S2E6: A Conversation About Somatic Self Leadership Training with Brian Fritz

Brian 00:02

So maybe to cue it up the other way. I don’t know, if you wanted to, like, kick it off. But like, We had talked What, like a week and a half ago, and you were saying that this Somatic Self Leadership Training is for Somatic Self Leadership is the name that you kind of landed on through reviewing a lot of the types of work that we do. And I was actually kind of excited to hear the word. Because it’s just a lot of stuff and I don’t know that it has a proper name that really describes what it is. But maybe I’ll just like, kick it over to you to give your Webster’s definition of what Somatic Self Leadership is?

Chris 00:53

I think what we can do here is let’s just have a conversation, an overarching conversation about what is Somatic Self Leadership Training? And I think you alluded to a, you mentioned something in our last conversation that I think, really, we could kick this conversation off with. Sure. And you were saying something about vulnerability and protecting parts of yourself. Can you go back to that and just share with me what, what you meant by that, or what you were saying, when you said that? You don’t have to try to repeat yourself.

Brian 01:32

I’m just writing notes on the back of the envelope to help kind of keep me Yeah, linear. Somewhat. I was just describing to you how intellectualization is my armor, right. And so everybody in the entire world has some strategy that they’re employing to protect them from vulnerability. And yet, at the same time, being able to deal with uncertainty. And being able to deal with vulnerability is like the key to actually getting what you want, right? Like we have, I keep talking about how it feels like we’re all that boy nervously on the other side of the dance floor. And we just feel like, if we had nice enough clothes, if we had big enough muscles, if we had.

Chris 02:31

When you’re saying that to me from a Somatic Self Leadership Training perspective, you are looking outside of yourself. If I had this, I would be okay.

Brian 02:46

We’re just like, not ready to cruise across that dance floor and ask our other person to, to dance with us, we just keep preparing for that moment, not realizing that being able to deal with the uncertainty and the vulnerability is the real skill there. It’s not the muscles, it’s not the clothes, it’s not anything else. I mean, sure that that maybe plays some part, right? But the real game is allowing yourself to fail and deal with uncertainty. And a million other things that just kind of feels like eating a shit sandwich, I guess.

Chris 03:27

That’s where I like eating a shit sandwich exactly like this is, this is the conversation I think we need to be having, because what I noticed within this conversation is you keep saying everybody, yeah, like we all fundamentally are having a human experience. And we even when we go to learn about ourselves, there’s this propensity to look at to think I’m going to go read a book, or I’m going to, I’m going to listen to a podcast, right? Like you’re doing right now. I’m going to acquire some information and I’m going to, I’m going to gather it, I’m going to place it on me like metals and that there is even a propensity to intellectualize my experience. And what I’m doing is I’m, I’m actually, I’m not actually disconnecting. I’m not actually connecting to my experience as it is. And yet if we think what we’re going to do here in this conversation is we’re going to bounce in and out and we’re going to keep coming back to what is sSomatic Self Leadership Training, right? Like those four words like we’re going to break them down, right and this protection from vulnerability, this this i this thing that I am that I am having, I have created this This protector this this identity, which is my external self, and it is hiding, it is protecting some inside some core, no matter what words we use for it right? Like some people might call it the true self and the mask, right. Others might call it their protector, right? Some call it their identity, some call it ego, right, but there’s an outside and there’s this inside. Right and so Somatic is, comes from the word Soma, meaning body, right energy body, though the non conceptual body, the felt experience that you’re having. And what I, what I find so awesome about what you were saying earlier, is that this is something that everybody has, right. Like, we’re all we’re all dealing with this in some form or another, right. And so what we’re doing within these groups is creating spaces where we are gathering, and we’re arriving, we’re setting some agreements, we’re learning some, we’re creating some structure. And then within that we are getting to open, we’re getting to, we’re guiding men out of their head and go at patterns. And we’re, we’re bringing our awareness into the body as it is. And then in that experience, we’re noticing that we can open and that we can close, right, and we’re noticing a bunch of beautiful, amazing things, but they’re happening in this space. Right. And that, to me, is the training, right? When we, when we put it all together Somatic Self Leadership Training, right? There’s a lot of different portals, right? There’s lots of different ways to do this work. But I think one of the most fundamental ways in is the realization that I am that the self that I have an external self, and I have an internal self. And now along the way to get here to where I am today, I went through an adaptive process of protecting myself to survive, right to be able to survive to get to where I am today. And that that adaptive self, that that thing that I identify with, isn’t me. That’s not me. It’s my mask. I’m experiencing my life through it. But yeah, unconscious of that I’m not aware of it until I drop out of it.

Brian 07:41

So I’m hearing like this external versus internal self and like this, like adaptive process and strategy to maybe go in a little bit further. I think that maybe it would be helpful to give some examples of what that looks like.

Chris 08:00

You mean, like examples in our own lives of what it looks like to note?

Brian 08:04

Or just like, in general?

