Moore Style - Redefining Masculinity and Sacred Sexuality with Traver Boehm

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

When it comes to men’s role in society, things are rapidly changing. Many men feel lost, disconnected, and find themselves falling into patterns of addiction. Traver Boehm, author, TEDx speaker, and founder of Man UNcivilied, was no different. After facing a series of losses, Traver found himself navigating the trenches of life which ultimately led him to pave a new path for himself and other men to follow.  Join us as he shares about the impact of societal messaging for men, why it is important to build a relationship with yourself, and how we can implement sacred sexuality to improve not just our sex lives, but life as a whole! This episode is packed full of wisdom that both men and women can benefit from. Tune in and then let us know what you think over on Instagram @celestemooreimage and @traverboehm. In this week’s episode, we discuss: [01:39] About Traver Boehm [03:03] What sparked the UNcivilized movement? [10:21] Using life’s difficult moments as a catalyst for self-expression [16:15] Where do men fit into society? [17:59] Paving a new path for men [21:02] The transition from a transactional relational paradigm to a co-creative paradigm  [24:46] The importance of raw, real, and relational personal development [29:42] The impact of societal messaging  [32:31] Suppressed needs, trauma, and addiction [37:38] Using loss as a time to open up to life changes [39:36] Implementing sacred sexuality to improve our lives [45:01] Trust, integrity, and communication to get beyond friction in the bedroom [46:57] Traver’s favorite date   Connect with Traver: Website  “Man UNcivilized” Book Instagram The Uncivilized Podcast  

Hi, everyone. I'm your host, Celeste Moore, and you are listening to the Down and Dirty podcast, aka the Double D's of dating. This is a podcast for navigating the ins and outs of modern midlife dating. Here, we will discuss the challenges that men and women face in today's dating world. Like many industries, this one is forever changing, and I believe this platform will help those who need or want it. Today, it is the best time to take control of your desired outcome, whether it is a marriage, significant other, life partner, or just to gain the confidence in dating once again. Every other week, we will dive in and talk about different viewpoints that seem to be challenges in today's dating arena. So let's get into today's episode.

Welcome to another episode of the Down and Dirty podcast. As always, I'm your host Celeste Moore. And I just want to say a big thank you to everybody who continues to tune in and listen to these episodes. I truly hope that you're able to, you know, bring what you've learned back here today into your relationships. And please don't forget to give this a glowing review and five stars because it really truly helps the show get recognized, which helps everybody who's listening. So thank you again. But before I jump into today's episode, I'm so excited and really honored to introduce you to my guest today. His name is Traver Boehm. Traver Boehm is the author of the books Today I Rise and Man Uncivilized. He's a two-time TEDx speaker, men's coach, and the

founder of Uncivilized Men's Movement. He helped men all over the world to become uncivilized as they wake up to the power of their hearts, the brilliance of their bodies, and the wisdom of their souls so they can blaze their own path by uniquely blending both the primal and divine within them. He's dedicated to doing his part to help end the suffering in men and the suffering caused by men by guiding them through their own journey into an actualized version of masculinity. He's also the host of the Uncivilized podcast. Thank you, Trevor, for being on today's show. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much. It really is in the last week and a half, I've really kind of Googled and listened to podcasts and really found out more information about what you do and who you are. And I just the more I learned, the more fascinated I am about what you're doing in this movement. So yeah, thank you.

Could you, I mean, there's such a, like, there's so much information here, but could you tell me, was there something that, was there a catalyst, was there something that set this in motion, this uncivilized movement in motion? Yeah. Celeste, it's almost cliche. And yet I imagine so many of the men who find you or find the work or find their own consciousness, it comes from pain. It comes from a fall, right? I was married to the quote, woman of my dreams. We had our first kid on the way. I had the business that I really wanted. I ran a CrossFit gym. I was an acupuncturist. I felt like I was expressing myself in the ways that I wanted to. And within a year, we lost the pregnancy. She told me it was a catalyst from the universe telling her that we shouldn't be married. And the very next day, my business partner was like, nah, I'm not really sure we should work together either.

So I had the classic fall. Everything that I'd worked for, everything that I thought I wanted, everything up until that point in my life that I had unconsciously called in, disappeared. And I was left in a gaping hole on rock bottom with nothing but questions of who the hell am I? Why did this happen? What role did I play in this happening? And as I was coming out of that, perhaps six months to a year later, who am I as a man? And I was 40 years old and I'd never asked that question. That question was not in my consciousness. It would, you know, it'd be like learning Chinese and then like, oh, how come no one told me about this verb in Chinese? It just wasn't in my sphere. And that question took me

down a rabbit hole. And for whatever reason, my life up till that point had prepared me for that question. Because when I started thinking about it and started feeling into it and started looking at the culture and studying it, the answers landed in me in a way that resonated with other men. And I had no idea what I was talking about. So to give you some context, I get divorced, get through a bunch of stuff, and I write the book Today I Rise. And it's just about my own journey with divorce, how I used it to quit drinking, how I used it to quit smoking pot, how I used it to quit looking at porn, how I used that situation as a up level in my life. So I just write this book, I throw it on Amazon and very little happens with it, right? My dreams

