Define Your Masculinity | 064

Oh, Speed. I'm so excited to talk to you. When Bo

said, You guys have got to know each other, he was right. I

gotta ask you, where speed, where? Where that came from, how

your family gave you that nickname.

So I was born in the early 70s, and my parents were

convinced for the invention of ultrasound, they were a girl,

and so they had these early 70s girl names picked out. I was

going to be sunny or Daisy, and when I popped out a boy, they

didn't have a name ready for me and not knowing what to do, and

presented with the embossed birth certificate from the state

of New York. They gave me my father and my great

grandfather's name. So legally, I am William Henry weed, the

third my dad was a, was a, was a mad man. He was an advertiser,

and he just he didn't like that. He had given his son a normal

name, and he didn't want he was Bill. He didn't want me to be

called bill. Everyone's named Bill. And so the night I was

born, like hours old, he it popped into the back of his

head, let's call him speed, and he went to my mom, and she loved

the idea. And I've been called Speed ever since. When I turned

13 and told my parents that both by names have drug connotations.

They were like, oh yeah, we didn't think of that.

Now you're so committed to the clarity that

comes from being in sobriety. Beautiful, full circle story. So

tell me about your first experience being embodied as a

young actor. A

great question. It wasn't an acting moment, but I

was certainly acting at the time, I remember taking an

afternoon nap in my bed in my freshman year of college, and I

woke up in that sort of liminal space, and I had this deep

feeling in my heart, space of the Divine, and I could feel it

like a like a warm blanket, or like a, almost like a liquid

warm blanket in my being, and I felt deeply at peace, and there

was no thought associated with it. There was just a deep

knowing that all is right with the world. That's probably the

first time there's, I'm sure there are moments that are pre

they're much younger, right? I think you see five year olds.

They're totally in their body. You see seven totally. That's

the one I remember as a young adult that sticks with me,

yes, so then going into acting and having embodied

experiences as an actor playing characters, why did you not go

down that road of being an actor when that was very fulfilling

for you?

My dad said, No, I remember him asking me in my

senior year of college, what are you going to do next year? And I

was shocked by the question, because I I thought you knew, I

mean, I was so, yeah, neither. I'm gonna move home. I grew up

in New York City. I'm gonna move home and I'm gonna I'm gonna

act. And he said, or not. And I really was so taken aback by

that I really had had a lot of support from my parents up until

that point for my acting, and I don't know if it said I didn't

have the balls, I didn't have the runway, I didn't have enough

time to figure out what else to do. And one thing led to

another, and I I got a job teaching high school English at

the American School of Tangier I'm like, well, that's super

cool. That's cooler than acting than waiting tables in New York.

I'm gonna go do that. And then one thing led to another, and I

had a lot of cool jobs in my 20s. Tell

me about some of your cool jobs.

Let's see. I taught high school English at the

American School of Tangier. I imported hundreds of Moroccan

rugs to the United States. I worked for the Clinton White

House for two years as an advance man leading the

President and First Lady around the country or around the world.

Oh, I love it. How you just pop that in, like,

it's, you know, the same as selling rugs.

They were kind of all the same to me. They were

interesting. I was, I was fascinated. And still am, by,

like, the end of the road, by, I'm a very experiential learner,

and I love doing things not reading about them, yeah. And

then I started writing for science magazines and writing

plays on the side. And then eventually I found Hollywood,

which became the main focus of my career,

yeah. What is it about words? I. And about

writing that feels right for you, that's a

question that's, I'll be honest, is still in

process for me. And I think each writer and you, I'm sure you've

got an answer to this too, that I'd love to hear is their own

relationship with an articulation of that which can't

be articulated. There's something really fascinating

about being able to communicate through words, something to

yourself and something to another human being. I'm

reminded of a I think it's Edith Wharton.

Oh, I love Edith Wharton. She

was asked a question by an interviewer, and there and

she heard an implicit, an implication in the question, and

she stopped the interviewer, and she goes, hang on a second. I

think you're asking me. Why do I write to say what I know, and I

don't do that, I write to find out what I know. And that's

definitely true for me too. I write to find out what I know.