Chris 08:08

I mean, when it comes to the masks, I think we see this all over the place, right? I mean, I’ll go first if just any time I am confronted, right, I noticed tension in my body. And I might not be aware of this right now. But I am trying to be a good person. I am trying to do things the right way. And that trying is, is this quality, right? This like aggressiveness or this like almost as if I allowed myself to be exactly as I am, something would go wrong. Right? It’s this like, pervasive cultural message that we receive that if you don’t try to be good, something’s gonna go wrong. And I feel like I can zoom into I mean, there is a message I received from one of the men in our community and and he he said, if I just do one more project if I just update one more website if I just send one more tweet or respond to one more email, learn to use Blender get promoted write an article, learn to code speak at a conference working with W three, then I’ll be safe then I can relax. Right and it’s like right, like this is so and from a somatic experiencing perspective. There I am having an experience right now, like right now, it’s not in my head, it’s in my body. Right and what we do, what I think is so just magical or wild and creative and beautiful about the work that we do with men? Is that telling guys about this right? Like having this conversation, isn’t it? These words that you and I are talking about are using right now conversation we’re having is a signpost to an experience, we’re saying, Guys, come try something just come into this circle, right? Come check in, right come gather come drop in with us. And that this is the things we are doing in this space are so fundamental, they’re so fundamental to the human experience, that it’ll just, it’ll just happen. All you have to do is slow down.

Brian 10:52

It brings up for me, the thought of I would, I would say, like an intellectual self versus like something happening in your body in this sort of dichotomy, and, like, even trying to convince somebody that there’s like, a reality outside of your intellectual reality. And it’s just like, It’s experiential reality, and there’s multiple things like even that, sound like a barrier

Chris 11:22

Like who am I?

Brian 11:24

I think that I don’t know, you could take this a million different ways. But the way that I finally like, let go of this whole, like, intellectual reality as being so incredibly rock solid, was actually through being led to breathwork. When I got there, I think breathwork actually does a really good job of helping us to get into our bodies and experience something else. Because my, my whole thing was, like, let’s navigate the world as, as it exists between my ears, but then, like, starting to see that oh, like, that entirely shifts, being able to heal being able to feel all of these different things, what if you’re, what if you lived in an entirely different reality, right?

Chris 12:18

Like, when do you refer to breath work? Are you referring to the breath work that we do?

Brian 12:27

Holotropic breathwork?

Chris 12:29

Let’s appreciate that as one one avenue into Somatic Self Leadership training, right? You’re training, you’re physically doing a practice. You’re not thinking about doing a practice, you’re not writing a book about a practice, you’re not right, you are physically practicing. And that form of breath work is just the beginning to it if you’re lying on the ground, you’re allowing yourself to connect with the body, and then to connect with the ground beneath you, you’re arriving in space and you’re being guided to bring your awareness into your body. And all of this is somatic. It’s a physical sensation that’s happening in the body, a thought is not happening in the body of thought, right? It’s and so when we asked when I asked you earlier, like, who am I like, how do we define the self with this work? Like, I am not my role? I’m not my thoughts. I’m not in my mood. And my judgments are not my stories, but so many people talk about that but how do we make it land? The term the definition that we use within our practice, is that you are that which is experiencing? That experience is felt in the body? It’s not felt in your head? When you had this, even when you say to me like oh, it was what was between my ears? There’s this quality of protection. If I understand the world, I’ll be safe. And how many men, how many young men learn that, right? If I can be the smartest one in the room? If I can show people my intellectual prowess, they won’t see how I’m actually feeling. And so you’re brittle, like a China cup. Like if you get dropped on the floor, you break you break open, and I don’t know, I just, I feel like we just have to be able to talk about these things from I mean, the 10,000 things right, like from, from so many, there’s so many different perspectives to come into this work from, but you need a certain set of fundamental building blocks to start to, to start to comprehend the work that we’re doing in these spaces.

Brian 14:53

So one of those is starting to see this internal versus external self right?

Chris 15:01

I would say that to just go first, I would say that just like any form of practice, it’s all it’s learned. We have the view of the practice and the results, right? So we don’t bake a cake by we don’t bake a cake. And we bake a cake in a series of steps, right? Sure we learn the steps by baking the whole cake. So right now we’re going to talk about baking the cake. Sure, right. And we’re going to talk about different things. But then you actually have to go practice baking. And so if we just start with somatic yes, that I have a body, right, I have a physical body. And that body’s natural. It’s a part of the fun, like, it is a physical thing. It’s made up of a nervous system, it’s born of the Earth, it’s, it’s, you’re not separate, we are actually a part of the physical reality that we are in, we’re not trying to escape that reality, we’re actually connected, right, and now we start to uproot, we can start to appreciate why all of these meditative practices all start with arriving, and then feeling the seat beneath you. There’s a structural reason for this. And so then within the body, I’d say that for men, and like coming into this space, a lot of I think one of the things I’ve found to be the most useful is to start to have an intellectual understanding of your nervous system. And the difference between feeling and thinking just simply needing to step into that there is a difference between sensuality, the sense of feeling the body, and thinking about the body, or thinking in general, or like a thought, an idea is not the physical sense of feeling the body.

