My annual men’s retreat is now called Theseus Lodge. Let me tell you about it:

The retreat started as “Project Crucible” last year when QC made a poast on X pining for a more masculine psychotherapy. As a former Marine and contractor, and now counselor and culture writer, I knew I could pull it off. So I floated the idea. 200 people messaged me on the 1st day.

I incorporated QC's entire wish list into the retreat plan, and then some. In the end, two cohorts of 26 men came to Boulder from all over the world to learn construction and wilderness skills, to backpack in the mountains, to wrestle each other & fight about philosophy, and to forge deep friendships.

This year, we're changing the name to Theseus Lodge, named after the Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment about something that changes piece by piece while somehow remaining itself. The central project of the retreat is now the construction of the Lodge on Storm Mountain.

The Theseus Lodge is a temporary ceremonial structure we will build, assemble, use, take down, and rebuild, year after year. It functions as the sacred center of the retreat, the place that we gather for brotherhood, truth-telling, fire, and an exploration of our own hearts.

We are still going to hike, wrestle, debate, and learn construction and survival skills. But this year, I've completely overhauled the curriculum. I've taken out as many of the lectures as I can and created classes that are participatory, embodied, and dialectic.

In wilderness training, I'll still teach survival, but I'll also emphasize perception, belonging, and becoming a connected steward of the natural world. I've greatly reduced the amount of physical training in favor of meditation, movement and presence. And we'll take more hikes.

If you want to come and help build Theseus Lodge, you need to be willing to tell the truth, first to yourself, and then to your fellow men. You need to be over the age of 18. You need to have been born male. You need to be willing to work. You need to be able to take care of yourself while also contributing to the group. You need to be willing to earn brotherhood through service, honesty and shared hardship. You need to be willing to challenge your own worldview as readily as you challenge others'. You need to be willing to grow, ultimately, into greater integrity, and a greater sense of yourself as a man.

If you’re interested in attending this year, please email me at gabe@namelessmountain.org and I’ll send you the details. Feel free to ask any questions; we can also set up a half-hour video call if you want to take my measure first.

The first cohort runs from 9/6-9/12 this year. If there’s enough interest, I’ll run another cohort from 9/20-9/26.

Running the men’s retreat last year was one of the great honors of my life, and I can’t wait to do it again with you all. See you this summer in Boulder.

I know many of you already follow me on X, and that’s my main platform, so you might already be aware that I’ve started fundraising for a new spiritual center. But for those of you that only haunt the Substack halls these days, I wanted to make sure you also got the news:

The center is called Nameless Mountain, it’s in Boulder, CO, and it's focused on spiritual maturity rather than enlightenment. Everyone else is trying to help you wake up, because that’s where the ego and the money are at. We’re trying to find the few who are interested in cleaning up, growing up and showing up, and making sure they have a place of their own.

Nameless Mountain will be Dharma-based, but open to people of all (and no) faiths. I’m the executive director, and the board of directors are Charlie Awbery of Evolving Ground, Wystan Bryant-Scott, Caroline Morrison and Leela Henderson.

The biggest reason I have for opening Nameless Mountain is to make high-quality psychological training available to people at scale, on a by-donation basis. No more $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 trainings to learn to regulate the nervous system or learn basic relationship skills. We’re going to teach people how to do this for free, and we’re going to teach people how to teach other people to do this for free.

And we’re going to do it all in a way that respects people’s current religion and culture. If Christians and Jews and atheists don’t mind learning what Buddhists and SBNRs have learned, we want to share it, and we want to learn from them too. No one is strong-armed into believing something that isn’t right for them, no one is made to feel lesser or inferior because of their faith.
There’s no reason that virtues which used to be freely transmitted as part of our culture should now be separate and hidden inside exorbitantly priced workshops and retreats. There’s no reason our culture should be in this bad of shape. Our elders, the holders of our culture’s wisdom, have been very unwise for the last half century. They dismantled religion and now sell it back to people piecemeal. Even mysticism has been commodified and sold. This is essentially spiritual fracking.

We want to put wisdom back together again. And we want to see a contemplative renaissance bloom in the United States, across faiths and regions. That’s what we mean when we say “We are here to renew the sacred.”

