor our practice, to respect the work itself. A gesture of humility and reverence before the work begins.

Get Bowing In

The guide is the map. If you want a guide for the territory, apply to work with me 1:1.

How do I know that?

There’s a tension I can feel — between creativity, an agreement I’ve made to post regularly, a value around integrity, and a little time. But mostly it’s a particular set of sensations in my body that I’ve learned over the years means: write. So that’s what I’m doing.

How do we know what’s right, in a given moment?

Or, what’s wrong?

How do I respond to _____? Do I initiate, take risks, be bold — or is this a moment to receive, to consider, to pay attention?

These are fundamental questions of being human. We’ve spent thousands of years building systems for answering them. Plato, Nietzsche, elders, poetry, tarot cards, the I Ching, psychedelics, TED talks, AI — everything between and betwixt them.

And then there’s your phone. Right where you left it.

Consider how often you consult it for things you think you don’t know. How many of your AI conversations are some version of: what do I do?

I said to a group of men recently that knowledge is power. One of them — who works in AI — burst out laughing. Knowledge is free and everywhere now, he said. Your attention is your power.

He’s right. But let’s stay with knowledge for a moment.

Information sitting in an encyclopedia on a dusty library shelf is trivia. Accurate data poured into an AI client is just data. Knowledge is what comes through you:

A clear No when your truest answer is No.

I’m not ready when that’s the clearest bell in your mind.

A yes when you’re a full fuck yes.

Here’s what I keep hearing from young men, in various forms: the frameworks being offered to them feel like traps. Another hoop. Another system that promises to help but ends up making them feel like they’re failing at yet one more thing.

That’s not an unreasonable read.

You can’t apprentice yourself to a moral compass you don’t yet trust. And you can’t trust a compass you’ve never been taught to read. Most young men haven’t had older men in their lives who showed them how — not because those men didn’t exist, but because the structures that used to transmit that kind of knowledge have largely collapsed.

The good news is that most men already know how to read it. They’ve just been taught to override the signal.

Here’s what the compass actually feels like.

It’s easier to detect when it’s telling you something is wrong. You’ve felt this. Should I take what’s being offered? Should I do this thing these guys are pushing me toward? Am I performing a version of myself to belong, or to avoid being cast out?

The signal of wrongness is physical: heat rising, heart rate climbing, tension, words that want to be heard but aren’t. Something feels off — the same way you know you’re angry before you’ve named it as anger.

But there’s a nuance to the feeling of wrongness, if you pay close attention: the anger, the No, the heat, the thing that wants to be said - these usually arise in service to something. In protection of something.

Learn to contact what that something is in you, and you’re already way ahead of the game.

Rightness is subtler. It comes as an absence of resistance. A calmness. A yes. A lower heart rate. A sense of openness, of attraction toward rather than away from.

We all know these two states. Every man reading this has pressured himself to do something that didn’t feel right. Or has been pressured by others toward something he wanted to do but couldn’t do alone. These are not abstract experiences. They live in the body as specific sensations, and reference points.

The more often you feed them, they become easier to access in the future.

The reason most men don’t trust the signal is that they’ve spent years or decades overriding it. Not because they’re broken — because they wanted to belong, or survive.

I used to buckle under the influence of people I wanted to be in with, because I didn’t like, value, or trust myself to make a choice that was right for me. I gave up what I thought was control.

But control and agency aren’t the same thing. We can’t control what happens. We can only control how we respond — and even that, only by slowing down.

Years ago I was in a men’s group when a new member I hadn’t met walked in. Charismatic, present. He noticed the pendant around my neck, leaned in, asked permission to touch it as his hand moved toward my chest.

I said No. Not out of fear. Just a clear no.

He pulled his hand back, made eye contact with me for the first time, and said: thank you. Your no helps me trust you.

I asked him why.

Because if you ever say yes, he said, I’ll know it’s true — because you know how to say no.

That was the beginning of one of the most powerful friendships of my life.

The compass works best when it’s used often. Self-trust builds over time, through repetition. But most young men haven’t had the chance to cultivate it yet. So they reach for examples of status — Christianity, the manosphere, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, whoever seems to have clout or success in a form others value — because status gives a man something to orient by before he can orient by himself.

That’s not weakness. It’s a stage of development that we all go through.