Brian 16:58

So let’s say that somebody wanted to be able to just experience things in the simplest way possible, and be able to instead of being within their thoughts, like to be in their body. What would you give them as maybe the right right quick is exercise?

Chris 17:16

Right, now let’s take our right hand just either hand either when you want and just put it on your thigh. And just feel into the palm of your hand and allow it to turn on. What do you notice?

Brian 17:43

It feels kind of like a buzzing sort of energy.

Chris 17:49

I feel a bit of your heartbeat.

Brian 17:51

Yeah, it takes more focus.

Chris 17:53

That’s attention. That’s your attention. And now, what about your right foot? Your big toe?

Brian 18:02

Yeah, as you call out the name of the body part, like my attention goes into it.

Chris 18:08

So now that was happening before I mentioned it. It was happening. You just weren’t aware of it. Right? Because your awareness was in your head, it was on coming up with the next thing to say. Or you were trying to pay attention to what I was saying. Now you do it, you do it to me? You asked me. This is called pointing by the way.

Brian 18:33

It makes me think of yoga nidra. But I guess instead of being in the limbs, which is probably a little easier, maybe start to point at things in your core. And so what can you move your awareness to, let’s say, right above your navel and describe how that feels.

Chris 18:57

I notice as you asked me to, she brought my awareness to you, you said the navel but then actually my whole top of my shoulder blades lit up. And I felt the underneath part of my chin. And then I felt like, like a rock on my sternum. And I can feel my like, inside of behind my groin, that I just loosened the I didn’t know there was tension. Like I was holding I was holding tension around where I was in my pelvic girdle and as you surprised me, I became so aware of that tension that my awareness just relaxed. Now I’m gonna stop leading the way that I am. So what did we like discovering right there?

Brian 20:03

It sounds maybe a little silly to be like, you have a body, right? Everybody? It’s like, okay, sure I’ve got a body, right. But, like really feeling that difference between and so much of our world requires us to just be up in our heads and like intellectually trading thoughts.

Chris 20:20

What is the requirement? What is it about our fundamental nature that makes that happen? The fundamental nature of our existence of just being you or being me? I’m not sure. For me, what I’m pointing to is that it’s unsafe. That my frontal cortex, right, my, I have to show up on time, I have to not get hit by a car, when I walk across the street, I have to make sure that I turn off the broiler after I do something in the oven. And so the operating system is trying all the time to reduce the amount of information that’s coming in. And it’s making judgments about my fundamental experience in order to keep my body safe. Right? And that, that the brain is cutting off your ability to feel your toe, because it’s not helpful right now. Yeah. Right. But when we slow down, right, and even the sensation leads to an emotion, which leads to a feeling, which leads to a thought, which leads to a judge, an attitude, which leads to a judgment, and then a story. And then a belief.

Brian 21:50

Like I can follow like three of those, but have a lot.

Chris 21:53

I know. So the sensation in the body leads to an emotion. Right. And so since emotions are physical sensations that are happening in the body, that the mind is consciously or subconsciously aware of that or telling the brain that something important is happening to the body’s well being. The only difference between the emotion and the sensation is that somewhere along the way, you’ve identified with the physical sensation, in a way, and it says, The mind is telling the brain, hey, or the brain is telling the mind that, that that hey, something are happening right now is important for the body’s well being. But so much experience is happening inside the body, there’s so much going on that it cuts it out, right? A very, very, very small amount of physical and sensory information actually makes it up from the bottom, from the body to the to the brain. And so, just within this one, this one word of Soma, or somatic right now the next the differentiator we want to make here is that we have our physical body, and then we have the felt experience of it. Like when you think about your toe, or you visualize your toe, that is not the same thing as feeling your toe. It’s not like there’s something to physically experience to discover there. I can feel my brain. And the more you relax, the more you can feel the tension around your ears and your head, and it all has to be relaxed to actually allow it to come to the surface. So what I like to call this as the wallet effect, if you sit on a wallet all the time. You don’t notice it. But then if you remove it, you’re all of a sudden, like, oh, like, now you feel different, right? And so with the work that we do, here is the first step. The first like cornerstone of the work that we do with men is just simply bringing this to light, right? Like, being like guys like dudes, like there is physically something to experience in your body. And our culture of manhood that we are a part of has told us to be tough, and told us to be aggressive. And that if we weren’t tough and we weren’t aggressive, and we weren’t stoic, we’re somehow not a man, and that that culture has disconnected us from the very source of our ability to connect, to feel to be with the experience of the profundity of our human life. And that I cannot connect with anything, I can’t connect with my partner, I can’t connect with a great movie. I can’t connect with art, I can’t feel my sense of spirituality because your sense of spirituality is a sense. It’s not a thought. It’s not a religion. And so then you see what happens, why people have religious experiences, like you get into religion versus having a sense of spiritual connection to the, to the nature of the Divine, or something greater than yourself, that’s felt in the body, it’s not about what someone says.

Brian 25:39

So you’re saying that all of these senses that are coming in, by then allowing us to be in this space, where we’re able to slow down, reduce the amount of inputs that are coming in, and just really work on prioritizing those, those pieces of us that we might not? It might not be able to feel otherwise, unless we’ve consciously made this effort.

