Part Five: Into the Wild
Going where few men have gone requires feeling what few men have felt.
[Part Five of a Twelve-Part Series: A Roadmap to Freedom]
It was my split from Amy and John Lee’s book, The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man, that made the cracks in my Gatsby armor so obvious I knew I couldn’t keep running from them. I knew I had to go back and earnestly face the darkness I couldn’t in Part Two. It was time to go down the rabbit hole.
One riveting scene in The Flying Boy kept haunting me: an argument Lee had with his father on the way home from a restaurant. The conversation became violent, but ended with father and son embracing in the back seat of the family car, both in tears. I knew instantly upon reading it that the same kinds of feelings were inside me around my own father: that there was more anger and sadness there than I could possibly fathom, but how could I access it?
It was clear to me that the talk therapy I’d been doing for the last decade was not the answer. I’d spoken the story of my past and my pain over and over again so many times it was beginning to feel masturbatory. And my shrinks and psychiatrists who nodded and gave me pills that made me think I was happy were no more helpful than my cocaine dealers and late night hookups. They were only postponing the inevitable. For the first time in my life, I didn’t want more temporary relief. I wanted to feel everything.
With my mother’s help, I located Jacob Gershoni at the Psychodrama Institute of New York. Psychodrama is like therapy meets improv — a chance to perform your life’s traumas on stage in front of an audience of fellow group members. And I will never forget the first drama I did: standing under the hot glow of the theatre lights, pacing in front of an empty chair where my dead father was supposed to be sitting. I felt ridiculous until something inside me let go and the feelings started to spill out. First, it was anger: FUCK YOU DAD, how could you kill yourself? How could you leave me? I loved you! Then grief: I can’t believe you’re really gone! I’m so sad. I miss you!) By the end, my body was shaking and tears were streaming down my face as Jacob and ten strangers I’d just met looked on encouragingly.
Something about being witnessed in that out of control, emotional state — and surviving it — was freeing. Walking to the subway after group that night, I felt one with the pulse of the city. My normally shallow breath was deep and full. I looked strangers in the eye and nodded Hello. I knew whatever crazy shit had just happened had worked. I was coming alive.
If we’re being fully honest, everything that comes before Part Five is just preparation: we’re standing by the edge of the pool, twiddling our thumbs, afraid to jump in. And as we learned in Part Three, it takes more and more denial to avoid the inevitable plunge. Eventually, life intervenes: we meet our teacher , who finally instills enough courage in us to embark on our journey. Or an external event appears that encourages descent as a collective act: In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, when so many had their jobs lost or transformed, when life slowed to a crawl, and so many men were quarantined inside their homes with partners, children, and selves (!) they’d been trying their best to avoid, certain truths became undeniable. All the darkness we’d been running from was right there, waiting patiently in the corner, drinking brown liquor like the Old Man in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love: This is gettin’ way outta line here. You gotta do somethin’ about this.
So we threw up our hands, and shouted towards the Heavens, saying: “Fine. I’ll do something!” And this is when, after much hesitation, we took the leap: we called the couples therapist, we joined the men’s group, we signed up for the retreat. We quit drinking or smoking weed. We pressed ’Send’ on the email. We said to our partner or our families: “We need to talk, I’ve got some things I want to say and need you to hear.”
And then we walked into the unknown…
In the 2007 movie Into the Wild (based on the John Krakauer book of the same name) Emile Hirsch plays Christopher McCandless, a Gatsby who turns his back on his privileged upbringing on the East Coast to find a simpler way of life. He cuts up his credit cards, changes his name to Alexander Supertramp, and hitches to the Alaskan wilderness to fend for himself against vast, open plains, rushing rivers, and potential starvation, which he ultimately succumbs to. McCandless’s manifesto: "This is the climactic battle within me, to kill the false being within myself to achieve true victory through spiritual revolution.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because we, in Part Five, are embarking on a similar quest. And although ours may not involve bears or a hotel on wheels, we are taking our first intentional steps towards dismantling our protective, ego-identities, and our first steps towards claiming our authentic selves.
To do this, we must leave behind the safety of what we know - our friends, our families, our conditioning, our favorite numbing agents. They can’t come with us where we are going. We are on a sacred, masculine quest, a crusade outside the walls of the village, and — like an Arthurian Knight — the quest demands we be pure of heart. We have become professional seekers now. Seekers for what? You might ask.
Seekers for feeling!
As men, most of us are numb from the neck down. We learn to suppress the majority of our feelings at an early age for a variety of reasons, the most prevalent being that as boys we are encouraged into stoicism by other boys, our families, and society. At school, we shut down our vulnerability to avoid being called names like “faggot,” “pussy,” or worse. Remember, there’s no crying in baseball. And home is usually no better: we’re shamed for any outbursts of frustration and anger, and punished for questioning authority. “You’re fine,” we hear seemingly a thousand times a day. And we believe it. “I’m fine.” It seems safer to stuff everything down, and feel nothing.
But shutting down painful feelings results in blocking joyful ones, too. Which means we grow into Gatsby men who must chase after peak experiences to feel alive. (Jung wrote: “Men go forth to admire the high mountains and the great waves of the sea and the broad torrent of the rivers in the vast expanse of the ocean and the orbits of the stars, and to turn away from themselves….”) Every Gatsby will be familiar with these “high” experiences: for one guy it could be prostitutes, for another, Phish concerts and LSD, for another, scaling 14,000 foot peaks. However we get our jollies, it’s a cycle that leaves us in a perpetual state of craving, staring at the horizon, aiming to satisfy our next Jones. We’re never present, which means we never have to face our own discomfort. Which is convenient for a while. But then the burnout we discussed in Part One appears. We realize we’ve been going so hard on autopilot, we don’t know which way is up. We feel lost.
