The Rich Roll Podcast - Psychotherapist John W. Price Unpacks Ancient Wisdom For Modern Healing

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

Dr. John Price is a depth psychotherapist and co-founder of The Center for Healing Arts & Sciences. This conversation explores why men have 50% fewer friends than twenty years ago, the crisis of modern masculinity, shadow work, and John's concept of "sacred refusal" —honoring the adaptations that once saved us but now destroy us. We discuss why suffering is initiation not pathology, the absence of rites of passage, and how the things we find most uncomfortable often reveal our deepest truths. John turns the therapeutic lens on me throughout—a benign adversary calling out my own resistance to vulnerability. This is medicine for anyone feeling trapped by their current circumstances. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style👉https://www.on.com/richroll Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉https://www.gobrewing.com AG1: Get a FREE bottle of D3K2, Welcome Kit, and 5 travel packs with your first order👉https://www.drinkAG1.com/richroll BetterHelp: Get 10% OFF the first month👉https://www.betterhelp.com/richroll WHOOP: The all-new WHOOP 5.0 is here! Get your first month FREE👉https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll Bon Charge Get 15% OFF all my favorite wellness products w/ code RICHROLL👉https://www.boncharge.com Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us ⁠@voicingchange

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need and knee and learning the ways they suffer. Our environment is asking oftentimes us to join it rather than it to join us. We suffer the burden of reality not looking as if we imagined it to look. and then we are at a distance from the truest expression, I think, of who we are and who we can be. There is a suffering, the carrying that you must do, and you have to get in line with that, because if you don't, your pain will have other plans for you. Hey, everybody, welcome to the show, to the podcast. I am feeling a bit.

nostalgic today because I'm out of town. I'm on the road and I am without my fancy studio equipment. I don't have a big sure microphone at my disposal today to record this week's introduction. So you know what? I'm just talking into my iPhone like I used to from time to time back in those early traveling salesman pre-video days of the podcast where look things were a little bit more lo-fi a bit more simple and uh you know what i kind of like it but you tell me i don't know if it makes all that much difference so yeah that's where i'm at i'm hot from 12 days in tokyo uh where i was working with on supporting the brand doing some storytelling with some of their athletes competing at the world championships.

I've never been to Tokyo before, so that kind of blew my mind. Even though I was there for 12 days, I feel like I barely scratched the surface of what this extraordinary city has to offer. I'm definitely going to go back. But, yeah, had a blast, a 10 to two nights of finals at the stadium. I saw George Beamish when On's first gold medal in the 3,000-meter steeple chase, which was just electric. I saw firsthand Mondo break the world record again in the pole vault, which was, you know, really

super fun. Julie and I did catch up with Craig Maud, friend of the pod, who took us on a walking tour through a neighborhood I would have never otherwise visited. That was amazing. Anyway, I went from Tokyo straight to where I'm at right now, which is New York City. It's climate week here. There's a lot going on. I've been catching up with some friends, getting some writing in. I saw Alex Honnold the other night, which was cool, had dinner with William Gouge, also friend of the pod, the guy who broke the record running across Australia this past year. But now I got to head down to D.C. And I'm doing that deal with a little bit of chaos, some not-so-fund difficulties around my aging parents, my mom,

who was suffering from dementia, my dad, who was suffering from trying to take care of her and kind of the, you know, suffering at large that's being caused by their resistance to get help. It's sort of a form of denial. And look, all of this is sensitive. This is sort of private family stuff. I love my parents. I'm very sympathetic to how difficult this situation is, how difficult it must be for them to face the reality that they're in in this late stage of life so everything is very emotionally heightened and my job is to show up and be of service and what i'm really trying to connect with is that it's also this scenario that's just layered with all kinds of amazing life lessons opportunities to grow all of which i'm bringing up right now

in part because in this kind of shockingly synchronistic way what i happen to be mired in in the moment kind of exactly mirrors the themes of the conversation you're about to hear and those themes are how to confront the questions modern life has taught us to avoid which basically gets at the heart of things like addiction fear and denial how to refuse the identities that we've inherited and outgrown and this is a big one how to see suffering as a gateway to transformation i want you to think about that how to see suffering as a gateway to transformation another theme that gets brought up today which is particular to men is how to challenge and overcome these culturally conditioned nests of masculinity that end up interfering with things like true intimacy and that's something that's

really up for me right now especially in the ways it's being like mirrored back to me and how I see my dad behaving, who's this guy that I have just so much emotionally challenging history with, but also a guy who in recent years I've grown extremely close with, and I'm about to go see, obviously. Anyway, these are just a few of the things that I get into today, mainly through a Jungian lens, which means we talk a lot about mythologies and archetypes and psychological alchemy. which is all very fascinating. And when I say we, what I mean is me and John Price, who is a depth psychologist.

Don't worry, he will define that term for us. And basically this mystic, this modern myth maker. John is the co-founder of the Center for Healing Arts and Sciences. He is the president of the board at the Young Center of Houston. He's on the faculty at Esselan. He hosts the Sacred Speaks podcast. And his upcoming book is entitled The Ten Gates. I have to tell you that I was really moved by him, by this conversation, by what he shared about spirituality, storytelling,

writing of passage, grief, death, vulnerability, healing, transformation, and this hunger, This hunger that I think we all have to pursue, to find, and to live a life of meaning amidst the modern world that we're in that seems to antagonize this deep human drive. So yeah, we're going deep today. So put your oxygen mask on, lock in, and let's do it. We're doing it. You're here. And thank you. Thanks for making the long journey. I'm here to do this. Sacred pilgrimage. I'm touched and honored that you're here today. We're going to do our best to try to make sense of the messiness of being human. And you're somebody who seems to have a pretty good bead on decoding all of this messiness. And you've got lots of very compelling ideas.

and methods for how to approach our common difficulties. But I think it probably would be best to start with some kind of basic operating thesis that you have, you know, on the human condition, like what ails us and how we can think about a dress and heal that ailment. Thank you. I think first and foremost, the disclaimer is that those who work

with messiness do so from within, with their own messes and I think I immediately need to kind of tip the hat to my own suffering as we begin because it's funny with my wife I run this integrative wellness practice and we have a lot of people we hire and when you ask therapists why they became therapists usually they start with their own story and so I think I have um my own narrative of suffering that I have endured, and then, of course, have been gifted sitting like this. I did the math recently with over 28,000 hours of therapy in my life, sitting with people knee-to-knee and learning the ways they suffer. And I think most importantly, getting a peek behind the curtain of the ways that we hide that suffering.

So, to answer directly, I think that from a tradition, a perspective of tradition, I am a Jungian. I think one of the reasons I claim that, even though Young said, I'm glad I'm young and not a Jungian, is because the signifier of Youngian theory really bridges together a lot of different orientations. So it gives me an excuse to play in a lot of different sandboxes. I can draw from religion and spirituality and psychology and anthropology and sociology. And I thought this is really cool. Everyone comes to play here. For those that aren't familiar with Carl Young, you know, maybe kind of lay out like his general outlook. Well, yeah, I think something that comes to mind is that, and please, I'm going to speak.

As we said, we're just going to scratch the surface. So I'll just, I'll stay a bit on the surface and we'll dive a little bit deeper. But I think without, to talk about Jung, you also have to talk a little bit about Freud. And granted, this is all going to be a reduction. But a lot of Freudian theory was really interested in the determinism of early life and how we have this collision of our environment and our own unique qualities that come together. And inevitably, that leaves a mark because our environment is asking oftentimes us to join. it rather than it to join us and with that we carry various wounds and given the nature of the human

being and how just biologically when we're born our cranium size has to be smaller to fit through the pelvis of the female you know when a horse is born it just horses pretty quickly and same for many animals but a human is dependent upon its environment in ways that a lot of animals aren't and so with that kind of interdependent nature we adapt very quickly to the world of our environment and therefore pick up kind of the nature of that environment and it becomes fixed there are these agreements that we unconsciously make about who we are and what the world is early on and part of this Freudian theory is that trend continues throughout all of life and we therefore are going to suffer those burdens and are beholden to those burdens and what I loved about

as he said that's not quite the full story and there's also something mysterious working on all of us and seemingly is working for our initiation expansion and growth and this is where we get into the world of weird wild events that happen to most of us that can't be explained by the events that happened early on in our lives and so young became a sleuth an investigator of these phenomena that oftentimes don't fit in our categorical models. And this is where we get into some kind of ancient, I would say religious practices like practicing unknowing or not knowing, being with and merging with the inevitability that our consciousness

really attempts to codify and colonize our lived experience. But when we really look at it, that's quite an impossibility. So Young left room for the gaps and the unknowns and the not-earned. yets and the maybes. And so it I think is a study that allows for us to be enriched by the fact that we're not beholden to our limitations, but we certainly start there. So whereas Freud was looking at this

through the lens of inherited dispositions like our genetic blueprint and the confounding factor of our environments, Young is introducing this new vector, which is the ineffable, the thing that like science can't get its head around, this more mystical, makes room for the mystery and the mystical that comes into play in shaping who we become and the trajectory of our lives.

And this is something that fundamentally, I think we all are in some general, state of awareness of and there seems to be evidence and Easter eggs all around us all the time. You know, modernity isn't exactly, you know, structured such that we're kind of taught to pay attention in this way. And perhaps that's part of some of the,

the crisis of meaning that we're suffering from. But by bringing that in, it kind of opens, it opens this space, you know, for a completely different kind of conversation. Yeah, and one that is challenging to that part of our kind of individual psyches, but also our collective psyches, that is hell-bent on knowing. and in the idea i mean science does that i mean and and i'm a i'm a lover of science and i'm also a both andist and so i think my friend jeff cripple says this very well he says look there's not there's not an issue with science it's it's not that it's wrong it's that it's incomplete and where the road

stops the humanities picks up and so there's this dance between a kind of poetry things that point to the nature of reality that's beyond our comprehension and therefore can't be codified by the ways that we can imagine or the ways that we can reduce or measure. There are just elements of nature that we will always be in relationship with that are inherently mysterious. And I think any study that makes room for that,

I feel can be trusted. And I feel it's a little like, I mean that old axiom of knowing you know nothing, you know whether that is inherently true or not that's not the point it's do you have an active practice that recognizes that you have a you have a capacity to be full of hubris and that can create a lot of suffering in your life and those around you and if you don't have a practice of humility or not knowing on the individual level or the collective level then then problems can emerge with the ways in which you've come to know what you know so how then do you think about suffering in general? Well, I think of suffering as inevitable. I think Brené Brown comes to mind there about how she directed us to the etymology

of to carry from beneath the things that we carry. And so I think inevitably our suffering is when we have expectations or desires or ideas about what reality or I am or you are and they're disrupted. And we suffer the burden of reality not looking as if we imagined it to look or life not behaving in the way that we'd rather it behave.

For example, that we will be healthy all the time or that we won't die or that those that we love and that love us won't feel pain. And I think inherently with this capacity for us to be alive and to live and to grow, there's also that corresponding capacity for us to decay. and to die. And so these polarities are put into relationship, the life and the death. And I think

inevitably suffering involves more of this side than this side. And so I think it's very Western, rather than acting as if we will not have to carry burdens that we'd rather not carry. I think we need to act as if we will and prepare ourselves for that. And so I think when I think of suffering, I think of my individual pains that I experience. I think carrying the pains of people that I care for. I think carrying the collective burdens of our culture, seeing people that are hurting other people that are acting unconsciously. I think it's an inherently a disruptive force. I'm like, you know, what you and I were talking about earlier with your back, that there is a suffering, the carrying that you must do.

And you have to get in line with that because if you don't, your pain will have other plans for you. Sure. And I suppose it's very young Ian to say that the obstacles that we face or that are visited upon us are nothing but opportunities for growth

and evolution and a deepening of surrender and a deepening of self-reflection, right? On some level, that's a choice that we make, that we can attach meaning to these events of our lives over which we don't have any control. But there's solace in that choice or in that belief. And I happen to believe that this is the case. Like, I think we're here to have experiences

and learn from them and grow and evolve and pass on what we discover along the way in service to other people. But this is very different from the kind of Western cultural perspective on suffering that is sort of baked into modernity that you talk about, which is that suffering is a pathology. But what it really is, to use your words, is the things that we suffer from are companions for our initiation into transformation. Yeah, and I think you kind of nailed it. it rather than talk rather than than say this is what it is um i i think things are profoundly more expansive when we do have that attitude the worldview of yeah this is this on one level

the things that happened to me that i'd rather not happen on some level um they are painful and also if we really look at our lives and i know that you and i could treat it this way if we looked at our lives and paid attention to the transformations that happen after the greatest, most painful events that we've had to endure, if we observe it closely, we do see that something changes

and transforms within us. And so the thing that comes to mind is that on to one level, we could say that psyche is a self-healing organism, you know, that there is something self-healing about the measurable and the immeasurable. growth, transformation seem to be truths that just exist. And we are to participate in that.