The brave move, when the time comes, is to risk finding yourself. To take the gap year, travel, sit with discomfort, step into the unknown, to say the thing, to be of service in whatever way is available. A young man volunteering at a food kitchen or showing up for elders may seem like a trite, 20th-century act. But in a world bereft of real connection and apprenticeship, poet ’s instruction matters more than ever: learn to apprentice yourself. To an instrument. A craft. A relationship. Even to loneliness, anger, grief. Whatever it is you carry, whatever cloud or pattern or that follows you, commit yourself to learning from it.

The compass is already in you, just like the knowledge. It has been the whole time.

You just have to get quiet enough to feel what it’s telling you.

If this landed: Bowing In is a guide for men who’ve decided to stop going it alone in the dark. 49 frameworks across 8 domains every man passes through: work, money, body, relationships, intimacy, brotherhood, fatherhood, purpose.

It’s a guide built to be returned to, not completed.

To bow in is to acknowledge our intention, to honor our practice, to respect the work itself. A gesture of humility and reverence before the work begins.

The guide is the map. If you want a guide for the territory of your life, Apply to work with me 1:1.

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I saw a sign in my neighborhood this week, hand-lettered, duct-taped to a telephone pole:

The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.

I stopped walking and read it twice.

A few blocks later I pulled into a gas station. $7 a gallon. In Portland. I’ve been watching that number climb for weeks — it’s more than double what it was two months ago.

I have friends whose businesses are bottoming out. A luxury home builder told me recently that the slowdown he’s experiencing right now, in early 2026, is already worse than what he endured in 2008. I’m hearing similar things from clients, fellow coaches, massage therapists— people whose job is to help others navigate difficulty, and who are themselves not sure what to do.

I’m one of them. I want to be honest about that.

There’s a version of nervous system regulation work that is, at its worst, a sophisticated form of looking away.

Breathe. Ground. Come back to the present moment. Don’t let the news dysregulate you.

I understand the impulse. And I want to be clear about what I’m not saying:

I’m not telling anyone to stop overreacting. If outrage is your natural response to what’s happening in the world right now, that response is not the problem. The outrage is appropriate. The fascism is real. The wars are real. The unchecked power is real. The $7 gas is real, and so is what it means for the family that was already stretched.

What I’m saying is something different.

When I talk about creating space in the nervous system, I’m not just talking about calming down. I’m talking about the difference between responding to what’s actually happening right now and reacting to everything that has ever happened — to your father who wielded power without accountability forty years ago, to generations of persecution and exile and fear that live in the body as inherited threat, to every moment you felt worthless or unsafe or not enough.

Those things are real too. They live in us. And when present threat lands on top of accumulated historical threat, it’s not just this moment we’re responding to. It’s all of it at once. The body doesn’t timestamp its wounds.

That’s why we call it work. We’re asking something that doesn’t want to happen — inviting the self-protection mechanisms that kept us and our ancestors alive to loosen their grip, just enough, so we can see what’s actually in front of us.

Not so we stop caring, or initiating action. So we can care more accurately with our actions.

The activist and the contemplative are not opposites. The most effective people I’ve watched move through this moment hold both: the anger and the compassion, the resistance and the presence, the clear naming that this is not okay and the grounded capacity to keep showing up after they’ve said it.

Outrage without ground, like electricity, burns everything flammable in reach. Presence without outrage becomes complicity via bypass.

The work is learning to hold both without collapsing into either.

Some people’s role right now is to show up at the protests. To be a body in the street, counted, visible, refusing to normalize what is not normal. That matters. That’s one form the work takes.

But there’s another form that gets less attention, and I think it might be just as important.

Talk to someone today. Not via text. Not through Instagram messages or a Zoom rectangle. Actually talk to them — voice, presence, the slight awkwardness of real-time human contact that we’ve been slowly algorithming out of our lives.

Say hello to someone you don’t know. Start a conversation at the gas station, of all places, while you’re both staring at the same number on the pump. Build something small with a stranger. Show up to the thing you said you’d show up to. Call instead of text.

If fascism is worth stepping out on a street corner for — and I believe it is — then the slow erosion of actual human contact is also worth resisting. These things are related. Isolated people are easier to frighten. Frightened people are easier to control. Community is not soft. Community is infrastructure. Infrastructure is resilient, balanced, supportive.

Your accounts with kajabi or reddit or anthropic may offer a sense of connection to like-minded avatars, but it comes at a cost to what’s possible in real life.