of like waking up the next day and being on Oprah didn't happen. I like check sales and it's like, oh, there was two sales this month. This isn't awesome. But it did start to sell and it did start to get passed around. And here's what was fascinating. Men would reach out to me after reading the book. I did not know this would happen. I did not expect it to happen. Most of my career as a gym owner and an acupuncturist was working with women. So suddenly, Bob's emailing me, Steve's emailing me and saying, hey, this really helped me. Thank you. Or hey, I have a question about this. Like I'm about to get divorced. I'm getting divorced. My buddy's getting divorced. And instead of quitting drinking and all the things you did, he's found Coke and

his 19 year old secretary. What can I do for him? And I was at a very unique point in my life that I had sold my business and suddenly wasn't a husband, wasn't a father and wasn't working, but I had income from the sale. So I would reply to every one of these guys with a simple message of hey would you be willing to get on the phone with me no idea why i was doing that but i would get on the phone with these guys and again for whatever reason my background plus the experiences i'd gone through let me see patterns it's like oh you don't have a drinking problem you you don't know how to express yourself you don't your marriage isn't falling apart because quote she can't feel it's because you're way out of integrity you say one thing but do another all

day long. You're not bringing your own sexual needs forward in this relationship, and she can feel that. Now, I have no training in this. I'm an acupuncturist. I'm an ex-MMA fighter. I'm a gym owner. I can teach you how to swing a kettlebell, and I know points on your body to put needles. But for some reason, it made sense to me. And so this just happened for almost a year. It was like street-level conversations. And at the end of that year, someone said, hey, do you know, you should probably start charging for these calls. Again, I was like, charging for what? I'm just two dudes talking here. But I started noticing, well, I'm having a lot of the same conversations. And so I put that together in an idea of, hey, I think you're missing this primal nature, man.

You got to get out there and fuck some shit up. You're living in a little box. I can feel the tension in you that there's no adventure in your life. There's no awe in your life. You're scared of life or to the other guy you're out there fucking shit up all day but you haven't felt a thing in years have you you're terrified of what's going on in your chest you're terrified of your emotions you're terrified of intimacy so you need to go out you need to stop fucking shit up and start feeling shit and so it's like that separation of the primal and divine five six years ago made a lot of sense to me and so i would say to guys we need to have both when i looked at the male options societally. It felt like I was being pushed one way or the other. You can either be

all primal, 1950s Marlboro Man, you have no feelings, just go do, do, do, conquer, build, slay, or be the opposite. Just feel. Do nothing. Create nothing. Have no power. Apologize for having power. Apologize for being a man. Be as close as you can to being a woman in a man's body. And it was like, wait, I don't want to go left here and I don't want to go right. I want to walk down the middle. I want to fuck some shit up. But I need to also feel my feelings. I want to have a partnership. I want to have a relationship that's built on connection, that's built on something other than, you know, sex and alcohol. And so I presented that to the world. And now my life is radically different. that's so I think for you you know you said the catalyst losing a child losing a wife losing a business was your completely you know rock bottom and instead of you just like losing yourself you looked at well you looked inward but you created something of this that was missing and I love the

research you did I love that you were able to just get on a call just very organic and just talk like you said another brother to another brother man to man like this is what I see this is what's missing this is what what you need it's really so beyond self-aware you were able yeah I felt in hindsight so I remember the day my ex-wife left and I remember sitting on a couch in my house Celeste being like I can't believe this isn't happening this isn't happening this isn't happening like what just happened because it came out of nowhere it was the classic like she decided to leave six months prior and then so we stopped having arguments everything was great we were having sex it was like wow this is amazing we've turned a corner and then poof gone and i remember

hearing a voice in my ear and i'm not a religious person i'm not like and it was jesus i don't know who it was or what it was but essentially it said hang on if you can get through this you will come out on the other side in the ways you've always wanted to be. Now, that is some divine shit for a dude who used to punch people in the face for a living and swing a kettlebell. But I listened to it and I felt it. I was like, you know what? I think this may be true. There are parts of my life I'm not proud of. There are parts of my life that I don't want to continue. There are ways that I want to express myself in the world that I haven't been able to or I have felt stifled. Now, what if I get to use this, this terrible, horrible,

gut-wrenching situation as a catalyst to learn how to do that or to become the man who can do that freely? Now, that is beyond my scope of understanding at the time. I'm punching way out of my weight class, but just went, okay, you know what? What else am I going to do? I don't want to keep drinking. I don't want to keep getting high. I don't think that my sex life should be between me and my laptop. I want to write in ways that I've never written before. Like I wrote a blog for a business. That's how my writing career took off, but it was a gym. You know, there were constraints. There was like, Hey, you can't talk about this. We also need to get members in the door. And so I felt like suddenly I could like rip my shirt off and just have like freedom written

