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greetings boys and babes it’s the magic hour a place where we navigate through life’s peaks and valleys with all the vulnerability and shamelessness we can muster with the help of world-class guests from all walks of life we uncover new truths and valuable tools for manifesting our highest potential i’m your host mercedes terrell along with my partner in shine jay bryce hey you guys and i told you guys this at the top of the show but we are doing things a little bit differently today we’ve opened up this podcast here on

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zoom to the attendees in our men’s workshop awakening the king within so they are on live with us now and we will have the opportunity to open it up to questions from them at the end of this episode which means uh guys you listening you kings listening if you would hit the q and a button not the chat button in order to submit your questions we can find them at the end of the show so jade tell us about our guest today yes so we are having on a man that not only has mentored one of my mentors and one of mercedes mentors but also has

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mentored my partner so basically without even knowing him and without him even knowing it he has changed my life through both of these people he is a seminar presenter storyteller and teacher with a background in counseling experiential psychotherapy and personal and spiritual development in addition to more than 35 years of experience as a healer breathwork practitioner and trainer he has also been for just as many years engaged in a deep study of various systems of thought from depth psychology jungian and neo-jungian sensibilities various

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esoteric religious models all the way to mythic and archetypal symbols he synthesizes this vast knowledge into an easily understood practical and accessible framework i am so excited for you guys to hear from him today so with that please help me welcome james frazier to the show thank you hi thanks for being here um so james as i said in your intro you have mentored some people that are very close to me and one of them had mentioned that there are four things you would really want your male clients to do um the four were

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and you can correct me if i if you know i’ve misquoted this recognize and heal their mother wound learn their symbols find their art form and do shadow work so we would love to just touch on each of these four things today on the show um if it’s okay with you i’d like to start with the mother wound maybe how we can recognize it yeah and then start to heal it okay thank you well first of all thanks for a wonderful introduction it’s always a mixed blessing love to hear nice things said about yourself but then

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you start wondering am i going to live up to this i appreciate that um i’ll yeah i’ll be happy to jump right in i i guess i would ask for a differentiation because normally i refer to this as the mother issue no doubt there are lots of men who are wounded by their mother just as there are lots of women who are wounded by their father some of those wounds are conscious and some unconscious but the mother issue label reflects a much much larger um thing that we’re dealing with because we’re not just dealing with the real

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life mother although there’s some very powerful things that need to occur around that which are not occurring in the modern world notably the separation of puberty that traditional cultures would have all insisted upon and would have facilitated with various ritual practices we’ve not done that in the last 4 500 years and i think that’s creating huge amounts of problems in the psyche of males as well as in our society in general so when i talk about the mother issue i’m not only talking about the real live

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actual physical mother i’m talking about the archetype of the mother i’m talking about the separation of a mother that needs to take place a movement out of the world of boyhood into the world of true mature masculinity and i’m also talking about things like the inner feminine which is heavily colored by the mother’s experience and then i’m talking about the transference of that onto other real live women often to disastrous effects so it’s a much bigger package than just you know me and my actual literal mother

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so i hope that kind of clears that up a little bit this can even involve things like trauma of birth and by the way i should interject here none of my work is ever about parent blaming this is not about blaming mothers or claiming mothers are responsible for the all the dysfunction we see in masculinity uh if if anything uh if any blame would be to be attached that probably should go more toward the failure of men to help young men move into this masculine mature expression but again i’m not about i find it very

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dissatisfactory to try to blame parents most parents do about the best they can most of them didn’t get the blessing they didn’t get the initiations yeah they’re kind of limping along like everybody else there are some you know occasional cases where you have extreme dysfunctions and psychopathologies but it’s really not about mother blaming so i hope nobody misunderstands me on that particular thing but thank you for clarifying yeah we’re all affected by birth birth is one of the most traumatic

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things we ever come through and there’s been tremendous amount of work in the last particularly the last 40 years about understanding the imprint that birth gives us and even forms the lens through which we can be affected the rest of our life because that’s the lens we look at the world through so i’ve done a lot of work around that particular aspect particularly with the non-ordinary states of consciousness work that i do um but it’s also all the different stages of childhood that we’re supposed

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to be doing developmental processes and whether those get completed or not or whether they get damaged again sometimes there is a failure to separate from mother effect quite frequently i would argue in the modern world we’re not really separating from mother and thus we have a situation where a lot of men walking around in mature six foot tall 220 pound bodies but they’re still operating on the same psyche of a 12 year old because they have not been helped through the developmental stages and processes that are needed

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for someone to come into a real mature expression of masculinity yeah yes i witnessed this [Laughter] and how um how would a man know if he if that is an active area he needs to look at and maybe what what would come from healing it well i think what happens for a lot of men as they begin to wake up to this about mid-life and we start off when we’re in our 20s we’re kind of bulletproof society has told us all the things that we should do to be successful uh we may buy into that more or less and sometimes we have quite great

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success in the outer world only to discover at midlife that something’s wrong there’s some we could kind of go into flatland if you will where the things that worked maybe when we were in our 20s no longer work often there’s a deepening sense of is this all there is you know maybe i’ve attained success or the opposite i haven’t attained success at all and at midlife i start really seriously questioning everything including my relationships my vocation who i am as a person and that’s actually the beginning of

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what can be a very powerful initiatory time period and i’m using the word initiation in a broad sense to mean processes that truly can become effective enough that when you finish those processes you wind up with a chain sense of self so very often it’s mid-life or there’s some crisis that happens prior to mid-life i certainly work with clients who are younger than midlife but sometimes people will suffer a great loss they lose a career they get a disease they lose a loved one they lose a relationship you know it’s

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usually some loss that throws them into this serious questioning of who they are where they’re going what direction they’re headed and many of them find i don’t have the answers and there’s not very many places in our culture to look around because it’s not a topic of popular conversation we do all of our educational process for example are mostly geared toward learning skills that will help you get a job we almost do nothing to teach people how to do relationships we don’t teach about boundaries we don’t teach about conflict

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we don’t teach about being self-assertive being authentic being in integrity we don’t teach any of that we just assume people are going to automatically get that when they turn 18 and of course that’s absolutely not the case so usually it’s life sort of catches up with you and people are often thrown into this flatland place where they feel like there’s something they need to be doing but they’re not quite sure what and often it’s again turning inward not that they need to abandon the outer

