The New Way Of The Superior Man - David Deida (1st interview in a decade) - #1101

31:48So a lot of men go, you know, I'm losing my sexual desire. I need to get it back. Whereas, as I describe in the book, there's what turned you on now is not as much, you know, what turned you on before, lingerie and porn or whatever. But a partner, I'll say woman, it could be any sex, but a partner's actual love, her devotion, her surrender. So when you feel someone's devotion to love or surrender, opening their body to love, that brings a part of you to the fore that could become sex from zero. Like you're rested at zero. You're not pushing. But from that place comes a polarity or sexual attraction.

32:37There's a lot in the book about that. We can unpack it more now if you want. Absolutely, yeah. I think the role of sexual polarity, obviously, massive part of your first book, and then to see it, you might think that the amount of stillness would kill the polarity, but you're suggesting that that's not the case. stillness is one side of the polarity the other side is fullness or energy and that's you know i use the word masculine and feminine it's problematic for some people but the way i'm using that word is that the masculine is that unchanging stillness that we can all experience and the feminine is everything that moves is life force is energy um is the fullness to the emptiness.

33:24And so as you rest in emptiness through polarity, you tend to attract fullness. So in a heterosexual relationship, you will tend to attract to you women who are very active. They like to talk. They like to socialize. Just as you're feeling, I don't want to talk, I don't want to socialize. And so it's important to learn to embrace that polarity, but it's still a polarity. And ultimately, the polarity is being the fullness of your depth, of your awareness, and attracting to you a woman who's in her fullness of devotion. That is, her heart is open and full of love that she also wants to share, but she's not driven by a sense of lack.

34:13So she loves you but doesn't need you and vice versa. And that's a very strong polarity. Your depth of stillness is in polarity with her radiance, her power. I see it even coming out as more and more women, I'm sure you know this, there are more girls who graduate high school than boys. There are more women in law school and medical school than men. And I think it's going to keep going in that direction. I think that over time, women will be much, and already are, will be more, there'll be more women leaders than men. There'll be more successful women than men. The pendulum will swing. And then men will need to learn how to rest as this man of zero in depth because then they still have polarity.

35:05It's very valuable. When a woman who's very strong and powerful kind of comes home from work, if we want to use that metaphor, like she comes home from a day of being in the world, and there you are completely present, rooted in the deepest sense of being, absolutely attentive to her without being singing because your awareness is free. She feels that is the greatest gift on earth. So she moves from being attracted to a man who, whatever, makes a lot of money and is socially charismatic to a man whose polarity matches her at the level of being and doing or emptiness and fullness. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit.

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36:22Normally, this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's$365 a year. That's$1 a day to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now you can get$25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save$25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. Interesting to think about the masculine essence of, I guess holding frame would be one way to put it, but just being you, just being. And that even if you're not doing as much doing as the woman in your life, the fact that you're able to be so still and so comfortable with it commands a kind of masculine power and respect that kind of means that no matter what happens in the outside world, the protector provider, the socioeconomic balance or imbalance, it's always still you in a position of masculine frame holding.

37:32Yes, because awareness is where everything happens. You wouldn't be aware of something unless it happened in awareness, and you're that awareness. So you are the ultimate frame, if you will. And this could even apply sexually. So let's say you're laying in bed with a lover. In the past, you might initiate sex and, you know, you might be kissing and touching and foreplay and building up tension, maybe spanking, you know, lovingly being together in all kinds of playful ways. But for a man of zero, he might be laying there feeling like, I don't want to do anything. I don't want to move. I love her.

38:08I love being here with her. I don't want to do anything, no. And I would say to that man, okay, don't do anything. You just lay there in bed, hold her in your arms, but completely feel her, feel her body. Notice the tensions moving through her body. Feel her emotions. Feel the ongoing yearning in her heart. And in the book, I give details, but you learn how to feel into her effortlessly, just in a completely relaxed way. And then she feels your presence. She feels you feeling her. She feels you knowing her. and that is incredibly valuable even sexually. So now you're just laying there holding her with her but she feels you deeply knowing her, probably deeper than if you were pumping her.