across my chest. And I got to do all the things I really wanted to do. Now there was a price for that, as you said. I went to therapy, a lot of therapy. I went to workshops. I went to men's groups. I sat in a pitch black room for a month. I did ayahuasca. I got on the TED stage. I went through all of these initiations that I now help men work through themselves or say, hey, do you realize? I was just on the phone a second ago with someone saying, this is an initiation. Do you see this. It's so magical how you've burnt your life to the ground that this only can happen for you to rise out of that, the ashes, in a different way. Or guess what? We'll have this conversation three years from now when you've burnt it to the ground again because you didn't come out in the

ways that you wanted to. And I think that's such a missing piece for so many men. They go through divorces. We go through breakups. We go through loss of parents or children or whatnot. And instead of going, holy shit, this is going to suck. What can I do with it? We go, okay, we're not allowed to feel pain. We're not allowed to have emotion. We're not allowed to express this. I'm sure you've heard this before, but the advice I got was during my divorce was like, fuck your way through it. Drink your way through it. Hey, when can we take you out and get you drunk? As opposed to awesome, man, for the next two years, you're going to be in an incubator. It's going to marinate you in a way that you'll come out and possibly change the world. No one

said that it was like bro yeah i can't imagine those words came out of anybody's mouth yeah people told me i was crazy when i quit drinking when my ex left like oh you're just overreacting oh this is just your way to get control of things i was like i did not like sitting in bars paying 15 for a beer talking about football i'm sorry there was a part of my soul that was like please stop doing this. This is not what we're here for. And I think once men taste the alternative, man, I've had lunch conversations, sober as you can be, that I've walked away from either in tears or just so deeply moved by the level of connection, maybe even with another man, that I would trade that a thousand days out of a thousand over sitting around bullshitting about the Giants

and the Cowboys and I'm a Giants fan, right? Yeah. I'll leave it at that. Yeah. No, I think one of the biggest things I'm taking away is like, you know, we're born, I mean, whether or not you're religious or not, but we're, we're born with a soul and so much of our life, so much of the day to day, the rat race, if you will, um, work kids, you know, that kind of thing. We forget about what feeds our soul or we don't even know how to feed our soul and this is i know we're we're we're talking mostly about men here but i've gone through this similar feeling a similar movement in the last couple years of my life where because i've been in survival mode for so long i forgot about that so now that i'm getting out of that what makes my soul just sing just like what's

my church, if you will, to put a, in quotation. And in finding that and doing that, it's just been like, I get chills on my body because there's nothing, you can't really put that into words. So you are doing this. You were putting it into words for somebody. And I hate to say it because it's so stereotypical and cliche, but you know, like you said, our society has made men, they're not able to feel. If you feel, if you cry, if you talk about your emotions, you're a pussy, right? If you don't, you're going to blow up. So it's this dichotomy of like, okay, well, where am I? Where do I fit in? Where does this man fit in in society today? For sure. You know, one of my greatest mentors and teachers is a guy named Dewey Freeman. And I met him a couple of years ago.

he's a freak savant equine therapist in his 70s like he's been a therapist almost as long as i've been alive and the first time i met him he took me up and to introduce me to his horses and said do you know what horses need two things in the world they need to know that they're safe and they need to know where they fit in in the pack and i went holy shit i need that men need that women need that children need that we all need that i just got chills and we're at a time specifically with men that we don't know where we fit in. We're at this cultural kind of intersection of we don't need you anymore. We've heard that for decades, right? We don't need you. We don't need you. We may not even really want you. But then the other side of the swing is,

oh, we need you to step up. We need you to lead. Where are all the powerful men? Where are all the good men? And we have this clash of those two ideas. And so a lot of men then look at the world and go, well, there is no place for me, which then, and a lot of guys don't want to hear this, they then don't feel safe anywhere. We feel safe when we feel needed. And I'm not talking like, oh, I think someone's going to break into my house and beat me up. But emotionally in the world, I talk to a lot of men who go, yeah, I don't feel safe because I don't know what to do. I don't know why I'm here. Suddenly just the 3D requirements of get a paycheck, don't drink too much and don't beat your wife that's not enough anymore as it should be but

it hasn't been replaced with anything substantial so we're saying hey the old path is now gone and irrelevant okay cool what's the new path well there isn't one yet so try not to just hang out in the middle and be lost and so that's where i try to come in with a movement and with with an actual path now i got asked on an interview last week what would your life have been like if if uncivilized existed for you in your twenties, in your thirties, when you were going through your divorce? And I said, I would have felt like I knew what to do. I didn't know what to do with those years. I didn't know what to do with those decades. I just fumbled kind of from job to job to job and relationship to relationship. But there was no clear path. There were no elders. There