Chris 26:09

We might not be able to feel otherwise. Unless we make this conscious effort. Yeah, let’s just appreciate those words, you just said we might not be able to feel otherwise. Unless we make a conscious effort. That is like the amazingness of those words, we might so let’s break that down. We might not be able to feel like, top down, able to feel unless we make a conscious effort. So this realization that I am actually going unconscious. Right, like when I get up, and I get out of my bed, and I walk into the other room, most of that in the morning. from my bed to the hot water kettle I could actually do that with my eyes closed.

Brian 27:23

How many of us drive to work right? And don’t even.

Chris 27:27

The body, the brain is a battery, and it’s saving energy. And it’s actually cutting off an experience of the light of your life. And so we have to make a conscious effort. Now there’s a difference between attention. And being serious, right, or trying so hard that we cut it off, or actually doing is learning to be with the experience as it is, right, we’re opening to realize that like I’m having an experience right now. And if I just allow my attention to be here, come into the present, I get in touch with it, right, like and it’s it’s a wave, it’s wafting, it’s changing. It’s effervescent, it’s, it’s, there’s always a quality to it. Now, within that, we then have our relationship with the experience. And that blocks us from it, right. And this is where in our groups, it’s so important to let guys know that there are no good or bad emotions, there’s only constructive or destructive reactions. So this is where emotional awareness comes in. Because emotional awareness is our experience of our life. It’s not our intellectual life, if we couldn’t feel our emotions, we wouldn’t have any experience, we would just be it would just be information wouldn’t have a texture, it wouldn’t have a quality. We couldn’t feel our life. Like that’s all happened through the nervous system. and those emotions aren’t linear. They’re a filing system of combinations. So like, one emotion reminds the brain of a billion experiences, a billion memories, which is why the body doesn’t have a memory, it doesn’t have time. Which is why trauma gets stored in the body because we tightened around it.

Brian 29:33

It’s more of that shorthand, right where the brain is kind of in a permanent low power mode, right? Where you can only like, have so much input coming in at once, but then also, you are experiencing those feelings and those perceptions that are coming in and then your brain is then referencing all previous times that were close to, decide what it wants to do with that.

Chris 30:00

Self energy, the it within selfless internal family systems work we talked about the nine C’s of self energy, that self energy is Connected, Compassionate, Curious, I can’t go through all of them off top my head right now. Right? But that there’s this quality of self energy and that when we’ve lived our life as human beings and men through this protector part, our experience of our life is not that it isn’t actually compassionate and connected. So after a men’s group when we slept when we checked in for an hour or two hours together, why do you think guys leave energized, we leave energized because we’ve relaxed, that protector part and it takes physical energy to maintain that shield. Yeah. And so when we’re in a group and our nervous systems and our breathable line, and we feel safe, right, and we start to come into attended men, then we start to open to receive an even if a man is dealing with a challenging subject, we are holding space for it, and we’re breathing with it and allowing any and all emotions to be present. What guys find is they leave and they’re like, holy crap, I, I feel good.

Brian 31:26

I was gonna sit and say like, we don’t realize that some amount of our brain’s low power mode has been actually assigned to this thing we had no perception of right before, like, not a full conscious perception of this thing. And then once you’re able to then like, let that thing go, then all of that, that energy that powers then like restored back to you, again, just kind of spitballing but like that, that’s kind of what’s what’s landing for me is like that, that power of all the things that we’ve been hung up on that we’ve been, we’re able to then release that and more commit our experience to other things.

