I'm Jonathan and I'm left of center.
And I'm Rich and I tend to lean a little bit more to the right.
But the bottom line is, is together we try to look for the balance
of what it means to be human in today's world.
So let's get started.
Welcome to Living in the Matrix.
I'm Jonathan. My co-host Rich is not here today.
He's in fabulous Greece.
So I'm a little jealous.
Today we have a fabulous guest.
And I found her because I was reading a book
and her name was mentioned as part of some work in psychology today
for an article around men's mental health.
And I just, I read the article and was really kind of blown away.
And I thought, let's invite her on.
And she said, yes.
So welcome, Karima.
It's a pleasure to have you.
Thank you.
I'm excited to be here.
Absolutely.
So let's start with the article.
Men need more than eye spas and podcasts.
Help our listeners understand the point and intention of the article
because I'd love to dive into it with you.
Well, the article came to me and my co-author Mark Schellbach.
When we were grappling with thinking about,
okay, there's this culture right now of ice baths and podcasts.
And that tends to be where a lot of men stop.
They can do this amazing work of, you know,
sitting in an ice bath for and keep, you know,
doing their time limits and how long they can stay in it.
And they're willing to do that kind of discomfort work.
But part of me was like, what about the emotional discomfort
that we're all in?
Like, how long can you sit in that?
And so we started playing around with that.
And we really wanted to create an invitation for men to try
applying those skills to their emotional world and their inner world.
And so what did you, did you do research for the article
or was it kind of an encapsulation of what you would learn?
It was an integration of so many facets of what I do.
Okay. So what would, what would you consider beyond the ice bath
and podcasts, because I believe men are attracted to those two things.
One, because they're both very physical.
I've learned the more that I listen and do this,
the more that I call my own bullshit.
And because it's recorded, like I have it out there.
My ideas are out there.
So I can't be as, it requires a lot of integrity to do a podcast.
And ice baths are that, that hard physical thing.
So what's, help us see beyond that of what you're talking about.
Okay. So I work with a lot of men in therapy
and I almost consider it like doing weight classes
when they're doing, working with their emotions.
I love shadow work.
I love this, the idea of the shadow is that, you know,
there's parts of ourselves we're not willing to see
and there's positive shadow and negative shadow.
Positive shadow are the amazing parts that we don't see in what we're doing.
And then, you know, negative shadows, things we're trying to hide,
you know, might make us afraid.
And the more we can tolerate discomfort,
the more we are willing to take down our armor and our masks
and our cultural toxic messages and, you know, get beyond shame and get beyond.
Like that requires big muscles, big emotional muscles.
And like, it can be quite uncomfortable for people who start out.
They might be at the 10 pound weights, you know,
and working those for like a year or,
and then they move up to the 20 pound weights and they're like,
wow, that actually wasn't what I thought was hard is no longer hard to me.
And then you can keep building these skills and these tools.
And on all of a sudden, you're just like a heavyweight.
You're an Olympian when it comes to the inner world.
So that whatever arises in you, you're like, OK, all right, I know what this is.
I know what to do. So that's what I'm meaning.
I meaningly, how we dip into these, the badlands of the inner world.
So what does that look like for you?
In terms of men think visually, what does that look like in terms of experience?
So men can kind of grab onto that of what it because I know what you mean,
but I want to draw that out in terms of how does a man who's
interested in improving his life dig into the internal world?
What does that look like?
Well, it often first requires a safe container.
And so nobody is meant to do this kind of work alone.
It's great to have someone very safe that you trust, that can create a space
where you're willing to maybe take off some of the armor and like start.
So one of the things I talk about is becoming your own scientist
and getting really curious with what's going on like here.
Something just bubbled out of me, something just arose.
I'm not really sure what it is.
You have a weird reaction or a strong reaction.
I'm not really sure what it is.
You put on your scientist glasses.
What are you wearing as a scientist?
And your microscope, you take out your microscope and you start zooming in
and getting really curious and start doing data collection.
You can start collecting data on yourself and do it writing memos
and being like cataloging it.
And then you get really, you start putting this puzzle together.
Who am I and what's going on?
Why did I do this?
And you build this amazing map of your life, which is power.
That is powerful.
When you are able to identify, like you'll just know, you're like,
Oh, actually I collected this on May 17th.
And you start just having concrete data on who you are and why you do what you do.
And what's going on?
Well, I think the interior is for a lot of men could be a very dark space.
They don't know what's there and don't like to look like failures.
And I think it's kind of an Achilles heel for men is that we don't like looking stupid
because men are primarily up here and women can get down in their body a lot more easily.
And I think that's an extremely valuable asset.
I learned so much from the women in my life because they can feel a lot easier than men.
I think for men, going inside starts with not wanting to look stupid.
And I think that's the value of the ice baths and the podcast is their beginning stages.
But like you said, to go deeper.
Have you ever heard of Ed Brighton?
No.
Ed Brighton was a football player.
I think he played for New England Patriots and he started a podcast.
He's this burly football guy, six foot seven, but he's doing the journey of going inward.
And it blows my mind every time I hear him because what he realizes it comes down to is
if I go inward, I've got to deal with myself and I don't like doing that.
And he talks about it as a journey of what it means to go inside is I've got a first deal with.
I don't like parts of myself and that's hard to look at.
So how do you deal with that?
How do you counsel people to deal with that?
I love that you're bringing this up.