were no guides. There were no older men saying, hey, this is what you do in your twenties. This is what you do in your 30s. This is what you do during a divorce. This is what you do if you're drinking too much. This is what you do if you feel lost. And now we get to come in and provide that for men. And I watch them thrive. I feel it. I know guys who I have seen two years ago were a train wreck. And I didn't give them religion. I didn't say like, hey, by the way, if you keep doing this, you're going to burn for eternity in this thing called hell. I said, hey, have you thought about another way of being. Here's some ideas. What are you building? What do you want to do with your life? What would you want to do with your life if women didn't exist? And no, I don't

want that at all. But what would you do? What would you do differently? And it's these questions that make men then come internal and go, actually, you know what? I think I want to sail around the world and write a novel. Like, cool. Can you do that financially? Absolutely, I can. Then why aren't you doing it wow what would people think blah blah blah right or hey i actually do want to be a father i do want to be a husband or i do want to be in a non-traditional relationship scheme and this hasn't been available to me up until five years ago when everybody in san francisco became poly and it became a thing right whatever the changing society is we haven't given men a lot of choice. And there are people who will argue with me about that, but on the undercurrent has

not been a lot of choice. And now suddenly they're presented with all the choices, but no guidance on what choice to take. That was really well said because yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I'm teaching men how to be at a very much different level, right? More of a surface level. I'm going to be a hundred percent honest. It's how to show up in the world, how to treat a lady, all of these things, but there's just huge confusion. It's like, I know, even the women who are doing it all, I said, stop and allow him to have a purpose. Let him open the door for you. Let him do these things because yes, you can do it yourself. And we've voiced that. This whole movement of equal rights doesn't mean that we're pushing the man out. It's just a different sector.

So how do we, it is this very confusing time for not only men, but women, right? For sure. I agree with you completely. I speak mostly about men and to men, but I listened to a lot of women and spent the first three years of my career just getting feedback from women because it hadn't caught on with men yet. They're like, what is this thing? I'm not really, why do I need, it was just women like, Hey, I have a son.

This is super important. Hey, my husband would definitely need this work. I wish my ex-boyfriend had found your book and I would talk to equal numbers of women. It's so confusing right now. And I think a lot of the reason it's confusing is because we're transitioning out of a transactional relational paradigm and we haven't fully transitioned into a co-creative paradigm yet. So we still see a lot of men who we're like, well, I'm not going to share my emotions until we have this much sex. And we have women saying, look, I don't need a man because now I have my own paycheck. Like, okay, cool. Well, I see a lot of people who are angry and a lot of people who are lonely and a lot of

people pointing fingers at it's us versus them, them versus us. And in the middle of all that is loneliness. In the middle of that is desire for an actual relationship, for actual connection, for actual intimacy. That's there by choice. That's the key word. I get it. My partner doesn't need my paycheck. And I don't need to be in a relationship to have access to sex or intimacy. So I'm here because I want to be here. She's here because she wants to be here. And we haven't quite gotten the masses there yet. And there's a lot of letting go of the anger and the blame and the uh resentment and the entitlement right there's that stuff's just like swimming around out there pretty hearty but we've dropped into something a little bit deeper too of what

does your soul want right your soul doesn't care if he's six foot six and has a six pack and six inches and his soul doesn't really care what her body count is or what her social media thing is or how much money she makes and it's we don't give a shit about that but that's the places that that societally we're arguing and attacking each other, as opposed to sitting down and going, hey man, what do you want for your life? And I would say this to women too. I've said it to them. What do you want for your life? Away from all of this patterning, away from all this conditioning. You know, I started the movement in the middle of Me Too, Celeste. Oh, wow.

Right? And I would get women over and over and over who would comment on my work, and especially in the DMs of like, I don't need a man. I don't need a man. I don't need a man. I'm like, okay, cool. And I would ask, but do you want one? And there'd usually be like a day delay in the response. And he would say, yeah, I do. I do. But I want one who's conscious. I want one who's intentional. I want one who's kind. I want one who's not going to be abusive. I want one who's not going to punch holes in the wall when he doesn't get his way or act like a 14-year-old in a 190-pound body. And I go, that's completely legit.

He wants the same thing on a different level, right? A conscious woman, an awake woman, an emotionally intelligent woman, a responsible woman. And so I feel like we're getting on track, but we just haven't gotten there yet. And that's where I think there's so much angst in the culture. Right. I think there's, how do we get to that cohesiveness, right?