The main offering of Nameless Mountain is called Repertoire, and it’s built on the same model of participatory education we used for Fight Wise. From a strong base of Dharma and contemplative skill, we help people to dig deep and find the individual problems that make it hard for them to stand on their own two feet, trust themselves and be present in their life. And then we have them re-enact their patterns in a safe environment with others, so they can learn to do something new. We are going to do this, online and in-person, EVERY SINGLE WEEK. It will be by donation, and no one will be turned away.
When we raise enough money, we are going to add a second weekly workshop called Repair, which will work on a similar model, but for emotional issues, including trauma and attachment wounding.

Of course we’ll also offer retreats and workshops for people who want to dive deep, or need specialized training. Of course they’ll cost money. But we’ll never gatekeep information and training that can help people live a good life behind an unaffordable barrier.

We’re trying to raise $50,000 to cover this year’s expenses. If you’d like to help us bring high-quality, professional-level psychological training to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, please donate here:

https://givebutter.com/c/nameless-mountain-inaugural

In communities that keep nothing sacred, some percentage of people will inevitably elevate their own pleasure above the well-being of others. Infidelity, sex with minors, out-of-control kink, etc. Before I left Portland, I saw some rationalist friends drifting in that direction and, after I left, watched them become truly depraved. Total slaves of their passions, with no consideration for how their actions affect others. “Your feelings are not my responsibility” type shit. One of those people I really loved and admired, once upon a time. It was heartbreaking.

Libertarians are of course famous for having a higher than normal ratio of pedophiles - whoops, I mean ephebophiles - in their communities. They celebrate all kinds of irresponsible and abusive, antisocial indulgences. Rationalist spaces, which are ideologically related, are also becoming like this. Celebrating degeneracy, becoming consumed by consumerism, instrumentalized by Moloch. And Western Buddhists and spiritual practitioners, who are often adjacent to these spaces, turn a blind eye to it, as though non-judgment is the highest virtue anyone could aspire to. Worse, they sometimes put a religious gloss on debauchery, portraying sex work as “metta” or drug-addled stupors as states of sacred consciousness.

These are all people caught up in the nihilistic, orgiastic mode of transcendence. Sex, drugs and capital be my god. The purely rational mode of meaning-making terminates there. And it requires the objectification of the self and of others, because it starts with the premise that human beings are not special, we’re tiny nothingness in an incomprehensibly vast universe, we’re just chemicals and dust, baby.

I don’t think that every single libertarian or rationalist is like this. Many of them are great people with beautiful, generative structures in their soul that bring a lot of good into the world. Structures that came from people and places that do hold some things sacred. But the logic of ideology absolutely shapes group norms, and those that lack inner strength inevitably shape their egos to resemble their personas, rather than the other way around. These are the people that inevitably devastate themselves and others. Because they deny their own bodies, their own sense of what is right and wrong for them, they have no somatic or emotional foundation to determine Quality. They outsource everything to the thinking mind, which eventually demands more - up to even their sense of the transcendent. And so, ironically, they can’t even finish the logic of rationalism, the way all great scientists and mystics have - by locating the transcendent in the immanent, in the great Present, in the Thou of the other human beings with whom we share this life. They flatten all meaning in their life, demolishing their own values, and elevating their own low lusts and appetites to the same level as everything else - including any concern for the welfare of others.

Okay vv, I hear you saying. Another manifestation of libertinism is decompensating into spiritual wreckage. Old news. Well, fine - there may be nothing new under the sun, but you don’t have to turn a blind eye to it. You don’t have to indulge the pathologically permissive spirit of the age. You can refuse the company of people who break commitments that YOU think are sacred. You can quietly stop investing in relationships with people who lie and manipulate, who cheat on their partners, who groom teenagers, who use others and throw them away. You don’t have to judge people as individuals to recognize that this behavior is incredibly harmful, and so socially corrosive that it will destroy any community within a few years. It’s literally the stuff that low-trust environments are made of.

Maybe taking a stand means being lonely, maybe it means being unpopular, maybe it even means people privately and publicly denouncing you. That’s what it meant for me. Fine. What is it to be despised by people who despicable things? What could it possibly cost to be shamed by the shameless? I only wish I had *better* enemies.

Because this is what it means, in the end, to stand up for what is sacred to you: Self-respect. Integrity. A genuine feeling that you can trust yourself, and the few others that feel the same way that you do. The sense that you truly value the individuality, the interiority of the people that you love, and that they value yours. And, as a result, a much more secure social environment for yourself and the people you love. These things are more beautiful than any fleeting bodily pleasure, more psychoactive than any psychedelic, and more valuable than all the money in the world.

This is Part Four of the series “How to Fight Your Family.” Once they’re uploaded, you can read the first installment here, the second here, and the third here.