It's such an important point about the way men have been socialized and conditioned is different
than the culture women are in and their freedom to share their emotions.
They have some very oppressive norms that they're trying to figure out and move through
especially around looking weak or having a chink in their armor and not like they collude
in a culture of silence about how much emotional pain they're in.
And I've been privileged in that I've been able to witness people, men get more comfortable
in these spaces since working at distress centers in Canada where I'm from.
And where I really got to see behind the masks and see especially when men get to the brink
like the edge of do I want to be here or not?
Like if they have suicidal ideation like I have been with men in the pits of hell of their own hell.
And how do you feel safe?
Like how do we create options?
How do we create safety in those moments so that things that might seem like completely
awful it actually is so helpful when we can name them and create a safe space to figure out
what's going on here?
What is going on here?
You're definitely not alone in it.
And just putting it on the table as something to explore as this scientist.
Let's get really curious.
And there's so much work to remove the toxic programs that are on top of men in terms of
like shaming them. It's actually the hardest thing to do is get vulnerable.
Those are the most courageous people I have ever met or the strongest people I've ever met.
So it's correcting that cultural narrative that like as long as you look like you have no
chinks in your armor, you are strong.
No, actually the strongest one I know.
The paper tiger sometimes is more valuable, you know.
Exactly.
So it's doing these corrective messages to what's been like, you know, it's been really hard
to break this pattern and the cycle of like it's inherited from, you know, father to son.
And it just keeps going down of like we don't talk about things.
We don't talk about weakness.
We don't have hard feelings.
Yeah.
And so it's making it safe enough that we can put things on the table.
That's the power of shadow work.
We can put the ugliest thing on the table and find a way to love it.
Find a way to figure it out.
Find a way to find its place, to reap the lessons and like figure it like just know where to put it,
how to integrate it.
So it no longer holds that same charge because often men come to me haunted.
They come to me haunted.
They are just like, I don't know how I'm going to be able to keep going.
I every day think about X, Y, Z.
And then doing the work, getting through the work, the power of like creating the safe space to figure it out.
By the time we figured it out, you know, might be a year, it might be two years, it might be it's different for everyone,
but it no longer holds power.
And that is so, this is what makes me love what I do is when I can have it like somebody we start a session
and they're haunted by X, Y, Z and by, you know, a certain point later that it's a non-issue.
It's like they're just like, it doesn't even matter anymore.
That's amazing.
A lot of people don't understand what that feels like though, because it's, you know, people have certain fears in their life
and it's easier to compartmentalize and ignore fear than it is to deal with it.
And the problem is, is that when we compartmentalize it means we're storing it inside of our body somewhere
and it will create disease.
And it's interesting that people can accept the disease when in action.
This is the thing that gets me is the moment we face the fear, we realize we could always overcome it,
but we just had to face it in order to discover that.
And people don't have the discovery to know its value until they face their fear, because that was my journey.
I spent the last 30 years trying to figure out why I couldn't face my fears.
And what I eventually realized is that I could, I just didn't know it yet.
And I think work is in a lot of ways discovering your potential of what's already there.
I've always had the capacity to face the fear.
What do you see when you work with men that helps them get over that hump of being able to face it
and live into a sense of transparency?
I would say a part of it is dipping their toes in, just like with ice baths.
That's where I am not here to hate on ice baths.
It really is such an amazing metaphor for how it feels emotionally.
Like you dip in for a minute.
Maybe you can only do 30 seconds of the fear, and then it becomes completely overwhelming.
But it's having enough tools and safety that you come out and then you wrap yourself in a towel and then you get a smoothie.
Well, it's 90 seconds of showing yourself you can do hard things, and a lot of people don't know that.
It's a tough experience to do.
I learned it in the reverse, so I've been doing it emotionally my whole life because I had to.
I had to.
My soul took me to a place where if I'm going to be able to keep going,
I have to find a way through all of the heavy shit that has been dropped on me.
When I started doing ice baths, I was like, this is exactly the same.
I say the same thing. Yeah.
Yeah, it's like I'm just putting myself in a state of suffering.
It's chosen suffering to realize, oh, I can handle this, you know,
because everybody's trying to deal with the edges of what they can handle.
An ice bath is kind of like knocking one of them down, you know, and say, oh, I can do a little bit more than I think.
And you can do that emotionally to say, OK, I've got this fear that I've been ignoring for 30 years, and I think I can finally face it.
I just pick one little thing like something last Tuesday that's still whirling in my brain.
And I think learning that you can turn and face it is one of the most valuable skills I've ever found is just and I think that pivot is to courage.
So you had to just because nobody like for me, when I want to go in that ice bath, like I don't really want to go.
Right. Yeah.
You don't want to really go, but you know you're going to feel better afterwards. Right.
And so then you kind of you drop in like I have to kind of turn my head off for a second, drop in, turn my thoughts off.
And then, you know, because if you think you're just like, I want to get out of here, I want to get out of here.
This is awful. Like that's what the mind is doing.
And you have to find a way to work with that and turn it off to actually like take that.
Okay, we're doing it. And so, you know, some people count some people you find your ways to cope through it.
You know, the breath people go out of their ways to and it's the same.
It's the same with our emotional world. When we're facing these things, it's like, okay, I know it's going to not be fun.
It's going to be like, ah, for a few minutes, and then I might end up feeling better.
And that's the thing to know is that it's not we're doing it for no reason.