How do we get those two healthy individuals? I know that you're doing your part with the men. And I really, really love that. And I, I did some personal work years ago, you know, they've got these personal development and leadership training and stuff like that. But I think there's such a big component missing to that. there is okay let's get ugly let's get real let's show up for who we are and let's let people let us know how we're showing up and yeah fucking hurts and it sucks and right but how do you grow if you're not getting raw and real right and i think that's something that you are doing with this movement and i think it's probably more important i'm not saying more important, but it's so needed for men because it's just never been acceptable. It's never been okay to have these conversations when please God, yes, please have these, please work through your

shit so that we can have real connections. You know, that's just, yeah. I love that you use, so you've used the two words out of the three that we kind of have as a tagline and it's raw, real and relational and that's a big missing component i think of the self-development world it is very narcissistic it's very self-focused as it needs to be at a certain point or for a certain point but the relational piece that's also especially on the men's side has not existed right most guys come to me or come to my work because of some relational breakdown and what we find is like, hey man, it's not that you don't know how to relate to your wife. You don't know how to relate to you. You don't have a relationship with the guy in the mirror. You don't have a

relationship with your heart. You don't have a relationship with your soul. You have an unconscious, let's just call it that, an unconscious relationship with your cock, but you don't know who you are, right? So then how do we ask you to be in relationship with a woman or with a man? It doesn't matter. If you're not in relationship with yourself, if you're not in relationship with other men, you know, non-sexually. How do you jump all of that and go right into, yeah, I'm great in my marriage. I don't think you do. There's like a through line that's getting missed. Like we got to crawl, then we learn to walk, then we learn to run. Most of us one day wake up and we're sprinting in a marriage and going like, well, I don't even know how to crawl.

I don't know how to walk. And she just wants me to run faster, but I don't know what to do. No has taught me. So yeah, I'm with you. Raw, real, and relational. We just took that and plugged it into society because I've seen it. I see it at workshops. I see it at events. I see it with guys all the time. They're willing, but we have to be taught. It has to be modeled. And what we have to do is come out the other side of a raw, real experience and have it stay relational. Where so many men have been raw, have been real, and then have been shamed, have been left, have been put down. I talk to guys all the time. We're like, hey, I did get vulnerable. And it wasn't the other dudes who called me a pussy. It was my woman. She begged me and begged

me and begged me to be vulnerable, to be real. And I did. And now she's gone. And I can't argue with that. I can't be like, well, next time it'll be different. Hopefully next time it is different because you found a different quality of woman but it's either that or what they normally do is go okay cool i learned the lesson i will not share i will not be open i will not be vulnerable and then boom get in a relationship with a woman who's like hey i need this this is the nourishment this is the nutrition that i need relationally and the guy's like not a fucking chance i learned my lesson last time and i really like you so i'm not gonna do it and and i can't argue with those experiences Celeste I can't yeah right who am I to come in and be like no no no no no no try it

again right I can't yeah so hopefully there's a new woman that's not with those qualities because yeah I don't understand that I don't understand how women we've become so all we long for is someone to open up and all we long for is them to be vulnerable and tell us how they're really feeling and then shut it down with calling names or you're not a man or whatever these crazy things that we women say. And that's got to, you know, all that hard work and then just to shut it down again. I mean, I know we have our own issues and our own things that we've got to work through because you're right. We're changing and it's it's we don't know where we're at, even for women. Right. We want this high value man and, you know, we want this and we want that. And but we're still independent. And, you know, you can't have I mean, you can have everything, but you can't have these two sides that are polar opposite.

Right. It's a very confusing time, I think, just to speak openly. I talk to a lot of people who don't know where they land in the middle of a lot of societal messaging. And I understand why feminism came around. I have two older sisters. I'm so grateful for it. My sister's boss can't spank her butt in a meeting and have it be okay. That shit was not okay. I'm so glad Me Too happened. It really did shed light on every woman having some level of issue with a man at some point in her life. And there is an after effect. And there could have been a different outcome for both sides, but there wasn't. And so we have to land where we are and say, okay, what do we do now? Men, how do we claim our sovereignty, tap into something deeper than surface level and not get blinded by the attraction of a woman and actually drop into like, who is she really? And has she done her work? It's a real question. And I'm sorry that going to a yoga retreat for the weekend and reading Eat, Pray, Love is not doing your work. Has she

gone through her own shit? Does she know who she is? Does she know what she wants? Is she working on her own reactivity. These are things that we also haven't given men as a standard to say, I want you to be asking these questions of the woman in front of you instead of just staring at her tits and hoping you get access to them. We as men have to hold a higher standard of our own partners, but that hasn't been in the culture either. As you know, male preference is often demonized. It's like, how dare you have that? You're a misogynist if you want these qualities in a woman and so we were in this rather like mix and soup and kind of jumbledness relationally but if we come back to men i'll just ask them the question over and over and over what do you want

what do you really want and most less i've worked a number of guys through this exercise that i think is really helpful i'm like what does your ego want list it you know i have a fucking g wagon in the driveway. That is not my soul's car. That is my ego's car. Period. Now, what does your heart want? Oh, I want to have a relationship that's connected and intimate and loving. I want a house. I want a dog. God willing, someday I want kids. Okay, what does my soul want? My soul wants to affect the consciousness of the planet. My soul will give up the wagon and my relationship to do that. So I have to have access to all three and be willing to listen to all three because each one will reorganize my external life if I let it. But cutting one off and pretending that it doesn't