In Part One, we discussed five principles for fighting wisely. They are:

1. Be Prepared

2. Operate Your Nervous System Intentionally

3. Empathize Without Abandoning Yourself

4. Fight to Win

5. Integrity Is A Win You Can Always Guarantee

In this essay, we’ll cover the final two principles. Enjoy.

Whenever Rich and I cover these principles together in Fight Wise, there is one that always lands hard. Fight to win. You can see people’s faces change. Their eyes widen a little, they shift uncomfortably in the frame of their laptop camera. There’s a silence after we say it. Rich and I just wait. Then, someone finally asks it:

“What does ‘fight to win’ mean?”

It means, very simply, what it says. We are extending you the benefit of the doubt, a modicum of good faith that assumes that if things have gotten this far, that you are defending something important to you, and that your life would be poorer if you failed to defend it appropriately. There is no coherent moral or ethical system in the world that forbids self-defense. Most of those systems very clearly lay out conditions in which aggression is acceptable. We might even say something like, you have a duty to protect yourself and the people you love, and to stand up for what you believe in. It may be essential to your survival, your way of life, even to your psychological health.

I think people who struggle with this struggle with trusting themselves. Are they sure their motives are pure? Are they sure they were fair and decent about starting the fight? Can they hold themselves blameless? And the answer is, no. You can’t. You will feel triumphant when you win, and if you’re not a monster, you will also feel some guilt. Ambivalence is our natural human state and regret is unavoidable to a species that can conceive of counterfactuals. Many people would rather unconsciously decide to lose than live with the inevitable guilt of winning.

It is far, far better, for you and for the people you love, not to do this. If you can count on yourself to fight to win, and they can count on you to fight to win, then they will calibrate their respect for you appropriately. This is the actual way to keep the peace among a family of murderous, self-deceiving apes in the Realm of the Lord of Death: by being very, very good at war.

Listen: winning doesn’t mean domination or destruction. It means accomplishing your goals for the fight - getting clear with yourself about what’s sacred enough to you to stand up for, setting firm boundaries around those things, setting reasonable win conditions, and maintaining your integrity throughout. That’s what principles 4 and 5 amount to, in the end - seeing the fight through to a skillful resolution in which you remained true to yourself throughout. If you accomplish your other goals, good. But if you fail to accomplish anything but keeping your integrity, you can still walk away with your head held high.

Fighting with integrity is the heart of fighting wisely. Integrity, here, does not necessarily even mean honesty - you can employ tricks and deceptions to defeat an enemy who is threatening your life! But when fighting your family, it’s imperative to be as honest as you possibly can, which is to say, as honest as the family system allows for without relational damage. And sometimes, being willing to risk a little damage for the sake of the truth.

But more than honesty, what integrity means is that you don’t violate your own most deeply held principles in the process of getting what you want. You don’t go against who you are, and you don’t force them to go against who they are. You fight it out within established bounds that say, "I’d rather lose, or even die, than violate my own integrity.” If you don’t see how that strength of character gives you an enormous psychological advantage at the outset, I would suggest you have never really been in a fight.

So - how does one accomplish this, especially when the rage is hot and the spittle is flying? As with all fights - one prepares, thoroughly and deeply, for its eventuality. And most importantly, it means fighting on your terms. It means having the courage to go and start the fight yourself, in the time and place of your choosing, having fully prepared for it.

When you do this, we suggest you use a very particular framework: The Three Phases of Confrontation.

Before: The First Phase

Before starting any fight, there are three things you have to do.

1. Clarify your win conditions. What do you want from this fight? Be honest with yourself. One part of you may just want to dominate the other, or embarrass them, or get revenge. None of these are wise motivations for the fight, and it’s good to check yourself before starting a confrontation to see where they might be lurking. Take those out on a punching bag or a woodpile. Look deeply and be willing to be vulnerable with yourself. If your motive to fight is born out of genuine need, then sit down with your journal and determine your:

   1. Wants (I would like if…). This is a good time to write about things you hope will come of the conversation, but that aren’t critical. They’re nice outcomes, but you can safely discard them if the fight isn’t going your way.

   2. Needs (it’s critical that…) These are deal breakers for you. Things that you require for your life, your livelihood, for your relationship. When fighting with your family, these are things like the need to be treated fairly and with respect within your relationships.