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world by any means but it’s a beginning to take into consideration the background of one’s life or what typically in-depth psychology is referred to as the the unconscious and this would involve this would probably we’ll talk some more about a shadow work but it involves looking at what are the things that are affecting me profoundly affecting me that i have to this point had no awareness of so it’s a deep investigation of all the forces and things like complexes and belief systems and the programs that we took on from both

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our family of origin as well as culture in general and a serious examination of how those affecting me so a lot of the work that i do particularly with men although i work with women as well in the same way is trying to connect with deeper issues in the psyche that the person has been unconscious of as well as connecting to deeper resources so it’s not just a archaeological dig if to use that metaphor although that’s important as well but it’s equally about a construction project how do you build this second

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half of life particularly how do you do the inner work that allows you to connect with the resources which make you much more effective both in your relationships in the outer world in dealing with boundaries and ultimately reaching that place where you can become a very positive force in the world in terms of helping other people yeah and it’s so beautiful that you are you know you are one of those people and we get to have you here on the show who are giving men a road map and women a road map to get through this because it

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is a process that we have very few resources for um and we really have like you said we have really no initiation processes especially for men in our culture women we have a period you know we have this menstruation that starts and that kind of helps kick us off into that realm so to speak but i do i mean obviously we started a workshop on this because we felt like that was a place that was really lacking for the men in our lives growing up um and so we’re glad to know you james and uh something you brought up that

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really aligns with something i was actually watching yesterday i was watching a woman walk a man through um getting into some trauma work and the trauma work that you know you’re talking about or or shadow work let’s call it here um and digging up these places in our unconscious that are wanting to be looked at um can go as deep as what you were talking about earlier which is this uh birth trauma i mean as deep as in utero trauma where that transitions happens and we are now born and followed right after by circumcision

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yeah and we’re born into this very uncomfortable situation and then later in life like you’re saying maybe mid-life or or maybe even sooner for some but we have essentially a rebirth again and there’s some sort of almost traumatization that can occur again if we don’t have someone to help guide us through it and so one of the factors that you had listed there or jaded listed was how men can learn their symbols as a way to begin walking through this work so james if you could you know jade and i

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are both somewhat familiar with symbolism and dream interpretation i’ve been dream journaling for over a year now like really consistently and we’ve read some of jung’s work specifically on symbols and dreams but i would love to get into the basics here with us and our listeners and um get into how an authority on this in this realm like you can help men look at that stuff or where do they begin looking at their symbols or digging up what that even means in the first place okay again i would argue for a little more

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differentiation usually what i refer to this as learning to think symbolically might just as well substitute learning to think in metaphor in other words to be able to see one thing in another part of the problem in the modern world is that we’re quite disconnected from symbolic thinking in that we’ve gone down the road of a sort of uber rationality beginning with first the protestant revolution approximate reformation rather than the scientific revolution then moving into the age of enlightenment and then now

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the scientific and industrial revolution where we’re quite distant from uh even the idea of symbolism so we’ve moved into a quite epistemological criticism of symbolism that’s partly because science which is risen to like the ultimate place and it’s replaced religion actually in our culture as the ultimate authority but in science you cannot deal with symbolism things can only mean one thing in science so for example to take something as simple as water the scientific notation for water is h2o and it means one thing two hydrogen

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atoms one oxygen atom that’s it it doesn’t mean anything else it cannot mean anything else now compare that to a bowl of water sitting on your counter that bowl of water also means h2o but it might remind you of a fish bowl you had when you were a child and your first pet you lost which was the goldfish it might remind you if you can think even more symbolically to something as far as as big as the ocean which is kind of a perfect metaphor for the unconscious most of us think of the unconscious at best if we think of it at all we

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generally think of the unconscious as like a giant file cabinet everything’s stored in there in manila folders we don’t think of it as it really is which is living contents just like our psyche is our conscious mind is living so to the unconscious so the ocean is kind of this perfect metaphor because when you look at the ocean you generally don’t see anything but the surface occasionally a fish will jump out but normally you don’t see the tremendous amount of life that’s underneath the surface

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until you put on a diving suit and then you go down and then suddenly you’re in this whole other world so water could mean many many different things it could be in the ocean the unconscious it could symbolize tears and emotions thus connected to feelings so it you can see how a symbol can point to a mystery that may ultimately be unsolved in our scientific sense particularly but it can be multiple layered whereas a sign means one thing so we’ve we’ve moved away from symbolic thinking and thus metaphorical thinking

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and we must move more and more toward literal thinking which works wonderfully well with some things if you’re going to do science that’s where you want to be but if you’re going to be a human and you want to live then opening up to the symbolic dimension the metaphorical dimension and thus being able to see the value in things like story and myth and fairy tales and movies as how these could apply to the processes that are going on in the unconscious and ones on psyche as opposed to just dead stories

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that you know some guys made up who were bored on a friday night uh it makes a huge huge difference um so i i would argue for symbolic thinking as a way of kind of just opening up to even things like synchronicity for example there are a lot of people who have synchronicities and they just ignore them they just go oh well that was a coincidence unless it’s very overwhelming synchronicity but if you start thinking symbolically very often you’ll be able to actually utilize that the same is true with dreams you know so many people

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literalize dreams they don’t really have they’re not um they don’t actually have an understanding of the symbolic nature of dreams so if they dream of their friend joe who’s in you know in their real life they have a friend named joe and they dream of joe in the dream they think the dream is about joe instead of thinking well what is joe symbolizing in my conscience why is my unconscious using the symbol of joe so that’s sort of what i mean by symbolic thinking yeah absolutely just to bring in a personal story on

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that because you brought up joe i have a girlfriend who to me she’s always you know she’s always getting way too too intoxicated i’m having to kind of take care of her i’m the person who’s more like you know two drinks max type of person and she’s like two sheets to the wendy though very quickly so i’m trying to wrangle her all the time in real life and she’s a lovely person and she’s always crying she’s very in touch with her emotions very quickly and i’m very much the opposite in a lot