38:55So she's feeling this deep sense of you being inside of her. You're still penetrating her but you're penetrating her with your love, with your feeling awareness. And so sexually, the less you do, the more she feels fucked by you. You said before about how sort of the previous things that men were would be turned on by in sex. Maybe you could categorize them as a bit more obvious, a little bit more shallow. I can't think of a better word, a little bit more shallow. When you're then talking about sex at zero is much more intimate. it. Why do you think talking about intimacy when it comes to sex is hard for men?

39:43Talking about sleeping with women is pretty easy, almost sort of bragging about what you got up to last night, if you're in your 20s. But talking about true physical intimacy as a man, a lot of the time, I think, makes men uncomfortable. Women have a not horrendous archetype for this. You know, the transcendent, deeply desired, it's making love, not having sex. But for men, true physical intimacy and making love is, I don't know, I don't hear many men talking about it. And when they do, I think that there's a kind of uncomfortableness around it. Well, that's a, as you know, a lot of my work in the past has been on sexuality and spirituality.

40:26so we could spend months unpacking this. Hey, it's your first podcast in 10 years. I don't know whether you knew David, but this actually does last for months. So I hope that you've locked in.

40:42That's fantastic. Because of the way evolution works, I'm sure you know this, for male bodies, all they need to do is ejaculate in order to create the next generation. whereas women need to raise, you know, be pregnant, eat enough while they're pregnant, survive pregnancy, raise the child nursing. There's a big difference, if you will, in potential cost, evolutionarily speaking. And so men are built to be aroused sexually. So sexual arousal, you know, men are almost always able to be sexually, you know, they're fantasizing about sex a lot. But sexual arousal is easy. So it's easy for them to talk about that part, sex.

41:28It's easy for them to say what they like sexually. Intimacy often involves emotional sensitivity, feeling the other person, obviously. And most men during sex, because of their evolutionary past, get so wrapped up in the physical sensations. I have an erection. I'm going to ejaculate. Look at her breasts. Look at her ass. Like they're in this evolutionary churn that most men know. We all know that. So it makes it easy for them to talk about sexuality. But because they're deeply identified with nothingness, so at the depth of men, of the masculine, is this emptiness, this nothingness. And the emotions are anything but empty.

42:18They're what fill the emptiness. Most men, because they don't really realize how much they love the nothingness, they don't like filling it with emotion. So often a woman will ask a man like, what are you feeling? And he'll go, well, nothing. And he's not lying. Or, you know, what do you feel about this? And he might say, I don't have any feelings about it. Often they're not lying. They're really feeling this kind of sense of emptiness, or not in a negative way, just it's a nothing, it's an aware nothingness. And they're not feeling an emotion. And so the woman will feel like, he's not sharing with me.

42:58And the man will feel like, why is she doing this? Why is she creating a problem when there is none? So there's a big difference between the way, typically, the masculine and feminine communicate and why that difference is. What is your advice for a guy who wants to move from just having sex to proper intimacy? When one is in the man of zero phase, one of the obvious things is that beingness or awareness, being aware, is in all beings. Like you could look into a dog's eye and see their awareness. You could look into, you know, you're feeling that awareness in all beings, including your lover. So feeling like loving the love in your lover or being aware of the awareness in your lover.

43:54So she's aware of you, you're aware of her, you're aware of her being aware of you. That mutual awareness is love or that mutual we are the same being. It's not a thought like that. That is just a feeling. Again, you could feel it with an animal. You could feel it with a plant. But that being that I am the same as you at depth, we're different at our surface. Our minds are different. Our bodies are different. But at depth, when you look and say, look into the eyes of a dog even, you can feel love. You could feel them connecting with you. There's a being there. And that recognition of shared being, which we could call love might manifest as wanting to be physically intimate in the case of polarity.