Chris 32:03

If we just, let’s just put a pin in somatic right here and, and to just to just leave it there, we’re gonna come back to that, the great wisdom dwells in the body, right, like, ancient Zen phrase, right? The great wisdom dwells in the body. It’s not in the mind, it’s in the body. Next thing to just remember, the body is, is always connected to the ground to the space, we are disconnected from it, we are dropping in, we’re getting grounded, we’re bringing our awareness out of here and into here, and the minute we actually do it, we have a million stories, and things that we have to get through to get there. But when we actually do the practices of breath work, when we actually show up in a space with a group of guys, and we we slow things down, we use these structural tools like, like, like maps to get into our body, we find that we actually feel better and so that’s the, the somatic thing, right? And then we connect it with the somatic stuff that emotions are physical sensations happening in the body. So our experience of our life is felt in our body. And this and every time we come into our body, we’re telling, we’re reminding ourselves that there is something to experience. The second I think I know it, I’m telling myself a story. Because it’s, it’s responsive. It’s responding to the environment, without me thinking, like, I don’t have to think about my digestive system contracting when I’m stressed. It does it on its own. Yeah, right. Okay, so now self, right. And if we start off with self, so we have somatic and we have self, it’s like, Who the heck am I? Like how do I even begin and I think within within our art community within our practice, like, the the best way, though, the only way that I found in my experience to really work with this in community with other men is that I am that which is experiencing and we can explore this for a lot of different ways. But it’s not my role. My identity, the things that I identify with, the stories that I tell myself my egoic patterns, right? And we all kind of have an awareness of this, but because we intellectualize it and we haven’t had a physical experience. have it in the body, we don’t have experienced a place with unless you’ve actually have the view that we’re talking about right now. And you’ve gone through some physical experiences that like the breath work or, or go Island, we can talk about psilocybin, right, and we can turn, right, we can go down that avenue. But the, I think from within our practice, one of the things that I really want a guide to guide men towards is that this is not, we don’t need anything external to do this, right. So then that’s where we start to have the conversation that you had already brought up. And like, again, one of the things that I think is important to recognize in this work is, you’re gonna find all of this out on your own, you don’t need me and you don’t need me. You don’t need someone to teach you this. It’ll accelerate the path, this work. But what I liked about what you said earlier, is that like, these are discoveries, these are things that you’ve already you already knew that you had this shield, this intellectual shield, that was there. Absolutely. You maybe weren’t connecting it to the somatic experience you’re having right? Putting it all together. But this, so then this is where with the self, if I am that which is experiencing, meaning I can experience through an angry episode. I can get angry, right? But I am not an angry person. Like we make each ourselves into nouns. But we’re verbs Right? Like he’s an asshole. No, no, he was like an asshole. She hurt a part of herself, came out and didn’t know how to get its needs met. And was projecting or, or looking to get agency and safety how and so this part is there. So one of the one of the like, next pieces in that area that we talked about is the this comes from ifs internal family systems work. It’s fun. It’s another fundamental building block of, it’s not a it’s not necessarily a concept. But it’s a way of looking at the self. And it’s this, this concept, I guess it is concept, its concept of monolithic personality versus multiplicity of self. So this idea, right, that I am one person that I am right, I have this monolithic, like Chris Wilson, somewhere over there. There’s Chris Wilson, that is me, right or Brian?

Brian 37:55

I think I’ve heard this described before is like, if you can imagine that multiple personality disorder is just an extreme adaptation of something that we all have. We all have these many selves, right, that had, like, integrated into like, one thing. But yeah, there’s many different versions of us. One version may be at odds with another or something like that. But we’re just so much more nuanced than just one thing.

Chris 38:26

You recognize that people’s language, we do this on our own right. So like, part of me was so angry. Like we’ll say it naturally. And so all we’re doing within our practice is starting to bring our awareness out of our head. And so this is the practice of finding trailheads and finding protectors and finding exiles, finding the parts of yourself that didn’t quite fit in, in your experience of your life. So maybe, as a young man, when I was a little boy, maybe when I was creative, or high energy, it just wasn’t it. It’s not that it was pushed down or someone said, You’re bad. It just wasn’t promoted. And so I, a part of me, learned to protect that part of myself. And within the IFS if there’s some omit one of my favorite books on this as you are the one you’ve been waiting for, bringing us bringing courageous love to partnerships. And it talks about the magical kitchen metaphor of how we are this, this one self that’s in charge of all of these parts were like the parent for all of these little kids. But when our kids are when we don’t know how to take care of our kids, they become unfed. They get hopped up on sugar and caffeine, they’re running around, right. And they’re just looking for someone to take care of them. Right. And so what we’re doing on this journey of becoming whole is we are learning to be the primary caretaker of those parts instead of relying on our friends, our community, or our partner, or our job, right to take care of it for us. But that care that attention is a physical embodied response in the body.

Brian 40:36

Can you maybe unpack that a little bit?

Chris 40:39

Yeah. Where did you go when I said that?

Brian 40:42

I was just trying to feel into, I was saying before that there’s like this. I’ve committed to unconditional self friendliness and I was trying to relate..

Chris 40:56

How do you not being friendly to yourself? How do you get woken up?

Brian 41:03

It almost feels like classic cold waters getting hit, because I catch myself beating myself up. It’s all these thoughts trying to write? And I can catch it and kind of pies on your face from across the way.

Chris 41:21

So one of the tools in this practice with me to search for a journey with myself or with yourself that I would give is that it always, always comes. Just come back to the net, the fundamental, natural, grounded reality that you live in, right. And when I say that, I mean, it’s basic, right? And, and when a thought is up here, it’s spinning around in your mind. And so we can try to work with thoughts. And a lot of people’s practices are trying to work with thoughts, but what ends up happening is where our entire meditation practice is actually fueling up, and creating this thing of not wanting to experience our life as it is, whereas the somatic meditative practice, right, I’m gonna say real meditation, right? Like meditation, and its most ancient lineage, it wasn’t about mindfulness, it was actually translated as body fullness, we just didn’t have that word. So we call it mind. And we made it into thinking about controlling negative thoughts. But if we get into the body, we will find that the story in your head actually follows the state of the body? So when you said, when you went off in your theme about that, and then asked me, What do you can you, like, make that thing I’m gonna get, I’m just gonna be sure from my own experience, like in my relationship, before I was aware that I had parts when I would get angry. I went with my partner, I would tell I would try to talk it out, I would try to get her and I to agree on something. I was like, I’m upset. And you need to say the right thing to make me feel better. That is my responsibility.And when this shifted, it was, Oh, holy cow. What it actually is an example of walking away from the argument, moving away, and realizing that I am actually allowed to do that. I am allowed to be in a relationship with another human being and to feel what I am feeling. And for me, it always had to be in the car. And so I would go to the car. And I would sit down. And then because of the work that we do, and in space with other men witnessing them do this, I learned to do it for myself. And it was, what are the three questions we asked men in our groups? What are you feeling? Where do you feel it in your body? And what do you need? What we’re doing in our groups is we are taking over that man’s frontal cortex and we’re guiding him into his body. And then I’m learning and what would happen is when I went to go give this part of me like, Hey, man, I’m so angry. What do I need? I need the first three things I would need would be I would need her to do something. And then you realize, what can I do? What is she going to give me? In some way. I am giving up my ability to get my needs met?