exist, that's a great recipe for addiction. It's a great recipe for misery. It's a great recipe for anger and resentment and all the things that a lot of men experience. So in your experiences with men, do you feel like addiction is one missing component or do you feel like they're all different? It's a beautiful question. I find that it's used for a couple of reasons. One, it's just a numbing agent that if you, whatever you, who I say, whatever you push down will come out sideways, whatever you suppress will come out sideways. So I was not fully expressed sexually in my past relationships, let's say, especially my marriage. So I looked at a lot of porn. That's how I got that suppressed need met. Now, I didn't have the skill, training,

permission, or wherewithal to sit my ex-wife down and say, hey, I really want to play in these areas. I think this is something really fun and exciting. And I don't know why, but a part of me feels like it wants to express itself that way sexually. I didn't do that. Instead, I drank, I got high, and I looked at porn. So I think that's a lot for men is a lack of self-expression that they haven't given themselves permission for. Two, and this is a big one. So if you guys listening to this, I can't tell you the depth of pain that I can tell you, like how much pain so many men are in. Until you have held a man in your arms and listened to him wail about the shit that he's lived through. We will not as a culture accept that men have trauma. I mean, the unbelievable

shit that I've heard after years of men's workshops where I'm like, I'm shocked you're not a serial killer or a heroin addict. Because if that had happened to me, I don't think I'd be standing upright. So I think it's also a management tool for a lot of guys who don't trust therapists, who are deeply ashamed because it may be sexual abuse that's happened in their past or physical abuse that's happened in their past or stuff that they witnessed when they were too young to do anything about and now still carry shame around that, right? That is a big reason why a lot of guys drink, smoke, do what they do, exercise, overwork, etc. It's because there has not been an opening for that pain to come out. It hasn't. There just hasn't. Societally, there hasn't

or even structurally, right? One of my teaching partners, Michael Gay, says before we do really deep work as a group will say there are some things that are too big to put down alone. So you're fucking carrying it all by yourself. I get you. You're doing it. You've managed to create a system that works for you. It's got a little bit of addiction. It's got a little bit of avoidance. It's got some anger. It's got some outbursts. That's how you manage this pain. Because you know that if you try to put it down yourself, it'll fucking crush you. And so yeah, we're going to get you in a room with 20 dudes, a couple therapists, some guys that have been through the work, some guys that have been through some shit and put it

down themselves. And we're going to say, let us carry it with you. Actually, let us help you put this down, even if it's for an hour. Those are the guys that then go home and go, actually, I don't need to drink five nights a week. I don't need to get high four times a day. I don't need to work 20 hours a day, seven days a week, because they're finally unburdened of this extraordinary pain that they've carried. Sometimes since they're two or three or four years old, again, the shit they've lived through is astronomical. And society will look at them and be like, you drink because you're weak. You jerk off to porn because you're fucked up sexually. You overwork because you're aggressive and it's your ego. That we don't look back and go, what happened to you during that

divorce? What happened when your mom brought five different boyfriends in in a month and two of them raped you? That's not where our natural proclivity of questioning goes. It's like, that guy needs to man up. You need to do better. Right. So to answer your question, that's a lot of it in my experience. Yeah. And then I think if we drop down, even if it's not trauma-based, which is so big, I don't want to skip that. It's so big. A lot of guys aren't doing what they want to do, Celeste. Like they haven't tapped into that soul purpose. They haven't tapped into that heart purpose. It's like you said, you're in survival mode, right? When I was 22, I needed a job. I wasn't like, what does my soul want to do right now? It was like, I have rent to pay now.

Exactly. Okay, cool. I'll do this thing I don't like doing, but they pay me. And then I get bumped into a higher level of the thing I don't like doing, but they pay me more. Then guys get married. Like, cool. Now I have a wife and a house and kids.

And now I'm locked into this thing that I don't really want to do. But like, what am I going to do? Like pull the kids out of school and sell the house and, you know, become a painter because I really love it. No, they get trapped. So many men feel trapped. And I think a way to deal with feeling trapped is addiction. Yeah, I hope that wasn't rude. I was giggling because there's such truth to what you're saying. And I don't think it's funny. I just think that, you know, yeah, what am I going to do? Take the kids out of school and, you know, become a painter and just like, this is life because now my soul is half of you kids.