And a lot of times what we do is we push against it. And we try to hold on to our idea. And I think the thing that comes to mind the most is in anybody's journey through addiction or in AA, when you hear these phrases like let go and let God, it's it's the idea that there are forces and currents at work that are beyond my comprehension and when I try to assert my own agenda upon the nature of reality it might just push back and and so to get into a practice that is resonant with the inevitability of this flow and these currents of change I think that's kind of why we suffer a great deal more today is that

we are consistently trying to get out of those cycles. And with our technologies, which I love, whether they be windows or air conditionings or cars that got me here, there are ways that we get out of the currents of a process. The psyche is very good at self-healing, but its primary function is to make sure that we survive, right? And in order to do that,

It has all kinds of crafty ways of interpreting the events of our lives such that they become convenient devices to kind of hide from the truth of what's actually happening. And this is kind of the fabric of your work, right? Like, for example, something happens and we make a decision that it's somebody else's fault and we blame them and we, you know, just, you know, double down on our resentment because it's easier or perhaps it's a survival instinct to say, like, it's not my fault. or this didn't happen for a reason, and it's that person's fault instead. And so I can continue on with my life and procreate and never look in the rearview mirror or dig a little bit deeper

to understand the opportunity that is missed in making that choice. One thing I want to just push around with you a little bit here is to go back to your earlier question about young and maybe to add to that a little bit, I think one thing I really like about religion and ancient religion and spirituality and even Jungian theory is in particular this one perspective that I like very much, which is the multiplicity of perspectives. And so you say survival, you know, like from a biological perspective, survival is imperative. there are other values that are interwoven into what we would call psyche and so i draw from this

and i need to pay homage to origin this ancient you know religious theorist and um and also dante allegieri the author of the divine comedy when i was doing my dissertation i found this letter that dante wrote to his nobleman this is the funder of his project essentially and he says hey, let me tell you a little trick. I'm going to paraphrase, by the way, in my words. He says, the divine comedy can be read from several different perspectives. There is the historic, allegorical, tropological, and anagogic. And that's a lot of complexity, but essentially what it's saying is that we consistently have a

multiplicity of views and perspectives. And survival isn't necessarily the only game in town. And what we do oftentimes is reduce the, the, the beauty of our lived experience into these reductions. They're limiters. And so we miss out on other kind of dynamics. And so I think one element of this core question about suffering and survival is,

yeah, there are also other games in town, like the nature of connection, of love, of relationship. And I hear somebody saying, well, those are survival traits. traits. Yeah, kind of. But I'm nervous about reducing something simply to survival and kind of put it into the kind of physiological, biological realm. I think that we need to look at elements of nature that are beyond our comprehension, because on some level, if we back out far, survival is really important, but we don't know what this universe is up to. It's something more miraculous might be

happening. And that's why I tend to like to leave some room for the mysterious. I've heard you talk about it before, the ineffable. And so what it means on some level is that even our words today don't quite get at it. And this is what I really like about Jungian theory is that even in a conversation like this, we need to leave a little room for the unknown. And so, yeah, I think that self-healing and survival are all part of the process. But I then go a little aesthetic, and I say there's something about beauty and love and our experience that I don't think can be reduced to survival.

So I don't know where that goes, but I just felt like I needed to share that a little bit, maybe to open that door. We all would like to believe that we have agency over the arc of our lives. and that we can exert some control over externalities. And, you know, this is a grand illusion that we all suffer from. In the people that you counsel and work with,

how do you find your way into somebody who's holding on really tight and who perceives this notion of letting go or surrender or relaxing into an appreciation of the ineffable and that there is a, you know, there's something else here at play. you know, for the secular mind, you know, that's a very challenging thing. It can be very confronting and threatening. Totally.

Like this notion that like you have all these problems, you're suffering, you're riddled with anxiety, you're depressed or whatever. And you might find some peace in like just giving it up and as they say in AA, like turning it over, which can be interpreted for somebody who doesn't really understand this terrain as being told that the solution

to your problem is to like is to you know give up on life basically a thought just occurred to me about a dear friend of mine james as a priest and he he's always said um one of his books he would write is i don't believe in that god either and you know the idea that somebody comes in turning yourself over to something um and people resist that you know know, because as you said, we do cherish our autonomy and our control, and the idea of surrendering to a force that we can't understand, maybe, is... Especially in the age of the intellect and rationality. Absolutely.

And the scientific method. Absolutely. And so your question about how to work with folks that do, there's one fundamental element of therapy, I would say, that beneath all the theoretical models, all the denominations in religious traditions, all the orientations, there's one fundamental change agent, and it is the relationship. That's the gold. And there's bunches of meta studies that look at what really helps people change and transform. So one of the ways that I do that is that I really work in intentionally, mindfully, and deeply to navigate people's defense mechanisms.

And over time, I want to build a close enough relationship to somebody because it's experiential. Because a lot of us don't oftentimes have a deep and meaningful connection with another person who's completely and fully there to witness our life. Yeah. And well, yeah, it's that idea like, you know, oh, if you think you're enlightened, you know, just get into a world. relationship right and you're just immediately confronted you know it's this mirror to hold up like

all of your frailties and your character defects like immediately and you know if you choose to see this other person as an emanation of god or or like whatever you call god speaking to you when that other individual is in agreement and you're in sync there's a certain flow with that and when they say something or behave in a way that upsets you or inflames you in some way to see that as a window of opportunity to reflect upon why you're reacting that way and what's to be learned by kind of examining that. Yeah, and even when I hear God, you say God, I immediately thought of this profound gift that we are all consciousness,

conscious of consciousness, you know, that's like a holy shit. Like that is, if that's not miraculous to you, then. But also, sorry to interrupt you. On top of that, that are like awareness, our consciousness of consciousness is also just an appearance in consciousness. Yes. Yeah. You know, yeah.

Yeah, like, so when you see someone as a fixed image of how you believe them to be, you then are afforded a way to behave that could be harmful to self or other. But when you are in relationship with this kind of ineffable reality that we are all particular expressions of a deeper consciousness, then I think you then behave in different ways.

And not to say that you're boundaryless, because you also need to have your boundaries, but the possibilities and potential of transformation and simply just a beautiful connection with another person is richer and more potent. And so to get at that point of like what it is that I do, I think it's something that I've done a lot of my life. I immediately think of this time when I was,

I used to play music professionally and I was at a show opening up for this big act, you know, in town. And I played my gig and I was cruising around doing my thing as a young 20-year-old lunatic wood. And I went to the bathroom and this man who was probably in his mid-40s was crying. And I stopped and I sat in the bathroom with him for about three hours. And I just talked about his life. And he was suicidal. He was really in a tough spot. Probably had a few too many drinks. And I don't know where his life went. But I know that something happened that was powerful that helped him suffer the burden with somebody else and that in

its in and of itself is pretty immeasurable and profoundly powerful and for you or any of the viewers and listeners just think of a time when some random relationship buoyed you up in a way that you could never have predicted and one might say that's miraculous and and so that that kind of essence I think is profound, and I can't get a glimpse of the nature of reality from outside of this. And so, whatever that is, I just know that our suffering, our deepest suffering, is penetrated on some level by people willing to witness and connect with the depths of our darkness. think are good enough suddenly get better in ways we did not expect. And that's what happened when AG1 launched three new flavors. Look, I was perfectly happy with the original. I've been drinking it every morning for ages. It does its job. But then I tried tropical, which tastes like

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is always a teacher. You don't quite appreciate it though until you're past it and you have... That's right. You know, the gift of being able to look in the rear view mirror and see it for what it was. But they are these like initiations if you choose to grab onto them

that become these powerful levers for transformation. I mean, was that experience in the bathroom part of one of the inciting incidents that led you to transition from being a professional, musician into being a therapist. It was much more aggressive and violent than that. Yeah.

No, it's funny because I look back on it now. That's kind of like those little pebbles and breadcrumbs along the road that you look back and go, oh, yeah, I saw that kind of emerging. And to your point about, yeah, because if in the depth of my most painful experiences, I'm not thinking, oh, how cool this is. I'm in change.

Because that would take, me out of the purge and I need to be totally connected and and kind of in a state of non-awareness because parts of my my psyche are releasing that are beneath my own ego so yeah I think it has to be in some kind of retrospect so yeah I can look back on my life I ended up and this is a narrative for a lot of therapists I mean I became a therapist on a therapist couch And I was going through one of the most destabilizing experiences that I ever thought possible. I was a professional musician. I had a record deal.

I was on tour. I was, from my standards, I had made it. You know, I signed a record contract, and I was professional, and life had other plans. And so I, a son was born, and I could never have planned it. I could never have willed it, but my life was met by a Mack truck. And I went in directions that I never have even contemplated. And so I don't know what you call that,

but I know you don't call it coincidence. And I certainly, looking back on my life, I can't imagine it to have been any other way. I don't know much about your, your early life experience with alcohol and drugs. I lived as excessive as you can live as a night crawling, rock and roll person. I loved the night and everything that came with it. And all of a sudden, I had, it was 1.30 in the morning and I'd look over, this little being was bouncing in his crib

with a glow in the dark pacifier. And the light that used to be cigarettes and stage lights was now a glow in the dark pacifier. And I sat reverently with this circle of women, because I was raising a four month old. I mean, the woman that, his biological mother, very quickly, left, and for all kinds of reasons that formed me into a therapist.

And I remember sitting with all these moms, these yoga moms, just soaking up information saying, how do you do this? And I never intended on that being my life. And so it's one example, I think, because my life has been so totally disrupted. I wanted to play music from the time I was six, and I achieved it. And then all of a sudden, I'm raising a child and going back to school and becoming a therapist when I never imagined being a therapist. And it was really perfect.

So only in retrospect, because if you would have seen me then, I weighed about 30 pounds less. And I discovered Buddhism as a contemplative practice and actually started building my life back. I would say with a spiritual and discipline, blend Buddhist practice, and also one that created a mothering in me that I wasn't conscious of.

Yeah, that's wild. It's kind of amazing how many musicians, and then when you layer on top of that, like, you know, an affinity for substances, you know, end up kind of in a more therapeutic realm later on. Like, just off the top of my head, I'm thinking of my friend Guru Singh or like, I don't know if you know,

Raganath Kapo, like these are like musicians who then kind of get into, you know, this more expansive work. And I think, you know, what I see in that is like the soul of a seeker, you know, like you're seeking truth through music, you're seeking answers to your discomfort or some kind of higher state of consciousness

through substances and ultimately, you know, with growth and evolution and maturity, you find yourself in a, you know, like in the seat of the therapist, you know, because this is what interests you and this is what brought you peace and this is where you're finding answers that then in turn become helpful for other people. Yeah, that collision between art and science. And what I just did was tell a story, you know, and you talk a lot about, you know, storytelling and the role that it plays and how we make sense of the world and

create a perceptual lens, you know, through which to interpret it. You call it like storying, right? Yeah, yeah. And this is what we're made to do. And in many ways, you know, it's through stories that we connect with other people and, you know, create a frame for the world that allows us to survive. But these stories become entrenched and very often kind of lead us astray because they're based upon untruths or misapprehensions of reality. Something just to add that to that House of Mirrors, we were designing earlier about consciousness being conscious of consciousness. and story is the same kind of dynamic, I think, and that we story just inherently. You know, you and I are creating stories right now

of who we are and what we're thinking, and our mind is working, creating story and narrative. And I have a story. We are in a story, a greater story, and my mentor, Richard Rohrer, talks about this, my story, our story, and the story. And certainly the opportunity,

to teach through story or to communicate through story is important because we are able to contextualize ourselves, come to know somebody else, come to understand how they think and feel. But it's quite miraculous in that we story our existence and sometimes those stories, to one of your points, our perceptions are off. You know, I even wrote about this recently. Today I was going over my material for our conversation. And I was thinking about how often I meet with somebody who has a story of their mother or their father. And it's one that is rigid. You know, my mother, not mine, but the story here is an individual who has a very rigid mother. And then upon reflection, when they kind of work that story over and over like a, you know, like a pearl,

their perception changes because other elements start to come in. And so, yeah, we are storying beings that seek out story and relate through story. And I think that there's healing in story. I'm curious about you, actually. Here comes the therapist part. Well, I'm curious about, because as I'm thinking about what you do, and I really respect this project even working on, I mean, to put it lightly. And how has connecting with people in this way affected you,

listening to people's stories and preparing for it? In what ways have you changed since you started doing this? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. You know, I have a story about that, you know, that I could spit out. Is that story true? I'm not sure. I mean, I think the truth of it is that it's complicated. Like, on the higher awareness side of things,

like it certainly made me a better human being. And I can't say, oh, this person said this and then I changed this. It doesn't work like that. It goes into, you know, it's like it goes into the soup, you know, and how that gets spit back out in terms of how I behave and interact with people and respond to the world. I couldn't put a finger on, but there's no possibility that it isn't impacting that in a positive way.