The nervous system learns safety through relationship. Not through solo meditation, not through breathwork alone, not through content about regulation. Through actual contact with actual people who are actually present.

That’s the rep. That’s the practice.

This is not only men’s work. I’ve spent years working primarily with men, and that might change. Because what I’m describing is human work — the slow building of capacity to be present with what’s real, in relationship with others who are doing the same.

The road to something better is lined with people who stayed in contact with each other when it would have been easier not to.

Who’s one person you’ve thought about actually calling?

Also interviewed that unpacked how our relationship to authority directly translates to how we show up as leaders. If you missed it, watch here: The Leaders We Swore We’d Never Become.

Also: Bowing In is available now.

It’s a guide I built for men, distilled from 10+ years of men’s work, somatic therapy training, 1:1 coaching work, group cohorts, retreats — 49 frameworks across eight domains of life: powerful ways of relating to work, body, purpose, money, shadow, intimacy, fatherhood, leadership, death, and more.

It offers deeply-researched graphics for visual learners; concise descriptions for the word-learners; and reflection questions that shine a light under the hood.

It’s not a self-help book, a course, or a program. It’s a set of tools you can pick up and put down, return to, take your time with. Something to have on hand when a specific thing is hard and you want a clear way to think about it.

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Bowing In: A Guide for Men

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I’ve been thinking about authority lately. Not just what it does, but how we relate to it when it shows up in others, and in ourselves.

Helen Mosimann-Kogan has a PhD in behavioral neuropharmacology and has spent two decades building what she calls Holographic Transformation — frameworks for understanding how consciousness operates, from inside a single mind all the way up to the architecture of civilizations. She writes Leaders as Reality Architects on Substack, and when I read her recent piece on those who build through collapse, I knew we needed to talk.

We spent an hour on it. Here’s some of what landed.

Helen draws a distinction between power and authority that I keep coming back to.

Power, as most of us have experienced it, is relational in a particular way. Somebody’s up and somebody’s down. The dynamic only works if somebody’s smaller. A lot of what we call leadership is really just this: someone learned to stay on top by keeping others below, and called it strength.

Authority is different. Helen locates it in the solar plexus, which is exactly where I’d locate it too — that felt sense of knowing yourself clearly enough that you don’t need anyone else diminished to feel solid. You don’t need to lift someone off the deck to prove you’re king.

The problem is most of us learned authority from people who were running on power. Which means the first thing we have to reckon with is what we actually absorbed.

Helen’s parents were Soviet Jews who left in 1973. They carried fear and inferiority out of a system designed to produce exactly that. She grew up in London, nowhere near that world, and still saw it running in them. Still felt it pass into her.

The pattern goes wherever you go, because you’re the one carrying it.

That’s Helen’s entry point for this work: you don’t start when you understand the pattern. You start when you’ve had enough of it. When you notice it shows up in every room, every relationship, every boss, and you finally stop blaming the rooms and start asking what you’re bringing in.

That 180-degree turn, from blame to curiosity, is the whole game.

I told her about the fishing captain who came into my bunk on a 45-minute sleep break and found me journaling with a small light on. He said, “I pay you to sleep.”

And I pushed back - silently - thinking, this is more nourishing than sleep right now.

I didn’t say it out loud. But the push was there. Some small insistence from my deeper self. That’s what happens when you’ve been around men who needed you scared. Part of you learns to recognize the grip.

The question is whether you carry the grip forward.

What Helen said about parenting stayed with me. She was asked what she’d tell parents raising kids in a world that looks like this one. Her answer was essentially: stop trying to prescribe the right model. Attend to what you haven’t cleared out of your own system. Remove what isn’t you, and what’s underneath will come through naturally.

The reference was Michelangelo, who reportedly said the statue was always there inside the marble. He was just removing what wasn’t David.

Most of us are still carrying a lot of extra marble around the edges. Not because we’re broken, but because we inherited it from people who inherited it, who were doing their level best inside whatever system shaped them.

The work is to keep finding out what’s underneath.

Helen’s own pivot point was a deep Ayurvedic purification process — Panchakarma — that stripped away enough of the inherited structure that she found herself asking a doctor: “Who will I be if I don’t have those things?”

His answer was the same one I’ve heard through traditional wisdom: it will come through naturally. It’s already there. You don’t need to build it. You need to stop defending what was never really you.

She said after that she’s been living in a kind of continuous question: who am I today? How do I want to respond to this?

