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Shadow Work for Accountability (with Luke Adler) · Evolutionary Men

• 0:00
  Luke Adler: All right, men people, Jason Lang and I are back. It has been months, we've been busy, we've been teaching and we want to talk about shadow work for accountability. Shadow work to be more responsible, more capable, more awake, more aware, particularly in our relationships, relationships with each other, in our men's groups, relationships with our spouses, with our children. What is the purpose of a shadow work container, a group that is steeped in shadow work, if not to call the best in us forward? But the real question is how to do that, how to do that in a way that's honoring and respectful. So today we asked the question, how does shadow work refine and enhance our ability to be accountable and responsible to our lives?
• 1:00
  Jason Lange: Yeah, and, and it, this is so, you know, we're kind of recording this off the cuff in that it's just alive in our lives and in the cultural field. And I think a deeper inquiry, as, you know, unlike, I'd say even five, ten years ago, there is visibility to the men's work movement and men's groups and all of these things. And some of the, I don't know, I guess you could say pushback is okay, well, there are conscious men now and are they showing up and calling out, calling forward men, you know, pushing back, holding people accountable when men go awry and astray, or when we go awry or astray. And you know, I think we've emphasized quite a bit on our episodes, you know, the power of shadow work and working in a group together and being in a long term group is to make these deeper patterns become super clear and aware and bring them to the surface. But right in a lot of ways, that's just the first step. First, okay, wow, I see. I, I do the thing, I did the thing, now what do I do about it? Right? And accountability in a lot of ways is a form of repair of right. To hold someone accountable is how do we start to bring harmony back to whatever system was disrupted potentially by us men and our shadows and the things, you know, we weren't aware of or were aware of in the harm we caused. And how do we do that in a way that draws men in versus pushes them out more to the fringe and more to the places we actually don't want them to go. Right. We're maybe a month or two here post rape Academy article of this thing and motherless and what these men were doing. And there's been a lot of energy around how the fuck is this still happening, how is this still happening and what are our roles as men in men's groups, in relationships, as for you and I in particular, as leaders. And what does it mean to hold someone accountable?
• 3:12
  Luke Adler: Yeah, I can feel the. The evolutionary edge here, Jason. And just to. Just to quote you, in our prep conversation, you talked about the shadow of shadow work. The shadow of doing shadow work in a group is the. The desire to just stay in the space of catharsis, stay in the space of release. So this is. I want to quote Jason, give you credit for saying that, but that is actually true. Shadow works. Shadow is that I just want to stay in the place of releasing my pain. It feels so good just to touch the pain, to feel it, to know it, to release it, to gain that burst of insight that. That clarifying, unburdening of the pain that has accumulated, the pressurization of my childhood wounds that I've now released. Can we just keep doing that? Can we just keep doing the part where I let it out of my body and I see it again? The insight and the response to that is, yes, we do need to keep gaining awareness and gaining. The word that we use in shadow work is intimate, intimate awareness of our history and our wounding and our conditioning. That's one of two essential parts to healing. The second part, which you just named Jason, is just as important, and that is the behavioral change. That is an evolution or more in aligned with who you want to be in the world. And that is difficult because it requires catching yourself in the moment when you would normally react from a fight or flight or a protectionist space. This is me and mine. Get away from me. You're gonna hurt me. Back off. So to catch that reflex of protection and go, whoa, okay, that's the reflex of all of my conditioning and wounding. I've done enough cathartic work to have awareness of it. We often hear people say, I'm aware that I'm doing the thing I don't want to do. So the second phase of healing is relational, and that's, here's my system winding up. Well, here's the belief kicking up behind that. Here's the energy. It's wanting to come off of my tongue and pit viper, venomize it towards my friend or partner. Whoa, let me take a breath and be accountable to the man I want to be in this relationship. And a shadow work group will also put structure around that meaning will come forward and say, hey, Jason Brent. John, how's it going with this insight? How's it going in this relationship?
• 6:06
  Jason Lange: You.