And then there's, you know, then there's the, the kind of darker side of it, like how is this infecting my ego, you know, and how I carry myself in the world and think about myself in relation to other human beings in ways that maybe aren't so good, you know, like, it's like everything, it's not black or white, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of contours to this thing. I mean, but it's a gift, you know, I can't, and it also, you were like, oh, there's no coincidence that, you know, this, you know, I don't know how this happened with this child and this path that you went on, but I know it's not coincidence. And I can't, I can't believe that I'm sitting here by coincidence either. It wasn't

something that I, you know, visioned for myself or set about achieving as a goal. It, like, unfolded as a process of committing to my own personal growth and evolution and following my curiosity that led me here. And I believe that on some level, like that was, it's meant to be or whether you call that, you know, divinely inspired, I don't know. But I am in relationship with it from a place of gratitude. Like, I realize that, like, I've been given this gift, and with that gift comes a responsibility. Yeah. Because there are people, you know, we're doing this, but, you know, people will watch this and

interpret it in their own ways. And I want to make sure, you know, to the extent that I'm capable of doing this to make sure that it is helpful, to the human beings out there and that it's meaningful, not on a surface level, but the goal is always like, how can we co-create something that will have a substantial impact in a positive way

on the people who are choosing to carve out time in their day to focus their attention on it? Thanks. I relate in that, you know, I do, the show that I do The Sacred Speaks is a, you know, I'm similarly minded. I mean, one of the reasons why Elise thought you and I were connected,

I'm sure, is mutual interest, but also a kind of mutuality in who we are and how we show up in the world. And I know that my intention, as I wrote in an email to you, was really to sit down and have a deeply connected conversation and, of course, have some ideas on intention, but really just see where the conversation takes us. And I think that, you know, the nature of the way that you show up in the world is that you do have a desire to serve and to help others,

but you also show your kind of inner hurt self. And I think that's a story that people can connect with. Because in seeing you own that hurt allows for others to own their hurts, which is, you know, we don't really. have a culture that says let's do that you know let's let's show up and be creatures who oddly enough self-protect in ways that harm us because we show up inauthentically and so just I've been excited to connect because I think the nature of the way that you've shown up here is not simply as an intellectual that's on you know charging to understand a subject which certainly

you do but it's deeper than that and it's more erotic and And I use that term, which sometimes drives people nuts because they think of gag balls and whips, you know. But erotic at its core is about eros and connecting and being deeply connected. And so to kind of hold that together is to allow for our stories to connect, but I think one thing that we struggle to do is actually open to the fact that we're all hurting. And, you know, I do think it's ironic that vulnerability is the word we use for like the pinnacle of authenticity and it's also the word for a weakness in the structural integrity of a fort or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think what you're getting at is, you know, when you use the word eros, like you're talking about like the heart, like, you know, somatically, you know, feeling connected to our feelings. And I would say that I am, somebody who struggles in that kind of superhighway between head and heart.

And I think this is probably familiar for anyone who's listening who feels like they have a grip on their own personal dilemma. You know, like I have a story and my story goes like this. And I have a great deal of self-awareness. And I delude myself into believing that that self-awareness,

which is an intellectualization of like, what happened, what it did to me, how it set me back and why it made me the way that I am. But that's not really part of the solution. It's a piece, right? But there's a difference between having a heady understanding of your past and the kind of formative experiences that you've had and how they've crafted you

into this individual that has an identity and a story to go with it versus like feeling into it. and trying to, you know, resolve it or make peace with it or transcend it, which is something that you really can't do within the confines of the mind. Yeah. And if I were God,

I would hide the most profound realizations beneath disgust, you know, the places that we tend to avoid the most. And if we have a series of ideas, we can call it, you know, like I immediately started thinking about how, frequently people who are self-aware are involved in a really problematic spiritual bypass. You know, that they're hiding out in a lot of intellectual connections and ideas.

Because frankly, if a friend of mine, Hunt Priest, who runs a nonprofit called Lagare, he says, he's talking about churches here, but I think this is the truth for anything or any one of us, that if the church or the person isn't about working with healing our wounds, then it needs to shut its doors. And we could take that as a personal orientation, that if your entire life is devoted to expanding your own capacities and reach and not helping or connecting with others, then reevaluate. I think that's an important note that we cannot imagine ourselves as separate from others,

and we have the capabilities to imagine ourselves as separate from others. Never underestimate the human mind's capacity for self-delusion, because spiritual bypass can come in many forms. It can come in the costuming of a variety of spiritual traditions in which you delude yourself into believing that you are a spiritual being, having a human experience when in fact you're rationalizing some bypass

of the one thing that actually you really should be looking at but aren't courageous enough to. Yeah, it's performative. It's totally perform. So, I mean, to put a kind of blunt word to it, I mean, your solution, and you've said as much, is basically confronting the questions that modern life has taught us to avoid. Yeah, and just to articulate that a little bit,

I think one of the things our culture has done has created materialists out of us, and I don't just mean that from economics. I mean it also, the metaphysics of materialism. And things are changing, but we have imagined that life is matter. we have disconnected ourselves from the cycles and flow of reality we are disconnected from cosmic changes we do not have a culture that facilitates rights of passage and ritual we have

we have not answered the call to show up as caregivers for our families and for our communities and so we're all alienated and isolated. And in its place, we've had productivity. So we are incredible producers. And so I think that in the absence of a culture that really helps us to become human, we forgot that. You know, what does it mean to be human?

And this is an ancient question when I was reading Peter Kingsley. He's got an incredible book, Catafalc. and he says this that we forget of all the archetypes that we live out we forget the number one archetype that we're living out is the archetype of human that we have a lens of what human is and we live that lens out and at times that lens is not necessarily connected with the depths of our needs and so we're performing what it means to be a spiritual person or what it means to be a human even and the process of self-discovery is a reclamation act of saying what is this really. And we no longer have our sacred institutions that really help us have those kinds of

communions with, you know, the story and our story. And so we've become commodified. And then, of course, we suffer because we are at a distance from the truest expression, I think, of who we are and who we can be and young articulated this really well in the red book when he begins it saying there's a difference between the spirit of the times and the spirit of the depths and spirit of the times of course is the zeitgeist and you know of course we all know we all know what that is how fashions change and ideas change and cityscapes change but the deeper aspects of our longing is is universal and arguably won't change all that much and to tap into that deep instinctuality and truest part of our expression that's beyond the politeness and niceties

of our social conditions and the secularized busyness and productivity that we must have in order to matter, we suffer that split. And addiction here is a wonderful surrogate. You said it earlier, that I had this thought that addicts are, Young said this, deeply spiritual people,

they've just found the wrong spirits. I connected once this woman, Tracy, who was Stevie Ray Vaughn's photographer, and we did a class together at the Young Center. And in her book, I was reading her book, this really cool depiction of her work with Stevie Ray Vaughn, she previously had a methamphetamine addiction and said, you know, I suffer deeply.

Methamphetamines ruined my life, but also for anybody who's never known the desire of a deep addiction, I pity you. That's Eros, deeply connected. So in the absence of that devotion to the great mysteries of existence, methamphetamines and cocaine and alcohol or surrogates that take the space.

Yeah. But the drive is this deep desire to feel connected. oh to feel accepted and loved unconditionally and communing with some kind of something yeah something yeah some aspect of the beyond right yeah yeah i like that this episode is brought to you by whoop whoop is the only wearable that turns your health and fitness data into personalized guidance, leveraging everything from resting heart rate, HRV, sleep stages, and efficiency, and real-time stress levels to inform how you train, work, and recover so you can live better. And now the all-new whoop is here, and the recent upgrades are dramatic.

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in the context of certain behaviors or substances. And we think of the heroin addict and the gutter drunk and things like that. But addiction is a condition that lives on a spectrum. And we all are on that spectrum to one degree or another. And the way you identify that is by evaluating your choices, your decisions, and your behaviors and getting objective about how,

how we do the things we do, either to progress us towards some degree of greater truth about ourselves in the world, or to distract ourselves or to numb ourselves from whatever happens to be making us uncomfortable in the moment as an avoidance strategy. I wanna go there, how do you, when you think of truth, what do you think of?

I'm running an experiment here. Yeah, I mean, like, wow, how do I answer that question? I guess, I don't know that I have an absolute answer to, you know, the idea of absolute truth, but I would say, you know, what is real, what is objectively real when you remove the human impulse from it, desire, ego, attachment, all of these things that are kind of operating unconsciously within us? It's fun, I've used the word, and I hear the word. You know, recently a friend of mine, he's a translator of ancient Greek, Mark Erie,

he told me in a profound moment that the word truth in Greek is a combination of two concepts, a leithi, alethe, and it means without forgetting. And speaking of the Spirit of the Times, we took a word like truth and made it about what is objective, what is verifiable, what is replicatable. You know, and this is probably a conversation for the philosophy department.

But there's another part of this, which is truth is not forgetting the essence, the very core of your nature, and to look outside of yourself, for something to address an inner conflict is part of our issue. We've consistently been looking outside of ourselves for salve and balm. And on some level, the deepest of spiritual truths are those realities that we discover

or remember within. Let me say like metaphysically, I really like dual aspect theory. Have you discovered much about dual aspect? Explain that to me. So dual aspect monism is that there's one stuff. The universe is one stuff. But there are two expressions of that one stuff. And we might call it matter and mental or image or imagination, psyche.

But at its core, it's just one thing, energy. Right? We could say that. And so when we get into these kinds of conversations, there's the part of us that is connected with matter. what is this is here you know i can measure it and feel it we can it's verifiable until quantum physics comes along and says ah wait a second hold my beer there's there's a whole another aspect of reality that's beyond our capacity to image it and so the light spectrum is a really good example

here of that you know i can we can see all this and our eyes take in what it does but there's more to this than meets the eye there's more to this than meets the touch there's more to this conversation that meets our words there's more to me than i can possibly be conscious of and you too so truth you said that and i thought wow i really love that word i've been thinking about it a lot because from a more from a psychological perspective truth is and i i speak religion i like all religions i'm obsessed a religion i think is this way of encoding mysteries of human experience, I think. And what the sciences can't measure,

what the senses can't measure, over here, this mystery, mysterious world that we have words that approximate and point to something. And so truth is, yes, verifiable, but truth is also not forgetting. And I think in addiction, in a lot of ways we've forgotten that we are,

are interwoven and interdependent with the entirety of all of nature. And we've not realized that. And so we seek out a spiritual experience in an external to try to enrich what our current understanding of ourselves in the world can't possibly fathom. So thanks for running that experiment with me.

So for the people that you work with that are suffering from addiction? What is the path, the council to move them towards a better direction? Yeah, I mean, I think that's so dependent on where they are in their process. And I've done work in adolescent residential treatment. I've worked in group practices and all kinds of different settings.

And for younger people, a lot of times it's skill-building and ego-strengthening. You know, you have to do things like teach people how to say no and how to give affirmation and how to just look you in the eye and be connected. I can't help but go to early attachment theory. Have you been into this much? Have you looked at? Yeah, yeah.