Brian 45:03

It definitely is. It’s a whole other world realizing that you’re giving your power away, right?

Chris 45:11

But when you do that, it’s a whole other world now the the story of if I don’t get this the the mind, the brain creates an entire in full color movie of how if you don’t get what that is the world is gonna end in this person I can’t get married to her like, yeah, if that right How could I ever trust, right? It’s like a full picture thing, right?

Brian 45:39

And the experience of the present moment somehow is a solid thing and will continue into the future, forever. So however, like at the worst point of your relationship that defines your relationship like the most challenging part and nothing’s going to change.

Chris 46:01

When the story follows the state of the body, right, so the memories, the compassion, the connectedness, the ability to be with this person, like the intimacy, that just the vibrant nature of whatever the quality of the being, was that brought you with that person is wiped out. And like you can only see red, right? Like, you can only see what’s there. So you’re learning physics like, what this is, being the primary caretaker of your parts. This is the best part, man, this is the full on twist, when you actually realize that you need this person to help you find these pieces. That actually this piece has been sitting dormant just like your big toe is right now. Yeah. Right. And you’re not feeling it. And it’s just waiting to bubble up. It’s just waiting for it to not get met for it to prove it. Right, the way that a physical experience in your past had, right? Because you’re not actually dealing with the reality of the person as they are, you’re dealing with them as you, your past, your body thinks they are. Which is probably how you were nurtured by your parents, or your community, or whatever traumatized you the most at an early age.

Brian 47:25

So you’re repeating your previous slash childhood patterns until you stub your toe, right? And then you can feel what’s been going on in your toe this whole time. You’re asking a metaphor.

Chris 47:38

You’re asking that person to interpret what that part needs, and to be able to give it to you. And if they don’t do it, they’re doing something wrong. And it’s not their responsibility, right? Now, you do it. You learn how to give it that and there’s this relief, there’s this. Whoa. And then all of a sudden, you can see the fundamental ground in a more clear way. And this is what I think sugar and trim pot talks about as like meditation, this work is seeing getting out of the hallucination, right, you’re able to see what it is you’re able to see that person you’re not, you’re not you’re be you’re able to speak for your needs rather than from them. And now, your relationship is not about this person needing to give you what you need. They’re helping you learn how to find how to be that primary caretaker. And that’s a romantic relationship. Now, let’s talk about being an entrepreneur. Like let’s talk about, like trying to, let’s talk about attempting to bring your gifts out into the world. How many as you expand as you as your creativity grows, right? Like creativity is life force. It’s being creative, like making something out of nothing. Poof into the world. Like you made a bakery. Or you make a song. and then people don’t like it. People have something to say about it. And so what do you do you hide? You don’t show it to the world?

Brian 49:23

Or you attack or like, you’re wildly dysregulated for sure.

Chris 49:30

That emotional dysregulation clouds your perception of what the world really is. And so then we realize that people and so this isn’t just romantic relationships, it’s not just your relationship with yourself. It’s literally the experience of your life. Right and this is where the phrase I always say like this work is our practice in this practice is our life like, we’re dropping in These groups to, to play and to learn how to work with this stuff. And just look at this conversation. We have 55 minutes, there’s so much here. And yet you didn’t need to be aware of these things to start practicing. We’re just now talking about it.

Brian 50:31

You can look at many different religions, belief systems, all that sort of thing. And like, encoded in a lot of that is like very much this like type of work with like, within, I guess I’m just trying to say like, there’s so many different avenues, and so many different belief systems and truths, that, that lead to similar sorts of things without necessarily being able to even name it. It’s just kind of a mystery.

Chris 51:02

For me, the thing I keep coming back to, as we discover this as this community evolves, the work that we do here evolves, is just constantly reminding myself that I’m not, this isn’t stuff we’re making up these are, we’re putting terms on things that have fundamentally been true. And those words are pointing toward a real human experience. And the challenge that I think the call that that you that I see you and I doing right now, is we’re simply translating this to a culture of men who so that guys, very similar challenge of spiritual materialism with with trying to be the culture, right, trying to be Buddhist trying to be Tibetan. And it’s like, you’re not, you’re never gonna be Tibetan. And the longer you try doing it, the more you’re actually separating from your own fundamental nature, right. But we, I do want to give credit to the lineage right to like the amazing like, Pema Chodron. like welcoming me on welcome that book. I mean, it is huge, and has been a big part of my own practice. I’ve heard you talk about her. Okay, so let’s, let’s take the self right, and just put some pins in that. And then we’ll end on leadership. But so this, the self stuff that we talked about is how do we define the self at a basic level so we can begin doing this work? What are you experiencing? I am not my role.There’s an experience and that experience is felt in the body.