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of ways and that’s been a struggle for me so in my dreams i realized that she actually represents this feminine quality this chaos this you know fluidity this emotional being and all these things so when i can now see her because she comes in my dreams often so i knew it was a definite symbol i needed to be really looking at and uh when i could recognize her as this feminine energy i could see my interactions with her in the dream completely differently now they could guide me to whatever my dream was trying

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to show me it was pretty groundbreaking to just uncover that one symbol yeah um i also for me when someone shows up um that’s been really key for me is like what do they represent for me so like for a long time i kept having dreams of snoop dogg and i started to ask myself like what does he represent to me and to me he’s very silly he’s goofy he’s playful he’s like you know just such a goof and so it was like my psyche asking me to embrace those parts of myself the part that’s playful that will be goofy

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and um there was a time that like i had a dream that mercedes was like kissing my neck and like whispering sweet things in my ear and she’s like a sister to me so it’s like so weird but then i realized you know mercedes to me represents logic and um groundedness and centeredness so it was like that was my psyche um trying to those parts of me trying to entice me to you know have that exchange with them lately i’ve been having dreams with random celebrities and i’m trying to figure out what they represent but my

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guess would be that they their symbolism would be like the unknown or you know the fantasy you know maybe i’m still digging in on that but symbolism has been really useful um i also want to get into how important it is for men to find their art form um i’m not sure so we already on the other two questions were a little bit misconstrued on what it meant i’m not exactly sure if art form means you know picking up the guitar if it could be a martial art or what exactly that means but i’ll let you describe before i assume

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okay uh well again usually what i’d say is for men to do artwork i’m referring to particularly things like art journaling or trying to to put trying to connect with emotions inside and express them in some art art form now it is true that there are men that are going to resonate there are some men who are terrified by looking at a white blank piece of paper and often with those men i’ll have them try to do something that’s more tactile like clay work or mask making or even painting objects like rocks

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where the form is already there and you’re just trying to express it so it’s it’s the idea that through artwork we are often able to express emotions in a way that we cannot in just english language uh language sort of tends to remove us one step from the art and sometimes particularly for men you know we’re we start off behind the eight ball in terms of this emotional stuff women are just they’re just gifted and talking about emotions there’s some people who would speculate that goes all the way back to the

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hunter-gatherer situation where the men are out hunting and you don’t talk because it scares all the game away whereas the women are back at the cave so to speak raising the children and having conversations with each other but i i it’s deeper than that i’m being a little slightly trying to make a joke with that but the idea is that women are typically much much better at expressing emotions and much more differentiated in their emotions so you ask a woman how she’s feeling she might come up with one of

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200 different emotions and with some men it’s like you have trouble pulling out whether they’re one of the four emotions you know anger sad happy glad but that’s partially also because the failure of the particularly the puberty initiation does not allow men to awaken to their masculine emotional body if you get around men who have been initiated their emotional body is quite awakened they are quite capable of discussing emotions and they are quite capable expressing emotions and differentiating emotions so

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it’s partly this failure on the part of our culture to really initiate males into the masculine awakened masculine body but for many for many men if and women if you’ll do artwork in addition to your inner work it just accelerates everything so much and so i’m continually trying to push for that it also helps connect you to the very fundamental part of our psyche which has to do with creativity and in some ways when we’re creative we’re the most god-like in one way we’re bringing up our lover well i’m

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never suggesting that we try to be gods we make terrible gods thus you don’t want to ever try to become an archetype for example but on the other hand creativity is just a gift that we have that no other animal has we have an opposable thumb thus we’re tool makers we’re also myth makers we’re storytellers you drop us down anywhere on this planet and we’ll start telling stories i love my dogs for example my dogs have great capacity in the emotional dimension but they have no creativity they don’t sit around discussing should

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they knock out this wall make a bigger dog house so it is one of the things that uh is is so distinguishing about us humans and so i believe every human is supposed to be creative and if you add creativity and artwork to your in inner practice it will accelerate it enormously yeah you said um a man who’s been initiated and maybe you can give us an example of of how a man can be initiated since we have lost the um you know sacred rituals for that okay well i almost need to go back and talk about a time before we had lost those to

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kind of example what this was like uh you mentioned earlier mercedes about women’s initiations i’m very convinced that many of the early man pre-modern man their attempts at initiating the male was first of all based upon what nature did to women uh it it doesn’t take a caveman to make these so you know you have to be very bright to figure out that women’s menstruation cycle which is their onset of womanhood it’s the demonstrable nature act that they can now have children um that’s cosmic in its nature because it’s

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related to the cycle of the moon they match exactly so again you wouldn’t have to be brilliant to figure that out and i also suspect that the moon is quite mysterious it’s like no other light in the sky it grows it grows bigger it gets full and then it starts dying and this happens so it’s a perfect metaphor for birth and death and also if you lived on the ocean you would know very quickly that it affects the tides and we also have this uh apocryphal idea that in full moons people are more emotional

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so again this is pretty ancient stuff so there’s no equivalent uh cosmic initiation for males i mean a male getting pubic hair and the ability to ejaculate sexual orgasm is not exactly cosmic but you you if you study these ancient cultures what you find is that very often the practices that they developed and the rituals that they developed mimicked what nature did to women so you’ll often have boys taken into caves for example left for three days the caves in france i truly believe the ones that have been discovered in this last

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century that are dated 35 40 000 years ago with these magnificent animal paintings on them are truly stunning but you can imagine boys being taken in there left for three days with no light no water no food you will go into a non-ordinary state of consciousness uh it’s just inevitable and then suddenly you can imagine the shaman initiators lighting torches and suddenly illuminating the interior of that place it would be like a second birth it would be like you and the and in that situation there’s very strong

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possibility that you would have brought up material that was uncompleted from your actual birth the circumcision that you mentioned earlier was never done at birth it was always done at puberty so that males had an equal genital wound so much of what’s happening is that they’re copying nature so to speak but the realization that in the case of men a much bigger intervention needed to take place and if you did not go through that second birth you really weren’t quite human and things would turn very demonic and

