I read something recently that stopped me cold: "The life you're living now would have saved the version of you that was drowning."
So, now that there are about 1000 of you reading this, I thought I'd reintroduce myself and my work by writing about the life that I've lived so far.
At this moment, I'm writing from Peru. I split my time between a small town by the ocean on a Canadian Gulf Island and this small town tucked between mountains in the Sacred Valley. I'm in a relationship that's equally playful, sexy, adventurous, and full in all the good way. I lead men into the wilderness to remember who they are. I'm writing my second book. Preparing for a TED Talk where I talk about fear that terrifies me in the best way.
Every single thing a scared little kid was afraid of? I do it now.
I speak in front of people. I lead ceremonies. I guide men through their darkest shadows. I wrote a book and put my name on it.
I used his fear - that bone-deep terror that kept him small and silent - as the biggest ally of both of our lives.
But it didn't start here.
I was five or six years old in Bangladesh when I first realized I had a stutter.
You know how some memories burn themselves into your body? This one lives in my throat. The classroom. The other kids reading out loud, their voices confident and clear. Then my turn coming, and this sensation - like my mouth filling with cement, my tongue forgetting how to move.
During popcorn-style reading, when they'd call on kids randomly, I developed a strategy. I'd pretend I wasn't paying attention. I'd stare out the window, doodle in my notebook, anything to avoid being called on.
I got detention. A lot of detention.
To me, that was better than being found out. Better than everyone hearing me stutter. Better than the shame of my voice betraying me in front of the whole class.
My own father told me not to speak in front of people because of my stutter.
So I learned. Learned to make myself small. Learned to disappear. Learned that my voice was something to be ashamed of, something to hide.
That shame ran so deep it would take decades to unravel.
As a teenager, I got kicked out of military school.
My friend and I had looked inside an old vandalized British-era vehicle for scraps we could use for an upcoming science project. We weren't vandalizing it. We were curious. We were kids looking for parts to build something.
But the principal - a military vet - saw it differently.
He told my mom that a kid like me should do better things than rebel against the norm.
A kid like me.
A year later, we legally moved to the US. But a communication mishap voided our legal visa. Just like that, we became illegal. Hiding from the government. Hiding from everyone.
This became the theme of my life.
Hiding. Blending in. Making sure no one looked too closely.
The kid who couldn't speak without stuttering became the teenager who couldn't exist without hiding.
The first time I tasted purpose, I was breaking every rule I'd been taught.
In 2013, I found an ayahuasca ceremony through Facebook. Every piece of conventional logic said don't do this. Don't trust strangers on the internet with your consciousness. Don't drink plant medicine from someone you've never met.
I did it anyway.
The medicine showed me multiple timelines. Different versions of myself, branching out like a tree. It gave me faith in the life I was living, even when I couldn't see where it was going.
A year later, I drowned for three minutes at Yosemite.
I know how that sounds. But during those three minutes, I encountered Divine Light, my now word for God, for the first time. In the sun blaring down on me on that cold day. In the space between breaths. In the moment between life and death.
I came back different.
After that, I realized I wanted more from life.
I pushed my illegal self to do crazy things I still haven't told my family about. Burning Man. Puerto Rico - a place as exotic as Africa to me then. I was seeking something, though I couldn't name it yet.
Then ICE pulled me off a Greyhound bus while I was visiting my girlfriend in San Diego.
They deported me to Mexico because they assumed I was Mexican. I spent a week combined in solitary confinement and immigration detention facilities in and around California.
Have you ever spent time at a solitary confinement? It takes every voice you've been running from and amplifies it. Every shame. Every fear. Every wound you thought you'd buried.
That kid who was too afraid to speak? He screamed in that cell.
When I got out, I joined the US military. I kept seeking thrills, putting my life in different kinds of danger. Finding community where I felt belonging, even if I didn't know why I needed it so badly.
Then Hawaii happened.
After a Burning Man experience, I met my now ex-wife and an amazing man who showed me people could live differently. I saw it. A different way of being. A different relationship to life.
I decided to move to Canada with the woman I'd just met.
I knew that by doing so, I'd give up my home, family, friends for the foreseeable future. I also knew the rest of the world would finally open up to me. No more hiding from immigration. No more illegal status.
It felt like freedom.
We got married. Within months, we realized we triggered the worst parts of each other. All my abandonment. All my need to disappear. All the ways I'd learned to hide showed up in our relationship.
We separated after a year.