Brian 52:43

Or maybe another way is to say, of all of those versions of myself, I’m misspoke. That everything hubs out from right.

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Chris 52:57

And when you speak, it’s like to just connect it to the practice of pure awareness to, like, somatic meditation, like we build, we drop our awareness in that breath work, right, just like we do in the groups that we start with. We’re dropping our awareness into the body into the lower navel, right? Feeling into that space, the perennial, the Hora, right? Very special place. And this space is unconditioned, as what it’s the quality of it, right? It’s not conditioned by thoughts or judgments or identification from that stuff. And when we drop in there, it creates this, like, oh, I can feel that. But I have to, I have to hold the meditative position, I have to sit and breathe and allow my awareness to drop in there. And then we feel that getting in touch with it. And that actually travels from that space up the backline up the back of the backbone, up behind the heart through the neck right to the brain. Right. And that connects with that and then looks at the structure of our men’s groups. That’s what we’re doing.

Brian 54:22

Absolutely. Sorry. I was just getting this whole image of like, the whole chakra system and like how like, the spinal cord that unites everything and we are a nervous system. We can go to a lot of places with that but we have more…

Chris 54:37

…leadership training, it’s rooted. Thank you for the message.

Brian 54:46

So somatic Self right it two words in and we’re at an hour.

Chris 54:52

Somatic self, that which is experiencing we have a protect, we have an external self and we have an internal self. Right. We have protectors and exiles, and we’re learning to become the primary caretaker for those parts. And we need our life experiences to help us find it. We’re no longer trying to not feel this stuff, we actually need to get the parking ticket in order to be able to practice soothing ourselves. And that is the opposite of going into your head and being like eff this about the parking ticket. Instead, you bring your awareness into your body. Instead of getting angry about what somebody said, on the internet, we are getting pulled mentally and emotionally into a text battle. We’re coming into our body and ask ourselves what, right? And yeah, right. So that’s the self right self. And then leadership, what is leadership, and this comes down to this, another fundamental building block of that leadership is not bravado, it’s not shielding yourself off, from connecting with the world around you and moving through the world shut down and unable to connect. We all fundamentally know that when somebody is shutting down in a community of people and just barging ahead, that’s not your shit. Yeah, leadership is courage. It’s being willing to open, right and brave comes from the word bravado, which means to shut down. So it’s not about being brave. And if it is, it’s being brave enough to be courageous, which means to open the heart cur, the root word for courageous to show the heart in the face of right in the face of all of this stuff. So then you look at what is that like somatic self leadership, you’re then learning to take this work, this connection to the body, the fundamental practice of dropping out of the head into the body, learning to be with your experience, learning to be the primary caretaker for your parts, getting a sense of that, and then taking it out into the world where you’re gonna be challenged. And then bringing it out of the men’s group, right, bringing it out of the container. Because we’ve created these. We’ve created these little hidden gardens, where we get to practice this and safety. But then you leave the men’s group, right, where you’ve discovered that you can be this way, and you’re like, Whoa, holy crap, I can feel this way. I didn’t even know I was masking it over. I didn’t see how my aggression, right, my intellectualization of things was to protect myself. Yeah, yeah. But then we stretch. And we make that stretch with another human being, another man, another relationship in our life that cares about us. And that’s, it’s like belonging, right? Accountability is about belonging and shame. It’s about when I say to you, I’m going to, I’m going to do blank, I’m saying this relationship matters to me. And for me to come back here, I need to do what I say. So the last part about leadership is being willing to open out in your life.

Brian 58:29

I think that you’ve said opening and closing a number of times. You also like as we were transitioning into leadership and talking about self, you were even like talking about, like, opening a closing in a certain sort of way without saying it, right? Where it’s this, like releasing the tension.And as you talk about leadership, I think about someone that just in closing down, right is, is the natural way of thinking where it’s like, Hey, I, somebody has to make the decision, right? And I’m going to do my best to account for absolutely everything here. And then sorry, sometimes people’s feelings get hurt, but like, I am going to, like take this, take this objective, hold it tight, and then just run over anybody that gets in the way of this mission being completed. And so it’s like this disconnected, well intentioned, yet disconnected and continually taking it intention.

Chris 59:31

maybe not well intentioned, right, maybe Sure. It was from a place of protection and passing pain on to others,

Brian 59:41

Things that a lot of people can relate to have like everybody’s needs to get met. And maybe a leader is somebody who’s going to make the hard choice or whatever, right as you see it.