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toxic this is coinciding of course when the young male is suddenly being flooded with a dna testosterone agenda of aggression and the idea was that if you did not steward that that it would turn very very bad very quickly so the idea was that you were both put through a near-death experience a confrontation with death you had some kind of symbolic things such as scarification a very frequent thing you’ll see in ancient culture so when you met somebody in the woods you’d know whether they’ve been initiated or

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not they literally would have stripes on their arms with leftover vestiges of that of the military uniforms we have today which have stripes on the arms that’s actually where that comes from wow but uh you would have been put through this initiatory process and again by our modern sensibilities this is just incredibly primitive and horrific because usually some of the boys actually died in the process and of course to again to our modern sensibilities this is just unbelievable but their sense was unless they were playing with

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death it wasn’t going to be strong enough to pull that boy out of the world of mother because the mother is contains this euphoric memory going all the way back to in utero where all of your needs are met your oxygen is being supplied your food products are being supplied your waste products are being eliminated you are directly connected to the great mother goddess you and she are one you’re floating in this warm oceanic fluid protected from loud noises and extreme temperature changes and literally happiness is kind of

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forced upon you i don’t know what your idea of bliss is but that’s mine powerful powerful euphoric so these cultures understood that if you left a boy in that world of the mother he would never mature and be able to face things like pain predators to act in a warrior function to protect the tribe so that was like a giant electromagnet if you will it took a huge counter-force to pull a boy out of that and in these cultures if a boy survived it and he went on to go through the other stewardship around the warrior energy from that day

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forward nobody ever treated him as a boy it was a clear cut before you went into the initiation you were a boy when you came out of it you were a man and in many of these cultures their emphasis is not like our modern culture on rights their emphasis is on what are your obligations what are your obligations as a man toward the the tribe or the culture so you would also this is the time when you would have been introduced to the mythic stories the religious sacred texts which generally were uh stories about what happened at the

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beginning like the creation myths unlike me i started getting this when i was probably a year old in nursery school at the southern baptist church they started indoctrinating you right away whereas in these traditional cultures you would have never been told something as sacred as that story until you had been through this second birth so there are a number of different things that coalesce together including and most importantly perhaps the stewardship of older unrelated males to guide this initiatory process you

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would have been taken through the warrior initiation which would have connected you in a very powerful and regulated way to the archetype of the warrior then you would have been allowed to marry but you would have never allowed anybody to marry who had not gone through that initiation because the odds of them turning violent was pretty great so now what we have in the modern world is we quit doing all that basically with the knighthood traditions and even those of course were mostly aristocratic but we decided we don’t need to do all that

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it’s all mumbo jumbo it’s all primitive stuff from the past and it’s just not a necessary thing and consequently we think well you know boys are all warrior well actually they’re not they’re boy warrior and they’re flooded with this energy but they don’t know what to do with it and they don’t know how to steward it so unfortunately much of that gets uh channeled into the shadowy parts of our culture things like gangs for example very frequently the young boys join those gangs right at

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puberty that’s the time they know something’s supposed to be happening the gangs put them through an initiation they know a lot about more about initiation than our culture does unfortunately it’s an initiation into a cult of death not one that’s a cult of life that could protect the culture and is concerned about the boy’s soul but the shadowy parts of our culture you know the hell’s angels the mafia these folks elaborate initiatory processes yeah uh often involving death but they are not

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they’re the opposite again kind of a cult of death so we also in in college culture right in fraternities and such some sort of that happening do you think there are any kind of initiation processes that we have in place now in our culture that do do some positive for for a man there are some places in our culture where men are awakening this i would not put college hazing in i don’t that’s kind of the plastic replicas of the bones of dinosaurs of ritual you know it’s it’s very far removed from the real

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thing uh it’s usually just kind of sado masochistic acting out basically and it can be very dangerous now there are people killed every year doing this kind of stuff but the the real true initiation of attempting to help a boy or a girl come into their mature feminine and mature masculine with great consciousness and connecting them to a transpersonal sense even a transpersonal center is one of the fundamental things that’s missing here so then what happens is people either keep questing for that but there’s

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almost no place that really knows too much about all this or if they’re fortunate they’ll run across somebody who has studied this does know about this can act as a mentor in this case there are some groups of men who are around the world actually who are attempting to awaken this but initiation is one of those things that sort of goes in and out of cultural awareness and even among psychotherapists there are not very many who know about this process at least that i’ve met but it’s one of the most critical pieces

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that i think we badly need to wake up to so the more people we can get talking about this thinking about this that’s the bad news the good news is that in some sense life will initiate you and it’s also possible to voluntarily go into these now you don’t have to go into the near-death thing but you can voluntarily seek out a guide seek out someone a mentor who can help you through these processes we all go through these throughout life they’re not just at puberty originally the anthropologists thought

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that was the only initiation there were but i there there’s definitely initiations that are life cycle generated there’s one about three and a half years of age another one about six another one at puberty another one around 21. another one around age 30 another one around 40 42 and that just keeps going [Music] i’m you know i’m at an age where i’m approaching some of the latter ones but i do believe it’s possible for you to keep to be open to the fact that we’re all supposed to be going through these major

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processes of change managing change is one of those difficult things that humans have to face and simply you know there are some many things we know about initiation one is that there is a structure to the container of initiation and if that structure is not missing or is defective then the initiations are usually aborted or failed we have a lot of this today unfortunately where people are kind of self-appointed gurus who are offering what appears to be sacred space but they actually don’t know anything about it

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and they’re not contained and so they’re in a way they’re sort of like a harry potter who sneaks into his master’s room and grabs a wand and conjures up a spirit and they don’t know what to do with it but there are some components of sacred space that either make the initiatory space liminal which means healing or luminoid which means it looks like it should be healing but it’s actually not or even worse it’s destructive so this is not anything new this has been going on forever it has to do with the

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difficulties of the magician archetype but there there is increasing awareness of this and and i think many many men particularly and women as well of course hunger for this kind of knowledge and so i’ve just been very very blessed to be able to work in this area for the last three decades and um i think it’s one of the most important things we can do for our own personal psychological and spiritual growth we agree wholeheartedly i believe your mentor one of your mentors at least was robert moore who wrote