• 6:06
  Luke Adler: You tripped up. You fell down. All right, well, what'd you Learn. And so that's. That's the two important. That's the second part of the first part that is absolutely essential for healing to occur. And we want to break that down a little further here because it's not so simple as I'm saying.
• 6:29
  Jason Lange: Well, I think you mapped it out beautifully as we're talking here. It's almost like three parts in a sense, where part of what you're talking about is, and this is such a huge move for so many of the men we work with, which is step one, release, right? The shadow work helps us release the stored pain we haven't had access to. Or sometimes it's not even pain. Sometimes it's just different kinds of energy, right? It's grief or excitement or power, whatever, but there's like a release. But then the next two steps, which I think get into what we're talking about in terms of accountability, are, I think, then responsibility. So it's like I release. And once I've started to release, I realize, well, it's my responsibility actually, to tend this. Nobody, actually, nobody can do the release work around pain other than me. I can call in support, but I have to take responsibility for my wounding. Right? And this is the key thing I've talked about on episodes you've talked about. We didn't cause our wounding, right? We're part of a culture. We're part of family systems. We're part of dynamics. We've all been victimized in different ways. But then the big move is, well, and now I have to take responsibility for it, though, because nobody's going to fix it for me. It's mine. It's my pain, right? I have to take ownership of the pain 100%. And then once we've taken responsibility, so, you know, release responsibility. Then I think the next step of accountability, in a sense, is repair. Well, like, what do I do about this in my relationships? And repair is making commitments. It's apologizing for things. It's all the things, you know, we're all trying to work out in our life that I think is so crucial. But it is, like you said, it's bringing it into the relational field of, okay, I took these actions. Yeah, there's all kinds of reasons I took these actions, some of which I caused, some of which I different, didn't take responsibility for that. And now what does it mean for me to repair? You know, my. My teacher John used to talk about this. He's like, that's. That's the step not a lot of men want to do. Right. Which is shit. I didn't. Because sometimes the repair part of what we're getting into with accountability is even, what if I didn't cause the harm? Like, who takes responsibility for the harm men have caused? Right. Like, and that's. That's the kind of territory we're stepping into a little bit as. As a field in men's work. That's like, okay, you and I are not the guys in the rape academy, but we're part of a culture of men, and those men aren't going to fix it. Right? So, okay, well, who's going to step in and start to name these things and talk to these things and engage in these ways? And, you know, that's some of our repair work. I think doing it at the cultural level. And in some sense that that's harder to do if at a personal level we're not living in integrity. Right. In terms of getting feedback about how we're showing up and when my reactivity comes out and things I need to see that I don't see and that, you know, I think the beautiful thing when this is done right, though, and we've talked about this, right. Terry Real calls it carefrontation. I call it the spinach in the teeth. I think this is part of the deep love so many men are actually craving that they don't know about, which is the, I'm going to sit you down. You know, it's like an intervention of sorts. Like, man, I care about you so much. Like, I got to let you know, it's really hard to see how you're showing up in your life and what you're doing to your life. And I have deep care and concern, and if I didn't speak to you, I wouldn't be loving you right now. Right? That sometimes the. The kind and compassionate thing is saying the hard thing to a man that he doesn't want to hear. And, you know, you and I were talking about one of the most meaningful experiences we had on one of our shadow work retreats was when there was a serious rupture, like the kind of rupture that could melt down an entire event, especially these days. And our teacher Robert, who we were training with, just stepped right into it. Just, okay, this is. This now is the work today, and we're foregrounding this, and we're not going to hide it, and we're going to, you know, talk about it. And he in particular had us as men sit down and really care front a man of like, hey, man, that was up. You're not up, but that was up, and that can't happen again. Right. That's. We're not down with that. We love you too much to. For that to happen again. And that's, I think, part of the accountability. In some sense, men that are stepping into the work are being asked to take on the mantle of even more. Because like I said, if not us, who else?
