All men experience major life transitions.
There’s no way to get out of life without experiencing death, disability, or loss of someone we love. Life is a never-ending stream of these transitions and challenges.
It’s natural for humans to experience stress whenever we encounter change—but we make these major changes even more difficult if we feel that our survival is at stake.
We see a profound amount of depression and suicidal ideation that men endure alone. It’s precisely at these times of crisis and overwhelm that the potential for breakthrough and freedom becomes possible—but how?
Every transition is an inflection point
It costs men a lot of security to find a new path forward—and much of our sense of tribal safety comes from doing what we’ve done in the past—or remaining in sync with what’s worked previously.
We’re primates.
Our limbic system and our whole vagus nervous system are programmed for a fight, flight, or freeze response. One of our adaptive characteristics as primates, particularly in the human species, is that we are dependent upon others—yet we resent that at certain points in our lives. Dependency goes against our sense of freedom. However, no human infant can survive without a dedicated caretaker attending to all of their needs.
Whether it’s cleaning, feeding, or tending to any kind of health issues—it’s wired in us from the very earliest stages of life to receive support and care.
There’s a huge psychological cost to recognize that our pattern of normal behavior doesn’t seem to be working anymore. We’re often more comfortable with the fear of newness when we’re younger, but when we’re older, our flexibility and openness to the unknown fossilizes.
Despite our adolescent anxieties, it’s perfectly workable when we’re a teen and we don’t know many people. We’re thrown into college or work and have to open up and become gregarious and meet all these new people, finding our way forward with no guidebook.
Fast forward a few decades—how many of us have that same level of enthusiasm and emotional flexibility? It’s common that men stagnate or even regress in terms of their tolerance for newness and change.
Regression or self-actualization?
There’s frequently a psychological regression when major life transitions happen. We end up revisiting things that we didn’t give ourselves the freedom to experience because we may have been so tied up in fitting into our tribe’s patterns and expectations throughout childhood.
When a major crisis occurs and we realize our life is finite, we don’t have to go through the typical cliches of sports cars, a bigger boat, younger partners, and blowing all our money in Vegas. Things and experiences themselves don’t leave a satisfying groove of depth.
I’ve found over and over that men’s bodily health is directly related to heart health and emotional health. Heart disease literally starts with our thinking and how we relate to emotional intensity.
Few people are aware of how pervasive the constant dialogue of thoughts and inner commentary is inside their own minds. Very few have ever experienced any break from it except during certain substances (alcohol, drugs, orgasm, etc.) or engrossing distractions that provide a bit of freedom from the churn of our mind. Pretty much all substances will lead to a dead-end because we’re not dealing with what’s intrinsically going on inside us that is the root cause of our dissatisfaction.
At the crux of all of this is the broken idea that wealth, possessions, accomplishments, and relationships can lead to happiness.
Happiness is actually an inside practice independent of external circumstances. Learning this lesson and really understanding the truth of it costs us our beliefs and precious worldview about how things should or even could be. Suicidal ideation and depression are often symptoms that this deep inner transformation is occurring.
Existentially, this is one of the deepest stresses imaginable for masculine beings.
How do we capture the energy of these major life transitions and use it in a creative and productive manner? How do we locate the courage to abandon patterns that no longer serve?
This is the key that ignited me to step forward and begin teaching. There are three things you need for navigating major life transitions with grace and ease.
How to Navigate Major Life Transitions with Grace and Ease.
1. Clarify your purpose. What are you doing? What's your end goal?
Not honoring or allowing a man space to process these life transitions can result in a lost decade of life, or even lead to suicide. There needs to be a sacred allowing of time to grieve the past and our outgrown ideals. We have to acknowledge that it’s ok to question everything. The frame that you grew up in was much like the arms of your parents. There comes a time when we have to outgrow that, stand on our own feet, and standing where you are right now, see it from a more adult perspective.
The first thing you need to do as a man is to clarify your purpose. One of the most powerful questions for a man is: What does freedom really mean to you?
Watch your answer. Don’t judge it. Does your answer serve you alone, or does it open the world to greater possibilities?
It’s not to say that any answer is right or wrong, but if you’re going for the deepest part of who you are and what you’re here to do, you may need a connection to a purpose that’s larger than just yourself. It’s ok to want what you want, but it takes maturity and wisdom to understand how fulfilling your needs and wants are always connected to others.
There’s never a time where you’re actually alone—you’re always sustained by a web of relations. When you get into the depth of what freedom really means, you’ll realize that it’s not freedom from the web of everything that seems to be dragging you down. It’s how we’re seeing it that really is the cause of our most profound suffering.
Channel the intensity you are experiencing into examining these questions. Your naked inquiry can create a powerful inflection point in life, opening an opportunity to clarify your purpose during moments of change, loss, or shifts in worldview.
2. Get a support network that holds you accountable and gives you feedback.
The second thing is to get a support network that holds you accountable and gives you feedback. It requires having a trusted man who can hear you and mirror back when you’re complaining like your 13-year-old self—and believing everything will change when you have distracting toys or gorgeous young lovers. What you’re enduring and suffering is inside of you, it’s not the external circumstance. There’s plenty of people that have been in identical situations in life—but who are having a profoundly different experience.
Discuss your situation with buddies who challenge you to do something with the opportunity that is in front of you NOW.
3. You have to move your body. You cannot do this with mind.
The third thing, which is absolutely essential if you find yourself in these points of crisis and you want to turn them into a transformational opportunity, is that you have to move your body. You can’t do this with just the mind. All thinking and emotion have to be met with some level of physical activity. This is NOT what our ego or inner critic wants to do!
Getting into your body and moving it will interrupt and derail that inner critic’s momentum. Even brief cardio exercises can help undermine the habit of always trying to put the blame upon someone—even if it’s yourself.