   3. Boundaries (if you do x, I will do y.) Boundaries are often misunderstood as ways people can control others’ behavior, as in, you can’t say that to me, that’s crossing a boundary. This is a near enemy of what a boundary actually does, which is to set a condition for how you will act. A boundary around a nation’s borders says that if you cross illegally, the nation will arrest and deport you. A boundary around private property says that if you trespass, the owner will prepare to use deadly force if necessary. A boundary around a family argument might say that if you bring up the past, I will refuse to engage with it, or walk away from the conversation. A boundary is not a restriction placed on someone else. It’s a promise of consequences, often a threat - and when it’s clearly made and delivered, it’s an act of mercy, just like a warning shot. It lets the other know they are close to making the fight unsafe for both of you. It gives them information on how to predict your behavior, how to pursue what they want, and have a good, clean fight with you. It also signals that these are priorities for you, and encourages them to articulate the same. All of these help you fight wisely.

   4. Requests (I want you to do x, or I want you to stop y.) Before you head into the fight, know what you want the other person to change. Make it specific, actionable and clear. Of course, it could be that the conditions change on the ground as you’re fighting - you get new information and it becomes clear that you need to make a new ask. Count on this. As the great philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” But by establishing your request beforehand, you get clear about the direction of the fight. You begin to organize your resources toward a clear goal. And if you’re the only one of the two doing that, you’re in control of the confrontation.

2. Rehearse. I covered this in full in Part 1 of the series.

3. Regulate. This is in Part 2, as part of nervous system preparation.

During: The Second Phase

During the fight, there are three things you need to do:

1. Ground. This, as in keeping your nervous system grounded in the moment, with breathing and muscular relaxation techniques. I covered this in full in Part 2 of the series. But another part of this is grounding in the relationship, which is especially important when fighting with family. First, remind yourself of the importance of this relationship. They are family. You will either live with this person’s presence in your life, or you will live with their absence. There is no third option. So when you are in the fight, it can useful to affirm the bond between you, and stress that it’s important enough to you to fight about it. If the bond is genuinely threatened by their behavior, it’s compassionate to let them know that. And by reminding them that you love them and want a good relationship with them, it helps them keep the argument in context and helps to prevent things from spiraling into destructive action.

2. Communicate. The more clearly and skillfully you can communicate, the more likely you are to win. You don’t have to be violent, domineering or frightening, you need to say what’s true for you as skillfully as possible, and meet, understand and counter, as honestly as possible, what they are saying in return. To do this well, both of you need to keep your nervous systems in check, and avoid provoking each other unnecessarily. One of the best ways to do this is to use “I” statements. Don’t blame or accuse them, and don’t make assumptions about their motivations, or about anything they haven’t said. Describe your experience as it’s happening. Describe what you are feeling, describe what you are trying to convey, describe what’s important to you. And finally, when possible, ask as many clarifying questions as the fight will allow, to get to the heart of what they’re saying. Remember: the better you understand both yourself and your opponent, the more effective of a fighter you will be.

3. Negotiate. You will not win every fight, but if you are willing to negotiate, you can get your needs met and preserve your integrity far more often than if you approach it in a “winner takes all” spirit. Three tips we find helpful for negotiation are:

   1. Explain your intended outcome when you articulate your request. Don’t just ask them to do something, tell them why. Give them your vision. “Dad, I really want you to speak to my boyfriend more respectfully because I think it will make both of us more comfortable coming over, and I want us to have a good relationship.” This makes requests feel less like threats, exposes your motives and encourages them to discuss theirs, and opens up room for compromise and creative collaboration on getting both of your needs met.

   2. Be willing to compromise, but do not compromise before your position is heard. If you are a constitutional fawner, you may talk yourself out of making a request before you even start, or you may feel like it’s hopeless, and downgrade your ask before you’ve even made it. Do not do this. Make your request, clearly and truly, and let them talk you down from it. If you’re sure they’ll say no, fine. Let them say no, then have a response prepared. But don’t damage your own position and self-respect before you even begin the fight.

   3. Understand your BATNA. Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement. Which is to say, if the fight gets too heated, negotiations fail, or you’re unable to meet your needs, what’s the best alternative that’s available? It can be helpful, both psychologically and practically, to prepare this outcome beforehand, because it limits your anxiety and the strength of your reactions, helping you stay in control and effectively advocate for yourself.

After: The Third Phase

After the fight, there are three things you need to do to take care of yourself and ensure that you grow, as a person and as a wise fighter:

1. Regulate. All of the tricks and techniques that keep you grounded will also help you recover afterward. Don’t skimp on these, and give them as long as they take to fully recover. Treating your nervous system well is a critical part of fighting wisely.