• 11:28
  Luke Adler: Yeah. This is so alive, this edge here. I think the thing that we feel, we feel in society, we feel in men's groups when we hear someone say, hey, why isn't your men's group holding this guy accountable? Or why don't you guys kick him out or kick his ass? Or there's that kind of sense. And what happens is that the default reality that we're all in is, as Terry Real would call patriarchal, which means, you up. Well, get the out of here. You're done. We're done with you. You know, you're. You're outcasted, you're marginalized. And that's just what we've all inherited. That's how we've related to human beings for I don't know how many tens of thousands of years. But it's been a power over, power under dynamic. And so that all gets evoked around this conversation of the rape academy. This can't happen. We. We have to hold people accountable. And it leads to this thinking of, let's lock them up, let's imprison them, right? Let's other them, let's dehumanize this person who is out of integrity and not taking accountability. So this distinction is really important around shadow work, particularly the style of work that Jason and I teach and men's work in general. One of the principles around the work is that when someone arises to the truth of their own life and their own pain, and they arrive at it at their own pace, with their own understanding, they have full ownership over it. And it's natural to want to make amends, to want to become accountable, and to. To choose for themselves to evolve and grow. In a way it can be compared to this sensibility of rock bottom. But it's more that you're reaching the rock bottom of your pain or the bottom of the ocean of the limitation around your wounding or lack of being loved. And you arrive there and you go, oh, my God, I'm so hungry for love. And I can now see all the ways I've been fighting it and keeping it, keeping it from arriving into my body. And now I'm ready at that point, what's challenging is there's still a blank space in the man's awareness around how to actually do that because they've never experienced it. They've never experienced being protected, love someone being tender to them. And that's where some support, accountability, structure and reminding needs to come in. So that's one example where in shadow work, we're going to be working to facilitate someone arriving at that truth themselves, as opposed to saying, luke, you're not showing up as a husband. Get your shit together. And maybe I'll respond to that because my dad used to be like that. But I'm coming from this really triggered, fearful place where it's not integrated. I'm not owning it and I'm not growing. The second scenario is that maybe you're in a group with someone and there's just an edge. There's an edge in their lives. There's some aspect of their lives where they're just not quite seeing it. And if we enable a man to just continue when it's so obvious to the group, and let's be frank, it's so obvious to anyone who knows this person that there's a big blind spot, then yes, it's incumbent upon the group to respectfully point that out. Not with an expectation that you're fucking out of the group if you don't do this right? Not, not with that patriarchal like, you will be shunned and marginalized if you don't grow here. But more, like you said, Jason, the carefrontation, spinach in the teeth, as Robert would say, egg on the beard, bro. Like, did you. You got this thing in your teeth, did you know that? And to be with the man and ride the wave of his. Yes. Defensibility, his resistance, his unwillingness to hear it, knowing that we're interacting with a profoundly developed protectionist mechanism in the nervous system. And it's there for a reason, as you said, Jason, Robert Glover and Terry Real, and some of the. Some of the real longtime men that lead around trauma for men say, yeah, can we get close to the guy who has raped, has killed? Can we learn? That's a scary thing, right? And that actually takes a whole nother level of skill, talent, dedication and commitment and accountability to work with that in society as opposed to just say, okay, you're out, you're out of society. Right? This is the model we have, is we're done with you. That's not the spirit of the work.