So words are a way of gesturing toward the ineffable, gesturing

toward the totality of experience, which is so much

larger than we can put into words. And yet we do, we try, I

think we speak and write as human beings the way spiders

spin webs. We can't, not. We're meant to,

yeah,

take me inside writing for episodic television.

You know, if we think about the arc of story, and the beginning,

the middle and the end. And you said something really

interesting to me when we were speaking previously about the

fact that you don't think like that. So what was, what that

like for you when you were in that container where there was a

formula like that that you had to adhere to,

sure and movies have beginning middles and ends.

Television shows do sort of but they actually don't right. When

you create a good television idea, it is like a bear trap

that you can spring and reload and spring and reload and spring

and reload again. Yeah, yeah. And a well wrought television

show is about relational dynamics that repeat themselves.

And I am fascinated by relational dynamics. I'm now a

coach in the sphere of relational dynamics, and I love

relational I, you know, I was that kid in high school, I was

that boy in high school, and the unusually straight boy in high

school who, like, gossiped with all the girls about all the

relationships that were going on by masculine feminine

relationships my whole life, and TV was a chance for me to figure

out what I know about those on an ongoing basis.

Yeah. What was it like for you, the decision to

move away from that world where you were in a very, very

successful career, you know, you were working on law and order,

and the Summer I Turned Pretty and these huge hits, you know,

on top of the mountain, so to speak. You know, some people

would say, and then you realize this wasn't for you.

I've had a beautiful run of it. I've been incredibly

blessed in my career to work on great shows with great people.

And I should say, I'm not dead yet. I'm not completely out. I

do still have my tethers in there. And when some really

interesting project comes up, I love doing that. I have a

mastery in it, and I'm happy to do it. And when I found this

work a number of years ago, I felt a deep calling. It was

choiceless. I have to do this. It changed my life, restored my

life restored my sense of self. It restored my relationships. It

restored the deep knowing at the back of my heart, and as I

looked around in the in the groups that I was in, in men's

embodiment work and other arenas, I really could feel the

suffering of people. Here I am trying to write out loud to say

what I know I don't have this full and that what had been

taught me, and what I had learned, and what I had come to

learn how to embody was very quickly helping other people

really change their lives, save their marriages, change their

relationships with their children, and in a way that um.

Thing that I think is I've come to understand is quite a maybe

age appropriate is a good way to say it. Richard Rohr talks about

the two halves of life. He wrote a book called Falling upwards,

that in your younger years, you're really interested in ego

consolidation and like planting your flag on a hill and going,

This is who I am, and this is what I'm going to do. And when

you get older, littler things matter, and it's less about what

do I get and what more about what do I give? And so I could

really feel in my body that there are episodes of television

of mine that have been seen by 400 million people across the

globe over time, and one man telling me that I saved his

marriage, that working with me saved his marriage, was far more

important. I cared about it much more deeply. And so though you

know, my agents still send me stuff, and I still occasionally

go out on meetings like this deep, quiet, person to person,

transmission of a of a way of loving, of a way of being in our

bodies. It's deeply meaningful to me. And so when I wake up in

the morning, that's what I want to do, and I see that it is of

service. And I

so we've we've skipped forward, and I want to

fill in some of the the juicy bits on this journey. So you're

working as a writer, and what was it that led you into the

work before you claimed your role as a teacher or a

facilitator or a guide, or I don't know what word you would

feel comfortable with, yeah, where were you that led you to

doing that work with John Wineland and your other coaches,

Amir, was your first experience with this. What led you to join

that workshop? Yeah,

I was in a marriage that we were all suffering. In

me my kids full of miscommunication and

disembodiment and shadow and pattern, and not for lack of

trying, there was a lot of love, but also just a lot of

dysfunction. And I felt a couple of things that are important to

name. One is I felt hopeless. I didn't know a way forward. I

didn't know a way out. I didn't know what to do. My experience

of that time in that marriage was that no matter what I do,

she'll never be happy. No matter what I do, it won't be enough,

and map onto that a lifelong history that's very common among

good men my age, give or take 15 years, is I knew that I didn't

want to be like my dad. I knew a whole bunch of role models what

it meant to be a man that I didn't want to do. I had a front

row seat on a television show to a me too moment. That was

awesome, but it also put me in this place of of, I don't know

how to be a good man. And I can see two choices in front of me.