I love it. So early attachment theory, I think of all of Bolby's experiments with rhesus monkeys, and we can't, of course, replicate these now. They're harmed animals, but we can't, of course, observe what he and others like Mary Ainsworth have observed. The scene that comes to mind

is when you take a monkey and raise it outside of the tribe and then reintroduce it to the tribe, once they've established all their social norms and grooming techniques and ways of communicating and interacting, they will beat it. and ridicule it and harm it.

You're not us, you're other. And the only way that you can smooth that transition is by pairing that monkey with a younger monkey. And what happens is you pair them up and just over time the instinctuality takes over and they become conditioned and normed into the kind of tribal how you monkey. And so I think that's a really good example.

of for young in younger years it's what we have to do is because a lot of times people on some level didn't get what the culture needed to give them and I don't blame the individual parents or I think it's an issue with our culture I mean I am completely critical on our culture we have actually not done the things that we need to do to serve people's development effectively we are way too busy with our own bank accounts and our own you know what's that great quote of um um um don't tell me what you value show me your calendar and your checkbook and i'll tell you what you value so as a culture i'm critical and when it comes to the connection presence needs communion that young people in development need we are we are not serving them and then we have to

deal with that so i think that That's first half of life. You know, a lot of it is skill building, is time, presence, repetition. One of the things I did with this young guy I worked with, he said, he was a boxer. You know, it was one of my first people that I worked with in this inpatient center. And he was a feisty guy. I remember him to this day. I won't say his name, man, if you're out there, I remember you and think of you often.

And we were kind of knee to knee together. and he's a boxer, right? He could probably do some work on me. And he's crying and crying and crying. And I gave him some interpretation. And he looks up at me through tears and was like, fuck you, Mr. John. And I looked at him and I was like,

I'll call him, I call him Billy. I said, Billy, I'm so proud of you. And he goes, what the fuck? What are you talking about? I said, man, because two months ago, you would have punched me and now you didn't you know and so to look at in that moment he has this expectation that not only his his aggression is going to be met with aggression but it wasn't and that experiential process is what you need I think that's the gold is that you over time need to

have experiences of people not behaving how you assume they're going to behave and then people teaching you what the culture didn't teach you. And that takes time. For adults, it's different. I mean, I think for adults, it's deeply relational, deeply community oriented. I do think Buddhism had it right here, and I think AA gets it right in a lot of ways, that part of the three jewels of Buddhism is you need a teacher and a path and a community. And in the absence of those, you're not going to have the spirit of the depths speak through the spirit of the times. and you're not going to solve somebody's methamphetamines addiction or their alcohol.

So that's my first swing at that question. Yeah, and we're in an era in which, you know, community is fractured. Community centers are no longer. There are, you know, we're lacking in those spaces and gathering places that used to be part and parcel of every village and every town. in every city and those have sort of vanished.

The path is being dictated by the mores of Western capitalist society, which says your value and your entitlement to be loved and accepted is indelibly tied to your ability to produce, achieve, distinguish yourself. And that's a poisonous, noxious message where you feel like your self-worth is only in so far as you're able to kind of like acquit yourself in this material world. Like there's a

violence to that. And the teachers who can disabuse you of that and set you on a different course are few and far between. You know what I mean? Like you're not going to find them in the public schools. And you're not going to find them in the community centers that no longer exist. Right. And occasionally, you know, that that coach will come along or that special one person and that makes a difference, but it seems to me that there's less and less of that. And that's a greater challenge. And my sense is that, you know,

this is noxious for the culture and for all people, but I think it has an outsized impact on men and particularly young men. And when you share the story of the, you know, the crying boxer, like that's sort of the encapsualization of like this whole like dilemma that so many men are facing right now, who are,

more or less because they don't have a teacher, they don't have a path, and they don't have a community. A thought about two things. I was thinking in that, when I worked in that inpatient residential center, sorry to every therapist out there in the world, but the thing that people remember the most is not the therapist. It's not some interpretation the therapist made

and it's not some theoretical orientation that, you know, that creating, it's some skills-based approach that they learned how to do X, Y, or Z. When people are asked about what mattered the most, it is an event like the lady behind the counter at the cafeteria saved the favorite dessert

of the person. You know, it's these very loving, very relational, very kind, connected moments. And the other, thing I wanted to address is as you're talking about men and certainly the development of young men. Richard always brings up this one image of these elephants that were, you know, in India or somewhere that were just ransacking the town, running, rushing people, stepping on cars,

you know, doing things that elephants tend not to do. And they bring in this behaviorist, elephant expert and says, what's happening here? And they're like, oh, I get it. there are three adolescent male elephants that the father and grandfather generations have been poached. And so they are without initiation. So they said, not funny, but I love the solution. They bring in two granddaddy elephants.

And if any of you know Richard Rohr, I love him when he does this because he says, these elephants just kind of move their ears around and the adolescent young ones are like, well, what is that? And we see that in gangs, for example, that the same spells that we need for healthy initiation and community process are utilized and co-opted by what I would consider to be uninitiated people or people at least that are using the spells in service to some kind of harm to culture as opposed to the opposite. And so that, I mean, just a full disclaimer, I mean, I don't want to get

into necessarily a conversation that seems to paint capitalism or free market enterprise as negative. Again, it's just incomplete. When the enterprise doesn't recognize that there are people being left out by this equation and do the things necessary to bring along those who are being lost or forgotten, that's the problem. So if you're going to have whatever kind of economic or philosophical or political orientation, okay, run the experiment, see if it works. All over the world, we're going to do that. But any orientation is going to create some kind of neglect no matter what you're doing and so if you're not doing things i think to nourish and nurture those who are left then then that's that's the problem so i think when it comes to men the statistic that really came out as

you were beginning your question or thought about men is that men right now have 50% less friends than we did 20 years ago and i could give you statistics all day long about suffering of men but to me that's the most important because because i think it's the catalyst for all the others i think in the absence of real genuine connection uh intimacy presence um the experiential process of bumping up against another human being of being known of being seen and witnessed of being held accountable of being beholden to um relationships and forces that are outside of your own desires i i think that's a real travesty in our culture and men all over are suffering the burden of our issue.

What is your sense of what's driving this loneliness? Well, I think that see kind of item number one around a culture that doesn't have initiation. You know, we're telling us back to the spirit of the depths, you know, we're telling men how to be producers, but we're not telling men how to be in relationship. One of the things we do at the Center for Healing Arts, the Integrative Wellness Center that my wife and I have, is we look at the human as biological, psychological, social, and spiritual and really try to address all these levels of the ways in which we show up.

And the social is one of those levels. And we don't teach men how to be social, how to be connected, how to be in the mix with other men. And I do think that when you're not beholden to a community and really known deeply, differently than you are with a romantic partner, whoever it might be. But with a community of men, I just think that there are elements of our psyches that get untethered. And I don't know how you measure that necessarily, but I certainly know that I work with it a great deal and the kinds of addictions and depressions and alienations.

isolations that happen as a result are paramount. And I mean, there's a reason why in our prison systems, which I could be deeply critical of, there's a reason in our prison systems, the kind of worst consequence that you can give to somebody is isolation. That says something about our needs. And if we're creating a culture that is essentially knowingly, because we know the consequences with men that are disconnected from each other and feeling more and more isolated. That's a problem because we're taking a pretty aggressive part of our species and creating a pretty aimless hurt. Yeah, that's going to go out into the world and like those elephants, you know, just stomp cars. Wreck shit. Yeah. Yeah. And again, there's this ethnobotanist

named Mark Plotkin that I interviewed once who had been he spent a lot of time down in South America working with all these different tribes and he said you know really with the shaman like it's all the same spells you know they're all reading from the same spells spell books whether you're doing what could be considered dark magic or light magic same spells it's just your intention and so gangs use the same spells that we might have in a community that creates rights of passage that creates kind of in-group inside jokes folks, you know, markers of being a part of the group, processes to go through together to bond each other closely.

I mean, all kinds of dynamics that we need, that gangs will capitalize on, that the military capitalizes on. But for everybody that is not called into those arenas, we're without a process of moving through, I mean, I think in the best, the best rights of passage, this is really hard for people to hear a lot of times my favorite rite of passage which seems really kind of messed up is a process down i believe it's in columbia where they take tends to be young boys at about 12 years old and they take these bullet ants have you heard of this before bullet ants so bullet ants are these ants that are given the name bullet ants because their bite feels like a gunshot and what

they do to these kids is they smoke all these ants out so they're stunned they weave these palm gloves and they weave the ants inside the palm gloves so that when they wake up they begin to sting or bite the children so you see these images of these children that have these palm gloves on and for 10 minutes there to sit there and take it and then 24 hours it's gone i mean it doesn't last can you endure this and it's an experiential process where you're saying, I've done hard things. I've done hard things. And most importantly, then those hard things that I've done

created in me a community of connection and the community conspires. They want you to be a part of this. They want to fold you in. They're supporting this. And they fold you in after you pass this test, so to speak. And they give you all the ethics and moral dynamics and all the cultural accoutrema

of being a member of the tribe. You can then be in relationship, you achieve something important. You know, when you talk to a young person, you're like, what are your rights of passage? You know what they'll say? I mean, they'll take a stab. I mean, short of a bar mitzvah or, you know, being on a sports team, I suppose, on some level, or going through, you know, the process of, what do they call it,

when you're trying to get into a fraternity. Or like, these are very like low hang, you know, like very low grade versions of that. And they're almost like vestiges of, you know, this ancient practice that has existed for, you know, as long as humans have congregated and formed communities together. But this is kind of all that remains.

That's it. The culture doesn't conspire, right? Arguably the fraternity thing does, but still you might argue that a kind of immature, Sorry guys, but a kind of immaturity is running the show there. Yeah, there's no wise elder, like, lording over the right of passage and making sure that everyone understands, like, the greater purpose here or, you know, what the aim is.

So most people that I talk to when I ask them questions about rights of passage, they will say the first time they drank, the first time they had sex, and when they got a car. and fine but those again aren't supported you're not having the celebration of your community and your elders and your family because now you're a part of something and you can fight for the community and you can serve the community the stakes are i mean i think in a lot of ways we're warriors that don't have a war and don't have a process to i mean that spiritually i don't mean that about going out and hurting other people again i'm masculine in that way and that this spiritual

war of working through your own impulses your own tendencies your own hedonism your own desire to retreat and isolate your own uh narcissism and your own self-indulgence that that tension is something you must fight against and so no i'm not a tribal person in south america but i do need a marker in my life to say I was once this way and now I am this way and I've achieved something great and I've learned that I can do hard things. And the reason, you know, one of the things you were referencing earlier about what I call the little teachers, you know, these emotional experiences that are teachers, I need to learn how to endure the difficulty of grief, of shame and not act out on it and query it and sit with it and learn from it. This, this mirrored.

miraculous universal experience that everybody has the capacity to experience that takes me into a deeper orientation with myself and with others, they're not just pathologies and there's certainly not just momentary experiences to try to get rid of or to fix. They're powerful images and affects of nature seemingly that take us over and the ancients referred to them as the gods. but now as as young and nietzsche both articulate the gods have descended from olympus and landed in the solar places and as young articulated in that thought now they've landed in the doctor's treatment room to be fixed not aspects of our psyche and consciousness that are to be served what is my shame showing to me oftentimes my shame reveals to me the ways my culture told me i was not enough or too much

that's a story back to your earlier point you know is that um true for me right as am i not enough of course not but is that a belief pattern that shows up for me that can ever change the way i show up in the world absolutely so i i have a story that i shared with a group recently one time when i was uh again i wanted to be a musician for the time i was six i was 19 years old or 18 years old I was at this gathering, I was playing music. I was so excited, you know, new, going off to college, playing around the campfire, really beautiful experience. And I was ready to show off some songs I've been working with.

And here I was saying, I'm going to be a musician. I had this as part of my identity. And guitar is being passed around the circle. And I played my song and felt good about it. And the song goes to this other guy who plays one of the first. of the best songs i've ever heard and he was wanting to go into like finance or oil you know like he had no aspirations of being a musician i was shattered i mean you just got your ass handed to me shattered and and i stopped i was not conscious at the time of this but i went through a stage of

withdrawing totally ashamed totally if you would have said you're feeling shame right now i'd have gone you're full of shit. I did not have the awareness of my own body at the time. But looking back on it through the bread trails, I saw that I deviated. It took, later it took a phone call

from another friend of mine who called me on a Tuesday and said, hey man, what are you doing Thursday night? This is when I was 19. I said, nothing, I got a test on Thursday morning in history, but nothing, no plans. What do you got?