Right. It's a vicious cycle. And when do you when do you start teaching these men? I mean, that's right. That's I think at any age. But I mean, the younger, the better. yeah the younger the but think of what we're competing with we're competing with the civilized world we're competing with a society that says if you're fat sick addicted hooked on meds and working for someone you don't like as long as you have a nice house and a couple cars and a 65 inch tv you're doing great so i actually get most people like the cloud you know young said there's no coming to consciousness without pain there are openings when we have big loss for all of us i remember even before this work thinking like oh like my grandparents died i'm gonna read i'm gonna rethink my life a little bit oh i went through a major breakup that wasn't my divorce like is this

what oh i think i want to go to grad school you know we have natural openings when our little system wheel gets interrupted or gets shattered that's when a lot of guys come to us or come to me and go hey i think i have an opportunity here i don't want to keep doing what i'm doing gotcha that makes sense he's like they yeah it has to almost come from a loss so things are going great or like kind of great but you want more that's a really tough place to be like it's like the relationship that's 95 perfect but the five percent like oh but man like i really want someone who x that's a way harder position to be in than like this relationship sucks you know i found for cheating for the fourth time i think i may want to to shift yeah yeah no

that makes sense because i think like for me just my biggest growths in life have been at a point of loss or point of change where I'm lost and not sure where to navigate from. So that makes a lot of sense. Well, I wanted to talk about sacred sexuality. Yeah. Because I think I love my audience. Yes, you, everybody listening loves the topic of sex. And what you talk about is so different than you know typical how to spice up your you know sex life and so on and so forth and you know what's kinky what's not but when you talk about sacred sexuality what are you teaching men in these workshops or coaching about this I use this phrase and this is sort of the entry point in the starter point is that I want you to get beyond friction that friction is easy that's like

I'm rubbing up against something. Something's warm and wet and I'm sliding around in it. Great. That's amazing. That's awesome. That's why the species continues. If it wasn't cool, we wouldn't do it, but there's more to it, right? So I ask every man and I ask every man to ask their partner, what would be most expansive for you outs that we're doing in the bedroom? What would be most expansive outside of the bedroom that we can play with in the bedroom. So let's take this for example. I have a partner who is struggling with her voice in the world. She wants to say things, she wants to put content out, but she can't. There's some block there. She's been shamed, she's been guilted, she's been told, etc. So for example, I may say, cool, here's what we're going

to do, and I'm taking a leadership role in this position. You're going to be super vocal during our sexual play. I'm going to ask you questions. I'm going to have you tell me things. You're going to be speaking the entire time. I get it. It's going to be really uncomfortable and awkward for you in the beginning, and we're just going to fuck our way through it and celebrate you as you do it. Now, I just made that example up right now, but I've been in so many situations with partners where then what happens? They get this micro experience of, wow, my voice matters. What I say is celebrated. And that scenario is then infused with the greatest energy that we have, the creative energy of sexuality, of sexual energy. So the imprint left on that person,

even if it's only 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour of play, is I had an opportunity to speak. I had an opportunity to share my voice. I had an opportunity to put my voice out in the world. And not only was I celebrated, but I was celebrated with orgasms, which are one of the best celebration tools, let's call it, to be obtuse on the planet. That's what would be most expansive. Right. Your classic DS situation is on the woman's end. Cool. Tell me about you. How many submissives have said this? I'm a mom of three. I run my own company. I make decisions all day long. I'm so decision fatigued. I want to be in a situation where I surrender control, release, get out of my head, and I don't have to make a single decision. Now, obviously, there's safety and consent and all the things that we're mixing in without saying, but that person, that woman, then gets to experience an hour of not making decisions, of not being in charge, of not being in her head and being in her body. that will have a carryover after the scene, after the sex, after the play. She will have a highly infused pattern in her body, not just in her head, but in her body that she can release, she can let go, she can surrender, and she can trust. Now, I've done this a number of times. I've done this a lot. And know what happens with that woman for the next three, four days next

week is that, wow, works a lot easier to deal with. I'm much more patient with my kids. I actually feel wonderful in my body as opposed to feeling anxious and tense and all the things. So the play, what we did in the bedroom, which by the way, was fun as fuck and high and juicy and sexy and amazing for both people, didn't end when the sex ended, which also we can say, unfortunately, is when the guy came. It actually ended a week later or a month later because that person got to experience something that they didn't get to experience out in the real world. And we can take that idea and make it as kinky as we want, but just to keep it relatively clean for this conversation, that's a big deal to me. And so when I get guys who are like, hey, I want to experience

more than just, you know, I don't know. They've gotten past, like, I want to last longer. I want to keep my dick hard. I want to make her calm. Like, cool. You've gotten the friction is basics down. Now what else is there is a really interesting question. It was my good friend, Jamie Thompson, uh, who's a sex coach used to say that the bedroom is the most unexplored realm of self-development. Right. And now I don't use it as like a Tony Robbins seminar. It's a lock on fire now. Right, exactly. Like we're not setting goals in there.