I can see the Trump choice, which is to claim privilege and

and, you know, screw everybody else which is odious to me and

remains odious to me and to me. And then I also saw on the

liberal side a real, like Abnegation of masculinity, an

internalized misandry, like I'm a man, so I must suck, and I

could feel that in my body, I'm in this marriage. I'm getting a

ton of criticism, and I don't know how to carry myself as a

man right now. In addition, I looked around and I didn't have

any male friends. I had them use but I I'm not alone. Tess, the

data on this is really clear. Most men don't have good male

friends that they can share with openly and vulnerably. Most men

put all of the weight of their difficult relationship with

their own emotions on their partnership, and that doesn't

work. And I was like that. And so when I went to my first men's

group, and I saw 25 men share openly and vulnerably and from

the heart, and what I would now call in a masculine manner,

meaning they had themselves. Their hearts were open, but they

were they were grounded. I felt like an anemic, discovering

iron. I'm like, oh, been all my life. I need Yeah,

oh, you said before that. That you knew what

you didn't want to be with, the the men in your life and the the

role models that you had had previously. And you touched on

it a little bit about ISOC, or going into what we as women

would call toxic masculinity, or, you know, for want of other

words, what

do you call it? Yeah, what do you call it? I

call it in the Trump vein, I call it that too. That's

absolutely toxic masculinity.

Yes, yes, absolutely. What are some of the

other behaviors and the other things that you saw in the men

in your life prior to going into that workshop that you didn't

want to be. Can you just flesh that out a little bit for me?

Sure. I do mean to build out that when, as a

culture, at least on the liberal side, when as a culture, we have

talked about men for several decades now, and certainly at

the end of the 20 teens, it has been very negative. Men are like

this. And so there is the actual men that I saw, like this guy in

the who got me too out of the television show I was working

on. He's a jackass. He He used his privilege to try to get

people to sleep with him, and when they they didn't, he fired

them. Right? So that's a very glaring, obvious thing. But the

bigger problem for me, and I think now that I speak to you

know many hundreds of men, for most men, is just sort of a

vague assumption that men can't be open hearted, that men can't

be loving and grounded and assertive, that men can't be

either they're a taker and toxic or they're like all in their

feminine, ecstatic dance flow boys. And then there's all the

dudes on LinkedIn right who are just like scrubbing up their

resumes, their their outer the notion that there is a masculine

interiority that is beautiful and whole and available and

there to be gifted to the world. Nobody ever showed me that.

So what were you shown then, as a child, as a

teenager, as a young man in your 20s?

Sure, it's a great question. My father was a

beautiful, gracious, kind man, but when he was growing up, it

was discovered that he had a heart defect, and he was told

that he was going to die by the time he was 12, and his father

pulled away from him, fearing that he was going to lose this

boy. And my father grew up with a programming that I'm broken

and full of shame. Now it turned out that that diagnosis was

wrong, and he lived to the ripe old age of 84 but he carried

with him this wound that I'm broken and my heart is no good

like that literally mapped onto a metaphor that that he carried

in his embodiment. And so my father never said anything to me

that he wouldn't have said in a room full of strangers at a

cocktail party. He had no interiority.

So you mean that there wasn't a lot of emotional

intimacy, but there was no emotional intimacy. There was

love, but not intimacy.

Love, support, kindness, even a kind of seeing,

but no Depth.

Depth is enough. How did he see you without the

depth? What was your experience of that?

He saw that I was creative and wanted to be an

actor, and so he supported College, and then pulled the rug

out from underneath. Yeah, it was very surprising. Yeah, he,

he, I think he was a little conflicted about his support for

me. I think if I'd gone and interviewed at Goldman Sachs, he

actually set up one for me that that that would have really

delighted him.

So what I'm hearing, and correct me, if I'm

misinterpreting this, is that, because I like to pair things

down to one sentence from one writer to another, what I'm

hearing is that you had a deep desire to be seen, and

ultimately that was at the core. Of what led you to that men's

group with Amir, and that being in that work you felt seen, is

that one way of of saying or or surmising your experience,

I'd, I'd adjust it ever so slightly. I felt vaguely

that I had a depth, but I didn't see it mirrored in any other

men, with the notable exception of gay men in the theater in my

youth, but I didn't have any experience of straight men being

deep, and so I didn't know how to carry my own relationship

with my own depth. And what I got in that meeting right away

was, oh, there's a deep man, and there's another deep man and

there's another deep man. So it's less seeing though that is

important and more mirroring modeling.

