The more capacity you have to be a present and full participant in your life, the easier your life will be.
If you are trying to decide whether I am a man you can tell your truth to, and share your deepest pain with, reading this is how you find out.
We’ve been asking the wrong question for a long time
What is wrong with men?
The short answer is nothing. And I completely understand why a lot of men feel that there is something wrong with them. They have been told, over and over, that there is something wrong with them. They have been told, either with words, actions, or energy, that they are not enough, that they are not doing enough, that they are doing it wrong.
I believe that saying there is “something wrong with men” is an inherently broken statement and, to be honest, a very lazy one.
There is nothing wrong with men.
Have some lost their way a bit? Maybe.
Has your behavior caused pain for yourself and others? Potentially.
Do you feel broken and beaten down by the world? Maybe. And if you do, you are not wrong to.
None of that means there is something inherently wrong with you.
What a lot of men miss is that they regularly need to offload everything they are carrying. To be a clean and clear vessel, they need to find a place to be witnessed in their pain, their shame, their feelings of brokenness, and their insecurities. Nobody ever showed them how to do that. All of that had nowhere to go, so it found its way out in shadowy, and sometimes destructive, ways.
So you did what you knew to do in those moments. You looked away from the shame, the confusion, the rejection, and the pain, and stuffed it down. There was no time for it, showing people it was there looked like weakness and failure, and they would probably tell you to “just throw some dirt on it” anyway.
You learned to achieve over it, as proof it did not exist, and that you were okay. The achievement became the evidence of your worth, your enoughness, and your ability to protect and provide. Zeros, commas, a title on the door: that is where we all learned to go to hear “you’re doing a good job.”
And it worked for a long time. Maybe it’s even still mostly working. Until it stops working.
Here is the brutal truth that nobody tells you. None of that addresses the thing underneath it all, hiding out in the dark corners of your psyche and your soul.
The money does not do it. The exit does not do it. The company, the reputation, the record, the recognition, the beautiful family: none of it gives you more capacity to hold the experience of being a man in the modern world. It’s all just a cover for what lies beneath all of it. And when what lies beneath comes calling, no amount of success will guard you against it.
It’s all a nice shiny mask that looks like capacity. It’s not real capacity, though. How you can tell is that when things go sideways or get beyond your window of tolerance, you begin to panic, collapse, or numb out. You essentially begin to sabotage it all and self-destruct.
What capacity truly is: having the breadth to actually show up for your life no matter what is happening. To sit with your wife in her hard moments. To be there for a friend going through a hard time. To be with yourself in the mirror when the self-doubt or anguish is the loudest. To be with a hard decision that has no good answer available to it, and then hold the results. How much staying power do you actually have in those moments?
Everything you have been looking away from while you built is not the obstacle to your success. It is the doorway to your capacity.
On a man’s nucleus
Every man has a center. Not only as a figure of speech. It’s an actual center. It resides low in the body, where your power and your life force sit, and it runs as a central channel up from your root to your heart. In the traditions I trained in it is called the dan tien. In plain terms it is the place you operate from when you are not performing. It is where your presence, your truth, and your capacity live.
Life can pull us away from our nucleus. The stories we pick up about ourselves and the world, the wounding we carry: rejection, neglect, what was done to you and by you. Given enough years, the signal coming out of it gets lost in the distance. It’s not gone. It’s been forgotten.
Second, a man is designed to be the nucleus of his world. I do not mean this in the “my way or the highway” or “everything revolves around me” sense. I do not mean controlling or manipulative behavior, or a household that arranges itself around his mood. That is not a nucleus, that is an ego run wild. That is a man who is out of his center, and he’s making everyone around him pay for it.
What I mean by the nucleus of his world is that he takes responsibility for the culture he creates. For how people feel in his presence. For how his wife experiences the world he built.
When a man’s nucleus is off, his world is off, and everyone in it can feel it, including the people who will never say so to his face.
When a man reconstructs from his nucleus, he becomes the man his world has been waiting for: the steady one, the one people set their bearing by, the one who grounds the room.
On capacity
Capacity is what you get when you stop looking away. You gain staying power. Your ability to stay with yourself, with another person, and with your life is what determines how holistically successful you will be.
I have learned this time and time again in the jungle, the desert, in ceremony, building a business, in my marriage, and in my fourteen years post-addiction. When you can stay in something instead of running from it, your edges move outward. Capacity is the ability to sit at the exact limit of what you can be with, without looking away. Each time you stay, your limit is further out than it was. You have more capacity to move through the world with integrity, authenticity, leadership, and truth.
Most men live inside a prison of their edges and arrange their entire life so they never have to bump up against them, much less go beyond them. It ends up being an ever-shrinking and narrow highway to drive on. When you move your edges you get space: space to move, space to breathe, space to be with another person without your stories and ego showing up to steer the ship, and space to be with yourself without reaching for that drink, or that distraction, or that destructive behavior.
Resilience is how well you bounce back from the hit.
Capacity is how much room you have to remain centered as it lands.
Building it is the practice of capacity work. It is the basis and the whole of what I do.
What nature has taught me
Keep going.
When you are in the heat, keep going. When you are in the storm, walk into it the way the buffalo does, rather than try to outrun it. You can be with far more than you think you can. The thing you are walking through ends, and on the other side is the capacity you have always needed.
What ceremony taught me
The more I look away, the longer the process gets. The more I look away, the longer the pain stays. The more I look away, the further I get from my truth.
The more staying power I have, the more I choose to be with what is in front of me, the more I grow, the more I move, and the more present I become.
What I got wrong, for a long time
The same thing you are probably getting wrong.
I believed the achievement would fix it. The money, the accolades, the trophies from my tennis career, the commas and the zeros in my bank account.
I thought that was the first priority. It was not.
The first priority was getting my own inner world in order, so that I could hold all of it and remain grounded, instead of being derailed by the size and weight of my life.
When I finally understood that, I walked away from several business coaches and chose to go do the deep inner work instead. That was the most profitable decision I have ever made, and it is the only reason I can do what I do now.
My teachers
I have sat with and learned from Shipibo curanderos. Mexican elders. The world’s best leadership teachers and facilitators. I have spent years training my nervous system in rooms full of men. I have studied facilitation, nervous system work, linguistics, and bioenergetics under masters in those fields.
What they gave me was bigger than technique. They gave me somewhere to be witnessed in my own shame and my own discomfort, and then they taught me how to hold another person there. How to hold myself there. How to sit with a man in the darkest of his darkness, to stand with a man in the hottest fire he has ever stood in, and not flinch and not leave. And that is how I know how to walk out the other side of it with him.
There is nothing another man can bring to me that I will shudder from.
The hardest part of this work
The capacity does not come until it comes. Honestly, until you are ready to step into it.
There is usually a lag. You can do the breath work and the nervous system work daily for weeks and feel like nothing is moving. Then it arrives all at once, in a moment you did not see coming. Your wife comes to you, and you realize you have everything you need to be there with her, and you are present with her. You are in the middle of a big negotiation and you realize you are staying centered and clear where you used to tend toward chaos and get overwhelmed.
That is what the work actually gets you: the capacity to be there when it counts.
What I want for you
I want you to be able to look back in ten years and say three things.
I did not waste a single breath.
I did not miss a moment I was meant to experience.
I was there for the people who needed me.