44:45Unless you don't necessarily have polarity with a dog but if you're with a human or a plant, although some people do. If you have that polarity with a human and you're in your nothingness, that means you will attract somebody in their fullness and that connection is love, even though you're playing the opposite poles. So one feels that love and is still and silent and is not in the mood to communicate emotions. They're not in any mood. There is no mood. And the other is flowing with feeling, bursting with emotions and highly responsive to life. and those tend to make a good pair in terms of polarity.

45:35So you recognize the unity of heart, I am you, at depth, but then you recognize the reciprocity in body and mind. She's radiant, I'm still. She loves to dance, I love to watch her dance. Let's say that there's someone, let's say that there's a man who hasn't yet hit the man of zero thing, that sex at zero also not there, are there some practices that you think help to push someone who isn't already in stillness, a man that isn't already in stillness, toward sex being a vehicle for experiencing deeper intimacy and then also perhaps moving through some of the patterns that he has to work through in order to get to that man of zero point.

46:35Yes. Again, my previous 10 books were focused on this. Congratulations on 11, by the way. Thank you. You know, men shouldn't push their stage or phase. You should live it fully. The best way to grow out of it is to grow through it. Yeah, I agree. And so, if you really are motivated to just have physical sex, you know, wham, bam, thank you, man, just quick, you know, then if that's where you're at, do it until it becomes obsolete for you. When a man begins to become ready, there are all kinds of practices he could do. I mean, I'll say some of them, but again, there's a lot of them. One thing is for him to learn to take his attention off himself, off his own body, and onto his partner's body, even in sex and not in sex.

47:36So let's talk about sex. So to feel your partner's body more than you feel your own. To feel the tensions and relaxations in your partner's body. To feel the breath moving in and out of your partner's body. to feel the emotions moving through your partner rather than your attention locked into your own sexual sensations. So one would just be to learn to liberate their attention to at least feel her more than yourself. Another thing to do is to create a kind of resonance, so often breathing with your partner sexually. So when she inhales, you inhale. She exhales, you exhale. And then, of course, you might need to catch up breaths because you don't have the same metabolism as your partner.

48:25But creating a kind of resonance of breath helps deepen sex beyond the merely physical. Going deeper in the body. So, you know, some men only play on the surface of the woman's body. They kiss her lips. David, I'm going as deep as I can. I'm really trying. I've been trying for my entire sexual life to go as deep as I can. Congratulations. Sorry. Sorry, I had to. Go on. Do you want me to comment on that? No, no, no, no. Sorry, the thought arose in my mind, and I couldn't not make a deep joke. So, you were saying, yeah. Well, that's actually true. I mean, a lot of men just at the physical level have an impulse to go deep.

49:17They want to press, you know, in terms of actual sex, they want to press their sexual organ deep inside a woman. The feeling of going deep is the essential masculine urge. Going deep into her, going deep into self, going deep into being. So that sense of wanting to go deep is a kind of native expression of the masculine. Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man. I just kept chugging, waiting for the regret to creep in.

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50:48So things change and drop away. Ambitions, drives that we used to have may, they're just not there in the same way anymore. They feel hollow. You're not driven to do the same things. You may be more skillful because you're not pushing in the same sort of a way, but the drive to do the thing that you're skillful at may be diminished or entirely absent. There's not a collapse because the collapse would be depression, but there is a kind of emptiness and sitting with that in stillness is important. Also, the way that you show up and the way that you feel around sex may go from shallow to deep it may feel significantly more intimate less physical more bound together how does this get integrated what what what do you do next over it takes quite a while for the stability of your being to infiltrate through the patterns of your body mind So we have all kinds of patterns in our body-mind.

51:58We have traumas. We might feel aggressive because of the way, whatever, our father treated us. We might feel aggressive because we're mammals and we've inherited a certain degree of aggression. Well, as we rest as being more and more, as we become stable, as recognizing ourselves as that simple awareness of presence, those patterns become integrated. naturally, if you will, because tension isn't being added to them. You're not rewinding them tighter and tighter. You're letting them uncoil in the space of your awareness. Now, some people might have such a tight knot in their body or mind that they need a form of therapy.