We talked about what grounded leadership feels like from the inside.

Helen’s formulation: the one you work for may have more experience, more time in the work. That’s the only legitimate reason they’d be the boss. Not because they’re more human. Not because their knowing counts more. We are doing this together, toward something shared.

That’s a different relationship to authority than most of us grew up inside. Which means building it requires dissolving some of the structure we inherited.

The caterpillar must completely dissolve in order to change shape. The new information can’t get activated until the old form releases.

That’s the work. And it’s never really finished.

What’s one place in your life where you’re still leading from a template you didn’t choose?

Helen Mosimann-Kogan writes at Leaders as Reality Architects on Substack. She has a 20-week program beginning May 1st exploring what we can learn from goddess archetypes about the integration of power and authority. She’s also running a retreat in Italy in July. Find her at thewhiterabbitreveals.com.

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In 2021 I paid good money to learn from a well-known practitioner in the therapeutic field of psychedelic somatic work. Five days in an Airbnb, cannabis and ketamine, twenty people who wanted to learn to work with trauma at depth.

The first red flag came before lunch on day one, when the teacher said, “trauma happens outside the window of tolerance, so we have to work outside the window of tolerance to heal the trauma.”

But nervous systems don’t actually work like that. Anyone who’s worked with trauma in a real ways knows this.

The second red flag came during a practice session. Groups of three in bedrooms with low light. I was one of two male practitioners facilitating a woman who had disclosed rape trauma. She sat on the bed and took ketamine. The teacher came in soon after and led her to decompensate — to override the coping strategies that help keep a person grounded.

Think of the way you scratch your neck when you’ve just said something vulnerable, or tap your fingers when you’re nervous. That was the “doorway” in this method: invite the client to take powerful psychoactive medicine, then invite them to stop doing the thing that helps them feel grounded and safe.

What could go wrong?

These medicines take 15-20 minutes to really set in. Once she was “in the medicine,” the “client” (who was herself a therapist training in this modality) mumbled something about that hotel room and high school.

Three men standing around the bed she was on. The teacher kept saying: stay in your body. Stay in your body.

There is a reason dissociation exists as a survival strategy. Sometimes it’s not safe to stay in your body, so you go somewhere else. Maybe not physically, but in your head.

As a student of psychedelic healing, I’d been excited to learn new ways of working with people who suffered from trauma. But alarm bells were banging around inside me, saying No, this isn’t the way.

At the end of the day, there were still people high in the house. The teacher and his team were sleeping there, and implored the students to leave at five. So, people got in their cars and drove home.

No integration, no gentle come-down. Just the UP.

I’m not naming anyone. But I want to be honest about what I witnessed, because it’s not an isolated story. It’s a particular approach to healing, dressed up in the language of depth work, that gets replicated in men’s work containers all over the world.

With and without the ketamine.

Shadow work, in its actual definition, is simply becoming aware of the unconscious. It doesn’t distinguish whether the material you find in the “shadow” is a benign habit of switching a reading lamp on and off twice before going to bed, or the grandiose expressions of a messiah complex that sometimes emerge form psilocybin experiences.

Again, the shadow is just parts of us that operate below everyday awareness.

The thing you said that you didn’t mean to say. The pattern that keeps repeating and you genuinely don’t know why.

Anytime you bring curiosity and consciousness to that material, you’re doing shadow work.

What gets called shadow work in a lot of men’s spaces is something different: catharsis (literally: emotional purge, cleansing, purification). It’s a process that often looks like big upward movement in the nervous system - tears, shouts, physical movement or struggle in service to “breaking through” or “re-birthing.”

And it’s most often met on the other side by a group of compassionate men helping to down-regulate the man going through the big experience.

These moments can feel like real rites of passage, and serve as pivotal moments for many men.

Catharsis is letting yourself feel anger for the first time in a room full of men who are holding and witnessing you. Feeling grief that’s been locked down since your mom died when you were eight years old.

That’s not nothing. Letting repressed emotion move is real and necessary. Having it witnessed can feel incredibly powerful. So powerful that it is often overwhelming for the nervous system.

Which is precisely why you have trouble taking in any actual nourishment from the experience.

It also means that next week or next month, that big powerful release of catharsis becomes just a memory of a thing you did once. That embodied peak experience becomes harder and harder to access to the same degree because you couldn’t be fully present for it to begin with.