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the book uh kingwood magician lover is that right yes yeah yeah that’s so amazing um the uh um workshop that we did last night with airman’s group was on those four archetypes so um really cool to be able to have you on today following that yeah and james i do want to dive into to shadow work with you because that’s a really big one and i want to make sure we are respecting your time here so what does it look like for man to enter shadow work okay well we can use shadow in two broad senses one would be anything in the

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unconscious meaning anything we’re not aware of for some people even the idea of the unconscious is rather abstract but i can pretty easily demonstrate that you have one first of all if you’ve ever driven down the freeway and you’ve been intensely thinking about some issue that’s going on in your life and suddenly you realize you haven’t been driving for the last 15 minutes somebody’s been driving and typically it’s your unconscious you also will be able to demonstrate the unconscious very easily when you

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suddenly have outbursts of affect and emotion that are way over the top for what the situation calls for and then the other place of course is in dreamwork every night your conscious mind goes to sleep that’s the definition of that state and the unconscious now has a stage and it creates these incredible movies so it’s pretty easy to demonstrate it but becoming aware of it and trying to begin to investigate how it affects us in our daily life is the great shift from my point of view so the shadow work is almost one of the most

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important things that i can think of in addition to this initiatory material because the concept of shadow is that we carry within us rejected parts uh almost every position we take we automatically create its opposite and then but the fact is it’s like we push them all down into the basement we don’t want to know about them because they may be incompatible with our own self-image they may be typically the first shadow begins to get created by the family of origin where qualities that we have that might

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actually not be bad qualities they might be very good qualities are somehow shamed or rejected by the family and then that gets extended to the culture and of course when we all go off to school you learn very quickly what’s cool and what’s not cool and the parts of you that aren’t cool you try to get rid of so we wind up robert blair used to use this wonderful metaphor we put all the stuff in the bag that we dragged behind us and so the bigger our light the bigger our shadow is and if we are not at some point and again it’s usually

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mid-life people start turning around and trying to pull stuff back out of the bag again again some of it is things that we just simply need to acknowledge that we have so that we don’t act them out unconsciously so if i have a particular quality let’s say i i decide early in life based upon my family of origin based upon my own personality that i’m going to be a nice guy and i go out of my way to be just the nicest most pleasant guy i never say any bad words to anybody well where’s my aggression

40:57

it’s turning into a really big huge counterbalance inside my psyche and then suddenly one day it’ll come roaring out and i’ve put my fist through the door or i’ve thrown the teacup across the room and shattered it or i’m yelling at my kids or i’m kicking the cat and then that recedes and i go oh my god i can’t let that out again look what that damage happened and then i’ll start doing passive aggressive behaviors and then i’ll avoid conflict and then i’ll have my personality be quite inauthentic because

41:31

i’m not connecting to anger it would be far better if i learned how to do clean anger if i’m given that modeling even taught that as a class it would be wonderful but certainly if our family of origin said look anger is is a natural emotion life of things are in the life are going to make you angry but it’s far better for you to directly convey that your anger to only anger and also in clean anger you are you have a possibility of offering a solution so instead of doing it passively aggressively or pretending i don’t have

42:06

it i try to become more authentic and whole by saying you know to a person who’s made me angry look when you did this it made me angry and here’s what i need you to do to make restitution make me a batch of chocolate chip cookies we’ll be fine but that usually what happens is we get either repression or we get the extreme of it which is rage and rage by that point is not seeking any uh resolution it’s just seeking to hurt and damage so when we get in touch with shadow work we’re beginning to become

42:41

if we can own that shadow then we become more whole less perfect and our whole culture even our main religion is based upon an idea of perfection which none of us can ever reach and therefore a lot of us develop a lot of shame and a lot of inner adversarial voice that continues to hit us with how we’re not meant you know measuring up to the idea of perfection so shadow work is very very difficult it’s hard it’s owning things you think are not you at all but the alternative is if you do not do shadow work

43:15

the shadow will project itself out onto whoever has a hook that will hold it and so at the risk of misunderstanding i’ll use a political metaphor let’s say i decide i’m going to be a really good card-carrying republican i mean i’m died in the wool republican well all i’ve done is create a counterbalance on the other side like a schoolyard teeter-totter you know i have as the bigger republican i become the bigger the democrat is except i don’t know that and i just go a long life thinking i’m only a

43:46

republican and then along comes a democrat with a democrat hook and my shadow democrat jumps out on them and i hate them and want to kill them this is what james joyce refers to as the nightmare of history because this is the whole of human history i have the right religion yours i need to kill you because you have a different one than i do or your skin color is different than mine you’re bad so when we do shadow work we don’t become the shadow but we own that if we haven’t and thus we don’t need to project it any longer

44:19

so then the charge comes off of all these other people that we were so judgmental and maybe hateful toward so it’s if i had one wish it would be that everybody in the world do shadow work so this would reduce the amount of pain in the world enormously so it’s a huge huge subject we could spend several hours talking about shadow work but i hope that gives you a little bit of an idea at least yeah absolutely do you have a great maybe in a great place for men to start doing that work well many of my my workshops are geared

44:55

toward this but all of my individual work is geared toward this i do both work on the archetypal level i do a lot of work on the archetypal level but it also a lot of work on shadow of just trying to help men seriously examine the background of their own personal unconscious as well as things like the transpersonal unconscious which includes the archetypes yeah that’s we’re gonna give you that information in just a second here guys if you’re if you’re watching or listening to this now so get pen and paper out for that

45:26

yeah um so there are a few short questions james that we like to ask everyone who comes on the show so we’ll kind of wrap up with those and then we’ll hop into the q a session from the the guest today uh all right so the first question is if you could hug your younger self right now what would you say i would say always run toward the fear how old were you i would love for somebody to tell me that when i was three and a half hmm if you could have the whole world read one book which would it be i’m sorry

46:07

if you could have the whole world read one book which would it be that was that’s an almost impossible question no everyone feels that way okay um on the top of my head it would be man and his symbols okay it was co-written by carl young and marie louisa in france and joseph henderson it is a book later in young’s life and it was specifically written as a kind of an introduction to his work but if you do buy it make sure you buy the large hardcover edition because the soft cover edition the paperback is terrible it’s