• 16:50
  Jason Lange: Yeah. And you know this. I brought this up at a recent conference and I want to be super Clear like understanding is not condoning or right. When we talk about, let's say, the men that participated in the rape academy and wanting to know and understand their pain and what would lead them in there. Because only a man, I would argue, in deep pain objectifies women and takes actions like that, right? And oftentimes that's men who have been ostracized or outed from some kind of relational space enough and enough where they, they find one that finally takes them in. And so the, the trick here is to hold accountable and to invite people in. Right. Like what, what is the path in some sense. And you know, as men and as society, we have some explicit lines around that in terms of no, yeah, this is life in prison or this is a death sentence. Like there's real things around that that we, we're all figuring out. But the, the deeper thing is if we don't know what drives men there, how do we know how to pull them out? Right. In a sense. And I often think about, right. Gabor Mate talks about this in terms of addiction. His thing is like, the question isn't why the addiction, it's why the pain? Why the pain that causes them to find an addiction to try to self soothe. And that's part of what we're talking about here is why the pain of these men, right? And not everyone wants to hear that or engage with that or feel the humanity on the other side of that. And you know what, I get it. It's not for everyone to do. It's definitely, I don't think for the women to do that have been bullied or raped or victimized by men. But I think there is a space for us as men to step into that and be the ones that, okay, again, we weren't in this dynamic, but who else, right. It didn't impact me, but I can go in there and be with a man in this pain and this connects to, you know, our first step of release. Until he's connect, I would argue until he's connected to and released and felt his own pain, he is not going to be open to feeling the full impact of the pain he's caused others. That's, that's so, you know, the shadow work is part of that process of feeling. First we gotta get him in there feeling the pain, having some kind of release. And I think once a man's his own pain is honored, it's easier to open up and be like, fuck, now I can really see where my hurt drove causing hurt. And right. This was man, this was One of my favorite things I heard at this conference I was at, which some people will know this, I've known of him. I actually went to, did some video from his workshops back in the day. But Father Richard Rohr is pretty active in the Christian community and in a different way, right. Like he's, he's really on the, the depth path, I would say, and not so much the dogmatic path in his thing was so simple, right. And I was like, fuck, that's what we're doing. Like, that is what the heart of shadow is. That is what shadow work is. That is what good men's work is. And his simple teaching is pain that you don't transform is pain that you will transmit. So when you don't metabolize your pain, you end up transmitting it and pushing it out and causing it in other people. So our responsibility as men is to transform, transmute our pain, right? And that's that step one, to come in, to release, to get connected to it, to allow it to flow, to have the catharsis. We all need that as men. But it cannot stop there, right? Because then there's the structure of, well, what the fuck are you going to do to make sure this doesn't happen again, both in your personal life and to some extent now because you're so intimate with that pain and what caused it, you have a unique gift to help other people not replicate that, even if it's self harm. Right. Or in the cases we're talking about, harming other people. And this is like dark work, you know, in a, in a sense, it's, it's metabolizing the shadow of our culture right now in men, it's. And we have to get closer to it. Right. I mean, that's, I think the thing that some of these other men are saying that can be in itself so controversial is we don't get closer to it because, oh, that's a good thing. I want to understand them. It makes a lot of sense. It's. We got to get closer to it, to know it so we can become intimate with their pain and start to help them release it so they can step into responsibility and step into accountability. And we have to do that at a personal level too, right? Right. I still do all the time. Just had a major rupture with my wife. It's like, wow, okay, there's something I need to look at here. Right. And I need, I need support in looking at it. And I'm getting support in looking at it. And you know, we see it in Some of the groups we lead, we've been in too, of. You know, there's a way you can kind of come in and move the big energy, but not actually move the thing, not move the accountability, responsibility, fall forward, because that's, that's challenging. You know, I. We say it on our retreats. I've done a whole episode on it. You know, the retreat, the catharsis, that's. That's the fucking easy part. Like, as painful as that is, when you're sobbing or going to the place you never went, when you're held in a container of love and men and shadow, like, that's easy now when you're back home, like we always say, Monday morning and the kids are screaming and the bills are due and the wife is thing. That's the hard part. That is really the hard part. And when these old dynamics you thought you had fixed through the catharsis, it's here again, right? That is hard to engage with as men. And we need each other to do it. And we need to call each other forward in this sense of, hey, here's what I'm seeing, what is going on, right? And how do I hold you to structure and accountability? And what is the role of, you know, shadow work groups, men's work groups, male community in all of this right now, I think is, you know, again, part of what we're circling in, that even the work we love so much, shadow work, right, by itself, it's not enough. It has to be married with the accountability, the structure, the integration, the actual change in behavior so we don't keep perpetrating our own wounding on other people over and over.