He said, I booked you a show at the Artvark. And I hung up the phone. The Art Vark was this cool club in the area. And essentially, I was thrust into learning about 25 songs because I'd pretty much hung it up. And with his wisdom, I then started that path. But for a year, I was imagining to be a business major,

and that was not my bag. But this happened because you had a friend who was able to see you and know what you needed, and like intervene on your behalf to like do what you weren't going to do on your own, right? That's right. Which speaks to, you know, friendship and, you know, why we all need, you know, people in our lives to, you know, hold ourselves accountable and, and to be able to, like, really see us, right? And I think in the context of men and, you know, the peril that they're in right now,

like, of course, none of this has anything to do with, you know, the progress that we've made in terms of like women and, you know, the place that, you know, that they now occupy and there's plenty of work to be done there as well. But as Richard Rohr says, and you often repeat, like in the absence of mythology, we have pathology. And so we don't have this mythology

when it comes to men. and rights of passage and what they mean and why they're important. And as you also say, you know, as Joseph Campbell said, the day the culture gets rid of the men's clubs is the day the culture begins to deteriorate. And that's sort of a provocative statement in 2025.

But what he's getting at is this need that isn't being met in terms of like how men are relating to each other. And the reason that's important is because when it's not met, you know, we reap the consequences of that because masculinity is unleashed in a toxic manner and we all pay the price for that, right? And I think right now we're in a situation

where we're reckoning with masculinity, what does it mean? And there is this idea that masculinity in and of itself is toxic by definition when of course it's not, like masculinity is a beautiful thing, when it's healthy, there is a virulent, you know, toxic strain of that that we're seeing right now, But that is because these needs are not being met in the way that, you know, we need them to be met to have a healthy society and a society of healthy men. I mean, is that accurate?

Would you agree with that? I do. And I think that what we know, and I'll bounce this to you, I mean, think of all of the people that you know who have achieved success, did it do it? Did it do that thing that they were looking for? And of all the people that I know, the answer's no. They get to some pinnacle, some mountaintop of what our culture would say is successful. Track for you?

Sure. Yeah. And they say that wasn't it. And so now I've got to go looking for something else. Yeah. But not before suffering an existential crisis. I'm sorry. And without guardrails, that's where you really see,

you know, like weird masculinity run a rob. with like sports cars and affairs and like you know all kinds of bad behavior all of it yes the potentials are in service to lesser gods and that may ruffle feathers but the things we worship that we pay homage to that we devote our lives to become the gods that we worship and if it is the cars and the self-worth tied to the bank account uh then that's the god and so what what happens is that we know this we know this And why don't we change? Because we all think we're going to be the exception to the rule. Exceptional is, yes.

So there may be some real beautiful opportunity for those who are, if you're out there and you have reached that success, you have hit that opportunity to see the hollowness of these ideas that we continue to imagine are the pinnacle of success. We've not redefined what success is. It's an illusion. And so we stay with all of our resources devoted to productivity. We have people in leadership positions that have walked this path that have learned that, and here's the cynical side of me, is that unfortunately they've not actually learned it. What they're doing is trying to amass more and more and more, thinking that it will one day be that. But we don't have people that are up at the top of that, whatever it is, saying, shit, we need to redefine for our culture what success is and how this game. is played. The problem with that, though, is that there are people who do give voice to that,

but they're sort of a curiosity. I mean, I would say Jim Carrey does that. Oh, yeah. Every time he does any press, like, this is his core message. It is. It is. Thankfully. Thankfully. And there, I think, our forces in narcissism, I would say, in our culture that is in service to that God that is not going to wake up. And so I champion Jim Carrey. I mean, that's one of the people that I referenced there. I really appreciate the message that he's been bringing because he is a person that has reached a great deal of success.

But we continue to define it economically. We don't define it relationally. How much money do you make is a question, not how rich are your relationships? Amy Winehouse in her documentary said something about defining success as continuing to get to work with people whom she admires and respects. I really like that definition.

It starts to get closer to something relational. But I don't think we're going to solve narcissism. I certainly don't, but I do wish that we had more people who unfortunately suffered that existential crisis and were doing the work to congregate people. Richard Roar certainly did it. He led men's rights of passage for years, decades,

seeing the problem. He worked in prisons. He saw the problem of masculinity in the 90s, along with guys like Robert Bly. Bly was like the first guy who kind of came out, you know, the whole drum circle thing and all of that. Like how long, that was a long time ago. It was in the 90s.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do a different kind of drum circle on Monday night, but yeah, you bang the drum. All of that happened in the 90s. And still, it's radical to me. I heard this, so please somebody check this. I think this is right.

that 2014 was the first year that the humanities department had a degree in masculinity studies and so what is that about like so men essentially have been asking we've been defining our identity by what we're not and second is we're equating weakness with types of people

expressions of humanity what is I mean that's horrible horribly fucked up. So that creates in men a great deal of conflict. I mean, to, okay, don't be that. That, you know, wondrous, beautiful soul over there, who's an emanation of divinity, and now I'm supposed to not be that

because it's somehow reduced to weakness. Women in mass because of enormous cultural issues, I mean, to put it lightly, I mean, we have millennia of cleanup work to do with what we've done to women. And we also have a great deal of work to discover what men are and to ask meaningful questions about who we are and what matters. And I think we haven't had those conversations. And most men that I work with are deeply sensitive, but also deeply guarded.

I think of my son, he's 20, you know, and he's his idea of strength, when he kind of acts out the ways that men are supposed to be, I'll say, you realize that's a total compensation for a felt sense of insecurity. Mm-hmm. You know, your need to dominate is, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, like, okay, boomer. You know, right. When you're raised by like, you know, around this idea of what you're not supposed to be, like what fills in for the vacancy of like what you are supposed to be. And when you're young and adolescent

and you're trying to, you know, figure out what that definition is, you're looking around at the people who, you know, kind of embody what you think at that time are the admirable qualities or what is the kind of expression of masculinity. And so you're going to gravitate towards very, you know, confident, you know, versions of that that aren't always equally, you know, conscious, I guess I would say. Well, I facilitate two men's groups every week. These are psychodynamic men's groups, process-oriented groups. my co-facilitator is a gay man and it's one of the most beautiful opportunities to bring together men who have not been exposed to different expressions of masculinity so that we can start to understand

that masculinity is not so specific and that's part of the issue is that I think the violence that we do to men is that we say this is as far as you can go as far as you can be it tends to be a dominant aggressive um force i know a bunch of really beautiful and incredible men that are not that um that don't want anything to do with that and and so again we have an issue with our culture that is consistently producing an image of this idealized specimen and then men measure themselves

against that and feel insecure and seek to meet that image and I think we are desperate to increase the flexibility of masculinity and I would think that

one element that's necessary to be on that list would be the most profound and potent authenticity and honesty and genuineness. And so if we're creating men who are working together with each other to be more honest, genuine and real, if you and I are in a friend group and you call me out because I've not shown up authentically, that's a good thing. And without relationship where we can bump up against each other, then our narcissism and our insecurities are

running the show. Yeah, left unchecked. Yeah. When I look out on culture, I'm sort of two minds. On the one hand, I feel like this conversation that we're having, you know, versions of this are happening all over the place now. Like, I think that there is a dialogue that is occurring around all of the topics that you've raised, all the, you know, issues that you've raised. and I see young people, Generation Z, growing up into a world that they don't quite like, and they're searching for how to find their place in it and meaning within it, right?

And that's sort of at the tip of the spear rather than like, what school am I going to get into and what job am I going to get? It's like, what's meaningful here? How do I find meaning? How can I find purpose? you know, because it's so crazy right now and chaotic. And I find that to be hopeful. Young people like grappling with stuff

that I didn't start thinking about until my 40s and 50s at a very early age. And on some level, you can credit social media for that because there's people like yourself talking about this and these things are just widely accessible in a way that they weren't when we were kids. And there's a general dissatisfaction with so many people's lot,

Like, these young people have parents who are dissatisfied, and they, you know, so that's all getting internalized into the young mind, right? And I think that's really cool. You know, I think there is an opportunity. Like, the pendulum is swinging and there has to be a reaction to this loneliness and this, you know, missing ballast that people have in their lives and what's going to replace that. At the same time, you know, when you look from the top down, there's just a lack of ethics, you know, that we see. and leadership, a lack of appreciation for honesty that can't help but kind of trickle down into culture. And I think when you look at young men in particular who are disenfranchised to one extent or another, don't see opportunities, all that available to them. They become vulnerable to voices out there who are gonna tell them that it's not their fault.

It's because of this group of people or that group of people and their vulnerability becomes easily weaponized. And so that's happening kind of simultaneously, these two things and they're like countervailing forces right now. Yeah, it's funny, when I've worked with young people now, I notice that I don't have to do as much table setting about these ideas, you know, they're there faster. Masculinity, sexuality, spirituality, spirituality,

Like, it's very interesting that I had that thought about social media, certainly democratizing and distributing information faster. You know, like, I use music as a metaphor. My daughter is eight, and, you know, for so long we were just, we just listened to playlists, and you wouldn't even care what's on the radio. And so our interest in music was like, okay, whatever, you just play me, whatever playlist is. is the algorithm creates.

And you never listen to lyrics. You know, you just listen to music, but she now reads all the music, or all the lyrics on all the songs and is reconnecting with the artists. And it's a magical time for young people right now, certainly hard, but I see a great deal of strength

in what they've got going on. And yet, I think their anger is valid and necessary. because we have not invested in looking at our cultural issues and working to write the ship. I mean, to your point, I think a lot of people, there are conversations that are happening more and more and we're hopefully able to have more flexibility

in our conversations, but I stay pretty impressed with young folks. I spend a lot of time working with adolescents. I don't do it as much now, but when I do, I stay really impressed with these kids. I think probably through the lack of all these issues we're talking about, they have had to figure it out on their own, and they are having all kinds of radical relationships online talking about these ideas.

Yeah, I get concerned, however, though, knowing that the algorithm is going to serve, for every video of you saying a version of what you just said, being shown to a young person, the algorithm is going to serve up, you know, 10 videos of someone like Andrew Tate, you know, saying something toxic and unhelpful. Yeah, I know.

And I don't know how you untangle that, not, but. Well, I think that, you know, we have this inherent negative, I call it a negative attributional bias. You know, essentially that our media exploits are our fear-based systems and it will provide us what most activates that fear system. because we'll watch that rather than watching flowers grow,

which I think is pretty fun to do, you know, and just to, I spend a lot of time, I was just recently sitting outside just listening to The Locus, and that's pretty beautiful and miraculous. I don't know how many people are spending their time doing that. Not many. Yeah. Probably not that many.

So, you know, for every, for every action, there's a countervailing reaction. Like I just became aware that there is, a YouTube channel where there's this guy in Norway and he drives, I believe, I haven't checked it out, I was just like somebody was sharing

this idea with me, I believe he drives like a semi-truck and basically he just videos, like he just has a camera out the windshield of his truck, I could be getting this wrong. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it and he just drives

and the video is just a feed of like an unedited feed of like what his drive looks like. And it will just be a nine hour video of like nothing happening. And apparently like this is very popular. Like every, yeah, people are like, you know, like. So it's sort of like, yeah, this is modern day,

you know, a modern day antidote to maybe the chaos and insanity of everything else out there. But I wanna step back a minute here and kind of just your ideas are somewhat, there's an ethereal aspect of what you're talking about. You're talking about myth and, and connection and learning how to lean into the heart. And for a lot of people and probably more with men

than others, like these are challenging ideas to understand, let alone translate into practice. Like how do you drill down on these concepts and turn them into actionable tools that people can practice so that they can start to shift and embody, what it is that you're talking about. Yeah, great question.