46:44

hard to read and it doesn’t have the images but that’s a great introduction to young’s work and i guess that would be my secret hope is to introduce people to you i’m about halfway through it all right if you could whisper one phrase to everyone on the planet what would it be you are important [Music] before we jump into the q a what ways can people work with you and how can they get in contact with you for that okay the easiest way is to go to my website which is james frazier that’s f-r-a-z-i-e-r dot com james frazier.com

47:25

there’s a email box that you can send me an email and then we can go from there perfect guys i hope you do reach out to james because i think this is a great place for you to start doing this work i know that if you’re here from our men’s workshop you are already entering a lot of this um deep diving so he is a great extension of that if you are looking to go further definitely hit him up all right james so we’re going to jump into the q a session and i have a question here says james i think you said

48:00

you should not attempt to become an archetype what did you mean by that boy that that’s also a very big subject um i’m responding to the fact that occasionally i’ll see people posting things from places like facebook and other things like saying what archetype are you sort of given the idea that one your small s self ego could even control something like an archetype or worse that you might want to identify with an archetype archetypes are beyond human level energies they are energies that that absolutely uh fuel our psyche but

48:40

they’re grandiose they’re gigantic and possession by an archetype always turns demonic so when you the whole all of this work ultimately i think for many of us comes down to particularly with these four major archetypes that robert moore did so much work around and had a great good fortune learning from it’s actually the little less human self that has to regulate these things so regulating archetypal energy so that you can use it appropriately and not be flooded with it or possessed by it is actually the key

49:14

so much like a campfire for example if you build a campfire in a cold winter’s night you want to be optimal distance from the campfire to receive the warmth but you don’t want to jump into the campfire because it will consume you you’ll be burned up you don’t you also don’t want to be so far away that you freeze to death so the optimal distance and regulation of archetypal energy is the key if you get inflated in an archetype it can take over you and your personality go right out the door and i

49:43

can give you many many examples from history where that has happened where it almost always turns demonic so just for example a person flooding with lover energy is very prone to being in the active side of this which is addiction so if you get somebody who’s flooding with love or energy they may very well get addicted to some substance which then completely destroys their life whereas we all need love or energy but you don’t want to be flooded with it or identified with it this is true with the magician

50:13

archetype it’s true with the warrior archetype it’s true with the king and queen archetype you do not want to be an archetype that’s just that’s not you want to any more than you want to take your toaster down directly to the nuclear power plant and directly hook it into the reactor because there won’t be any toast there won’t be any toaster and there won’t be any you you’ve got to have appropriate regulation transformers wiring to your house switches fuse panel then you can adequately plug in your

50:46

toaster and get some toast so in a similar way these archetypes are kind of like that to use that technological metaphor they’re like a nuclear power plant and it’s just um not a desirable thing to become an archetype yeah that makes sense we have another one that says what is a technique for specifically healing my mother wound and how can i stop projecting it onto my partner well that’s a really good one well the first thing is you’ve got some awareness that you have it and that you are projecting and so the hard work is then

51:20

beginning to pull back to projection of really realizing this is an internal thing that needs to be handled internally so that’s no mean feat by the way but if you can do that then you can begin to actually deal with and look inside at what are all the dimensions of this and as i said when we started it’s probably bigger than just your actual mother but you can do things like journaling it’s a wonderful way to what i call circumambulation around something you just keep journaling and writing as much as you can about your

51:54

mother about the experience of the mother and then again this is generally better facilitated if you’re working with someone but if you’re working on your own trying to express some of the emotions that may come up with that in artwork can be quite helpful and like all complexes which again generally the mother wound is kind of synonymous with negative mother complex like all complexes you’re wanting to try to get to a place where you know as much as you can about the archetype about excuse me about the

52:28

complex and then you’re wanting to try to build boundaries between you and that so that that arc that keeps saying archetype sorry but that complex when it constellates the time that it’s taken over is less and less and less and the uh time it takes you to get conscious of it is shorter and shorter and shorter and then you developing defenses against allowing that to take to take over in other words to get to a place where you know you have that complex and even if it constellates you refuse to act it out

53:01

so getting conscious about the projection process is very very important and just trying to pull back that projection saying it’s both unfair to my partner but also i don’t want to keep doing that and where i need really need to work on this as an internal process not out here yeah yeah so i have another one here it says what was one of your biggest takeaways from working with robert moore uh blessing robert moore blessed me enormously in so many different ways the second thing of course is that this model opened up a

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doorway for me that i cannot even now reflect back and imagine what my life would have been like without it his his work is much more than just masculine psychology he became famous as being a masculine psychologist he actually published this book because of an incident he had when he was traveling in india where the cab driver turned down one street and said to him there are 7 000 prostitutes on this street men women and children you can buy any of them do anything you want to with them and it hit him like a cast iron frying pan

54:10

and when he got back to the university of chicago and sitting in the committee meetings doing all the dribble that goes on in committee meetings and realizing the tremendous psychopathologists in the world from the boy masculine he was decided to publish this several years earlier as a kind of way to help men try to get some orientation about what some of the stuff is going on so it opened up the whole world for me about my own woundedness in the masculine about my need to connect with the masculine about the work i needed to do on warrior and

54:42

it’s just simply the the most effective model i’ve ever come across in all of my studies of different schools of psychology it sounds very abstract at first like archetypes you know what are those things but actually it’s the most practical thing i know of you don’t have to be in psychotherapy 15 years to figure out what’s wrong with you you can take somebody who hasn’t never read a book on psychology and within a couple of three sessions they begin to grasp this model and within six sessions they’re like okay

55:14

self-identifying what they need to do so it’s very very just by learning which archetype they need to um which archetypes energy they need to work with and which one may be inflated yes they might be flooding in and then putting energy into the opposite generally we’ll have two of these more or less in our conscious and two more or less unconscious so the balancing act is usually working on the opposite energy so if you’re flooded with magician and you have too much magician you’re too distant manipulating um

55:49

or the passive side of it denying innocence you know either one of those you need to put more energy into the queen or the king archetype because that helps balance that out same is true with the lover and the warrior and you can see this in addictions for example where a person is addicted to say something like alcohol and they become chronic alcoholic and they cannot set a boundary between them and the alcohol they can’t do like mercedes is saying earlier i could take two drinks and then i stop they just