It's not suffering in vain. Right.
It's to be able to metabolize experiences.
And that's that is something that not a lot of people like I often get men they're like, I didn't know therapy would help.
I'm like, how did you not know that? But like they didn't think that they just thought it was talking.
Right. They think it's just talking. And it's like, no, actually, there's a way to do it where you're metabolizing your experiences.
You're digesting them. And then it actually can clear the energy in a way that it's not heavy on you.
And you're not just carrying it around, you know, in your compartmentalized boxes.
When I first got to therapy after I had been through the ringer, I had been through what Francis Weller calls rough initiations.
I told my therapist, maybe this is politically incorrect. I told my therapist I felt emotionally obese.
And what I meant by that is I just had so many experiences I didn't know what to do with.
I remember feeling like I was just hoarding experiences and I didn't know where they went or what they meant or how to feel about them.
So I remember that mentality being like, I don't even know where to start.
And it can feel so overwhelming. So I love what you're saying. It's just like, just pick one.
Dip your toe in. I want to go back to your article because you said the men's mental health crisis requires men to stop compartmentalizing and outrunning their feelings.
What did you mean by that? Yes, I have met a lot of men who will do everything to not feel what they're feeling.
And so our audience understands you are a crisis counselor. I started that way.
So yeah, I've been working with a lot of expertise in working with people that are at a crisis mode.
My first gig in mental health was working in crisis for five years.
I was working with people who are at their absolute edge. And like since then, I've worked in hospitals.
I've worked on nonprofits. I've worked all over the place. Private practice.
Yeah, so I have a lot of experience of people either they're compartmentalizing and they're like, but it works for me.
It's in a box, nicely in a box. It works. I put it in a shelf. It's gone.
So yeah, I've heard that a lot. And then I've heard the outrunning. They're just trying to keep busy as long as they keep busy,
as long as they have like full schedules and they go to the gym five times a week and everything.
The dinners up. They just pack their life. And it's podcasts.
And I have all my podcasts. So they're never actually having space.
You know, then they fill it with, you know, we all have Netflix. We all have, you know, we find our ways to fill our energy in mind instead of turning inward.
Yeah. So that's what I was meaning when I wrote that.
So that leads to this idea of tolerating momentary pain to transform what blocks the heart.
That unpack that sense because it's not just about getting over the pain.
It's about unblocking your heart.
I don't think most men understand what it means to not have a block on their heart.
Yeah. And it's something again, I feel so privileged that I have had the opportunity to support men
in softening their hearts again and feeling again because I know what a risk that can be,
especially in this culture where there's so much fear, there's so much shame.
It feels impossible. I know it can feel really impossible to be a man right now.
And so, yeah, it's the purpose of, you know, like the ice bath, you dip your toes in.
We're not just doing it in vain. The hope is that through this building of tolerance to the discomfort,
we can actually get to what is blocking hearts. Like what is this armor?
What is the, how many layers of protection where men can kind of operate in a way where they're not being fully authentic.
They've got so many masks on because they feel they have to.
They feel they have to, to please people or to keep being productive or keeping who they need to be for work or, you know,
keep up with all their roles and identities that it is incredibly difficult to actually be authentic.
And I have watched the horrible consequences of when they can't be.
You know, marriages ending where they were never able to tell their partner the truth of how they felt.
And so they became a zombie. In one case, I'm thinking of where someone became an absolute zombie in their marriage
because they just stopped being able to feel at all. Yeah.
And so then it just the distance between the partners grew and grew and grew and it and it wasn't able to work out
because it just they became such different people and he was so far away from his heart,
which thankfully now he's been able to reclaim and soften back into.
But yeah, this is where it's such important work to be able to get back to our authentic, heartfelt living.
For our audience that's never done any kind of work like that, what does that work look like for you in terms of either in a clinical setting or in a workshop setting?
How could men begin? What does it look like to kind of begin that process of doing work?
What would you lead someone through if they came into your office?
Well, it would again, first give them the tools to handle when discomfort arises.
Because we're not going to be able to get very far if they get overwhelmed and the armor goes up immediately.
Right. So you have to really build that trust and give them a skill set to handle the discomfort.
Right. Like just like the ice best, the breath work, mindfulness, whatever it needs, whatever they need to feel safe.
So the first absolute first step is safety. Inner safety. Right.
It's outer and inner. It's the cultural messages and then the messages that we've absorbed so deeply that we think like we attack ourselves with them.
We shame ourselves. Don't be weak. I don't want to feel this way.
Well, I think that's part of the problem is that most men feel anger and shame or I don't know what a neutral setting would be, but anger and shame or constants in men's lives.
And I think that's part of the reason is there's probably a lot of anger and shame, especially between fathers and sons and even mothers.
I mean, there's definitely mothers ones, but it's again, it's easier to compartmentalize and just kind of say it's not there.
And I've and here's the thing is for me is I've done enough work with men and to have seen what kind of the way you finished your article was around when you're not afraid of your inner world.
That is true power. And it's so interesting to see men become aware of their power because it's not egotistical.
You're taking care of yourself. It's not an egotistical power that needs attention.
It's comfort and calm with the self like to feel a sense of, oh, you know, we remove all the noise from the signal.
It plays beautiful music. That's kind of the metaphor analogy that I would use is it's like all that negative energy is just noise to the signal.
And if you remove it, you get to be the fullest expression of who you are.