What did gay What was your experience with gay men

mirroring that? What were they mirroring that you felt at home

with

coming of age, you know, in the AIDS crisis, at a

time after which many, if not most, gay men were out, because

I can remember when they weren't, and I smile with such a

joy on my face that younger people Today don't remember how

hard a struggle that was.

Yes, it's good that they don't well in our in

our circles, in our circles, in Liberal circles, Yeah,

unfortunately, there are many circles where people still do

not feel Yeah. They are free to do that. Unfortunately,

in order to be themselves, they had to ask hard

inner truths of the cost of being who they were. They had to

be at depth and in alignment with their deepest hearts truth.

And they modeled that to me in in their sexuality, in their

orientation, and they modeled it to me in their fierceness, for

creativity, for for sparkle and joy and play in the theater. And

I needed that to be the creative actor and writer that I was as a

young man, and so I deeply valued like they taught me how

to know my own heart at an early age, it's just that I never had

a model until I until I found a mirrors group, I never had a

model among straight men. I didn't think straight men were

capable of it.

Thank you for opening that portal for me.

Can I just add one thing there?

Yeah, please.

This is, I think, where the problem lies. It isn't

so much that we all have all these negative role models of

masculinity. It's that we have an absence of depth of role

models at depth in masculinity, and I think most it's this,

what's the right analogy of like a game where everybody's in the

same position, if they'd only like open up, we'd see, oh my

god, we're actually all this way. Every man I've met that

I've either LED or been alongside to as he found his own

depth. All men are deep. All men are deep, each in different

ways, but we run around in a world where nobody's showing it,

so nobody thinks anybody else is that's an exaggeration, but it

was my experience across my 30s and 40s,

yeah. So what I'm hearing again is permission.

Yes. Is that there's so many men that are not giving themselves

permission to express all the parts of themselves. And you

know, we could get into Jungian philosophy here and Shadow Work,

and that when we're not giving ourselves, we give ourselves

permission to only express certain parts of ourselves that

are acceptable within the rules of our family of origin, and

then the rules of the society that we place ourselves in, and

so forth. So when you entered that men's group and you saw

other men giving themselves permission, and by extension,

each other, to give expression to whatever was coming up for

them and to receive it from each other, What did that feel like?

Like, for

you, like, I said, like, an anemic discovering

iron, right? Yeah,

you said that before, like, but, but in your

body, like, anemic discovery is very cerebral to me. I can't

place that in my

mind. Like coming home. Like coming home, yeah,

and I do want to, just in case any listeners hear, it the wrong

way. It's not that we men are not giving ourselves permission.

We don't know how we're wired

to distinction,

modeled as a species to be modeled by elder men into

our depth. We're not supposed to just show up in middle life and

go, Oh, I know how to do this. Now. That's not natural. Any man

who thinks he can do it on his own can. That's a strong

opinion, but I'll back

it up. No, but it's a really important

distinction, and thank you for making that because as as a

woman who is in relationships with men and has been in

marriages, well, he's just doesn't want to, he just doesn't

want to. He just doesn't he doesn't want to tell me. He

doesn't want to speak to me, he doesn't want to share openly. He

doesn't want to or he can't. Is language that we would use, and

I hear my friends use and clients of mine use when they

express outrage or despair being inside of their relationships.

And I know you work with men and women and you see this, it's a

really important distinction. So when you were in these groups,

and then you went and studied with John Wineland, and this

world opened up for you, and how life became this juicy world of

so many more possibilities, take me inside of that, it has to be

me. Where you went from student and participant in the group to

claiming your role as leader and facilitator or Shepherd. Is

that? Is that a good word for you? What words would you use

for what your calling,

yeah, teacher, maybe leader, yeah, not yet, but

someday, elder, I'm still in search of my own elders before I

can claim that title.

Yeah, you're in the spring of the crone phase.