• 23:18
  Luke Adler: There's, There's a. A couple more things I want to highlight. One is that. And this speaks more to the. The cultural role and kind of the, the thing we're circling around in a certain way is reparations, which is. I'm not talking about money, but I am talking about accountability. Owning. Owning the energetic of masculinity and improving it. And here's one of the principles. Terry Real brings us forward. But when I heard him say it, I was like, oh, my God, that's so true. Is that the masculine or in the feminine imbalance in a. In a power dynamic is that when you're, when you're in a place of power and privilege, it feels good. It feels good to have power and you don't want to feel the pain, the difficulty, the heaviness, the low sense of esteem, of not having power. So there's an intrinsic reflex to Just not want to be accountable because it doesn't feel good to hold that pain. And so the masculine privilege is I don't have to feel that. I don't want to feel that. That's not mine to feel. I'm here to feel good, to provide, to lift the world up, but I'm not here to hold the pain. That's someone else's job. And so as part of this work is not taking on all the pain, but it's taking on our share of it. It's taking on our part of it. And in so doing, like you said, Jason, we start to gain compassion for. Oh, my God. Is this what my wife's been holding when she's managing all the activities with the kids, she's managing much of the household duties, and she's working for a living? No, it can't be that hard. I'm working more, I'm providing more money. I'm just not complaining about it. She's the one complaining. And the big shadow for us to wake up to as men is we like privilege, we like power, because it in general doesn't hurt so much. We can be buoyed up by the privileges that we have. And I can give many examples of this in my own life that were surprising and shocking of how much power I was given just by virtue of being a man, let alone a white man. So that's part of what we want to look at, is, yes, we have burden, yes, we have fatigue, and we do have a lot of privilege in ways that we just. We are literally not aware of some of the pain of people around us. And that's a great inquiry for us to be in. What is it like to be in my wife's body? What is it like to be my kids? To try to remember what it was like to be a child? How did it feel? It's hard. It's hard for me to remember. To remember having less power. I've been an adult long enough that I kind of want to forget it. The other. The other thing that's kind of the shadow of purgation and release is that it feels good to release. Then we want to move on and move forward and be done with it. But the capacity to hold pain, which is the shadow itself, is way in the background. It's the very bottom, interstitial, energetic space of our identity, an energetic system, and it's a reservoir, it's a container of pain. So as that pain accumulates, it's accumulating in a certain way behind our sense of Awareness so that we don't have to be aware of it. We don't have to be accountable to it. It's as if our identity is like the top of the computer screen and. And we're just dealing with what's on our. At the surface of our plate. We're not aware of all the. All of the corrupt files in the background of the computer that aren't. Aren't doing anything, but they are slowing the machine down a little bit. We start to notice this drag in the operational efficiency of our cpu. Maybe an interesting metaphor. So the, The. The. The shadow of the shadow is. We all reflexively don't want to face it. We want to stay above it and just operate unencumbered and unbothered. Shadow work in its highest aspiration is to stay aware of the. The bottom of the reservoir and to what's accumulating there. And what will always accumulate there is in direct relationship to our conditioning and pain, particularly around our attachment style and wounds. And we'll immediately start to kick in and take over how we relate to the people, especially the people closest to us. The most powerful thing to become accountable in a life where we're attuned to our shadow is the accumulation of our pain over time. And we're built to do that for survival. And the people around us feel it. The people around us see it before we see it. I know in my men's group, you guys are seeing me getting bogged down and clogged up before I do, because you know me long enough, and you guys have an obligation to call me out and say, luke, you look like a clogged pipe. You look a little tired. And you know what my first response will be? I'm fine. And then the group's responsibility is to say, are you? And I'll go, yeah, yeah, I'm okay. And they'll go, no, no, no. Luke, look at me. Are you?