So one of the things I'm working on a lot right now is creating a process. And what I hopefully create enough trust with folks to guide them through a process so they discover on their own. And I get it that that's not an easy sell today because in our cultural milieu, you know, what matters tend to be matter

money you know and um but i think one of the things i do is appeal to that just a little bit of doubt uh based on what we were saying about jim carey you know that i tend to work with a lot of guys who have had an opportunity to experience a great deal of success and then part of what i'm trying to do is there's a line um from the bible that i like very much which is they will know us by our fruit. And these concepts are shown in all kinds of religious traditions, but I tend to like that is that at the end of it, many of us are interested in legacy and many men that I connect with know what matters. And so if you give men a process where they can connect with other men and go through a transformation and they experience it on their own, it tends to be pretty

potent. I can't speak to the groups and people out there who are saying this is the get rich quick scheme. You know, that's not, those aren't the people that I'm reaching. And so what I'm doing is

trying to say... They have to play out the scheme first. That's it. Yeah. And many have. And I think that's where I step in, which is trying to catch folks who are a bit underserved, by a system that has said this is what matters and this is how you fit in it and their doubt back to this little teacher idea their doubt is what initiates them into moving into

territories that they would otherwise not have gone into so I'm not suggesting that's an easy sell or you can cast a wide net but I am suggesting for those that are feeling that doubt and that have suffered the burdens of knowing that what you imagined would help you arrive at where you thought it would help you arrive didn't, then there's a little wedge in that belief system that I can move in there and start to build relationship with. And so the book that I'm writing, for example, is a process. It's something like what the 12 steps are or what the hero's journey is. It's my take on a psychological and spiritual process

that I've observed people go through in my office in psychotherapy. So what I did is I simply put a container to that and can help guide people through that. It's not a manualized treatment and that do these six steps and then you're fine. It's you can locate yourself in a particular process so that you become aware of what might be coming next. And then you follow that thread

and you can discover from within what might be lacking. at the core of this there is this thing that you call sacred refusal yeah can you explain that yeah so i referenced it earlier a little bit about um what was happening with the rhesus monkeys um and the cranial size of the human being at birth we have scripts and adaptations behaviors, ways of being in the world that we adopted just by the nature of our existence. And these are in some ways social, you know, what you wear, how you speak, how you walk. They are also deeper than that. And on a very deep level, some of our most potent adaptations involved.

our most inherent needs as humans. Survival, of course, one of them, need for love, another one, that we essentially adapt to our environments early on and create these contracts with ourselves in the world, and we carry those out throughout our lives until they don't serve us any longer, or until we run into issues with addiction

or relationship or trauma, or crisis. So the refusal, putting the sacred in front of it is that you create an opportunity to grieve that vessel that helps you throughout a large part of your life but is no longer serving you. And of course, addiction is a great example. I was told by Jungian analysts that I worked with years ago. She was a professor of mine. When we were speaking in one of our classes, she mentioned a young woman who was sexually abused through much of her early life. So by the age of 9 or 10, she had a pretty significant alcohol dependence. Nine or 10?

Wow. So this was a horrible sexual abuse. The way that Priscilla spoke about it, she said that she was drinking anywhere from half a bottle to a bottle of vodka a day, I'm sure, supported by some of the adults in her life. So this is as bad as it can get. Yeah. And so at 16, the abuser was no longer in the home. And yet she still had the alcohol problem, the alcohol dependence, I should say.

Okay. So I would argue that's not wrong. That was based in her need to do everything that she could, to numb out from the catastrophic mistreatment that was happening. An almost appropriate adaptation to survive. Absolutely. Just an absolutely overwhelming trauma. Yeah, so then how do you take somebody

who for the formative years of their life has connected with this substance and it has helped them navigate their development and how do you then because now the alcohol is killing her and that's an extreme image of what happens to us all that we have these early adaptations about think about when you were in a relationship

and you got your heart broken and you determined that you will never love again or you were sexually violated and you made a proclamation about others in the world, this belief becomes ingrained. I will never do that. Or they will never hurt me again. Or I will never have this happen.

We have these agreements. It's a contract with reality. So the sacred refusal is when we eventually recognize that we have to go through a process of grief and begin to unravel our, connection with whatever that adaptation is and oftentimes it's done so in a trauma or a crisis you know that this is what in aa would be referred to as a rock bottom that you have to hit that and eventually say this is no longer tenable i have to consider something else i don't know what it is

so i will surrender over to a process that i can't possibly fathom but i'll trust you enough hopefully that you will guide me through that process, saying it to the community or to the sponsor or to the therapist or whomever it may be. So sacred refusal is an opportunity for us to ritualize that process where we can honor the adaptation. We can commune with it in a way that recognizes its value in our lives, that it served a great and holy purpose in a lot of ways.

But now we need to, on some level, kill it off and surrender it to the forces and the powers that be. And I think that process takes time. And in the best of times, it would be done with a ritual. But again, if you're not surrounded by elders who've gone through this experience and can find ways to ritualize that process, you're kind of left going at it alone.

and that can be a scary and terrifying experience and that's why in therapy one of the things I help folks do is try to recognize that the both end of the dance thank you thank you and I set you free and now I go through a stage of disorientation what I call disorientation where my favorite example here is a hermit crab

and I thought about the hermit crab early on and come to find out they actually do this the hermit crab outgrows its shell and it has to go looking for a new shell. And of course, the moment of transition from the old shell to the new shell is the most vulnerable time of its life. Yeah.

And the second thing that I thought it was really fascinating when I started looking this up is that it also goes through a phase of adjusting to the new shell because it doesn't quite fit right. And so it's got to take time to grow into that shell. So this is a stage of liminality, the in between. And we, and our ego's need for control, for clarity, for certainty, we suffer the burdens of ambiguity, anxiety, and ambivalence.

And during that stage, just not intellectually necessarily, but just our bodies are shaking and needing ground, you know, I need my familiarity. We're in the uncomfortable transitional phase of the unknown. And so disorientation is a stage that really needs a kind of midwifing, and you need somebody to sit along and reflect for you where you are in your journey, or else you will regress into patterns that existed and were very effective before, hence the nature of our entire addiction in treatment process. I think that's a great way to think about that. When you're in that liminal state, it's very confusing.

Like, you can't find your footing. And I think people have this sense that when you're in it, you can kind of like see where you're heading or like how it's going to work out or whatever. And it's like, no, that's the antithesis of what's happening. Like the whole point of it is that, you know, your compass is just spinning like this and you're very uncertain and unclear

and it's a scary time. But it's necessary, this dismantling. My friend Alexi Pappas calls it glop. Like if you think of the caterpillar and the chrysalis, you know, before it can emerge as the butterfly, it's not a process of like gradually shifting from one to the other. It has to dissolve into a goo and completely disappear. Like it has to, there is this shedding.

right, with the shell, et cetera. And that's just the deal, right? Like if you're going to move from where you were into this new and unclear space, you're taking this identity that you have inherited or co-signed and you're dismantling it, right? And that is the process of reckoning

with your inner authenticity. Yeah, becoming. Yeah, becoming, right? Yeah. You know, I don't know that you can do that alone successfully. Yes. And on top of that, you know, I often think a lot about how these things are designed because if you're behaving in a way that is leading your life in a not so good direction,

like what is the importance of those rock bottom moments of reckoning? Like, obviously, when we're in acute. pain and suffering, it's easier to make the change or to do the uncomfortable thing because you're up against it, right? The pain of your circumstances exceeds the fear of doing something different. But that change is always available to us.

Like, we don't need to go through this, right? Or, and yet, like, we're, this is the way it works, right? Like, it's like, why can't we just be, you know, more kind of robotic about it and be like, you know, like Spock would look at it and go, like, well, I have to stop doing this because this is not working and I have to do this.

And there's no friction in that process. I think of the idea from Buddhism, interdependent co-arising, that the flower and the bumblebee are not separate. And they're interdependent. The same can be said of the sunlight and the dirt and the rain. You know, it's a collective,

orientation and that is us and we become interdependent co-arizing with these various stages of our lives except unfortunately what we do is we cling to history and that's yeah what does that mean young defined a complex as an autonomous bundle of intra-psychic energy that had a feeling and thought pattern and there it is essentially our history manifest in the present moment. So the need to reach for alcohol or the need to call that person again or the need to go back to that job is our interdependence on how that was at one point serving us and our resistance to move into that next phase of hermit crab existence

or butterfly existence. And we know very well that we are creatures that are resistant to the unknown. And one of the ways I think about this is that the ego is an exceptional colonizer. It likes to grasp and hold what it can know and it will get involved

even sometimes to this is strange isn't it in opposition to our survival the ego will cling to our history and play out once useful or supportive or familiar ideas and ways of being in the world and that's strange for he called it the repetition compulsion and it's an odd dance that we do because we do have the capacities to to repeat. Again, that magic can be used in service to something harmful or something expansive. And maybe harmful, I like contracting.

It makes us contract. It keeps us small versus expands us into something larger. That was probably a better comparison. So our history shows up. We can't imagine what we can't imagine. We can't imagine the future. We can only imagine what happened in our past. And so because that has been so present in our psyches

that will cling to that history, despite the fact that being something that will create our undoing. This deep discomfort with uncertainty. Like I said, you're right here on my first, that will opt for the pain it knows over the unknown liberation. that is on the other side of the different choice.

Like every time until the pain of that known is just too much. My friend Jeff Kreppel says this. We have to have the explosion of at least one worldview then to get better at the next one and then the next one to realize that any worldview we have is not about meeting the present moment. It's about seeing the world through a particular lens with some certainty that once served us. So as you were showing uncertainty, I was thinking about how many fundamentalisms in our spiritual traditions are certain.

Yeah, they're selves to our discomfort with uncertainty. Exactly. So when you get into the more mystical orientation, you have a more fluid, not only are you fluid culturally. Like you bring a mystical Christian with a mystical Buddhist and they're saying the same things about. But fundamentalist Buddhists and Christians, they fight each other. Because the idea of difference

challenges the ego supremacy. And then we will be motivated to eradicate any suggestion or reminder of the fallibility of our certainty. And that's part of the insecurity there is that I'm going to kill you because you make me feel uncomfortable with the things that I've deemed to be certain. And because my relationship with certainty

is so fragile, I will direct that agitation and anger and fear out on you and hurt you for it. And that's something that plays out in all of our lives. Sure. We're seeing it writ large, you know, across the globe right now. It is the source of so much that divides us. And truly, I wrote this in the margin of a book once,

that I loved very much where I realized I'm a fundamentalist you know and I thought wow that's a really radical thing because I'm so anti-fundamentalism but what I'm saying there is

hi I'm John I'm a fundamentalist I need to recognize the ways that my psyche and ego inevitably create the concrete where there is fluidity I need to recognize the ways that I try to replicate my history

in service to previous ways of being in the world in the face of opportunities to dismantle those agreements that I made long ago, to encounter a reality that's beyond my current comprehension, that I have to be in process and relationship with those endeavors. And until I become attuned to my body's reactions and responses to the ways in which I cling to my previous orientations and expand myself and open to the new possibilities, I will continue to replicate that which served me once before. And I think that's true spirituality. I think true spirituality is a preparation for encountering the opposition of paradox

and the confusion of the unknown and the willingness to experience the fact that I am simultaneously an incredibly large and brilliant expression of consciousness and also a totally meaningless speck of sand in the most radical play of existence that the cosmos continues to expand beyond our comprehension that mystery continues to move like the horizon beyond where i can see it and as soon as i think i'm summiting one mountain i realize that there is about three million mountains to summit in the expanses of my visual field. Beautifully put, and yet, of this you still cannot be certain, right? You have to hold this loosely as well.

Because it is the certainties that when challenged inflame us most are the ones that we use to construct our identities, right? So when they're challenged, it's like a threat to like our whole belief system around who we are or our worldview, right? And as somebody who has this expansive, you know, kind of worldview and is holding their identity loosely to even, like, speak to that, speaks to, like, a certainty that you still then also have to be in a state of surrender around, right? Totally.

Yeah. You've beautifully articulated the paradox. Yeah, which is why, you know, I have a preference for like Buddhism and it's Zen Coens. And you know, it's basically like these things, they're pretzels, you know, and the more you try to get to the bottom of them, the more confounding they become for their, you know,

seemingly inherent conflicts. Because these are things that we never will get to the bottom of. And it's not about the answer. it's about living in the question and being in relationship with those questions. Well, and that's the gold. I mean, that's the juice, I think, is to be in this existence

and to live that as fully as possible, which is why I think that, of course I have need for certainty, and of course I have things that I believe are certain. And I don't presume to think that knowing any of this exempts you from the inevitabilities of life however what I do believe is that we are

in a powerful process and there are aspects of that process that we can intuit and observe and if that process is leading you to an idea that has certainty at its roots then I think reject it Yeah, danger.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, because that, people say that a lot of times, you know, I get this really weird look as a therapist when I'm sitting at a dinner table, you know, and somebody says, what do you do? And I'm like, I'm a psychotherapist and they kind of, oh, shit, you know, like knowing. Are you psychotherapizing me right now? Knowing none of this stuff. The defenses and the walls come up, yeah. You can see something in me.