So am I? We're knocking on the little door wanting to be let

in, but we're not quite there yet. Yeah, so So you had a

calling, but we often have callings that we don't listen

to, just like that young boy wanting to be an actor, you

know, and then not doing that. And I have had many of those

moments as well. This time you really listened. So what was it

in you that when I've got something unique to offer, this

space, this world, other men, what was it in you that leaned

into that there

were a couple of moments that happened in fairly

quick succession where and my training is both co Ed and among

groups of men. You know, my certification from John Weinland

is in masculine embodiment, but that was a three year program

with men and women and in in a polarity practice, I was deeply

in my practice across from a woman who is full of, like,

feminine, feisty Goddess energy. And when I opened my eyes in the

practice, I'm like, Oh man, I'm in for it, because she's like,

got so much juice, she's so much and she's a couple years older

than me, and, like, she's got her feminine Goddess Kali thing

going on. I'm like, in trouble here.

And and not I want to, I want to absolutely stay in

this. But for somebody listening that doesn't understand what

polarity work means, can you just explain to us what, what

that process was? Sure,

the framework of the lineage that I study is

ultimately rooted in Taoism, and the notion that the yin and the

yang, the feminine and the masculine move through all of

us, just in different proportions. And if you sit

across from another human being, and one of you consciously takes

on the masculine pole and the other one consciously takes on

the feminine pole. You can move a lot of energy through your

body and between your bodies that you can't do in any other

way, and it gives you like a radar into your own embodied

system that is phenomenal and. This is not it can be an erotic

practice, but it's not a sexual practice. And as an example in

this practice, my job was to hold wide grounded, open hearted

space to whatever my feminine practitioner partner wanted to

bring. And I could hear around the room that other feminine

practitioners were bringing joy, or like sultry arrows. My

partner was bringing fury. She started beating on my like

literally wailing away on my chest. And the practice was to

be to get wider and get deeper and be a yes, and I breathed,

and I I used all my embodiment training, and not that that was

it wasn't a strategy. There's no strategy in this. This is

embodiment work. We're not like thinking our way through

anything. And at a certain moment, I could feel like a hand

reaching from behind through me. This needs to end. And I grabbed

her by the hands, and I said, stop it with my heart open. And

she looked at me like this for a moment, and then she burst into

tears and lay her head on my chest, and she said, I needed a

boundary. Thank you for the boundary. And then a little

while later, maybe a couple months later, on another

retreat, I had a conversation with a man who had come to me

some time before with some really deep issues in his

marriage that were very personal that I won't get into here, and

I gave him some coaching that I don't know. Where it came from.

It came from intuition. It came from my own embodied sense of

what he needed. And he was coming back to me, and he said,

it worked. You saved my marriage. We have done in two

months based on what you said, more than 10 years of couple

counseling, more than any of the processing, more than the MDMA

journeys, more than all of that. Thank you. And so I had this

sense that in ways that I didn't fully understand or need to I

was holding a space of trustable, grounded, open

hearted masculinity to both men and women. That's what that

polarity practice told me, and she said as much afterwards, and

that's what I had wanted, that's what I had needed, that's what I

had lacked, and I didn't. It's not like I made a decision. I

really didn't, but I felt like a decision was made for me. I

want to ask you about words again, because you

have lots of good words and you're so articulate and express

yourself so beautifully. And that's part of bringing people

into the work, explaining things, making them feel safe.

You know, our mind wants to understand things. That's how we

feel safe, or we think that's how we feel safe. That's the

construction that we're we're brought up in in the world. But

we do need words as human beings to relate to each other and kind

of get on the same page and so forth, until we have embodied

practices in place where we can find that other, knowing with

each other and develop that and but until we do, the words are

an entry point. Totally agree so so often when we think about

embodiment, I should I say we? I'm going to say me and I, you

know, love somatic practices and embodiment work. I love words,

too. So I'm asking for myself as much as for you dear listeners,

we often want to pit the words and the body against each other,

or I do sometimes, you know, I struggle with that intersection

point. So for you as someone who has a lot of beautiful words and

then now being in an you know, having embodied practices, where

do you find that relationship for yourself? Where with the

words and the embodied knowing, and then being able to hold that

space or shepherd that space for other people like myself, for

example, where I'm sort of struggling to kind of express to

you what's going on in my body and my mind and my words right

now. Does that make

sense? It's a beautiful question. I love it.