I love that. And I use similar analogies in my work in terms of.
You end up just with this inner space like it's the voices are gone and that's part of that building of inner safety.
You end up like you're saying it's common there. It's not.
And I love that you're differentiating these kinds of power because, yeah, a lot of men are taught power is control power.
Like there's all these toxic messages about what power power is, just money and having the best car and having a buff body.
That's power. Having a bunch of people who want to date you.
Right. And so it's reorienting that idea of what is true power.
True power is when you feel peace inside of you, when you are able to just sit and feel calm and good and enjoy the present.
Without the intrusive messages and being haunted.
By all the ghosts and all the thoughts and intrusive thinking and spinning thought like when all of that nervous system energy has settled.
And you have that, you know, if anything does arise, you know what it what's going on and it's power.
Yeah. When you can get to a point where all these old patterns no longer haunt you, they might happen.
Like someone might try to activate you a certain way. If you have a pattern with somebody, it doesn't hold the same power anymore.
Yeah. You can just go back to that calm, beautiful space inside.
Why did you get into this type of work?
Why crisis and why helping people go through this? What what draw you drew you to it?
Well, so actually the what I specialize the most in is grief.
Oh, wow.
Nobody likes talking talking about that one.
So that's actually what I do specialize in.
But what got me into the field is I had been through the wringer.
I'd had my own rough initiations and I did not feel equipped.
I was like, I will need to understand what the what is going on here.
What I put on my scientist hat from a young age.
And I got very curious about what was going on in my life, what was going on with everyone.
How did how are all these people who love each other hurting each other?
What are what's you know, what is going on here?
All in pain. Oh, yeah. I know.
I have the same story. Yeah.
A lot of us do. Right.
And for me, it was how do I figure I wanted to figure this out deeply.
And so I was fascinated with psychology and sociology,
which is really important because it was both doing the micro microscopic exploration
and the macro of like these larger forces at play.
So I carry both my PhDs in public health, actually.
So I have been on this journey of building my what I sometimes joke.
I'm a cartographer of hell.
I'm just building a map, just like creating this giant map.
Right. No, I know. Yeah.
You hear me. It's it's interesting that in life, when it brings you a very deep sense of suffering.
Like I played a victim for so long and I realized being a victim is easier, but harder in the long run.
It's easier in the short run and it's harder in the long run because it becomes extremely tiring.
And it really is right around my 20s. I started saying, you know what?
I need help. Like I am a basket case.
And and I really began to seek out help, but I didn't have any clue where I was going.
I just started listening to really smart people that seemed like they were going in the direction that I wanted to go.
And so it sounds like you had a similar journey of just trying to figure it out for your own sake, because that's why.
Absolutely. And I thought I had, especially in the crisis distress center world, I thought I'd figured a lot of it out.
I'd been trained on every topic in mental health.
And then I went through my first major death experience.
Personal or for a client? It was someone I loved.
Okay. Died pancreatic cancer. And it just shook me.
Everything I thought I knew went out the window. Grief was like I was humbled.
I was just so humbled. Everything I theoretically knew no longer applied.
And I really wanted to figure that out because it was just such a potent energy that all of a sudden I looked around like, oh, my gosh, I've been grieving my whole life.
I had no idea that this is grief that I've been feeling.
And so that led me down an even wilder path of the Ph.D. and the research I've done.
But it's something that I especially missed. Can you unpack what grief is from a clinical standpoint, but also maybe from your own personal perspective?
Because grief, it sounds like it's distinct to you. And I want to draw that distinction out.
Mm hmm. Well, and it again fits with our going, dipping our toes in this ice bath because grief is one of these very hard things to allow.
But what I grief is multifaceted and it's an embodied response to loss.
So there has to be some kind of attachment to what's been lost. Otherwise, we won't feel it.
If we don't attach to something or somebody, we won't feel the loss of them. So it really is about the nature of the attachment.
And it's this embodied physical, emotional, mental, spiritual like it's a full experience that that's where I was so humbled.
And I see the power of it because it's again, it's not something that's just for no reason.
It's very adaptive and it helps us digest what's happened in our lives.
So it's one of these powerful forces like the ice bath that if we can grow more tolerance for it, there is such medicine in it and such healing and power.
If we can. Yeah, I could go on ad nauseum about this.
No, that's that's part of why I invited you on is because I think personally, I study my own internal world a lot. I journal heavily, but I also am very conscious of the world around me.
And I think we have entered, especially with the introduction of A.I. because A.I. is freaking a lot of people out politically.
The world is interesting. Money wise is interesting. There's a lot of things just kind of on fire right now.
And I think people are beginning to realize how am I going to survive through this? I can barely afford to live.
How am I going to survive? And in order to truly survive long term, you got to have connection to your heart.
And I think people are beginning to really say, I need help here.
And we're realizing this is a response to something going on here that I think at a core, people have to learn how to love themselves.
And that's at a very core level. You only deal with yourself 24 7. Everybody else gets a pass.
And so if you can't live with yourself, you can't live with anybody.
And I think the attachment part is who we think we are.
And when we lose someone, it's we're trying to make sense of what does it mean? What does life mean without this person?
And how do you help people through that process? Because I know grief is a five stage process.
But how do you help people through that? So I'm going to first just respectfully disagree on the five stages.
It is not. I am glad you say that. OK, I'm busting model, but inform us.
Give us better information. Yes. So better information here.