I'm like, I, no, no. Yeah, it's clench. Like, yeah, yes. It is an ass clench. You see it in the face and then that's fear. Oh my God. Like what, you know, this person is going to see me as I actually am. Yeah, they know something about me.

And why is that fear inducing? Yeah, why is that fear inducing? Because if people knew who I actually was, John, I would be rejected and exiled and alone. Yeah, isn't that, thank you. Isn't that the problem? is that actually we would be brothers because me too you know i have all those same things i we all do right and and we just simply don't create sacred circles display our guts on the table and say this is who i am and this is how i show up and this is how i view myself and this is where i feel

week and this is where I feel shitty and this is where I'm narcissistic and this is where I'm self-important and this is where I'm insecure and the witnessing is the miracle is that there is not a single person out there who doesn't have that what we have are a lot of people out there who are resistant to sharing that truth that they've forgotten that that is the truth that is the nature of our nature, you know, that, again, back to disgust. That's why I think in these in fundamentalist religious traditions, there are, they just, so many purity codes, you know, and I think that shows us something about us, is that those systems are based on the certainties of this is what is pure and that is not in avoidance of something that's very real and messy. And so, again, I think God hides our most

profound spiritual realities beneath disgust so can we look at what's disgusting are you curious or interested in what's disgusting in your life what you've deemed to be disgusting are are you have you ever shared that with another human being i mean i i said to my wife recently i've got a really cool business thing happening that that may not happen and i've been feeling really insecure and really anxious about the whole thing and it's uncertainty and i said god i just feel so vulnerable I've got to do something about this vulnerability. She's sitting behind me, she goes, like, feel it? I was like, yeah, yeah, like feel it.

Yeah, these complicated emotions that we harbor, our shame, our guilt, our fear, our secrets, our regret over things that we've done, that we keep to ourselves out of fear that should anyone know them, that they will be rejected for that sharing. And, and, you know, it's obviously the opposite, as you said. Those things hold you prisoner.

You know, you're basically shackled by them. And when you can share them in a safe environment with honesty, you liberate yourself from them. I mean, Brne Brown, like, you know, shame can't survive the light, bad idea. And I just, I just know this from, you know, being in AA for a very long time where someone gets up in front of people,

And they tell this insane story of all the crazy shit that they did. Like, you're like, oh my God, you know, like he did that. And he's like telling it and he's laughing about it. Like it holds no charge over him. He is free of it because he's not self-identifying with it anymore. And the community of people that are on the receiving end of that feel less alone for the sharing because although the facts of that person's experience are different from theirs, you know, the emotions are familiar.

Like, they can see themselves in that behavior, in that courageous act of sharing. And that brings everybody closer together. Like, this is how you connect through that type of honest interaction. Yeah. And in part, one of the reasons why I started this podcast was because I wanted to model and demonstrate that for a non-AAA audience, like how powerful that is.

And so, you know, a core piece of this is always having people on who, you know, it doesn't have to be an addiction recovery story, but a story of transformation or a story in which somebody is comfortable enough to, you know, share the intimate, vulnerable details of their struggle and how they got through it because this is the connective tissue that makes us feel less alone in a world that is increasingly, you know, more and more divided and acrimonious and isolated in our own little worlds and our indulgences of self-obsession.

That's beautiful. Thank you. I love it because you referenced Brene there. And I wanted to add another Brenayism, which is with somebody who's worthy to receive it. You know, we share ourselves with somebody who's to be careful who you choose your audience wisely. There's this guy Lionel Corvett who's a Jungian analyst and he actually just died blessings to his work. He wrote one of my favorite books called the religious function of the psyche. And in it, he says the fundamental difference between a psychosis and a genuine religious experience is that somebody who's experiencing a psychosis

can't discern who to share it with and who not to share it with. I've never heard that before. So good. Are you on the side of the road saying the world's going to end? Or are you sharing with a beloved person that you're terrified about? about death and that you're feeling,

you're realizing your finiteness. And as beautiful and miraculous as this is, this consciousness ends at some point as we know it and we don't know what happens next. And if that doesn't scare you, then you're not paying attention, you know? So I thought, I had your expression when I first heard that because it's,

yeah, it's pretty good. It goes back to the discernment prayer in AA. For somebody who is listening or watching this, who is in pain because we're all in pain over one thing or another, but isn't steeped in therapy speak, maybe has never even gone to a therapist

or someone the courage to like share a secret with another, what is your counsel for how this person can take an initial step towards, addressing that pain and getting on a path of healing for themselves. You know, I had a fantasy. Thank you. This is such a good question. I had this fantasy about somebody beginning to speak it to the sky, you know, to speak it to a tree. For anybody that thinks that's crazy. I don't think it is. I think that you looked at this journal when we first started and I worked with-

Yeah, which I said like, that looks like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Like I've never seen such dense, you know, like writing page to page. Well, there was a time I was working with a person that I was his therapist and I cultivated a love for this man that I just, thinking about him, I just feel love. I was working with him to start journaling.

And he grew up in a really, harsh environment and so we were talking about how he begins to journal and he came to me and he said hey I started journaling but I've been like trying to find out where I hide it in my house and I was like

you live alone and he was like I don't know what do I do what if somebody finds it you know and it was like well shit you know um we can't even and that's that's one of my in my own journaling that's one of my agreements with myself is not to pull my punches don't edit editing happens later so even having a process of honesty with yourself i think it begins there first of all the the opportunity to cultivate relationships where you do have somebody who's worthy to receive it because arguably sitting drunk at a bar i used to bar

and was a young guy, you know, tons of vulnerability there that's forgotten or that there's mistakes in that game. There's no real risk. So I think speaking it to the sky is one of the first recommendations. Just begin to let it cross your lips out loud. Next, if you were to start journaling, notice how often, and it's often, and this is almost my practice in journaling. you would rather not write that thing down that you want to write down. And you get distracted or move on to something else. And so having a practice of a sacred refusal here.

Sacred refusal not to give in to the urge to hide. And it starts within, right? It's an inside job. And so it's long-term work, right? I think the act of becoming is what this life on some level is. I think that this entire existence on some level is an initiation. And death is a part of it and a portal. But part of our orientation is to learn how to show up.

And if I can hide from myself, I can certainly hide from others. And I do. And we do. And own it and that's fine. And God, I feel so insecure sometimes about the fact that I do that. And my wife is like my, the most incredible sparring partner in the world on this, you know, and that she does get to see the parts of me that I'd rather not show. And she gets to hold me accountable to that.

Yeah. And call me out when I'm, like, here I sit all day long talking to people about being vulnerable. And the moment that it comes to me being vulnerable, she's like, hey, motherfucker, feel that. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, oh, shit. And like, you can't do anything but laugh. just laughed. Well, yeah, but it's healthy to get right-sized like that, you know. Well, there's a little humility injection and a little accountability, Mr. Big Shot therapist.

That's right. Sit your ass down. It's true. I don't know where I'd be without that, certainly with her. She's an amazing sparring partner. And, and I do, I think that's one of the, one of my favorite elements of, this guy Kohut, he's a psychoanalytic theorist and therapist that says our ego development, one of the things we need is a benign adversary. Did you ever do martial arts? I box right now, and I've done a bit of martial arts, so I like the metaphor a lot.

I would imagine you get it from pushing yourself just to limits. I mean, you've pushed yourself far in so many ways. Yeah, but it doesn't involve, like, you know, an opposing force, you know, another human being. I don't know, I mean, I'm sure you face a lot of, of inter-opposing forces. Sure, yeah, there's plenty of internal conflict. I just don't need it.

I don't need another human being to, you know, find, find here, my opponent, you know, my antagonist is inside my head, yeah. Well, that's another one. And so how wonderful to project that out onto a relational dynamic and see it, and give it a face, kind of, and have it, have an autonomy, you know.

And we need that. We need a benign adversary to push up against us. And to be vulnerable enough to allow somebody to reflect us, to mirror back the parts of us that we would rather not look at. I mean, I'd love to be the dude who's like, I am levitating and spiritually realized. And no, I mean, one of my favorite clinical books to give people, I have two my favorite clinical books.

One is Everyone Poops by Tarotomi. It's a beautiful children's book. And all it is is a bunch of animals taking a shit. And I think it's perfect to say, hey, look, we all shit. And as much as you wanna hide it, that's what we do. The other is other places you'll go. That's a fantastic Dr. Seuss book. But to have a life partner who is, you know,

you use the word sparring partner, which could be interpreted pejoratively, but really somebody who is, you know, able to like see you and see through you and is not afraid to like push back and hold up the mirror. is an incredible gift for your growth and evolution, but also makes your life less easy than had you chosen a partner

who just is like in constant, you know, kind of like a supplicant, you know, like a guru's supplicant. Give me the bliss of an open den. Yeah, so it's like, I mean, I share this with my wife, who we just celebrated 22 years together, and I love my wife more than anything, and she's been my greatest teacher in many ways. And is that person who pushes me and can see

through my bullshit and when I'm feeling sorry for myself or down some kind of shame spiral or whatever, like she can be the anchor but also like the clarity. Like, oh, you're not seeing the opportunity here. Or like, here's an opportunity for you to really like get real with yourself about this pattern that you've been doing for 25 years so you don't pass it on to our kids. Like, are you gonna deal with this or not, you know?

And so it's, so it's not always comfortable. Like, I don't wanna look at that stuff. I don't wanna deal with that stuff, you know? Back to disgust. But it's like, you know, I don't wanna be in a relationship where I'm always being, you know, but like of course, like this is the beauty and this is what makes life real and meaningful like to commit to that and say,

okay, do I have the courage to look at that and confront it and work through it? Even if I fail or have my weak moments where I do what humans do, which is, you know, resort back into my hermit crab shell and try to pretend like everything's fine. You know, I wrote this down as you were talking because it's funny to be on this subject, you know,

gratify me, you know, like. Oh, please. Please, just gratify. And that's what we say. Life, gratify me. Like, my existence gratify me. My partner gratify me. My friend's gratitude.

Can't you see? Can't I'm, this is, you know, yes. And, like, life has different ideas about, like, your desires, if you could have them met in all the ways that you desire to have them met, I would argue you would not be satisfied. I don't think that's the path of satisfaction. And I think that, back to your question very early on. Which kind of sucks, but.

Fuck this. Back to your question about suffering, it's like, well, like, interestingly enough, this subject it's not to be fixed it is the thing that is the great revealer it's the great revealer of truths that are beneath the the ideas that i have about what this whole dance and play is and it it confronts me with levels of consciousness that i would never have connected with otherwise and in this context it's how beautiful that in in our cases we have partners who are willing to spar and and I get your note about that could be pejorative like when I spar I'm just getting to the point in boxing where my coach is starting to swing at me a little bit and we laugh he's not

hitting me hard but what he does is I've done two different martial arts and I've not in depth by no means but I've since I was a kid I always liked him so I boxing has been the one I've kept with the most I did jiu-jitsu for a little bit which was fascinating And in jiu-jitsu, what's interesting about that model, which I tend to really like, certainly for men's development, I like the Greek educational model a whole lot because they taught strategy, rhetoric, war, wrestling, that there's a knowledge in the physicality of the experience, and you get confronted physically. It's not arguable and it's not intellectual with your own limitations. And there's a ritual to it. totally this is a yeah this speaks to all the things we were talking about earlier and so i i think in jiu jitsu this metaphor is okay we go into class and you're partnered up with somebody um they in my case always knew more than i did and so i was low man on the totem pole and what would happen is eventually

i would get submitted here and at the end of it i'm not angry at the slightest i'm i'm not mad at all in fact what i do is say how did you do that teach me because what he's did was expose a weakness or a blind spot or the area that I needed to grow. And I willingly submitted to that process, despite the fact that often there was a bit of pain. Great. Boxing, same thing. My coach takes a swing at me. What he's done is he's helped me understand that I'm not blocking here. I'm not blocking here. And I'm learning experientially how to do those things. And I think it's a fantastic metaphor for marriage or for long-term partnership that I and my partner are interwoven in an opportunity to show up in ways that men typically, men typically oddly enough,

let's see if this is your experience, men typically avoid conflict. And I've seen that with most men despite the fact that we're supposedly this aggressive dominant yet men are like totally sidestepping shit all the time 100% and and so i don't want to ruffle feathers i don't want to so we swallow shit all the time and i am no exception so i swallow shit and get in my head and try to rationalize and justify and then of course it comes out in some passive aggressive way or some withdrawal or whatever it does. And my partner's going, hey, what is that bullshit? You know, what are you doing?

