Gents,
If you’ve hung out in personal growth circles or trolled Instagram mental health accounts long enough, you’ve probably come across Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Monomyth (a term I’m told is borrowed from the James Joyce classic Finnegan’s Wake). If you haven’t, the Monomyth is the universal heroic narrative in which a protagonist sets out, has transformative adventures, and returns home. This narrative is the thread that connects practically every popular film, novel and play that human beings have ever created. (Not to mention the origin story for every world religion.) In short, Campbell’s groundbreaking thesis revealed a staggering truth:
There is only one story.
I remember first reading about the Monomyth sometime in early 2018, a few years into the deepest reaches of my own personal growth journey. Shortly after, I started working with a male therapist who handed me a copy of Robert Bly’s Iron John, a book that breaks down the male initiatory journey in a similar, mythical and universal fashion. Bly found that every man’s personal growth journey could be distilled down to a narrative which contained familiar signposts (or stages), similar to the twelve stages of Campbell’s Monomyth. In essence:
There is only one male healing journey.
And in the years to come, after reading similar favorite books by Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly), Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (King Warrior Magician Lover) and John Lee (The Flying Boy), as well as continuing on my own path of personal growth, and becoming a coach and guide to other men on the path, it has been proven to me again and again that this is undoubtedly true: that although our individual details might look differently — we may come from different places, experience different dynamics in our families of origins, have different skin colors and cultural influences, and grapple with different traumas, addictions, and relational challenges along the path — all men’s stories of healing share a common, universal formula.
There is only one male healing journey.
Now, if you’re a man looking to heal from past trauma, get unstuck, change your life, shake shit up, and feel more alive, loose, and comfortable in your skin, I don’t have to tell you how exciting this news is. After all, our early forays into the personal growth space can be overwhelming (do I kick things off with attachment theory or an ayahuasca ceremony?) so the idea that there’s a universal, A to B path that any man can walk to end up in the place all healing men ultimately want to end up in (for our purposes, let’s call that state of being “freedom”), is phenomenal news.
(A quick disclaimer: This state of being we’re referring to as “freedom” is not some perpetually comfortable state of bliss where no hardship can touch us. That’s a fantasy. “Freedom” is also not a fixed destination. However, after a certain amount of inner work has taken place, and a certain amount of cellular level, bodily trauma has been integrated, human beings CAN experience a revolutionary and very free state here on earth: marked by ease, opportunity, trust and abundance. An open hearted state of love, wholeness, and personal empowerment.)
A year and a half-or-so ago, my twelve-part series “A Roadmap to Freedom” was my own personal attempt to distill my intensive healing process (and the 15 years of research I’d done on other men’s processes) down to a single narrative. This was fun and exciting for me to do, and only further exacerbated my giddiness, as I saw my own journey — and the journeys of other men I knew — fit snugly into a similar formula to the ones that guys like Campbell, Bly and Lee had laid out decades ago, with a few updates that reflect more recent breakthroughs in how the body heals from trauma. Everyone who has researched anything exhaustively or come up with a thesis knows this feeling: Holy shit! It freakin’ checks out! However, there was one small issue in my process: I’d (quite conveniently) attempted to complete the narrative on paper before I’d completed the final leg of that Roadmap myself.
To recap the journey:
Part One: The Origins of the Perfect Man
Part Two: An Invitation to Descend
Part Four: The Teacher Appears (Addressing The Father or Masculine Wound)
Part Five: Into the Wild (An Introduction to Feeling)
Part Ten: How I Met My Mother (Addressing The Mother or Feminine Wound)
Part Twelve: The Return (Coming Home)
Now, I’ve tended to use writing as a sort of alchemy before. And by this I mean I believe words have so much power that we can actually write things into being. As such, many things I’ve claimed or proclaimed about my healing journey in writing have taken months and even years to integrate. So comically — and certainly not so comically when I was smack in the middle of it — right around my excited completion of the Roadmap in December of 2022, I was thrust into a short-lived-but-highly charged romance that brought me into my deepest pain and shadow material yet. (It was a very Part 11 moment without knowing I was, in fact, in Part 11 at the time…) Ugh.
That relationship revealed there was work left for me on the table that I didn’t know was there. Big, important healing work that traced all the way back to my oldest cellular level trauma and biggest losses like my dad’s suicide. (On our healing journeys, as in life, it’s truly darkest before the dawn.) As such, last year was a year of returning home for me — home to my roots, home to my deepest self, and — after a beautiful and grueling 4-month, 20,000 mile vision quest that culminated in Todos Santos, in Baja, Mexico — returning home to Los Angeles, where I live, just in time for the ol’ calendar to flip to 2024.
It feels weird to say, but as I write to you from my little Venice cottage that’s feeling more homey by the day, nearly everything in my life feels slightly different. This recent homecoming leg of the journey has profoundly changed me. New beginnings are popping up everywhere in my life, as they may be popping up in yours: I’m feeling freer, more hopeful, and more inspired creatively than I have in years. I’ve met an amazing woman and am in the healthiest, most joyful partnership of my life to-date. Life is quiet, deeply fulfilling, and yet still quite fragile, like a bud just beginning to protrude from a branch after a long winter’s nap. (As one of my friends recently pointed out, however, a young, green branch is the most malleable, and has the most ability to withstand the oncoming wind…) More than anything, though, I’m excited to be sitting in one place long enough again to get back into writing, publishing, and nerding out on the refinement of this ever-evolving universal “Roadmap” for healing and liberating men from suffering.
It feels important to say, also, that even with all the chaos happening in the world, I believe it is a very exciting time to be human. In the same way that opportunistic investors thrive in tumultuous times in the world’s markets, opportunistic agents of transformation thrive in tumultuous times on the planet. And 2024 and the way it’s coming together reminds me so much of 2020, the last time a huge, collective agent for drastic and potent (and at times scary-as-shit) transformation arrived in the world in the form of COVID-19. Then, like now, there was much hunger for change, growth, and the upheaval of outdated systems — a theme that will no doubt continue for the next handful of decades. And I look forward to being a part of that shift as we learn to create more sustainable systems that reinforce our health, wellbeing, and sanity in this world. So much needs to continue to change on a collective level. So many false Gods still need to be toppled. So many perilous and beautiful inward journeys into the hearts of who we are need to be undertaken. And I’m genuinely curious about all of it.
As always, I am hugely grateful to all the folks who have left roadmaps that have helped me on my journey (Bly, Keen, Lee, Moore and Gillette and more recently Bryan Reeves, John Wineland, and Allana Pratt, just to name a few.)
I’m also insanely thankful for all of the men I’ve worked with who have trusted me to lead them on their individual paths to greater freedom and fulfillment in their lives. I’m not sure you’ll ever fully know how deeply honored I am to get to do this work with you, and how much it feeds me every day.
Lastly, I’ve been just bowled over with Thank Yous lately for all the people in my life from all eras of my life who have acted as such powerful mirrors on my own path, specifically my closest friends, family, and the women I have loved. I know I’ve made practically a zillion errors in judgment, a zillion unskillful maneuvers, and I appreciate your grace as I fumble around, fall down, and keep trying again.
I am pumped for 2024—the good, the bad, the ugly, the wildly transformative.
To our continued journeys-
-Sean
Good to see you back writing again, Sean. Here’s to a great 2024🎉