There are no five stages of grief. There are no stages of grief.
There is no one right way. There's so many toxic, unhelpful, harmful messages that actually keep us shame in our shame about grief.
Because then we're like, the number one in one of the stages. Yeah, I'm doing it wrong.
So the number one question I get is am I doing grief right? That is the end infused in that question is shame.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's its engine. It's its engine.
The relationship between grief and shame in our culture, because it's the culture that's shaping the space for our grief to come out.
Because one of the big things that I love sharing and I find is just very powerful is grief is a mammal activity.
It's not just unpack that. So all mammals grief. Yeah.
All mammals grief. We are not this random, unique species grieving all mammals grief.
So to think we are somehow above it or that we can just push it somewhere is not helpful.
It's not. It's it should be the most natural, normal thing that if you go through a loss that you have a grief response.
Like you can look at a BBC Earth, I believe, like they've written up on this.
Like they could talk about the rituals done by giraffes and elephants and different sizes of mammals.
And I say all this to destigmatize grief. Like we want to destigmatize it because it's something that, again,
a lot of us are just just like a nice bath for like this is awful. I don't want to do it.
Why would I do this? Right.
It feels illogical to allow the pain of grief to happen when I'm supposed to be happy.
Yeah, I'm not supposed to feel this way.
How do you help people kind of step into grief is that space where you let the heart take over and feel it.
How do you help people kind of enter into that?
Well, again, so this is where we want to clear out these toxic cultural programs.
All these messages that keep us blocked from being able to drop in.
So there's a lot a lot of clearing and correcting of problematic messaging.
And then once that space is cleared, we can then it's actually a do less experience.
It's an allow. It's an allowing.
And I love sharing. We already know how to grieve in our creature, our mammal self.
We are when our bodies know what to do, we hijack the process mentally.
So especially when we think of, you know, we've talked about with men being way more cerebral, way more, you know,
they're proud of their advancements in logic and reason.
You could get just stuck in the head. You get stuck there.
And I used to be this way. Like I'm an academic.
I know how to be smart and cut off.
I know how to think that I'm just from the neck up and that I don't have a body.
And that's then I've also experienced the problems of cutting off from my body.
But when we can actually relax the mind and allow the body to do its magic, to do what it knows how to do,
that's it. We want to move people there.
And I've had to do a lot of work with men to assure them that when grief that comes in waves,
the waves, you know, can be overwhelming, they can crash over us.
They do stop. You get breathers.
They're not just like relentless waves. It does end.
Yeah. Well, and it subsides like maybe another round of way, just like the weather, you know,
like we can't predict the weather. Right.
But no weather is permanent. Like it's just not. It keeps evolving.
And it's also I studied a lot about pain and human beings can adapt to their capacity to experience pain.
And actually, what's the most painful part of the origination of the pain is your imagination of it, not the actuality of it.
And so you get in the side of this is going to hurt and that's your body practicing the rehearsal before it happens and you're feeling it.
And that's what a lot of people don't realize. The imagination they bring to it adds tremendously to the to the experience of the actual pain.
And when you let it go, you're realizing one, we have the capacity to let it go.
And that's the we create the attachment. And I like how you said it's the attachment leaving, but you got to let it go because grief is realizing, OK, I'm a better human.
I'm still OK. If I let it go. That's the hard part is it's that over that arc of what does it mean to let go of whatever this that I'm grieving over.
And that is a very hard journey for people because of the level of attachment. I've been very I think this conversation around attachment over the last three or five years has been extremely valuable because we're learning how our body does it automatically.
It's just it's how we're operating. And, you know, grief, you see that loss, that attachment process almost on fire.
Well, and it depends on what the grief is about, because some things are easier to let go of than others.
Again, some things are ripped out of our hands or the attachments are just, you know, with a sudden death, for example, that is just shocking to the body.
It feels so unfair and unjust to the body when it's sudden and unpredictable. So like there's that kind of heaviness. But then there's, you know, you know, loss of a relationship or a friendship or a shirt or, you know, like
it depends on what was lost and what we can do as we move through, like we have to allow the grief to kind of ripple through us to kind of shock our systems and move digest it because it is hard.
We don't want to let go. Letting go is maybe the hardest thing.
It's maybe one of the hardest. So we're talking like the most cold ice baths right now.
This sucks.
The first day is like the first ice bath. You don't even know how bad it's going to be. And then it's like shocking, you know, because Rich does ice baths a lot and my co-host and he said, you know, when you start, it's like getting in.
It's like, oh, it takes like five minutes just to get in. And then, you know, you realize by the third time, just get it. You know, it's like get over that. And then you learn, oh, you can get over it. And I think that's
it's got to be a very rewarding part seeing people get over their own fears
and get their own beliefs, essentially, because grief is very personal.
Yeah, and it's not that we ever get over grief.
And for some people, they don't get over it. So some people, like if you lose a child, if you lose a partner, you're not trying to get over it.
There's no end necessarily. It's not about, it's one of the big theories in the field is you actually, it's continuing bonds. And so it's more about transforming the type of relationship that it was, the type of attachment that it was.
Maybe they're not in the physical presence anymore, but how can you still keep a connection?
So it's not a clean cut in some cases with grief.
Or finding some perfect end. That's why there's no sages.
Because what we have to do is allow, we have to allow its process to work through us.
And this is where it's so hard. A lot of people don't want to allow the anger, because grief is all sorts of things. Grief is anger.