She says it, not like that, by the way. She says it beautifully. She's amazing, but she's pointing out part of those adaptations that I internalized early on about what matters, what my value is, what my worth is. Can I communicate about parts of myself that are hurting? can i communicate about parts of myself that are angry or agitated like i can certainly do that with men because men have two switches rage and withdraw good like i can do that guys we can bump up against

each other but in this dance it's different and i'm most men i know swallow swallow they just take it in and take it in and withdraw and reject themselves and the the dance of the partnership is to incarnate an opportunity to communicate about what What is genuine, I'm hurting. You know, I'm feeling something that I was not raised to communicate. It's all contingent upon a deep level of trust, though. Because short of that, you're venturing a risk that when you share that, that you will indeed be rejected, right?

So the bond has to be pretty deep in order to create the container where that can be not only shared, but received in a way that doesn't threaten the relationship. And that's something that's difficult to really create. I think, you know, I think there are a lot of men out there who suffer that thing of repressing their emotions out of fear of what might happen if they share it. And in partnerships where, you know, if they do share that thing, it will be weaponized against them. Yep. And it is. And correspondingly, I totally agree. And I think that's an important point.

there are a lot of partners out there whoever they may be in this romantic dance that because it's not just men or women it's it's it's it's polarity whoever's on the other side of this dance is in need of witnessing and not weaponizing and not taking advantage of that opportunity

and so that's the dance that we do I take a risk you meet me there we're more likely to create that bond of trust and so I do think in a similar way, as much as we're talking about men needing to open up and communicate and move into moments of communication and honesty, their partners are in need of giving them a few wins. You know, giving us, I love Terry Real talks about this, us, giving us a few wins. And I want my partner to win when I'm my most hopeful.

self when I am my what he called the he calls the adaptive child when I'm in my adaptation I am probably wanting to fight and that does not set the situation for trust building and so then I do the repair work and say well hey I messed up there so sorry and then we can dance but yeah I think that the irony of men typically being the part of this dynamic that tends to avoid conflict, yet needs to learn how to communicate clearly. And that's one of the things we do in the men's group that Rodney Waters and I facilitate. As I say to these guys, look, we operate on three levels. The inner life, the outer life, and the life amongst us. And so I want you to talk about your outer life. What's going on? What's happening in your marriages, in your

partnerships, and with your kids, and with your work, and with your family history, and all those things valid and important and this is a safe place to talk about it also your inner life which is the parts of yourself that you probably don't communicate about this is the private part of your life that you may not have ever opened up and written down in a journal or shared with a tree i think even probably more difficult is the life amongst us when you circle up with eight other men each week and one of them annoys these shit out of you just gets under your skin all the time the way they talk the way they talk over people the way they hide whatever it is whatever your particular complex is that constellates in that space and then how not to attack them for it or blame them for

it but own that it's actually about you it's not about them they're doing whatever it is they do you probably have some early experience that we could locate in your history that somewhat created and contributed to the conditions that are activated in that moment and projected out onto that other person. So the dance is really how do you withdraw the projection? And how do you start to take ownership for the fact that that thing, not only do I do it to you, I do it to me. So I now need to tangle with this and say, I'm, I'm projecting that, right? I'm disowning that experience, painting your face with it, and then getting mad at you for it.

And that's what happens oftentimes. I get mad at you. I'm sorry, we do the thing. You apologize, shake hands. Okay, great. But in a therapeutic dynamic, one of the opportunities there is to say, hey, this thing might be about you, and we need to figure that out. But primarily, it's about what stirs for me.

and I communicate with you in the group, what's happening with me in those moments. You're talking over me, I feel agitated. You're speaking about somebody with like contempt and it bothers, whatever it is, own it. It's not about the person or their behavior, it's about your reaction to it. Your body is affecting.

Your internal turmoil over it, like what is being triggered and agitated in you and like, what is that about, right? And there's agency in that because you can't control what that other person is doing or not doing, you can walk around and resent them for it, but it's beyond your ability to, you know, kind of like control. So what can you control?

Well, you can ultimately control your response to them. And if you can like look inward and like figure out what that thing is and set about healing it, then the trigger, the button gets removed. It does. It does, you kind of liberate yourself. And that's the brilliance of how all of this is really an inside job. We are, to a large extent, unconscious of all of those, and I'll use the term complexes,

because that's part of the tradition that I was raised in, those autonomous bundles of energy that just take over. And then I see the world through its lens. I'm no longer this guy. I'm a different expression of this guy. And there's an identity there. and there's a history there and there's a belief system there and there's a language system and there's kind of a a patterned way of existing like an eddy in a river and i get caught by

that spiral and cycle and i can stay caught in that for years i can stay caught in that for a lifetime you know back to that earlier example i was giving about heartbreak you know like i all of us hopefully suffered the catastrophic destabilizing experience of heartbreak and guaranteed we made some conclusions about ourselves and about the world and if we're not conscious enough we will continue that agreement and project that dynamic onto everybody else in the world and will continue to live as if that is absolute and complete truth never realizing that that was a conclusion that was made from one experience and then generalized and projected onto all others and that's sad that you're you're in fact living out of your history you're not living in a present

connection this is like an Eckhart tolaid wouldn't talk about the pain body here there's a sadness there because you've limited your capacities to show up in the world that's back to that contract contraction as opposed to expansion my expansion is that really hurt that's extremely painful i go through a grieving process i do whatever i need to do to feel fully and completely robert black said something i loved which is we need to be grief eaters god i love that i'm scared of that grief eaters yeah preparing to consume and to be consumed by grief i went to a funeral of a friend recently, and it was a pretty stale funeral. There was no eros, there was no feeling.

Even my tears, they started to come. I could feel his presence, and then they went away. I thought, that's a weird way to grieve. You know, everybody hit their marks, and everybody did their thing, and they said what they needed to be said, and they did this and did that and stand up and sit down. And I went to this, another friend of mine's funeral, beautiful beloved friends hunt and chuck were married and one of the pastors is from the south

she's a black pastor who we got into this beautiful conversation and i told her about this funeral there's a white funeral you know white folks and she goes have you ever been to a black funeral and i said no she goes oh it's not over until it's over i thought oh god i wish i wish i wish She says, oh, we go and grieve and purge and scream and yell and let everything come out in community, connected, purge that out. I think that's such a great metaphor for where we are right now, the absence of that. We don't know how to grieve. So I had a conversation once with a friend who was going to join our practice, but she ended up, I'm starting her own practice.

And she was initiated as a whaler in this community in Mexico, in this tribal community in Mexico. Whaler as in screaming, not whaler as in hunting whales. No whale, yeah, no whales here. So the tribe had anointed a family system to be the designated whaler, and they would train and practice how to emote in that way, knowing that because socializing is so important, we want to mimic each other and do it socially appropriate.

No one's going to wail unless someone wails first. That's it, right? And so the culture knows this. And what they did is they anointed this group of people to pass on this tradition, generation to generation. So they could teach the entire community how to grieve, how to wail, how to fully express. the absolute and complete devastation

of losing those with whom we love. That's beautiful. Yeah, we're preclamped, you know. We shove it down. We're, you know, trying to adhere to the strictures of our, you know, social conventions and all of that. And this is a, this is a, you know, a kind of betrayal of what the human heart needs to do

in order to to reconstitute itself, I suppose, like, you know, and be transformed by that experience to truly feel it from the heart, rather than intellectualize it in the mind, go to the funeral, check the box, okay, we did that, and now life moves on. Oh, and so much of earlier conversations coming back.

So what do you do in the absence of that? Well, you go buy something. you go drink something, you go smoke something or fuck something or tune out, totally beneath your awareness. Yeah, it's coming out somewhere. So beneath your consciousness, you are expressing that in ways that it has to leak out. So the culture hasn't set up the entire communion to allow for those. very universal realities to have a container. And I would suggest that any culture that doesn't recognize and harmonize with the nature of

our psychological, spiritual, social, and physiological selves is doing some kind of harm. and probably knows it on some level because it doesn't take somebody who is, has got a doctorate to realize that this is the truth. Anybody on a string corner knows that this is the truth. I have tear ducks for a reason. They are to purge. And they are activated in moments of complete joy

and they are activated in moments of devastating pain. And for me to be participating in, in a culture that doesn't teach me how to be most fully human, that's harmful. I wanna end with something he wrote that I feel like has something to say about everything that we said today. And what you wrote was, you're not broken,

you're being hollowed for something more enduring. You're not failing, you are being invited to love more full. fully, you are not alone, you are speaking the soul's oldest language. So perhaps you can end this conversation with a reflection on that. God, you've finished with soul.

And this word, this idea of soul has captivated me in many ways. Something that's universal, an experience that's universal and also particular, that whatever that is has a deep, private and personal relationship with each of us that is observing our lives, that is communicating to us in emotion, in thought, in dreams, in images, and in fantasies, sometimes well beneath what we would imagine to be ourselves, way to the side of what we could imagine and comprehend to be us. And those depths are longing for, I think, relationship. And we've created social spaces that are oblivious to this universe. universal reality that we all experience that beckons us for deeper communion when I started doing this work my friend Sean I started reading young and I didn't understand a word of it I felt so insecure

I called him I said what have I done like I like this is so I don't understand what the fuck this guy's saying this is horrible and he said hang with it he said psyche's like a lover if you attend to her she'll attend to you i thought i can work with that so self-love is not about necessarily just affirming yourself it's about communing with the deepest most uniquely particular expression of consciousness that is simultaneously universal and that we all have that experience communing with that doing so in the recesses of our own private lives but also doing so in our communities in our social spaces because we all know it's there but unfortunately we deny it and we repress it and we reject it and we go quiet so i think just taking that opportunity to

notice because it's not a voice in that it has words but it's a nudging it's a fluidity it's a it's a movement it's a dance and do you dance with it's a beautiful play this is a beautiful game so thank you i'm i'm really honored um my being here with you and i'm grateful for the time and the space to be able to connect in this way the gratitude is shared that was that was really beautiful what you just expressed and just the entire conversation. I'm delighted to have spent this time with you. It was a real treat and I'll be thinking about everything

that you shared for a long time. So thank you for that and I'm gonna thank you on behalf of the audience who's gonna enjoy this. So wow, amazing man, thank you. Thank you. Where would you like people, where would you like to direct people who wanna learn more about what you're doing?

Yeah, I have a website that's up. It's Dr. John W. Price, DR, J-O-H-N-W-P-R-I-C-E. It was a joke. A couple John Price is out there if you're Googling. I have to put these signifiers of Dr. N-W. So, DR. John W. Price. If you don't put the doctor up, you're going to get the other guy. There's a lot of us in the world.

And so that is the website that I've got, and I've got a number of opportunities for people to connect. I lead a number of monthly online groups. One's called the Open Gate, where we explain. explore the little teachers. One's called the lantern, where we explore, I would say, kind of the meat and potatoes of the book that I'm writing, which are elements like the different levels of consciousness,

the little teachers, the three attributes of spirituality. It's kind of the nuts and bolts of what I believe to be a spiritual practice. Of course, check us out at the Center for Healing Arts and Sciences at the Center for HAS.com. Which is in the physical...

Brick and mortar space. Yeah, is in Houston. It is in Houston. And I've got some stuff online, you know, Instagram at The Sacred Speaks. Of course, check out the podcast. I've had a really enriching experience doing that. So thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, very cool. Amazing.

We did it, man. How do you feel? How do you feel? Good. Somatically. What is your body? I feel my, I'm sweating like crazy. No, come on.

Yeah. This is great. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today,

visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, voicing change, and the plant power way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest, and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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Plants. Namaste. Thank you.