52:44So, they may need a, you know, whatever, a form of somatic therapy to unknot their body, or they may need a form of cognitive therapy to help them unknot their mind or release a trauma. They might want to do trauma therapy. But all of that is just for to help loosen that relaxation in the openness of their presence. So over time, it slowly becomes integrated and it's slow. Another thing that people don't really understand is, you know, you could have this kind of recognition of being and yet your body and mind continue with the patterns they have before and your body is the last to change. Your mind may change first, but you find your body doing things your mind doesn't want to anymore.

53:34So you have to have patience and compassion for yourself and others as these patterns in your body and mind continue to unfold. You might find yourself lying even though you don't want to lie. You might find yourself hurting someone even though you don't want to hurt them. So you compassionately allow these past contractions that you stored in your body and mind to open in the spaciousness of your present being. And that takes years. I mean, there are all kinds of stories, as you know, of people of supposed spiritual depth who act in not-integrous ways. pretty much every leader of some spiritual movement or yoga cult for the last like three decades has basically like 50 decades perhaps has done that pretty much because it's universal i mean it just doesn't change people it's a false hope i guess for it to change so there are some highly integrated people who are not that deep.

54:44Some are deep, some are not that deep. But there are also very deep people who are not very integrated. They may be alcoholics, they may be cheating, they may have sex with all of their students. And those, that doesn't mean they're not, they don't recognize the nature of their being. It just means that their pattern has yet to unfold. And you need to be careful. I mean, you could put structure so that pattern doesn't hurt people, or you could make amends as those patterns inevitably hurt people. But that's the usual. That's not the exception, as you say. People have a kind of recognition that they can share with others.

55:25And yet, it's just like being an artist. How many artists can essentially create, let's take a musician, they could make divine music, and yet they themselves in their personal life are pretty messed up. I wonder, this is why I said about real world effectiveness, right? That so much of the best analyses, the best philosophy, there's this great line, if you marry well, you will become happy. But if you marry wrong, you will become a philosopher. And I think what that's sort of speaking to is when you're pushing up against the grain of life, when it feels like you're swimming into the stream, when stuff's just not quite cohesing in the right way, or you still have these patterns to work against, these resentments from your past, this bitterness, this sort of unalchemized, untranscended and included problem.

56:23Because things aren't going easily, because things aren't going well, you tend to look at your world and yourself with so much more dexterity and resolution and obsession, that's where the art seems to come from. You know, how many songs have been made that are wonderful and unbelievably deep about everything's going well and my wife's happy and healthy and I've got these new kids and the field outside is really bright today and the weather's going. No, so much of what births great creative insight and that desire to make things at a level that would be unreasonable otherwise is the fact that you're brushing up against the grain of life.

57:06And that's, I think, what I was trying to get at, that as this stuff drops away, maybe if your ability to be effective includes your drive to do the thing, your output may change. the outputs that you get may diminish?

57:28First of all, I agree with you that suffering is the trigger for a lot of depth and a lot of art, which to me are the same thing. Good art comes from depth. So I agree with you, and that's why I don't think people should rush through these phases, and also why I don't think people should assume someone has depth. It means they're an integrated character. I would say that a lack of integration often creates art more than an integrated human. Can you highlight the difference between somebody who is, how do we identify somebody that is integrated and isn't? The way I'm using that word is that they're socially skilled, they act with deep morality.

58:14people who are good people a man someone who you could trust a lot of these teachers you wouldn't trust or a lot of these musicians or artists or whatever form they take you might trust their art but you wouldn't trust them whatever with your wife or with your bank account you have to use your discrimination and luckily that doesn't stop as I said even when you're rested at zero, those patterns continue. And they continue to cause trouble. And so the source of art that you're referring to doesn't cease. Your access to depth becomes more stable. What role does discipline play after purpose ends?