Without a family tether, without anyone else in a new country, I was left alone. Miserable. Closer to death than I'd ever been, even counting those three minutes in Yosemite.
I had to burn it all down and start from a clean slate.
From that place - that dark, terrifying place of complete aloneness - I surrendered.
I started seeking experiences and teachers like my life depended on it. Because it did.
I got deep into embodiment and polarity work. Went through a 2.5 year feminine cleanse, trying to find my own tether to myself instead of needing someone else to hold me.
Peru for six months. Two of them at an ayahuasca center, sitting with the medicine that had first shown me there was more.
Thirty-five days total in vipassana centers. Sitting in silence with everything I'd been running from my entire life.
And men's work. The thing I'd glimpsed at the end of my time in the US. I came back to it, but this time I was ready.
From a place of deep curiosity and the potential of healing myself further, I began to explore every modality that called me. As if they were breadcrumbs from God, I listened with great anticipation.
Silent retreats. Breathwork. Yoga therapy. Each one cracked me open a little more. Each one showed me there was another layer underneath the armor I'd been wearing since I was five years old.
I threw whatever money I had at teachers and trainings.
Breathwork. Yoga. Chi Gong. Sexual transmutation. Anyone and anything that could show me how to feel again. How to be present. How to stop running.
Slowly, something started shifting.
I found compassion for myself. Started enjoying solitude instead of running from it. Discovered I loved going to movies alone - me, the kid who used to need everyone's approval just to feel okay existing.
The kid who couldn't speak was learning to sit with himself.
I started hosting small workshops. First online, then in person. Sharing what was healing me. Realizing my wounds were becoming medicine for others.
Every place I'd been broken was where I could serve someone else who was breaking.
My first time in Peru left such a profound mark that I knew I had to share it.
I led two men's expedition retreats, taking everything I'd learned - the medicine, the mountains, the mirrors men become for each other - and creating experiences filled with awe and beauty.
Helping men reconnect with their fundamental lifeforce. What I now call Radical Eros
I started walking the red road. Vision fasts in the wilderness. The ancient way of tea. Indigenous practices that had been calling me since that first ayahuasca ceremony years before.
This wasn't just work anymore.
This was the path. The thing I'd been looking for my whole life without knowing what to call it.
Now, I split my time between a small town by the ocean and a small town tucked between mountains.
I'm in a relationship that feels like coming home instead of another place to hide.
I lead men into the wilderness through Men's Rites retreats. I work with couples. I coach men one-on-one, helping them alchemize their fear into their gift.
I wrote a book a couple years ago. I'm working on my second one now.
I'm preparing for a TED talk. Me. The kid who'd rather get detention than read out loud.
I share with men a different, more ancient and natural way of life. A way that doesn't require hiding. A way that asks for your voice, not your silence.
Every single thing that terrified little kid was afraid of, I do now.
And here's what I've learned: that fear he carried? It wasn't there to stop me. It was a compass pointing toward aliveness.
Every time I feel that old familiar terror rising in my throat - before I speak on stage, before I lead a ceremony, before I write something true - I recognize it.
That's the five-year-old who was told his voice didn't matter.
And now I thank him. Because his fear became the biggest ally of our lives.
As overwhelming as it gets - and it does get overwhelming - I remember. The kid in solitary confinement. The illegal immigrant hiding in plain sight. The boy who'd rather get detention than let anyone hear him stutter.
Not a second goes by that I'm not grateful for the life that saved him.
Your wounds aren't obstacles to your purpose. They are your purpose.
Every crack in your armor is where your medicine lives.
And we're currently living in a world that's changing very, very quickly. And it shifts, we're all going to feel fear as the lives we've known begin to drastically change.
You can let the fear come to you and paralyze you.
Or approach that fear head on and create something meaningful, through the fear, not bypassing it.
I'm on this journey.
Are you?
Ish
P.S. Every man I work with has a version of this story. The wound that taught him to hide. The fear that's been running his life.
If you're ready to stop hiding and start using that fear as the compass it's always been, you can choose to work with me 1:1.
This is the real work. Not seeking. Not performing. Actually transforming the wound into medicine.
My mentorship book is closed for the next few months, but I have a 3 session package available for those who can't wait to get started.
If this work calling to you, reach out.
P.P.S. I'm also running my Men's Rites retreat in Peru later this year - where the transformation I'm describing here actually happens. Through wilderness, ceremony, and brotherhood. Applications are open. Special rate for existing 1:1 clients.