So when we talk about anger with men, I love also, here's another myth to bust that underneath anger is grief.
I agree with that. Yeah.
That was big for me. I was like, really? Because it looks so different. But once you really, you know, once this act of like, ah,
but something has been lost. Something is unjust. Right? Like some boundary was crossed.
Something was, you know, there's something going on there that is a grief of some form.
And so when you are able to know that, you can work with it differently.
And when the people, so one thing I really notice I want to say is,
I've really noticed the people who don't digest their feelings versus the people who do.
And you were talking about how rewarding it is. Digest it. When they are able to actually digest and metabolize grief or these heavy experiences.
Let it flow through them. Is that what you're saying? Let it flow through you. It changes you.
Yeah. Because you're allowing your body to experience what it's meant to experience. And then it flows out of you.
That's it's the resistance. The attachment creates the resistance that creates the heat in the signal, which creates the chaos.
And if you if you just let it go through, you realize, oh, I can handle the emotion.
Yeah, it's I'm sorry. I just got a little tangent there, but it's like that's the experience.
It has to flow through you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you have to find your grounding for it.
And that's where the safe containers are so important. But what I'm also adding to this is that it will change you.
So, for example, let's say you are slowly learning someone you thought was a friend is not a friend.
You're starting if you refuse to feel the feelings of like, hey, what they just did was kind of mean or that didn't fit.
If you refuse to feel that, that is how you stay their friend. That is how you do.
Like, it's fine. It's fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. Really, your body's like, this is not like I'm cringing.
Like, I'm like feeling a little sick in my stomach. I don't really want to see them anywhere.
Like that starts building. And if you digest that, if you I digest the hurt of like, hey, actually, they're not really seem to care about me at all.
They seem to when you really digest that you change and you change. So this is where I mean, like these things can change us when we digest them.
And in that sense, feels like it's just coming to terms with reality, you know, integrating it like in all the parts, right?
The mental, emotional, spiritual, all of these parts, the body is now in alignment with the mind and saying, this isn't good for us.
This is no longer serving us. We don't really want to be doing this anymore.
You know, like that's when we have these integrated. It's not just the mind being like, but they're our friend and we have a history.
So they can be at odds, the body and the mind.
So I have a pet theory about that. And it's growing theory because I digest these ideas all the time is humanity is realizing, I think men live, lived in history primarily up here.
And we've been in a masculine age controlled by the head. And women have been live primarily here.
And I think what's happening is this emergence of a coherence where women are waking up to what's going on up here and men are beginning to wake up here.
And it's creating a sense of balance that people can say, OK, because the value of having both is a sense of coherence.
Your body is meant to tell you when it's hurting. And if you compartmentalized it, you can't even feel the pain anymore.
And that that's hard. So it's coming to terms with we're gaining both capacities on a much more robust level.
Men are realizing I can feel that's not just female. It's feminine energy, but it's it's not just female.
Both of us can have that. And women are saying, oh, I like the masculine and I can have that, too.
It's like you were an academic focusing here, but you learned I had to come out here and having both creates a much more balanced life.
That's my. That's an interesting theory.
We're waking up that humanity is beginning to wake up that I need both.
Well, and it's actually I mean, technically from a neuroscience perspective, it's all up here in terms of the I'm pointing at my head for those who can't see the back of the head
is where we store our trauma. And it's known to be.
And this is my like brain 101 because it took me forever to figure this out.
But I've taught it to my daughter. The back of the head is where we store our trauma and our memories.
And so that's where we can have these highly emotional experiences that we can't put our fingers on.
Like it's just and the goal is to get the prefrontal cortex, the front of the head online. That is the battle for a lot of people when they're triggered in their trauma or in their nervous systems, because nervous system science has is one of the most popular right now in terms of like.
And I don't know in terms of gender energies, how this all aligns, but it like to be able to get the clear thinking of the prefrontal cortex is such a battle when we're triggered with our trauma memories.
Yeah, the experience of when you say you're in your body resides.
Well, I have learned now. So I used to think that I was going to be cursed in my anxiety in my nervous system for the rest of my life.
I just thought it was now the water ice. It was the water. I swam in for years for decades.
I was just having a more hyper vigilant spinning mind, and it was life changing to do somatic work. And that's work with the body to find other to actually allow the mind to rest to recognize that a spinning mind is the back of the brain on fire.
It's you know you're activated in fight or flight or even in. So I don't know if you know this like the rat the ladder of regulation, where it's like at the very bottom we're in dorsal mode of this ladder were collapsed we're just completely overwhelmed deer and headlights.
And that is when we're just things that we have no tolerance for what we're going through. If we can climb up the ladder this is Deb Dana by the way, if in the middle of the light at ladder is fight or flight so that's an active energy, that means we've been able to climb out of deer and headlights and are able to do something.
Fight or flight run away you know fight whatever is happening and then at the top of the ladder is ventral mode. And that's when we can feel safe with other people. It's when we have other we're feeling connected we're feeling good.
The thing with this ladder is we climb up and down it all the time every day.
The goal is to be able to keep moving up and we can't just stay at the top of the ladder. That would be impossible. It's recognizing we can actually find our way out of the collapse state, maybe we need to do some fight or flight, then how do we reconnect with people.
So it's learning where you're at on the ladder learning what to do about it but so with the body yeah like the body is powerful. The body actually is your best ally and I don't mean it in a feminine energy way.