59:06Well, the body and mind continue to require discipline. You know, if you want to become stronger, you lift weights regularly. If you want to think about something more clearly, you may read books. So you may say that X hours a day, I'm going to lift weights or read books. So there's still a sense for your body and mind to train, how you're, you know, to learn to golf takes discipline, repetition. So your body and mind still require discipline, but the discipline is no longer to be what you are. You recognize you are what you are, so it's effortless. So the being depth is effortless. If you're doing something, you're missing it.

1:00:00So in this moment, if you're trying to be being, then you're trying, you're not being. So effortlessness is the key to knowing that in this moment you're just being. But that doesn't mean that within that effortless being, you might still decide, you know, I want to paint something or my kid needs to be picked up from school or, you know, I want to build a business. And all of those things require repetitive action or discipline. It's a very different sort of drive to get there though, right? Different from what? What's different from you? Well, in order to do this, it seems like there's kind of bottom-up motivation, which is less conscious.

1:00:49and it's driven by need for recognition. It's driven by past patterns. This is much more dictated. Like I don't need to paint, but I'm going to, I want to paint. I don't need to go to the gym and need to go to the gym is because if my body is better, then I will look good to the person that I love and she will find me attracted. As opposed to just, I'm doing this because I want to. Yes. No, I agree with that. Yes. You've been thinking about but how long have you been writing about men and women? 40 some years. Okay. We are, you mentioned it earlier on, at least at what feels like a bit of a transitionary period, especially for men, for women too, but especially for men.

1:01:35I think women had a big transitionary period about 50, 60 years ago. What do you see? Or what are you hopeful for and worried about with the current culture around men? I wouldn't say I'm worried about anything, but I would say that as women take over the functions that men once had, men will have to find the deeper reason for being. And that deeper reason is what we've been talking about this whole time to frame everything, to hold everything, to be presence, to be depth. So whatever somebody's doing, your presence deepens them. So their doing becomes deeper. And that involves a different form of self-worth, if you will.

1:02:26Like you're not measuring yourself on how much money you have or how much weight you could lift. You're kind of measuring yourself on, if you want to use that word, on your stability, be what you are. And rather than getting lost in thoughts or in activities. what's the core of masculine essence in your opinion well the way i use that term is identifying more with the emptiness aspect of being than the fullness aspect of being

1:03:01so the feminine is all into growth and change and flowering and fullness and eyeing And the masculine is more oriented to timelessness and peace and being. So there are two different orientations, emptiness and fullness, or presence and radiance. There's different ways of saying it. It feels to me like you've lived 30 different lives. I did a little bit of research. Apparently, you instructed in artificial intelligence, researched neuroscience, developed yoga techniques for intimate relationships, wrote PhDs that got an award from the French government, published academic papers, studied spirituality, and then wrote 11 books as well.

1:03:56I'm sure I'm missing an awful lot. What's the through line with this? You're kind of, especially now with not showing your video, living in the middle of nowhere and God knows where with trees that are blocking your internet signal. You're almost sort of this esoteric masculinity wizard working on this stuff for so long. What's the through line? What do you want your career to be about and be remembered about? I don't really think of it in those terms, but there's definitely a through line.

1:04:40For whatever reasons, this desire to understand reality or who I am or who we are has started very, very early in my life. Very early. I mean, I remember being in the crib. I remember being diapered and feeling like, ooh. I remember learning what perspective is or crawling on the carpet at my grandparents' house and realizing what size meant. Like some things were bigger than others. It's just something I've been interested in all of my life. And so at some point in my life that led me to mathematics. I developed the indicational calculus, which is a calculus of distinctions, how distinctions arise in consciousness, published papers and that.

1:05:29That also became biology and immunology. I worked in labs. I worked in a sleep lab to study sleep and dreams. These were all unfoldings to me of the same thing. And during all of that, my main interest is just like, what is this? Like, what is the nature of being, of reality, of me, of the world? Like, why are we here? What is the meaning? And not in an intellectual sense, but to be able to do it, to write a computer that could think. Back then I was working on early artificial intelligence. Or, you know, in the immune system I was working on, how does the immune system recognize self from other?