Without re-patterning how you work with difficult material over time, big emotional releases just empty a reservoir that is just ready to fill up again. On the surface, it makes for great social media posts, but in the body, it’s the equivalent to mowing the lawn between rainstorms:

helpful, sort of.

Something unconscious and something repressed aren’t identical. If I was trained to believe that anger is dangerous, then yes, my anger went somewhere underground. And maybe I need to feel it again before I can work with it.

But the work that changes things is asking what made it unsafe in the first place. What’s still running that old logic? What needs does the repression serve?

That happens slower. Quieter. In conversation with your body, over time. When something feels a little off in the room — when I notice it, or you notice it — and we get curious about it. We practice connecting to Ground. Stability. Resource.

The room doesn’t look like much from the outside.

Makes for pretty chill social media posts.

Also makes for stable, grounded, powerful, connected humans.

Here’s a powerful way to think about catharsis versus practice:

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He’ll cycle through it — hitting, scratching, occasionally biting. Running through the house, pulling cushions off the couch, blankets off the bed. When I intervene, it’s: “You’re stupid, papa. I poop in your ear.”

I know what’s underneath it. He’s cultivating connection with his mama right now in a big way, and there’s some agency stuff being worked out — what happens when I choose one parent over the other? What does papa do when I push? He’s testing for leadership, for steadiness, for someone to meet him in the chaos without becoming the chaos.

Most of the time, I can hold it. I’ll let him spar on my arms: go ahead, hit as hard as you want. When it escalates I hold my center and say things like, there is nothing you can say that’s going to make me love you any less.

I’ve held space professionally for years. Women in their fullest expression. Men moving through some of the deepest wounding imaginable. Group processes, psychedelic experiences, the kind of grief, rage, overwhelm that fills a room. That work is flow state for me. I was made for it.

This four-year-old, though.

This is a dojo like no other.

The other night we got back from a walk. It was bedtime. Another cycle started.

Pajamas? “I’m not ready.”
Teeth brushing? “My body, my rules.” “
Five more minutes? “You’re stupid and I poop in your ear.”

When I have capacity, this is an almost comical exchange. I can see the whole thing clearly — the powerful love, the developmental stage, the invitation to stay regulated while he isn’t.

But it was the end of a long day. And somewhere in that last stretch, I ran out of runway.

My own little one showed up. The kid who got teased and hit at school. The one who learned early that love sometimes came through as cruelty. And he was hurt. Genuinely hurt.

When my son settled slightly and asked if I’d read him a book, I said slowly: “I’m willing, kiddo. But I’m feeling hurt right now.”

Which would have been fine, said from a clear place. Naming your state honestly, without making it your kid’s problem, is good modeling.

But I wasn’t speaking from a clear place. I was inside the hurt, and I was withholding. When he awkwardly sounded out the words “I’m sorry,” I told him I didn’t want to hear it unless he meant it.

That’s the line. And I crossed it.

A four-year-old’s job is to play. To let life move through him. To push against edges and find out if they hold. It’s not his job to manage my inner world. He doesn’t have the development for it, and more than that — it’s not his to carry.

In that moment, my inner child took the wheel. And children driving buses is not a sustainable transportation strategy.

After he was asleep, my wife reflected back what she’d seen: a father asking his kid to regulate him through apologizing. She was right. I didn’t want to sit with it. But I did.

Here’s what I keep learning, over and over, about the last hour of the day.

It’s the last mile of the marathon. The final set of a workout. The moment when form matters most and feels hardest to hold. The stretch is real. So is the benefit of staying the course.

Not forcing it. Not performing patience while resentment builds underneath. But not checking out either, going through the motions with nothing behind it.

The signal that I’ve gone past my capacity is that I start needing something from him. Needing him to settle so I can settle. Needing the apology to feel okay again. Once I’m pulling on him for regulation, I’ve left my post.

What I’m working with now is preparation. If I know the last hour is the hardest, then what I do at three in the afternoon matters. A short meditation in the bathroom. A walk around the block. Five extra minutes of play before starting the bedtime sequence, because arriving at it with a little more slack in the line is worth more than arriving on schedule and burnt.

The question isn’t how to be a perfect father at the end of a hard day. That’s not on the table.

The question is how to stay close enough to your own ground that you’re not handing your kid something he can’t hold yet.

He’ll keep testing. That’s his job.

Mine is to still be there when he does.

What does the last mile ask of you that you haven’t yet figured out how to prepare for?