Part Eleven: The Abyss
Freedom requires a willingness (once again) to step beyond what we know
[Part Eleven of a Twelve-Part Series, “A Roadmap to Freedom”]
I returned home from the visit with John Lee in Austin feeling both scared and empowered to dive deeper into my past with women. And I knew the first place I needed to look was Amy. I hadn’t stopped thinking about her since we’d broken up, and I knew there was unfinished business there if I wanted to feel any sense of closure.
Amy agreed to meet me in Griffith Park on a sunny, late summer afternoon and we talked about the past. I apologized for ending things between us in the sudden and ungraceful way I had, and we spoke more vulnerably than ever about our love for each other. “You’ve been one of the most important people in my life,” I told her, choking on my words. “But I really need to fully let you go.”
After Amy and I said Goodbye, I stayed in the park late into the night, as a full moon rose over Los Angeles, and the floodgates opened. I cried and cried for the loss of this beautiful woman, and for the younger version of myself who had run into her arms after my father’s suicide.
There were other women from my past to fully let go of, too: Victoria (my girlfriend from those dark days in Part Two) Laura, Stephanie, and my stepmother Sandy, who I connected with on an October trip to my hometown in Maine. Sitting with Sandy and my stepbrother Alex around the dining room table in the house where we’d all lived together when my father had been alive, I had a new level of compassion and understanding for myself as a kid. Much of my Spiritual Psychology work at USM was teaching me about forgiveness: not just for others, but for myself. And I understood now that the protective shell I’d built (and judged so harshly in the unwinding process) served the purpose of keeping me safe in a world — and a family — that felt chaotic and scary.
I knew I didn’t need this protective shell anymore. And as I grieved, raged, forgave, and let go, a new, truer self was emerging. Yet, I couldn’t imagine letting go of that old version of me fully. It had kept me safe for so long.
But a major world event — and the resulting aftermath — would arrive just after the turn of 2020, cutting many of the remaining cords to my past.
So much of this male inward journey we’ve been traversing is about diving deep enough into our bodies to grieve and feel our original, core losses, so that we can move on and become sovereign, adult men. (That’s why this series is called “The Roadmap to Freedom”). We become aware of these O.G. losses as early as Part Two, decide to dive into them in Part Five, and, for a while, live between two worlds as we negotiate a wobbly, but more authentic existence, without the armor we carefully constructed to cease exposing our truest selves.
By Part Nine, we’re living a new life altogether, but there’s still quite a bit of work to do in the basement. In Part Ten, we look at the relationship that shaped all of our other relationships: the relationship to Mom (and all women). And by beginning to get in deeper touch with our anger and pain, we start the process of cutting the umbilical cord of safety and comfort that has left us in perpetual boyhood.
Now we’ve rolled into to Part Eleven, where we have — most likely — begun to live many adult male practices on a daily basis: we now know how to properly grieve and express our anger, we have likely curbed many of our go-to addictions and coping behaviors, and we may even have learned to be honest and forthright in our communication with other men and women. Like Timotheé Chalamet as Henry V in The King, we have morphed from unruly, half drunk princes into Kings. But to fully tap into our power and freedom as rulers of our own lives, we must stare down our most terrifying challenge yet: We must be willing to facilitate a final cut from the safe, comfortable world we know, and spend some time in the void. As codependent men, people pleasers, “Nice guys”, and Gatsbys, our survival has relied on our attachments to external sources for our self worth. So in Part Eleven we must be willing to face, for a time, the absence of those sources altogether. We must face being truly alone.
This initiation can look many different ways: For one man, facing the void might look like intentionally taking a sabbatical from a relationship, career, or community that only supported the people pleasing version of himself, the version who would over-give to the point of depletion and ask for little in return. For another, this stage might be as simple as refusing to participate in the same coping strategies that have left him powerless and insane.
But for most of us, we’d be wise to take this step quite literally: going away for a stint to a remote location, turning off our phone and email, and facing all the wildness that arises in the abyss of nothingness. In indigenous cultures, this step would be undertaken on what was called a vision quest: the young man, or initiate, would go into the woods or to a sacred mountain for days without food or water, to truly face the hardness and emptiness of what life as an adult man could feel like. He would sit and meditate, suffer and ponder, all the while connecting to nature, and praying — his belly empty — for a vision of what his life and purpose was as a man.
There is genius in this method: Only when we are truly empty can we see the path forward. Our modern lives are so filled with distraction, so mired in addiction and coping mechanisms, that it is hard to see clearly until we have emptied ourselves fully and have a clean canvas to take stock of.
To really face the death of the public-facing, survival self we created, a Gatsby must be willing to feel empty, alone, irrelevant, even invisible — as this is the core of any man’s original loss: He was invisible to his father, because his father — like his father before him — was invisible to himself. And he was invisible to his mother, because he learned to give her everything and ask for nothing. Subsequently, he learned to do the same for the world. And because we have learned to give ourselves and our truth away as a means of survival, to “get ourselves back”, we must be willing to face the subtle horrors of that original hopelessness. Because it is in the abyss of hopelessness and surrender that we finally realize that — much to our surprise — we were never alone. We can have our own backs. We can be our own best friends and advocates. And it is in the abyss that we realize that when all the tallies of life get added up, it’s our relationship with self that matters above all else.
This meeting with the void can — predictably — bring much to the surface. And we must face these feelings as a final test before fully ascending into the world again to take our place as a whole man. Questions to consider include:
What happens when I am alone?
If I stopped giving my energy out to people, things, and ideas that don’t give me that same energy back, how would I feel?
Do I ever let myself get bored?
When’s the last time I let myself feel lonely? Stuck? Hopeless?