56:16

keep going who drinks is better forwards breaks six is wonderful then they pass out or they get into these really addictive processes so the most effective program and of course it’s nowhere near the percentage would one would hope but the most effective program is alcohol synonymous and alcohol is anonymous even though they don’t talk about it like this it’s a warrior program it’s they do the same ritual every time it’s other people it’s asking for help that’s a real warrior move contrary to our

56:45

americanized uh skewed warrior image like you know rambo who’s got one pocket knife has been shot 47 times but he’s single-handedly facing off 17 000 of the enemy that’s complete total hollywood that’s not the real deal the real deal is if you need to ask for help to go beyond your limits so aaa is actually a warriorship program so you see people learning how to do boundaries how to not drink how to start living and at first it’s really really simple but it’s that act of asking for help

57:18

that is so powerful and helps the person start moving toward balancing so that they no longer have to do the addictive processes so you can see in all of these these are dynamically opposed to each other and thus putting energy in one side helps balance out the other side yeah that’s so beautifully put too that it’s about asking for help because you know and i guess we would also call it um creating accountability you know and especially when you talk about that aaa program it really resonates we’re actually having on a guest we’ve

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had before but specifically for our men’s group we’re having on michael brodie wait who is a addict-turned-three-time ceo and he now has all these leadership programs he works with men and women to really help them embody that that king energy essentially um and it’s so much of it is about removing the mask and that comes with having someone and something to be accountable to so yeah it’s beautifully put i wish we had done the whole call with you just on the archetypes we have just two more questions from our

58:26

group and then we’ll um we’ll wrap up with you okay so why do some therapists seem to point men to look specifically at mother wounds and then some focusing on father wounds is the uh is the important direction to look so why do some you know therapists point towards father and others towards mother i obviously can’t really answer that without knowing specifically therapists my knee jerk reaction is their own un uh owned material you know or maybe their own material yeah i again i really argue for the fact that we’re

59:08

we’re all going to get wounded in childhood the difference is whether we got consciously wounded or unconsciously wounded and then the responsibility however is ours it’s not the parents so some therapists just team and some schools of therapy tend to be orientated towards certain ways so it could be the educate the person’s education or their own experience i’m i’m not i’m an equal opportunity person i i think both parents have some negative effects as well as positive effects what i’m more interested in is what is

59:44

the developmental process of the childhood that the person went through how did that how did the developmental things either get done or missing and so even with symptoms i don’t work like a therapist does because therapists particularly psychiatrists are looking at a symptom for a diagnosis which is not only how they get paid but also determines in the case of psychiatry these days which drug they’re going to give you whereas for me symptoms are simply signposts pointing toward developmental processes for example if you go to a psychiatrist

1:00:18

with the most frequent disorder that people show up for which is anxiety the first thing they’re going to do is pull out a prescription pad write your prescription for something like xanax and that’s probably as far as it’ll go because there’s not much emphasis on trying to figure out why you’re anxious whereas for me anxiety almost always indicates you’re inadequately connected to warrior energy because if you’re truly connected to warrior energy you’ll be calm you won’t be full of anxiety

1:00:50

and your life will be less chaotic if you’re organized mostly in love or magician your life’s going to be chaotic and you’re going to have a lot of anxiety whereas if you have a balance with the sovereign energy and the warrior and you don’t have to give up magician and lover by the way but your life will become much more organized it’ll be more centered it’ll be less chaotic and thus you’ll have less anxiety i don’t want to make a blanket statement that there’s no such thing as

1:01:19

biochemically induced anxiety but i really haven’t seen much of it mostly what i see is people who need more adequate connection to warrior and of course in our culture we don’t really believe women should be connected to warrior just to me uh crazy i think we should be teaching young women martial arts when they’re in kindergarten there’s no reason that a woman should be as vulnerable as many women feel and i we don’t have to demonize that warrior energy in a woman we can foster it we can steward it we can and a woman

1:01:53

doesn’t have to give up her femininity to be connected to warrior in a positive way but that’s our image usually women who are really connected with warrior we think of them as not particularly feminine and some of them of course are not because they’re anonymous dominated they’ve allowed their their inner masculine to get in the wrong place but that’s kind of our image so we’re very black and white in our thinking yeah which i i think all all people should be initiated into warrior energy yeah i

1:02:23

think that really resonates with me personally because of that anxiety and panic all that came out of me and it certainly was a lot of it was because i wasn’t setting proper boundaries for myself um i was over over um overdoing it in all aspects of my life really overworking myself saying yes when i should be saying no i just didn’t have any kind of boundaries set in place and that’s is maybe a less obvious way that we need to be able to protect ourselves than doing a martial art of course but women i find so many women especially in

1:02:58

my sphere are overachievers or they are putting themselves putting others in front of themselves or putting them their work in front of their own you know physical needs or whatever else they might need in their life and just don’t have the boundaries or even the knowing that they need to be setting boundaries you know it doesn’t even come into play so that makes a lot of sense that the warrior is what uh needs to be looked at there yeah and i am curious if if i feel that my magician is inflated and i feel that my lover is suppressed

1:03:32

would i um try to channel the clean energy most well i think i mean ultimately we have to work on all four of these i’m just saying the fastest way to bring balance to one that’s imbalanced is putting energy into the other one the opposite so if i’ve got way too much magician i may drift off into so much deconstructionism that i become cynical about everything and everybody comics for example make us all laugh because they’re in the magician they’re deconstructing they’re showing us how silly we are there

1:04:09

which is true but they also can become quite cynical because they’re not standing for anything there’s nothing positive it’s just humans are stupid and that’s the end of the story whereas if you actually balance that magician out with some of the sovereign energy you can start to bless us and move toward being a centering force that can bring cosmos out of chaos then that makes that magician less cynical less deconstructed less over running with deconstruction energy so one of the examples you can see this is

1:04:45

in our university settings post-modernism is really what’s taken over the last half of the 20th century where you you’ll learn very quickly particularly in the humanities at least i did anyway i i went to university thinking i was supposed to do something but you very quickly learn that’s not they don’t want that they want you to show how other people who tried to do something are so stupid then you get real good accolades i’m being a little unfair here but i’m just for the purposes of pointing this out