So good. But imagine how different the world would be if men actually said, oh, there's so much more than me getting off or her getting off or me keeping my dick hard or me pleasing her and, you know, making the nine minute mark. Instead of saying, whoa, there's a whole language after this. There's a whole set of possibilities. Because what I just described, what it requires is an immense amount of trust. Now that requires an immense amount of integrity. That requires an immense amount of communication. So you don't get to play in the beyond friction realm if you're lying to your partner. if she doesn't trust you if you don't trust her so it necessitates a much deeper sense of intimacy period does that make sense oh yeah that's why i view it you know i've studied tantra i've hung out in the sacred sexuality circles and what i found was it i still found it lacking i found it

wasn't grounded i found there were a lot of people who were just trying to bypass their pain or whatever or predators that were like cool now i'm a sacred sexuality instructor dude but people weren't getting to why are you doing this can it lead to a higher connection to god absolutely if that's what's most expansive like hey i want i want to feel god cool then it's going to take a little while right but we have to first get beyond friction yeah i like that makes sense yeah no it made a lot of sense and i think the trust the communication what you said but that all makes Consent, right, safety, right, you've got to have those, right, right, to further that, that makes so much sense, well, thank you for kind of talking about how you view and how you talk about and teach to these men about sacred sexuality, one last question, and this is on the personal note, what was one of your favorite dates, and what was it? I have to think about this, can be in any relationship, that's a stumper Celeste,

I seem to stump a lot of people. I don't mean to. Here's what I'll tell you because it was an integral date in my coming out of nice guy-ness and it was a definite paradigm shift. So it's probably not the answer that you would expect. I took a woman, I'd met her very quickly at a dinner and she lived like two hours away from me and reached out to her and said, hey, I want to take you on a date. Will you come down and like let's meet in the middle and she's like i don't really know you but whatever like i'm willing to sure we had mutual friends so there was some connection there now here's my here was my thought i was like i found an escape room you know those of course right but this one was based

around darkness like it was going to be dark and i was like oh i just i did this month-long dark thing this will i'm into the darkness it will require like us working together as a team they'll be touching we'll be forced closeness etc i was like this will be super fun so we meet we go right to the escape room what i don't know from this experience is that they're going to put like jihadist black hoods on over our heads at the start like we'll be completely blindfold like with hoods on our heads and we'll start at different ends of the room and slowly have to work our way together so we'll be alone for the first half hour of this experience so about 90 seconds into her hood being put on i hear screaming like get this fucking thing off of me

get me out of here get me give me the fuck out of here and i'm like okay this is not going well so i pull my hood off find her she's in the hallway like on the verge of tears and i'm like okay, didn't know that was going to happen. Are you willing to come back in? I'll tell them no hoods and that we're going to start together and we're going to go through this thing. And she's like hyperventilating and calms down. And we end up doing that. And we have one more incident of like, we go to the restaurant that I'd chosen. It's closed. We have like, oh shit, what happened? We go next door. Long story short, at the end of the date where I'm like, hey, thanks for coming. Get home safe. And she goes, she says to me, you literally took everything

that I hate in the world and you put it into a first date. And I leaned in and kissed her and said, you're welcome. You'll never forget me. Now we ended up dating again, but the relationship didn't work out. Now I say, why was that one of my favorites or why was that one of the most impactful? Because three years prior, I would have been like, I'm so sorry. I can't believe that happen. Please let me make it up to you. And I would have been a wreck and worried that I didn't know what this woman wanted. And so I chose him poorly and I should have all the nice guy like, oh, it's all me instead was like, I know it wasn't the best, but look, we had a good time and now you won't forget me. And I walked away from that experience going, I'm not supposed to

be a mind reader as a dater. I'm allowed to make mistakes. And again, we went out again. So there was an impact there but I always share that story with nice guys like I work with a lot of quote nice guys to say like you're allowed to have things go wrong and it doesn't mean that you're wrong or that you're a bad person or all the things that we kind of self-deprecate and put ourselves through so that's my answer yeah the way that you dealt with it was like yeah shit that sucks okay but you won't forget me yeah that was classic I mean that was just such a great way to Yeah. I don't recommend like it's not a good thing when your date is screaming and saying, get the fuck out of here. I don't want that to be the bar. Like, please don't let that be the takeaway. It's his reaction. Hello. Oh, my gosh, that's amazing. I love your laugh, by the way. It's like joyful.

well you know what there's so much more that you have to offer and i know that everybody can find you it'll be on the show notes yeah man uncivilized a man the book is called man uncivilized i'm on instagram i'm easy to find uncivilized podcast yeah guys if you heard something here or women if you heard something here that resonated hit me up on instagram let me know i love to talk to an audience i'd love to talk to people and love to know what works and and where are people at i still celeste i still go back to that year on the phone i still am on every thursday i just take random calls from from guys like hey what are you going through what are you dealing with what do you want where are you at and i i love it my like business consultants are like don't do that anymore

like charge a thousand dollars for that like no i really love to talk to people so yeah i'd love to hear from anybody who listened to this and was impacted. That's so great. Well, thank you again for being on today's show. And I look forward to hopefully having another one of these conversations since you have so much beautiful knowledge to share. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Traver. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode. Come and hang out with me on Instagram at Celeste Moore image. Let me know your thoughts on today's episode, because I always love hearing from you all. You can find all the links and resources in the show notes of the episode on my website, Celeste Moore.com. Okay. That's all for now. I'll see you in the next episode.

See you next time, friends.