I haven't written in a while.
It's been a buuuuuusy few months, full of responsibilities and commitments since returning to an island where I'm not on island time.
As I sit with that this morning, I feel the busyness that hits all of us - even the men who are most steeped in this work.
The responsibilities.
The commitments.
The appointments stacked on top of each other.
The free time that isn't really free because the mind is already orbiting the next thing that needs doing.
This is one of the great traps of being a man.
We are trained in doing.
We stand on it.
Build identity from it.
And so even our rest becomes a form of productivity, even our healing becomes another item on the list. And the thing that actually nourishes us - the being, the presence, the aliveness - keeps getting quietly postponed.
What I keep coming back to is this: Radical Eros isn't a philosophy. It's not a set of practices or a framework you learn. It's the fundamental right and activation of your life force - the energy that permeates your being and shows up through your essence, through how you move through a room, how you love, how you lead. It's not something you add to your life. It's what's there when you stop piling things on top of it.
That showed up for me last week. Twice.
Last Tuesday I was initiated into the Freemasons, one of the oldest brotherhoods in the world. I'd been looking forward to it since returning from Peru, because I hadn't had much time to myself. More than that: I knew this was going to be one of those places where I needed to let go of control. To surrender it. And surrender is its own kind of practice for men who are used to managing everything.
The ceremony was grand - full of production and feltness, and at times beautifully clumsy in the way only human ritual can be. Men stumbled over memorized lines. Didn't matter. What I carried home that night was a single image: a room full of men who had spent real time and real care preparing something for me to walk through. One man. One threshold. The care was the ceremony.
I wrote about it that night, still buzzing.
And then Friday arrived, and I drove out to a weekend training with the Mankind Project.
Going into to, I didn't give it much thought. Just that it would be a weekend away from my phone and in nature.
Something in me was already managing it. I've done the plant medicine. The men's groups. The sweat lodges. Peru. If anything comes up this weekend, it'll probably be something around fatherhood. That's been my lifelong edge. The men attending will be beginners to this work, whereas I'm advanced.
I had my story about myself already written. And I walked in wearing it.
Here's what nobody tells you about doing deep work: it builds its own armor.
Not the old armor - the one made of numbness and distance and performing strength. That armor most of us recognize eventually. This is subtler. This is the armor of the man who has done things. Who has wept in ceremony, faced his shadows in the wilderness, learned the language of the inner life. Who has enough self-knowledge to be genuinely helpful to other men.
That man has a new kind of protection available to him: his own spiritual resume.
The work was real. But somewhere along the way, the accumulation of experiences starts to function as insulation. You stop being a beginner. You stop being someone that initiation can fully reach.
This weekend found the gap anyway.
What cracked open wasn't what I expected.
I'd been braced for the father wound. Instead, what surfaced was my relationship. The place where I have tried, so deliberately, not to repeat my father's patterns.
And the men in that room reflected back what my journal already knew and hadn't fully said: I've been becoming him anyway. Not in the ways I feared. In the subtler ones. The emotional distance dressed up as wisdom. The part of me that would rather stay in the next adventure - the ceremony, the wilderness, the next initiation - than do the slow, unglamorous work of being fully present to the person sleeping next to me.
I have a shadow that judges. That quietly believes it has seen further than most. And underneath that judge, when you get past the credentials, is a man with a lot of self-loathing he hasn't fully metabolized.
The initiation found it.
Initiation doesn't care about your resume. It goes looking for the part of you that stopped being looked at. And the further you've traveled in this work, the more sophisticated that part has learned to be - until it's not numbness anymore, it's quiet certainty.
I came out of the weekend with a refined mission statement that felt carved rather than constructed: I want to create a world of utter freedom and awe by guiding the activation of radical eros.
Still integrating from this weekend. Still don't know what it all means. But I know this: the moment I decided I had graduated - that the really deep work was probably behind me - was the moment I needed initiation the most.
So, where are you quietly certain you've already done the work?
What would it mean to walk into the next room as a beginner?
And what if the real initiation isn't the ceremony you signed up for - but the relationship you come home to?
Ish
P.S. If this letter found something in you - the work I do with men is depth work. Not therapy. Not coaching. Initiation. Transforming what you've been avoiding into what you're here to give. If you're interested, you can visit my 1:1 mentorship page.
P.P.S. I also run men's rites of passage in the Peruvian Andes - multi-day treks into the mountains, where the land itself becomes the initiator. If something in this letter is stirring, that might be the conversation worth having. Reply and tell me what's alive.