1:06:08You know, so I was always motivated by that. And through that, I was also meditating and doing yoga. Like you said, I had a yoga school. But all of those to me were the same thing. They were different ways just that my personality manifested this discovery, manifested this exploration, and still is. So for the last couple of decades, it just naturally came. I've been living in mostly silence and kind of retreat-like life. but not because I'm avoiding anything. It's just I succeeded at everything. I accomplished what I needed to accomplish and it came to a point of being, of rest. And that's where this book came from because the men I was seeing were struggling with that transition.

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1:07:32And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What is it that you attribute your ability to stay in touch with what you're truly interested in to?

1:08:04I never had an option. I don't know how to say it. It hurt me too much. For instance, when I went to college at 16 years old, I entered a program that was a combination of medical school and undergraduate school at a very young age. So I was going to medical school very early and studying science and all of these things. And at one point, I remember just sitting there in the library studying. I was dissecting brains and labs. I was in it deep. And suddenly it was just like, I can't do this anymore. I've outgrown this or it's become obsolete for me. As much as I loved it until yesterday, today, it's done.

1:08:49And for some reason I was able, I mean, I didn't just quit. I let things go in an easy way, in a responsible way, but it became clear to me that that phase had ended. And usually I don't know what the next phase is. I spent a year living under a tarp on a beach on a deserted part of Hawaii with no money at all. And out of that year came my first book. So I didn't know that. I just thought I'm done. I'm going to just live under a tarp. cheap as possible. So I did. And then I just started writing. I didn't plan on it. And I began to realize that if I could surrender to that process and not be lazy to really put in the work as things arose for me, that what I created from that place of depth was worth something to people.

1:09:44So I learned to make a living doing what I love.

1:09:50i don't know if that's answering your question it does i think it might be difficult for you to to see why waking up one day and feeling like your work in the lab is no longer fulfilling you in the way that it used to but not continuing because of sunk cost fallacy or loss aversion or fear of what people will say or not being able to beat your previous career or whatever. It seems like that comes pretty naturally to you because the pain of being out of alignment is greater than the pain of change. But I don't think that that's the case. I don't think that's the case for most people. I think most people are pretty riven by that stuff.

1:10:38yes i would say that the pain of living an untrue life for me exceeded the fear of what might happen if i do yes yes so so you know i was willing to risk everything because i just didn't have a choice like it hurt so much literally hurt like my body hurt every going to do these things to do. I don't know how to describe it. Just the pain itself. Suffering, like you say, is the root of a lot of exploration and creation and art. And the suffering just became so intense that when I ended a phase that I had no choice but to allow the new authenticity to find a way to express itself. I did a retreat.

1:11:30Do you know who Joe Hudson is by any chance? Are you familiar with him? I don't. So Joe is a spiritual teacher, makes him sound, it's far too two-dimensional for what he does. But Eastern, Western, lots of therapeutic modalities, does retreats. He's also head of human culture at OpenAI. He's Sam Altman's coach. He's also my coach. And he's a wonderful, wonderful man and I did a retreat it was my first sort of deep emotions boot camp retreat and I did it on a flower farm in uh Santa Rosa in California last year I did it I did it in September and I haven't done Hoffman process I haven't done IFS this is the first thing of its kind that that I've done and you know by day four of seven you're pretty cracked open by day three of seven you're getting there.

1:12:22And by day four of seven, you're pretty cracked open 12 hours a day, working on anger, working on grief, working on sadness, working on upright communication and apologies. And it's what you said earlier on about the pain of when you tell a lie, sort of it comes back to get you when you get to this phase of zero, because that was kind of like speed running to zero, but without the psychedelics. And what I found when I got out was all of the ways that my patterns and incongruence and like just all of the things that I did in the world, the conversations that I would have with my staff and the small ways that I might lie because I didn't want to hurt their feelings.