I mean it in a just a mammal way.
If the body tells us the truth.
The body has been with us our whole lives.
Yeah, it's our best friend. And I don't think a lot of people realize that that signal is what helps us navigate life really well.
And I will say the men that I have worked with are often so taken aback as they continue to pay attention to their bodies.
Because I yeah as we've talked it's it's men you know it's beyond emotions emotions so when I talk about emotions. I am talking about them like they're just symptoms of things happening, just like we would talk about having cold symptoms.
Like they are not right or wrong at all. It's not about right or wrong with feelings. They are just you know it's like oh you have a cough and a sniffle that's probably this. You have a this and a this you have anger and shame.
That's this. Yeah.
Yeah, it's really predictable patterns going on with our feelings and they we don't choose them.
It's just what happened creates feelings in us. They're not the truth. They're just symptoms of things they can point us in directions they can cue us to understand what's going on in our lives.
And so again, maybe this is a part of why I'm thinking this is important is it's not necessarily feminine.
These are just things. These are just human thing capacities that we can all work with is we can work with figuring out these patterns in our feelings or in our thoughts or in our behaviors we can start seeing them for what they are and figuring out what's going on in our nervous systems and seeing our body as our best ally.
And so when men come back into sessions with me they'll often be like my body told me a thing and it was right.
And my body responded first my instinct.
Like when you've done this work to get back in your body.
It's amazing what it will tell you.
It's amazing like it's such a powerful tool.
Yes, I think.
I think in terms of everyday life if you hate your job and you're not sure your wife even wants you in the house and your kids don't pay attention anymore.
It's your it's like you've compartmentalized all those feelings you've missed those signals because you've kind of numbed your body.
And I think that's the trap most men fall in.
Yes, absolutely. And I also know on this thread is a lot of men are afraid of those cues.
What do you mean by that? So they're afraid of like so in response to the article we've had a whole variety of responses.
But one guy was like I feel a beast inside me would emerge and just wreak havoc on my life.
And I think that resonates with a lot of men.
A lot of men are like whoa I have been compartmentalizing this for 30 40 years.
If I start feeling again I don't even know what will happen.
Right. Yeah.
And then you go back to the old adages you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
I think you know we can. That's the thing. I'm 57 and I've probably changed half of my life over the last year and a half.
It's possible we just don't believe it's possible.
Neuroplasticity is very real and it's very valuable because that's our makeup.
That's actually our biology.
Yeah. And I love that. And I love I love carving these new brain pathways.
It is so possible to rewire.
And that's even why I love when you were that your matrix podcast because it is kind of like the matrix and how you can recode.
You can replace old codes with new codes.
Yeah. It's that. And so that is when you've asked like how do I work with men.
That is one of the things we're doing. We're taking out old codes that no longer serve.
They probably were put in in you know if they're put in the 90s and it was like completely different technology back then.
And it's like OK this code is actually blocking the heart.
This code is actually just making you self sabotage.
It's unnecessary. And it's how do we update these codes. How do we keep doing program updates.
So you're at the latest technologies of yourself.
And going back you know because I know you're not bashing ice pass.
You're suggesting just don't stop there.
That's the key is but ice bass are sort of a very quick way to realize to challenge yourself to say can I do something hard because I think that's what a lot of men today are really searching for is you know is this it.
Can I do something harder. And I think men are waking up to wanting more of that new life rather than just being sedated by the old.
I want to switch gears for a second because you brought it up from your perspective.
What did you think of the matrix because we started this podcast out of a conversation like that.
What what did what captured you about the matrix.
I very much resonated with the socialization into a world that you can be awakened from.
You can then love it.
Yeah you wake up and you're like what the like I had someone say to me the other day they're like I would have been the guy who would have wanted to stay in the matrix.
It's like that guy you mean the guy who like betrayed his friends and got them killed like what are we talking about.
It's always better to be that person to wake up to see reality.
I'm committed to wanting to know the reality as close as I can possibly get to it to be as strong as possible in it to have my map my cartographer of hell map because I feel so much stronger for it.
And so that's what I love about the matrix is we can have in the Neo does this I think by the I don't remember which one when he finally gets it right.
When he when it finally all clicks for him and he can see the codes in front of him.
I actually cried watching that scene rewatching it from my version of myself at this age.
I'm almost 40. But from this point of view where it's like the codes were just in front of him and he's like I get it.
He was just like calmly like you know and he fights and he's like bored and he's he stops with bullet and he's just like.
That is true power when you see these codes when you see what's going on here and you know what to do.
That's again maybe a visual that scene in the movie of what deep power is.
If you were a character in the movie who are you.
Here's what we asked this of a lot of our guests if you're one of the characters who are you.
And if it doesn't matter to anybody.
I am you. I am you. I would have.
Yeah. Yeah.
Why did Nia stand up stand out to you.
I just I have gone through so many rounds of these initiations.
These rough initiations where half the time you're like what is happening what is this you know you're not sure where it's going and you see the building your capacities as you go.
Because yeah one of the big things is he's like am I like am I here to figure this out like he's questioning often and that is a really common beautiful heroes journey.
To go through these periods of doubt and trying to you know trusting your trust in the past and then you finally get there and you're like oh OK.
Yeah. Yeah. Like I can do it.
And that's where it's if now that I am someone who's gotten I have gone through I can't even tell you the amount of suffering the amount of pain.