Chris 59:59

I can relate it directly to our community, like we had a schedule of Monday through Friday of doing checking groups. And we had had 28 men that were coming to groups regularly, twice a month 54 men who would show up once in a month, and I felt I knew, as an individual that I was unable to continue comment, hosting the groups on Tuesday and Thursday, if I was also going to be able to do the deep work required to organize stuff for the community. Because we had grown and I could feel how, in my maturation, the community was helping me find the places inside that needed my care and attention. But what was true for me was that I had to make that call to say, Hey, this is what I need to do, I need to cancel, too, we need to reduce this and reduce that and change this and change that. And it was such a wild experience to see how, when I was just being a men’s coach, I didn’t have to engage with a community. But once a community was there, my parts, which were codependent parts that were bonded to this community, felt like it needed to give up on something I needed. And for me, I’m just sharing my inner experience. For me, that was like a fault that was a hole Am I gonna be received as is gonna make someone angry or upset. But just like, that’s such a small thing like, it’s such a small thing, but it made a huge difference in the experience. Like now we’re recording a conversation like this during the middle of the day. And on a Thursday. So those I really appreciate your depiction of, of shutdown leader who’s barging through, in order. And on one end, I remind myself, there’s only love and cause for love. And that Eve, we, I might be judging seeing a person and how they look at how they seem to be like, oh, there’s they’re shut down, look at them hurting people. That’s my judgment of it. But I think the key word that you used was intention, right? And I think that that intention, that personal intention, that you are the only one who can report on your experience. So if you, if, when you discern how you’re moving forward, if you are moving forward with the story in your head being I don’t give a fuck about I like, fuck it, I’m gonna, I’m just going to move forward, I don’t care what they think that is your intention. Versus I’m going to move forward, I understand other people are going to have a really hard time with this. But this is what’s right. I’m going to allow their experience to be their experience. I’m going in, I’m gonna let that happen. It’s a very different feeling, right?

Brian 1:03:24

And I also heard you, like not putting on your Superman cape, right, I heard you taking your cape off and saying like, Hey, I’m not able to just keep adding to my plate, adding to my plate, adding my plate, right, I had to take a step back and distribute some responsibilities, make some decisions do a lot of like inner work, rather than just continually charging through, I need to understand where my story is, in all of this and like what other things are going on here, right and slow down so that I can make appropriate choices, rather than just continuing to in so that’s like by pulling things off your plate that then allows you to open up and having a completely different connected experience. I think that’s, that’s the word I was trying to get to, is instead of closing and pushing, it’s giving yourself the space, removing some responsibilities and then connecting to others. And like that, yeah, it’s it’s, it’s this whole, like inverse thing of being able to open and connect to others, to be able to meet your challenges so that you’re not bottlenecked by your ability to perform slash other people’s ability to tolerate whatever kind of toxic stuff comes off as a result.

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Chris 1:04:50

Brian. Thank you. Thank you for just showing up in this conversation and just holding space to have this conversation and this was, this was awesome, I think I’ll give you I’ll give you a moment to think about how you might want to sum up our conversation. But for me, the last piece that I’ll add is just that, that this whole thing is around becoming skillful. Right, that even when we talk about all of this stuff, and the way you talk about moving forward, in a connected way, it’s like, it’s, there’s this sense of appreciation and of all, like appreciation and fear, just just like, wow, like, we’re all I am learning how to be able to do this stuff and to remain open. And that throughout the experience of my daily life, I’m shutting all the time and it’s not me. It’s not me, it’s me, who gets to choose to open. Who gets to choose to be conscious again? And to be a friend to myself, like you were saying, right? And to that add the part that sets that over says he’s going to do something right. And to be like, this was the reality of my day. That’s how I’d like to sum it up.

Brian 1:06:25

The only thing I just want to sum up is that maybe bow tie back to the beginning of the conversation is like, sometimes it feels perhaps lonely, or you are doing this sort of work. And shoot, I’m sitting in Kansas City, while you’re in California, because, like, finding other men who are thinking of similar things, and like, really digging in no matter practicing, and, like, we exist, right, and even, like, believing that others like us exist, can be like a like, what, like, it’s a whole, my flip there, right, but, but like to know that other people are out there that it exists. And it’s just a joy to be able to, like, we all come in from our enter in through different portals as you said, but just to have a connected conversation like this, and find a whole resonance between us, as much as we just went through and described all the same thing. And I’ve been an unshakeable man for a year. Now, there’s still so many experiences, like we don’t talk on a regular one on one basis, it tends to be me sharing my story, my emotions, my experience doing the practice, right. And less of these like one on one conversations. To be able to talk to somebody in California about this type of work and be able to give it a name. It’s just a pleasure to like, have a place and be able to have a conversation like this where I am able to find resonance with another man. It’s great to have a space and I just wanted like, Thank you for continuing to create the space of The Unshakable Man so that there’s a place for us to practice. Lost Art, I guess, is what I would call it.

Chris 1:08:29

Totally. It is. We’re getting to rediscover the same way we bake. We all know how to bake bread, right? That’s an art. Thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, Brian, and it’s just a joy to get to practice with you, man. Thank you for coming in here and having this conversation with me.

Brian 1:08:52

Absolutely. Till next time, man. Thank you!