It's actually very

long winded question. I'm sorry it took me a

minute to find my way into it,

but that's okay, right? You've actually opened a

line of inquiry that I've never made. So thank you for that. Oh,

please

share that with me. Yeah,

most of the time in my work, let me just put this

in, and then I'll come back to the question. Most of the time

in my work, at first blush, I'm up against a man who is so

trained to make logical arguments and solve problems

that it's keeping him from getting in his body. And so I am

trying to wipe aside the stories and the analysis in order to

clear a space for him to sink into his body. And so in that

moment, which I spend a lot of time in, words and embodiment

are at odds, but there's no we are embodied beings with

language, and there's no conflict there at all. There's

no zero sum game. Let me I think you, I think you answered your

own question in the queue up, which is that if our minds are

racing in circles because we don't feel safe, then they're

not helping us. We'll never get there that way, if our thoughts

and words are up regulating our nervous system, if our heart

rate is getting faster, we are on a train of the monkey mind

that's taking us out of our embodied moment. If we are in

our bodies, which I experienced you as in that long question,

where I felt you as gesturing toward an articulation of

something that you could feel but couldn't quite articulate.

Nothing wrong with that at all. That's beautifully deeply

embodied speech. And again, we're in the Edith Wharton

territory of using words to figure out what we know, which I

think is deep and beautiful. And then the last thing I'll say on

that is that we have this very old phrase in English. I don't

know how old, speaking from the heart, that's an embodied

experience. It's not a metaphor. And when we speak from the

heart, we speak in very short utterances.

I know I love. I'm not going to do that.

Hmm? So for, for when your heart feels so hurt

and raw and the inclination is to completely close off instead

of open. How do you shepherd somebody into taking that leap,

even when they're terrified and feel like they they don't feel

safe? Basically,

sure, what you just described as a good portion of

what I do with men is they

are.

Nobody taught them right, like we were saying

before, they are in touch with their hearts, or they're

starting to get in touch with their hearts, and they're

feeling feelings and they don't they want to close the short

technical answer to your question is eye contact. Show

me. I'll say show me to a man, but what I mean is, look at me.

Show me with your eyes. Show me I've got you right here. I'm not

going anywhere. Show me and then I'll close and look away. Show

me again. Show me that makes so much sense. I got you, yeah,

it's a, it's like, it's like a fox on the other side of the

water. It, it takes stillness and presence and time

and so much trust in yourself and and you as the

teacher. How do most men find themselves to you.

I wish there were a common answer. There isn't. Men

come because. Because they have a sense in mid life that they've

done everything right, and they're not happy. Their

partner's not happy. Like I checked all the boxes. I did

everything I said I was going to do. Why? Where's the deeper

meaning? There's a pain point around depth. What we've been

talking about, they haven't arrived at depth. So they'll

come, you know, whether they come into one of my drop in

circles, or whether they come to a discovery call, they'll find

me through a friend or, you know, through Instagram,

something like that. I i The truth is, I get most of my work

these days from word of mouth, and that's important because you

mentioned trust. Men are deeply skeptical, and they have every

right to be and the the thing that feminine partners don't

often understand is how much courage it takes, right? Like we

said, you said before, oh, they just don't want to right, so

having heard that message for a very long time, or they're not

capable like actually stepping into this work requires an

immense amount of bravery, and that bravery is helped by, hey,

I know this guy, also, men generally as a marker, like, we

like the thing that's hidden. We want to go to the back room of

the speakeasy is the godfather. And then we were let in. And

then many men come to me because their partners have said, have

laid down a law of some sort of like, hey, I really need you to

do this. And the trick there is that so many women I know think

they can make their partners better. Got bad news for you,

ladies, that's my job. It's not yours.

Well, it's the man's job, and it's the ladies

job to do her work too.

That's right, what we're talking about here. Like I

said, in terms of modeling, has to come from other if you're if

your partner is a masculine being, if your partner is more

masculine than feminine, we all have both, then that modeling in

my book needs to come from other men, and from not just any men's

group, from a well held men's group. Because this can be done

wrong.