In Part Five, though, everything we’ve avoided becomes our North Star. We are going inward in search of our original source of loss. And the only way to get there is by leaving the protection of our mind’s defenses and traveling on the road of the heart, into the body.
To access our body in this stage we might sit quietly alone and ask:
How am I feeling today?
How is my breath?
If my heart could speak, what would it say?
What is happening in my body right now?
Where does it hurt?
Where are my most intense triggers popping up?
What am I sad about in my life?
When do I experience anger or rage?
What does my anxiety/depression feel like/look like?
If I cease numbing out - with work, drugs, porn, social media, binge watching, peak experiences - what happens?
What needs my attention immediately?
***
If all of this sounds scary and potentially disastrous to you, you’re in the majority. Most men I meet at this stage are afraid of opening Pandora’s box — like I was — and rightfully so: When we have decades of unfelt emotions inside us, the thought of letting them out seems overwhelming, if not death-defying. Most of us are sure we will be annihilated, or at the very least, rendered ineffective at our daily life functions: What about my job? Will I lose my edge at the office? Will my family and friends still respect me if I turn into a walking Hallmark card?
But stay gold, Ponyboy, for that is just the ego speaking. The ego has no interest in us going to our core, because it knows the deeper we go, the more it loses its control over us, and the more wild and free we become. And to be wild and free as a man is to integrate the feminine aspects of ourselves that we have discarded as weak, as soft, and as trivial in a patriarchal, bottom-line driven world. These are the same aspects that render us frozen in the face of our more feminine partners’ expressions of those same feelings. We’re pros at checking out when that happens. We walk to the pub, duck out for eighteen holes of golf, or go to the garage and putter around. If we stay, it’s begrudgingly: “Honey, calm down!” We might say. “She’s crazy,” we might tell our friends, shaking our heads. But it’s this very craziness and unpredictability we need to unearth in ourselves if we want to keep on truckin’ on this journey.
Every Monday night when I went into psychodrama with Jacob and the group, I indeed felt crazy. But with every feeling expressed, every drama I took part in or watched, my shell slowly receded. My body felt looser and more relaxed. I began to understand that what we call “anxiety” in our culture is nothing more than a profound disconnection from the whole truth of who we are, which includes ALL of our emotions, not just a few.
Still, some days, it felt like I had turned on a faucet I could not turn off: one afternoon, walking to a meeting for a potential writing client in Soho, I started to sob. Cursing my luck, I ducked into a vestibule and considered postponing the meeting, but was too embarrassed to bail out just a few minutes before the scheduled time. So in I went, my eyes still swollen and red, where the company offered me the job on the spot.
And that’s the funny thing about this step of our adventure — as Gatsbys, we go our whole lives believing we must be perfect and in control at all costs: of our emotions, of our actions, of our precious appearances and everything that encompasses them. But the moment we let them fall, for even an instant, we are rewarded: We collapse in front of our men’s group, and they hug us and tell us they see us clearer than ever. We cry with our partner, and he or she says: “I have been dreaming of this vulnerability from you for years.” We create a courageous piece of art, and people say: “My god, I had the exact same experience. You have helped me.” We begin to see that the material spoils we sought in Gatsbyland offer little when measured against the spoils of the heart.
The wild feelings we bring forward internally tend to spill over into our lifestyles in Part Five, too. It’s not uncommon in this stage for men to grow out a beard, wander in nature, write poetry, experiment with psychedelics and plant medicine, learn about tantra, or quit their corporate jobs and take solo road trips to far-flung locations. It is in this wildness that we reclaim our relationship with our bodies, our breath, and our primal nature. It is in this wildness we become sovereign, breaking the attachment to a society that demands us to exchange our inherent, feeling nature — and our sanity and wellbeing — for a steady paycheck and the latest iPhone.
By choosing to feel, we wake up. We notice new smells, sounds, tastes, and sensations. Our long-dormant intuition comes back online. We can sense a greater connection to the natural world and our fellow humans and animals. We develop a rampant curiosity, and begin questioning everything we’ve held to be true. We create, as men’s work teacher John Wineland calls it in his book From the Core, “a new masculine paradigm.” One that originates in love, in presence, in a balanced nervous system that has grieved and integrated its core losses, creating a safe container for our partners, loved ones, and communities.
But before all that, we have to walk the rest of this road. And it won’t be easy. We’ll need all the new skills of feeling that we’ve gathered in Part Five to face upcoming challenges that will attempt to close us down, and send us scattering back to our Gatsby shells, back to the safety of what we know. And it makes sense: the hero doesn’t just walk into the proverbial cave and take the chest of gold from underneath the sleeping dragon, does he? No way. The dragon is going to wake up, nostrils flaring, belly empty. You can count on it. And when it does, we’ll need some tools to dance with the danger it brings. Fuck it, we’ll need a whole box of tools for the job. And a few allies and some wisdom and maybe even a little magic, too.
But we’ll learn more about all of that next time.
(Part Five will be published on September 19th.)
Hi Sean reading this got me thinking about my dad and things which were said. Looking forward to the continuing story.