• 29:50
  Jason Lange: Yeah. Well, I think that's a great example. You know, obviously some people this word, but, you know, patriarchy is real and that. That we're taught to kind of store and hold pain as men. That's part of that, right? That's part of the masculine ideal. I just. I just push through my pain. My pain doesn't stop me. I keep going. I'm Rocky, Rocky Balboa. I just keep getting up and. And, you know, there's something. Obviously there's a golden shadow in that, and there's a dark shadow in that. In that. What it teaches men is keep your pain buried. And then A lot of men don't know what to do with it. And this becomes, you know, part of the whole reason men come to us. Like, okay, I can, I can feel my pain and I don't know what to do about it and I need somewhere to bring it and I need to learn to take responsibility and work this and have a container for it so it doesn't keep spilling out into my, my life. In that the more we do that, I think this is also part of the, the more we can connect and become intimate with our pain and metabolize our pain and transform our pain and release our pain. All the things we're talking about, the literally the more space and awareness we have, right? That I think then makes it easier to engage with the pain and the hurt we've caused without being defensive, right? Because the. If there's one thing I've gotten clear about in our kind of woke, post woke world and everything we're going through is ranking pain is a losing game. And so when my pain hasn't been honored or metabolized, I don't want to hear about your fucking pain, right? And we get into the what about cycle that is everywhere in culture right now. Well, you can't complain because what about Da da? They have it even worse and it just, it doesn't go anywhere, right? That's like infinite and, and it keeps fracturing in a lot of ways. So hey, I'm going to deal with my pain so I have the space and energy and presence to even engage or inquire or be curious about yours without being defensive, right? Because, oh, what about my pain? Right? I do this shit all the time. And I think that's, you know, part of when we talk about moving into accountability as men and taking responsibility and being able to repair is, you know, I think a big currency. I mean it is absolutely. My edge is how do I receive feedback? Really? Like literally how do I receive feedback? What happens in my nervous system when someone tells me something I don't want to hear or I don't agree with or you know, and I could tell you I still got some work to do there for sure as shit in the relationships closest to me. And that's one of the things we want to train men to do. And now the beauty of something like the Heart of Shadow and the groups we build is instead of just going straight there necessarily, we build up a reservoir of goodwill, positive affection for each other and genuine love. So when that feedback does come, it's sourced. And you know, I love you Right. Like just me and you, man. Like, you know, I love you. So if I give you feedback, I still love you. Actually, it's me loving you. To give you this feedback is to, to say the hard thing, you know, or to point out the thing I'm not sure about. And that's deep work for us men, both in our individual relationships inside our men's groups and a culture right now. To okay, how do we open to this? Which you know, again, it's different than falling on the sword of it's all my fault and taking a hundred percent responsibility, but being open to hearing, feeling feedback, getting it metabolized, connecting to what's mine, what's theirs and where, where can I help? Step in here. I think is really important. And you know, we are living in a post accountability age. I think that's the thing that is really challenging our systems, our structures of government culture right now that I'm a pretty liberal dude, but I have my own charges around and I think that's somewhere Obama really fucked up. Didn't hold torturers accountable, didn't hold the bank people accountable. These were fractures in our culture that said, hey, you're allowed to do shit that is outside the realm of what we consider morally acceptable. And you know, there might be things that limited that, but that started something. And then what did we do? We elected someone who lives shame free. Just like there, there is no self shame in our current president. He doesn't have that capacity. And that's liberating for people because it means you don't have to be accountable for anything. Say whatever the fuck I want, do whatever I want. And that's a big part of the culture right now. And who is pushing back and you know, holding accountability for taking responsibility and having to repair the, the, the messes we create in a lot of those messes. Not all of those messes. A lot of those messes are from men. You know, that's where this work becomes so important, both at the personal level and the metabolizing. All the things we've done, so many episodes about shadow work around, of getting closer to it, seeing it, feeling it, releasing it, and then yes, that that can't be the end. And that's why we don't just lead one off weekend workshops of shadow work. Because you know, you and I could do that all day fucking long. It's just like boom, boom, boom, great. And then it doesn't necessarily change people. Right? Like that's, that's what I've seen. I mean all of this Stuff this is, you know, stuff I've talked about so much. State and stage. Like, state is the easy part, the cathartic release. It's turning it into a permanent trait, a stage. That's the deep work. And it actually doesn't matter if it's shadow work, if it's breath work, if it's meditation, if it's ayahuasca. You can go have the state experience but not convert it to a permanent trait. Behavior changes of you taking responsibility for your actions and repairing what those actions cause in the world. And that's, I think, the. The next place you and I are getting inspired to do. And, you know, this sounds like super heavy in a lot of ways. And engaging with it at a cultural level is.