How can it be done wrong, in your opinion,

in the eaching, and I used to remember which

hexagram It was, however many 1000 year old book, it says, the

responsibility of yin in the universe is devotion. The

responsibility of Yang in the universe is trustability. And if

a leader of men's work hasn't done the work on himself, or if

a group of men haven't done the work on themselves to know where

their own shadows are or how to spot them when they come up, if

they haven't learned to meticulously hold space for

another human being, which is really what a John Wineland

training is about, that's certificates on the wall over

there, like, that's, that's what it's for. Is you can come to

that moment of exposure and get betrayed. And I do get refugees

in my practice, from from other men's groups. Now, I should say,

by the way, there are, there's a lot of great men's work out

there, and it's only serving a small sliver of the population

that need it. I think it's a growth industry.

Oh gosh, we can only hope it's just such a

beautiful practice. And knowing quite a number of men who are in

masculine embodiment circles, oh, it leads to rich, beautiful

relationships, ladies and other men, listen. Would you? I'd

love to hear your experience of that, like, what

do you see in those guys that that that give a testimonial,

yeah, and an openness, a presence and ability

To express, to see and be seen, vulnerability, deep listening

from the heart and not just the head, and ability to take

personal responsibility in the moment and respond, as opposed

to react being more mindful in communication. Conversation,

recognizing the signs in each other's body, in presence with

each other, not just hearing the words, oh gosh, I could go on

and on and on,

lines up exactly with my own experience. Yeah,

yeah, it's really beautiful. And also, you were

talking before about mirrors, putting a beautiful mirror in

front of me. That is an invitation to continue doing my

own work, so I can continue meeting men who are also doing

that beautiful work, so that we can meet in a place of trust.

It's a gorgeous, incredible thing, which is one of the many

reasons that I wanted to speak to you, to celebrate the work

that you're doing, to invite more men to do this work, I want

to ask you about something that was coming up for me as I was

listening to you, if we accept the premise that we're always in

training, that we're always learning and growing, that we

never arrive, You know, in that way of knowing everything, what

comes up for you as a teacher that serves when you're working

with others, that serves as an invitation or A mirror to keep

expanding into your own practice?

Hmm? Two

things come to mind, though it's, I know it's bigger

and wider than this. One is as my offerings have grown, and as

the number of men I serve grows, pure and simple, my nervous

system capacity has to grow because I am we use the word

holding. I am holding a lot of people. They're relying on me to

see them and to feel them and to use, uses the wrong word,

because it implies an agency that's not there. But to to to

offer them my embodied intuition for their growth and betterment.

And in order to do that in in the John Wineland world, we talk

about nervous system capacity, and so I continually need to

expand my capacity in order to remain grounded, still present

and knowing in front of the more men that I serve than I used to,

and that's been beautiful. And like you say, is never ending. I

never expect that to end. Every now and then, I'll give a 1.5

answer, every now and then, like and this happens, full

disclosure, like a man, will trigger me, and I need to be

very clean about that. I need to deal with that immediately. That

cannot come back to the man. It happens much less now than it

did when I was starting out and but I'm told by, you know,

people who are much farther down the road that that actually

never ends. Just have to, you're human, to put systems in place

where that never becomes your clients problem, it becomes your

men's group problem, like the men's group that holds you. So

there's that. And then the second piece I was going to say

is

like, like

Crohn's and training. I think we got a TV

show there. Tara Tess, Crohn's and training. I really am

craving, in my own work elder space. I'm craving men who are

in their 70s, and I'm hoping to work directly with Bill Plotkin

this fall, and he's wrote soul craft, and they just have an end

of life depth that that I feel called to to learn from. I I

want to

ask you about something was coming up for me

as I was listening to you about this pressure that I imagine or

that I perceive, that men take on to have the answers, to have

it figured out, to be. Expert to front load that part of

themselves, particularly when they are taking on the role of

teacher or elder or facilitator or whatever words we're going to

use. How do you hold that construction or that pressure?

And rebalance, so to speak, so that you can hold space in a way

where you're not taking that on as much.

It's a great question, and it's a

sophisticated question. So it's an understanding question of

what I do. And when I started two years ago, I would get

frustrated if a guy didn't get where I thought he could get.

I've definitely let that go. My job is to give it my best shot.