1:05:14

i’ve always wanted to go to a post-modernist convention and stand up in the middle of it rather mischievously i guess but i’d like to stand up and say exactly what are you folks for what are you taking a stand for you’re telling me everything that’s wrong but and that’s some of that’s useful but so you can get too much magician so moving into that king to try to figure out how you can think about the whole realm how you can bring order out of chaos will help balance that magician if you have a repressed

1:05:44

lover very frequently oddly maybe moving toward autonomy is part of the part of the situation which would be the warrior energy to give you the safety to be able to fully express your love without feeling like you’re going to get harmed or hurt or slipping into codependent behaviors and you know all the other difficulties that come with from with that so conversely if you’ve got somebody who’s just shooting up with warrior energy they badly need to put some effort and energy into the lover so this often happens with men who

1:06:21

kind of get into a workaholism kind of thing where you know they spend the work 70 hours a week and they don’t have any time for their children they don’t have time for their wife they don’t know that their magician’s not working so when they come home they’re still working we’re supposed to be getting into the garden with their lover so those folks can help balance that warrior out by doing the lover but ultimately we need all four of these online we got all of them regulated and balanced and if you do

1:06:49

that your relationships will get better your insights will become better your boundary setting capability will become better and you will be much better at creating a sense of cosmos both within your psyche as well as within your sphere of influence yeah again i wish we did just on the archetypes but maybe at another time so our last question seems the collective considers midlife issues as a negative issue for men do you find men going through this tend to push it deep into the bag they’re dragging and just ignore the questions

1:07:24

within self well we certainly have a lot of acting out you know we call it the midlife crisis because this is mostly what we see we don’t have much awareness that this is a tremendous time of initiation a tremendous opportunity for change and growth and even a movement turning toward a more balanced life particularly in the area of spirituality uh and psychological growth so we you know the classic thing is that you’ve maybe you you came up and your father was an accountant so he said that’s what you should be and you said

1:07:59

okay i’ll become an accountant but in fact you had the soul of an artist but you did it you got your cpa you did all the stuff you did everything society called for you got married you had the 2.7 children you got the golf club membership the boat in the backyard and then at 42 everything goes flat 40 42.

1:08:19

and so you suddenly think well my life is just nothing is bringing me happiness but you know that 18 year old secretary that they just hired wow and she lights up my life and suddenly you’re in an affair with an 18 year old secretary and you decide to move off to new zealand to become a goat farmer not exactly the best way to handle this kind of thing but without guides without any cultural understanding men are just kind of and women too are left with this it’s not just men so we see a lot of acting out we see an

1:08:52

incidence of people buying red corvettes goes up through the ceiling around this age period plastic surgery becomes all vogue where it’s really what’s supposed to be happening is that’s pulling stuff out of the bag not putting more into it so if i understand the question correctly i yeah i do think a lot of people try to do what’s called regressive restoration of the persona it’s like a you know the computer if a computer goes haywire there’s a restore button or at least on some computers where you hit the restore

1:09:20

button and it takes you back to the time period before everything went chaotic and a lot of people try to do that so that’s actually a rejection of the call to initiation it’s an attempt to go back to how it was clean it all up get it all put back together so there is a significant amount of putting stuff into the bag at midlife unfortunately primarily because people just don’t know what to do what comes from that is that i mean we talk about dis-ease being in this unalignment inside the body or body mind

1:09:53

at least what happens when we continue to stuff down the stuff we are needing to look at well cause some people are successful at this you know they they live the conventional life and they go through the midlife crisis with just more or less a blip and i think they had bad cases of indigestion or something and then they just stay very rigidly controlled in their conventional way of living for other people it sets up a real neurosis where there’s a real war with oneself because the higher self our transpersonal self is seeking

1:10:26

manifestation it’s seeking for us to get bigger and so it keeps ripping this fabric of our universe to give us the opportunity to get bigger and we keep interpreting that as disaster so we do everything we can to get that put back together instead of embracing it and saying okay i have to figure out a new kind of way of living i have to figure out a new life again if you have some guides if you have some people who know about this they can help you greatly by saying no you know this is yeah i know you’ve had this big loss and

1:10:57

i know you’re facing great difficulties but if you work through it and you face the challenges you’ll come out on the other side with a changed sense of self and then your life can open up i mean it’s i’m always hesitant to start telling people all the great things that can happen when you do this because i don’t want to sound like i’m selling something but truly if i look back on my own life before i started doing this deep level work and especially the archetypal work it’s like i’m talking about somebody

1:11:28

else there’s no comparison i cannot imagine what my life would have been like and i can say that my life is deep and rich and full of meaning um and i’ve developed the capacity for awe and wonder and so it’s just a very very different situation than the world and the life and who who i was before i did all this work yeah it makes me think of something we talk about on the podcast a lot which is thinking from your deathbed head and just putting yourself in that mindset of where you’re laying on your deathbed do

1:12:01

you have regrets because you don’t feel you lived a full spectrum life you know do you feel like you didn’t get all the juiciness that was offered here because you obstructed yourself in some way so that is beautiful to hear that that your journey is working out well thank you so much for coming on today i know i said i was you know working on this inflated magician but i think even though this may be that that’s wanting me to do this i’m going to book a session or two with you just to just to try to because um those

1:12:33

few moments of talking about the archetypes was so helpful so i’d love to dig deeper into that with you and and um really figure out what exercises i can do and things like that so it sounds so magician like so it’s kind of a catch-22 but um we have actually a really beautiful comment from one of our attendees that says this is so eye-opening even for a guy seeing a counselor for a few years he’s been doing that now so thank you for your information yeah and i think what’s different with james um is uh his style is more

1:13:06

mentorship if i’m correct right yes yeah so um a mentor really like he said with robert moore is like it’s blessing they they speak into you yeah and hold that space that beautiful thank you james for coming on the show and thank you for the work you’re putting into this world not just here today but just generally we’ve i’ve you know through jade and through tom known so much beauty is coming through that channel on its own and it’s even flowing as deeply as to me just through that channel alone so we really appreciate

1:13:37

you here and um being such a light so thank you yeah thank you very much have a good night we’ll talk to you soon take care bye-bye