I'm a tiny person. If I can do it anyone can.
And so that's where I just feel so passionate about wanting people to have the same kind of freedom that I have now known possible.
That's that is the message there is there are ways to heal.
There is freedom to be had and peace to be had.
And if I can do it anyone can.
You said your journey started around nine. Is that when you said.
Age nine. Yeah when you really started listening to what was happening in your life is that when you started.
Oh no I I mean I was born just one of these sensitive souls.
You were. Yeah.
If you were to look back at yourself in that in those sort of one of the really hard moments where you just could only survive through.
What would you say back to that person. To you yourself back then.
What would you say. I would say.
Well done.
Well done. The it it's and I'm not saying that because I handled it perfectly because I did you know some beautiful job like it was rough and I was surviving.
And well done for getting through. And so that's where I had so much empathy for people who shut down people who go numb.
We have to to get through those phases especially sensitive souls and I think we're I think that's one of the most valuable things that I learned probably last year a mentor helped me see that is.
It's okay to just be completely lost.
The survival act was enough. You got through. That's it. You did your job. But guess what was my job to learn later but you got learning that I could go back to my 12 year old self.
Because I just went to Hawaii with my wife and I didn't realize I went back to the the location I had been there in 28 years where we went as a family through my parents divorce and I was able to sit with myself on the beach strand had as the waves were crashing on me and it was just a very healing moment to realize.
You survived and I cried I cried very significantly because I realized man I had left so much pain on that beach and I could sit with myself and go you did your job and I think most people don't realize they can do that.
They can go back and actually change the story because you can't change the event but you can change your assessment of yourself in the event.
And you can re write the ending you can yes you know it doesn't have to end where you think the memory ends. Yes there can be a new ending a reclaimed ending that is so much better than you can imagine.
Yeah I love that story and I have very similar ideas of how this like I am always being revisited and revisiting whatever arises and this is that whole not being afraid of what's inside of you.
Because your body will tell you when it's ready to let it go it'll tell you and I think if you're but if you're not listening for the signal then it's hard to hear it.
And then it'll kind of bash you upside the head and say hey wait a minute listen because that's my own self sabotage techniques were always me trying to tell myself.
I've I'm not addressing something I'm not listening to something and and kind of waking up to that.
If what did you think because I know you're Neil and that was exactly who I thought you'd pick. What do you think of Trinity as a character because Trinity I think is the biggest badass.
Do you know what do you think. Well she's the first she's the first character introduced. And what we see is she's the she's the she's the antithesis of what we think a traditional female model role model is she's both she's both masculine feminine she's kicking
names and she knows who she is and I think that's she's sort of the hero because she inspires Neil.
Yeah my mind went to she is way more self assured. She's very like there's no question in her mind what's going on. Yeah. Yeah she's she's the version we all aim for.
We all love to be Trinity that way. You know I'm more of a fumbling bumbling my way through suffering versus but then now when you get to that point I mean Neo joins her in that.
That's what I mean. She's the hero. She inspires him to move up to believe in love. Yeah. And I think that's why people when people look at that move we had a gentleman that we interviewed and he picked Trinity and I said that's awesome because she is the hero.
The story she is the one who got it right and she's the inspirer and she's the energy of the movie and I think for women looking at that movie going well I don't know it's no you have the most badass character.
You really do new had to kind of come around to get it. She got it from the very beginning. So
very few of us are born that way. Yes very true very very true. It's something you aspire to.
Prima what are you doing now. In my work. Yes. Are you writing any more articles is this something you because I was I was inspired by the article. Is that something you're doing regularly.
It's something I'm moving into. So I finished in PhD that took me eight years and now I'm coming back in to share my work. And so I I'm writing another remark and I are writing another article right now. So look for it. It's actually about the beast within men.
So really tell me what's the synopsis.
The synopsis is we actually got we do a bit of a deep dive into the story of iron john do you know this. Oh my god that's one of my favorite books my mentor introduced me to that 30 years. Yeah. I totally yeah. Yeah. So we go natural.
The key under the mom's pillow is one of the arcs of human. Yeah. Most males yes. Yes. Most people don't even know that story. So if you're listening to this go find this article because our John is a seminal men's book. Yeah. Exactly.
I don't even know these. I just kept getting handed like James Hollis and different things. So I'm doing more deep dives of like what's going on in the wounding of men. But again my specialty is grief. My specialty is grief. So I'm going to be like I'm publishing in academic journals and I'm speaking at conferences.
But I am also doing like this men's wounding. I love men. I have very passionate about this. It's complicated. It's so complicated. And we I love that you're doing this podcast. I love that you're having these conversations that inspires me to know that like these spaces are being created to have hard conversations and dip in to the ice baths.
Kareem it's been an absolute pleasure having you. I've loved this hour because I think one of the things that we are very passionate about is helping people not just men but people find ways to overcome. And I think everybody can really learn from you today because just the act of listening turning around and finding your curse to look at your compartmentalized stuff is very valuable because as I always say on a lot of my Instagram stuff is when you let it go you have a lot more energy and that's your true power.
And so thank you for clarifying a lot of that for us and really helping us see it's sort of a simple progression. So this has been fantastic. So thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So to everyone who's listening rich will be back next week and please comment and review. We'd love to hear from you. You have a guest you'd like us to interview. Please send them our way. Much love everybody.
Thank you.