1:13:07I didn't want to say something that might make them uncomfortable. So I didn't say what was just true or my truth or the way that I might deal with a friend who was late for dinner or, or, uh, an interaction with somebody that I just met or whatever, all of these different ways, there was this, and he used the word constriction, which is the perfect word for it. There was this sort of tightening and it feels like, it feels like a wet rag. If you imagine a wet rag that sort of goes from the back of your mouth to the middle of your stomach. And it, it feels like some, it feels like someone's sort of twisting like this.

1:13:45And, um, I'd never had, I mean, I always, I try not to lie as best I can. And I'd always known that it was something that didn't make me feel great. I'm a horrendous liar. I'm a really, really unsophisticated liar. And this extra level of sensitivity, you know, this attunement that I had from stripping away, opening my heart, doing all of this work for, you know, a full week just meant that that, that level of sensitivity to the, the, the rag being, being squeezed inside of me was so, it was so fucking hypersensitized. It was insane. And, um, I kind of imagine, I just have to assume that this is, this is maybe what it's like to be David Data, that that level of sensitivity to the pain, the pain of misalignment.

1:14:38I was having a conversation yesterday about why I'm glad that I get such bad hangovers, which is the cost benefit analysis or the reward punishment balance for me for drinking alcohol is just way off. It was never great. And now I'm in my 30s and it's gotten even worse. I'm kind of glad because what that means is the likelihood of me ever becoming an alcoholic is super low because the pain, I wouldn't even be able to get to the point of dependency because I'd be so miserable after day three or four. I mean, I can't, I cannot fucking do this anymore. Um, this, what you have here is maybe, and if you do the work, the opening, the freeing, uh, the, the attunement, that's kind of the same thing.

1:15:25It's a very high level of pain when you do something that you shouldn't be doing. and that whether it's through training or just a fortune gift that you've been given means that when you start to do stuff that's out of alignment, you feel it very harshly. And that has pushed you through what to me from the outside looks like, again, 30 different lives that you've lived. But to you just feels like, well, I was just, I was following what I was interested in. I wanted to understand myself and the world around me. And I kept going. I was trying to keep that rag unquisted. that you described, the wet rag.

1:16:04So you did a process, a week-long whatever process, to feel that, which is great. But you can also feel that at any time. So right now you can feel the extent to which that area of your body from your throat down, which is the typical place people feel it. I talk about that in the book a lot, the Man of Zero book. So that contraction in the front of the body from your throat down your solar plexus and down even deeper, that's a signal for you and many men that they're out of line. Now, if their mechanisms like their need for self-worth is so intense, it could push them to ignore that for years and years.

1:16:49And then you have to do what you did. You have to go to a training and have it unpacked, which is very useful. I've done those kind of things. So you could do it in an intensive kind of way, and you can learn to feel that tension, constriction, contraction as it's happening. And you're reading that. It's like a meter. It's like flying on an airplane by instruments. You're feeling the tightening of that, and you're going, okay, you might not be aware of why it's happening, but right now I'm living off the mark. I'm not living on point. And then they accumulate. less. But it doesn't matter how you come to that place.

1:17:31Like you said, I mean, you could do it through a process, which you did, which is great. You could do it through, some people feel it through psychedelics. Some people just feel it through the school of hard knocks. Just the pain in their life. But yes, that contraction specifically in that part of the body, the front, the solar plexus, the belly, the chest is a sign that you're not relaxed as you're in depth. It's a sign that your depth is living you. Something's living you that's not your depth. Yeah, that's the lead indicator. And the lagging indicator is that you end up in a life that you're not supposed to be in.

1:18:05But I think it's going to be difficult for you to get to the life that you're not supposed to be in if you haven't denied the wet rag being twisted for quite a long time. Yeah, I don't know how long, but yes, they go hand in hand. If you ignore that twisted rag. That's just, it's the constriction, it's the tightening, it's the tensing and it's different for different people right mine sits right in my stomach right this sort of just below my solar plexus feel it sits right there and it just feels like someone's twisting it but sometimes it moves up to my throat and sometimes it moves down and um yeah i get yeah that that contraction is the main sign and different men as you say not only feel it in different places in their body usually they feel it where you feel it in the front of their body, kind of near their solar plexus, but they may not feel it in their body.