When’s the last time I took a trip solo, or sat in solitude?
If I put my smartphone on ‘airplane mode’ for a day or two, what happens?
If I stop checking social media or my email, what happens?
What am I afraid of losing the most?
If my life and all my attachments ceased to exist tomorrow, how would I spend my life?
What do I believe in?
What cornerstones form the foundation of my life?
What unfinished business remains in my life/from my past?
Where in my life am I abandoning myself, or living from less than my full truth?
Where am I holding back from being the man I know I want to be?
What would putting myself first look like?
How would my life change if I became my own best friend?
As I forgave and said Goodbye to the women from my past, and grieved and raged the losses of my childhood on a deeper level, other threads to the past seemed to disintegrate, too:
For starters, the inheritance my father had left me in 2005 after his suicide — and that I had been living off of like a prince since — finally ran out in September of 2019. I remember the day my checking account went into the red, and I was forced to leave the apartment in LA where I’d been living. I felt helpless, and ashamed, and trapped.
It was the harshest kind of initiation: because of that money, I’d been allowed to stay a boy, never truly learning what I was capable of creating financially or otherwise. Now, I was faced with a back against the wall situation (the finest kind of fire there is for most men!) Earn a living or perish.
Luckily, my housing crisis was answered quickly: a twelve-step buddy of mine, Israel, offered up the small cabin in his backyard in Los Feliz, and I moved the few possessions I had there in February of 2020, just weeks before COVID-19 hit U.S. shores and the country went into lockdown.
The shame of being “homeless,” and the long stretches of time in quarantine were a devastating adjustment for me. I felt the void acutely without many of the sources of validation and coping mechanisms I used to manage my self worth: writing assignments about anything but coronavirus became nonexistent, the dating world slowed to a crawl, even food was hard to come by as grocery store shelves sat empty. I began posting fervently on social media (for the quick hits of dope) and taking marathon drives through the streets of Los Angeles. But I knew in my heart that I was just trying to outrun the loneliness.
I believe that until we fully feel our core losses, we will always be trapped by what we haven’t faced. Blaise Pascal’s famous line comes to mind: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Because to “sit quietly” means to feel everything: our pain, our numbness, our longing, our dread. Miraculously, however, I’ve found it is only in this feeling of our oldest hurts that we can transform them — like alchemists — into the gold we were meant to bring to the world.
In hindsight, COVID-19 was the exact initiation I — and so many friends and clients of mine — needed into a deeper level of our own personal truth. In the quiet of quarantine, I grieved and grieved my old life, my old identity, my old friends, my old lovers. At times the whole two-and-a-half year exercise felt like one big Viking funeral — I was watching my old self be pushed out to sea on fire. And I was struggling like hell not to swim after it.
Meanwhile, in the silence, a new, exciting vision for my life was also arriving. I knew I wanted to help other men walk the same inward path I had been walking, that much was clear. And I’d already been accepted to a Masters in Counseling program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. But at USM, I was meeting life coaches who were doing the same healing work as therapists without the academic hoops and the scramble to fulfill State licensing hours.
I was leaning towards coaching, but my decision was made with a single phone call: while writing an article for Men’s Health I’d had the pleasure of interviewing a Seattle-area psychic named Ainslie MacLeod. Ainslie was a great guy, and in exchange for featuring him in the magazine, he offered me a reading. “Don’t go get your Masters,” he said. “ I never tell people what to do, but you’re meant to coach men. And you’re meant to start right now.”
So, as the quiet of quarantine settled on Los Angeles, I put out a series of Instagram posts stating I was starting a coaching practice. And in April, my good buddy Elliott and I started an online men’s group to help dudes get through quarantine. Over 40 men showed up on the first night. By June 2020, just nine months after my call with Ainslie, I had a full roster of men eager to begin this wild journey into themselves.
My purpose had arrived.
Other gifts began to arrive, too: Later that summer, I received an email about a legal settlement for an apartment I had lived in back in my early days in New York. A former tenant had sued the building for price gouging, and miraculously, I was set to receive over $40,000 in back rent, more than enough dough to get me back on my feet - and out of Israel’s cabin.
When considering a new place to live, my thoughts went immediately to Topanga Canyon, where I’d had that magical Christmas Eve day with Amanda years before. It felt like a symbolic move: closer to the wilds of nature, closer to the water, and closer to the vision I’d had for my life while sitting by the fire at my house in Peekskill — It was the quiet life I had not been ready for back in New York. But was finally ready for now. On craigslist, I found a room and an office in a ramshackle old house just a hundred or so yards from Route 27, and with the help of my friends Tobey and Ashley, moved into my new house in May of 2020, just as the world seemed to be blowing up.
Oh, to be in Topanga in those uncertain days of 2020. I felt like a free man indeed. Misty mornings walking at Tuna Canyon, and afternoons swimming at Topanga State Beach, after which I’d lie back on the sand, my skin browning in the sun, grateful for the crazy road that had brought me here.
I knew my inward journey wasn’t complete by any means (is it ever?) — much restlessness and loneliness and inner friction was still present and my second year at USM was dredging up some of my deepest inner material yet — but I knew I had made significant actions towards becoming a person that felt a lot less like what I thought the world wanted from me, and a lot more like what I wanted from me. It was a long-awaited recalibration, a settling into myself, a settling into my soul. It was a feeling of knowing I was living my life for me, and no one else. And it felt fuckin’ good.
(This series will culminate with Part Twelve on January 9th.)
Part Eleven: The Abyss
HI Sean, glad things turned around for you in part eleven. My coaching here in Canada didn't help me like I wanted so not wanting to be alone much. Prefer to keep busy