• 36:04
  Luke Adler: Is.
• 36:04
  Jason Lange: But it's also just at a really personal level, like actually giving the man we love feedback we know might hurt. Right. He might not want to feel that or see that or hear that, but then it falls back to, well, if not us, then who? If not the men that are most intimate with this man and trust him and love him the most, that built up the most rapport, who's going to give him the feedback. Right. And so there's responsibility for us there.
• 36:34
  Luke Adler: Yeah. As a healthcare provider, you know, I work with people of every age. And when I work with folks, you know, in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and they are still working out issues in their primary relationships, they're still getting pissed at their husbands and wives, still complaining about the things that my wife and I complain about. I wake up to the fact that you're always on the path and you're always on the journey and you're still working out your same issues late in life. And if you don't get support and don't get guidance, you'll still complain about the same shit and not grow. And that's true. And I can say that now, having led work for a long time and having worked with people all the way to the end of their lives and have many illustrations of people having breakthroughs and then people just their lives ending and they actually don't heal the thing that was ailing them. And then that's the story. So that motivates me to go, hey, let's work on it. Because if you don't work on it, it doesn't get done. And this is part of the great design of Heart of Shadow that Jason, you and I wanted to share, because we experienced the power of a men's group that had continuity, where it continued year after year and how it got deeper and stronger, and the work became more nuanced and powerful. And so our inspiration offer Heart of Shadow was to create and offer a structure that made a massive difference for our lives. And we have a module right at the end where we could give men a structure around accountability. How to get into conflict in a loving, structured way that's. That doesn't default to, oh, you called me out, okay, fuck you, or you called me out, I'm out of the group. No, there's a way to do it where there's space for the nervous systems to calm down, to re regulate, to find that wise, loving presence and to really hear each other and train each other and to build these windows of tolerance around. This is really uncomfortable. Okay, let me keep breathing. And so that structure's there. In Heart of Shadow, we train accountability. We train and have structure around building safety and intimacy. And the amazing thing about the program that Jason, you and I intended is that it's decentralized, that at the end, Jason and I don't own the group. It's not our own group. It's not our group. It's the unique thumbprint of the 10 men that join and create this incredible experience. And what's powerful about that is accountability is intrinsic in the group because the group owns the group. The group isn't on the curriculum of Jason Lang and Luke Adler. It's their karma, it's their lessons, and they have the tools to keep burning through it. So mid September is our next cohort. And heartofshadow.com you can learn all about it. We are. You can get on our wait list, I believe. And this one's going to be in Austin, Texas. Really exciting. We're going to be there. We got an amazing retreat site, Zenful Cove. We're signing a contract with them soon. And great caterer. So we're excited to come to Austin, excited to call men into this, this next iteration of the work. And, you know, good for you to know we will be training men in leading Heart of shadow in 2027. So if that's of interest too, you know, you'll want to do our hard shadow program because that's a requisite.
• 40:18
  Jason Lange: So accountability, if you want to. Exactly. If you want to be able to guide other men in this work and take yourself deeper. That's woven into the fabric of what we're creating. You have to have the very structure of accountability around you that you want to bring forward to men. And I think that's the only way this. This moves forward. So, yeah, registration will be open here probably within the end of the month. Austin's coming. I think this is going to be a juicy one. I can feel it. You know we wrapped our last cohort a couple months ago and yeah, you know this conversation's really I can feel the flame coming back here of ooh, yeah, there's there's work to be done and we want to be meeting you men who are ready to do it and you know, it blows me away every time we graduate a group to see what happens in their lives after and to run that hypothetical of wow, what would they be doing right now if they didn't have the group to help them metabolize and process and be held accountable in these challenges in their lives and something I feel every day. So definitely yes, shadow work has to be part of accountability and we want to keep these conversations going. So been a real pleasure, my friend. Until next time.