But the premise of this work is any man sitting across from me,

first of all, there's nothing wrong with him. Any growth he

wants, he has to want, and that's why, what depends on the

container. Either I'm leading the container, but often I'm a

coach, right? I'm a coach. I'm not the athlete. If, if he

doesn't do the work, I can't get him there. I'm not I'm not

carrying him across the finish line. And there are, there are

times when the process of going down the wrong road is the only

way to get to the right road. That happens with some

frequency, where we need to investigate this valley in your

being and realize, Oh, that's not actually what the issue is

here. But that's not wasted time. I'm definitely not in the

results business. My testimonials are in the results

business, but my showing up every day for the men that I

show up for is not in the results business. It's not my

job.

Well, it's bringing something else up for

me that's really important is to acknowledge your place in the

process and to allow yourself to be present with yourself while

you are in process, which I would argue is every minute of

the day. So as you are a human being in process, how has this

work that you've done in workshops as a human being and

now as a teacher, how has that helped you be a better father

for beautiful friendships in your life with other men, yeah.

How has that played out for you in your life? Now? Give me your

own testimonial.

Yeah, yeah.

Most of the time I speak from the heart, and I'm

fairly quick at knowing when I'm not, and so I feel a depth and a

authenticity to the relationships that I Have with

my daughters and with my friends and it occurs to me as like, as

an embodied feeling that I have. I have it right now that my

heart is falling back and down in my chest settling back like

like in a recliner. And it has a piece a down regulation, a sense

of rightness that I didn't feel across my 30s and most of my

40s, and when, as with a child or with a friend, someone comes

to me and says, Hey, I'm I need Your counsel on this. There's a

there's a two way street of trust in that that feels really

good. You know, if, if the responsibility of Yang is

trustability, then I'm just doing what I'm put here to do,

and it feels right and on purpose and very relaxed.

There's no charge to it, right? That's a young man's game. I'm

going to charge, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm Babe Ruth, I'm

going to hit the home run over there. There's none of that.

It's just, there's an there's a presence, and I mean that in the

other like, nowness to it. Yeah, and a right? To it that needs no

explanation or justification or analysis, to come back to that

word

I love when you say it just feels good to be

this way and to be relating with other people in this way. So do

you find that you are less attached to your words now in

the sense of needing them as much to justify your experience?

I'm a son of an advertiser, and I'm actually

working on an essay right now. Don't advertise like

and I do love your blog posts. They are great. I

appreciate that from one writer, that's a high

compliment to another. Yeah, across my 20s and 30s and in my

early 40s, not knowing who I was, feeling a depth inside me

that I didn't know where to put or how to mirror. I was

constantly telling people how great something was going to be.

You know, especially my ex wife, and that really didn't work.

Turns out my words were empty, and she had reason not to trust

me. So I am, it's it. I think what I might say is a little bit

what I said before about work with clients. I'm unattached to

outcome at the risk of intense vulnerability. I have one of my

kids who is having a really hard time with me right now, and I

suspect that's a result of something that went on when she

was very young, and I hadn't done this work yet, and it's

sort of coming to the surface now. So it's not the

relationship I want right now, but that doesn't matter. It's

the relationship that is. And so my role, my I don't have words

for it, like it's just to be with what is as it is. Feel my

feelings about it for sure. Put those feelings in a container

that can hold them, which is not my daughter and and and carry on

in right relationship with reality. As the Buddhist would

say, Oh,

I love that right re right relationship with

reality.

Oh,

speed. I could talk to you about this all day

long. I always close every episode with the same question,

which is, as someone who has a dream in their heart and doesn't

feel like they have what it takes to make it happen, what

Would you say to them? Tell people

recruit allies. Don't do it alone. Find the

people, let me qualify that. Find the people who see you

clearly.

And if they see you clearly, chances are they'll know that

that dream is right, and they'll work with you to make it happen.

Thank you. We think that we have to do it

alone, and so much of what you've been sharing with me is

so much of what I teach in my community, as well as that,

we're not supposed to do it on our own. We can't do it on our

own. We need support. Yes. Thank you for the the way that you

show up in the world and and how you are teaching and helping

other people to show up with their hearts. Oh, I look forward

to more conversations. It's been

so much. Thank you very much. You.