1:18:57Some men have that contraction in their emotional body, so they become emotionally unwell, not just physically twisted, but emotionally twisted. Some men experience it in their, if you will, mental body or intellectual body, so they start thinking strange thoughts, they're all twisted up intellectually, mentally. And so there's different dimensions that men can feel that contraction in. And different men feel it primarily in different dimensions. And that's the dimension they should focus their work on. That's interesting. Speaking of that, I know, and I appreciate you not encouraging people to growth hack or speed run their way through phases that they're not yet in.

1:19:48Right? that you'll get there when you need to get there and the dose that you need to take in order to get to your next level of development sort of arrives at the pace that you're moving through life. And maybe trying to speedrun that is actually not a great idea. But across all of the modalities that you've tried, all of the different techniques that you've employed, what are the ones that you attribute the most amount of... I don't want to use the word progress because that sounds like more speedrunning, but the most amount of development too, what are the ones that you come back to the most?

1:20:23Are the ones that looking back, you go, wow, like those things that I did were very worthwhile and I'm glad that I did them. Well, again, this is different from man to man. So I wouldn't want any man to model me or you or, you know, every man has to discover this for themselves. But for me, I would say one intimate relationship. So I've been in long, intimate relationship. And having a partner, so you described that part of your body twisting, but it could be your partner twisting. It could be your partner contracting as a reflection of you being off. And it's harder to bypass your partner's complaints, your partner's contractions.

1:21:11And so I would say that the wisdom of my intimate partners, just in their natural reflection and depth and love, has probably informed me one of the most. And then together with that, I would say working with a teacher. And, you know, I've worked with just a few teachers, long-term teachers. I don't mean just a learning guitar or something. I mean, so long-term teachers usually could reflect to me areas that I can't see myself or that I'm not willing to, and lovingly continue reflecting that to me until I pick it up. So I would say that my relationship with, you know, a loved one, an intimate partner, and a relationship with a teacher, more than a specific technique, Although, as I said, I've done a lot of things like hatha yoga and tai chi and qigong and moving energy through my body, you can also feel those contractions as you can.

1:22:13So, feeling that contraction in the front of the body, learning how to open that, feeling what's forming that. But for me, the love, my partner's love and my teacher's love would probably be the most effective ways that I, I know what you mean, using the word effective. Yes, those would be the modalities. Yeah, if you marry wrong, you'll become a philosopher, but if you marry well, you'll become a yoga teacher. Is that your?

1:22:47uh david uh let's leave it there mate you're you're wonderful your work over the last you know however many decades has just been so great and um it's great to speak to you you know you didn't need to do this i uh i really appreciate you giving me your time if if if you give what's this an hour and a half if you do 90 minutes a decade of uh of podcasting i uh i hope that this one was worthwhile well you seem authentically and genuinely committed to truth um that's pretty rare you know you're good at what you do you know you have this podcast you've been highly motivated to create this thing but you're also your heart is in it and so i felt moved to connect with you like this mostly because i agree with your heart i resonate with your heart i appreciate you i I appreciate you too.

1:23:39This podcast is a thinly veiled autobiography masquerading as a conversation with, you'll be episode 1100 maybe over the last eight years. So yeah, this is the vehicle that I've chosen, at least for now. And I'm trying to find out what's true. I'm trying to understand myself and the world around me. and I'm asking people who I think have got at least a few of the answers. And if I can hold on to 1 % of all of the stuff that I've learned, then I, you know, you said about teachers, I guess I'm just cycling through. I'm serially monogamous with 1 ,100 world experts on a variety of different topics.

1:24:22And we'll see what sort of horrendous Frankenstein's monster gets constructed out of this by the time that I finish. Fantastic. We'll trust your heart in the midst of all of it and you'll go the right direction. David, you're wonderful. And let's keep in touch. I'd really love to keep in touch with you. Appreciate you, mate. Me too. Thanks, Chris. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

1:24:55I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at mintmobile.com.