2. Reflect. Just as journaling is a critical part of preparing for a fight, it’s also a critical part of growing, updating and staying prepared for the unknown. You might think you remember the confrontation well, but it’s crucial to get it out of your head and onto paper before time, self-interest and neurological trickery change the memory into something unusable. At the first available opportunity, write everything you can remember about the fight. Who said what? What was the sensory environment like, what did you feel during it? Get as faithful of an account as possible. Then, put it away for a bit. Go for a walk, or even better, sleep on it. When you feel like you have a bit of distance, return to it and ask yourself: If I could do this over again, what would I prepare differently? How would I regulate differently? What would I say or do differently? What outcomes might have been possible? This is just as important after you win as after you lose.

3. Update. With these reflections in hand, get a handful of “updates” from the fight. Analyze them and ask what weaknesses they point to in you, or what strengths they point to in the other person. Then, figure out how to transform those insights into real training in the real world. Not just nodding your head and saying “now I know,” but real, concrete updates to your self-knowledge and your future preparations and routines. Even if you felt you lost the fight, if you know that you did your best and you take the time to uncover and learn the lesson, you won’t suffer undue regret. And you’ll maintain your self-respect, because you know that you used the loss to lead yourself to genuine growth, and that if there’s a next time, you’ll be a more formidable opponent. All wins are wins, and if you do it right, so are all losses. Until death, all defeat is psychological.

And with that, the series concludes. You now have all the knowledge you need to fight your family this holiday season. And though Fight Wise Holiday Edition has already passed for 2025, we’ll keep running cohorts of the regular program throughout next year, which includes everything covered in this series and more. The practice is much more important than the knowledge, so hopefully we’ll see you in an upcoming class.

Until then, may you be a happy warrior, formidable, decent and wise, and win the peaceful, loving holidays that, underneath it all, your family truly desires.

Friends, I’d like to introduce STRUCTURE - a new retreat I’m hosting this New Year’s, at Nameless Mountain in Boulder. STRUCTURE will consist of four days of meditation, as well as classes and workshops on the structures - both in us and without - that give rise to our experience of life itself.

Let me tell you a little more about it:

Course Content

I designed this retreat for those that struggle to give themselves direction without coercion, to keep resolutions, and to make meaningful, sustainable change in their lives.

We will meditate every morning and evening, share and prepare meals communally, and conduct classes and workshops together around a roaring fire.

Together, we will synthesize lessons from architecture, systems thinking, Western psychology and Zen Buddhism. First, we’ll survey your individual pattern language, or how you construct your experience of the world, with year-in-review exercises and reflection exercises. Then, we’ll learn how beliefs, attitudes and rituals form the inner structure that gives shape and meaning to our everyday lives. We’ll work together to identify limiting concepts, dead patterns and restrictive, useless routines that are not serving you. Finally, we’ll design new structures from the ground up - structures that systematize and enhance the life you’re already living, rather than attempting to impose an alien, oppressive regime from the top-down. .

You’ll leave with a dedicated integration plan - not a list of goals or resolutions, but a blueprint for positive changes to your inner and outer environments that will help bring about the truest, happiest, most vital version of you.

Location

STRUCTURE will be conducted entirely at Nameless Mountain, a secluded and scenic farmhouse in North Boulder. Participants will sleep on bunks at Nameless Mountain, and have access to Wi-Fi, electricity, showers, laundry, and a full kitchen. All meals, as well as snacks, coffee and tea, are included in the price of the ticket.

Tickets

The in-person price is $500 for a ticket, and the remote price is $250. Scholarships are also available. I’m really excited about this retreat, and can’t wait to share it with you. I hope to see you in Boulder this New Year’s!

This is Part Three of the series “How to Fight Your Family.” Once they’re uploaded, you can read the first installment here, the second here, and the fourth here.

In Part One, we discussed five principles for fighting wisely. They are:

1. Be Prepared

2. Operate Your Nervous System Intentionally

3. Empathize Without Abandoning Yourself

4. Fight to Win

5. Integrity Is A Win You Can Always Guarantee

In this essay, we’ll be exploring the third principle. Enjoy.

Empathize Without Abandoning Yourself

Instinct and Virtue

It was inevitable, when empathy became a weapon in our eternal culture war, that its existence and utility as a virtue would one day become contested. We bludgeon others with accusations of heartlessness when we perceive them to be lacking in empathy, and we glory in our own performative refusal to empathize, when we’ve determined it would be “suicidal” or overly self-sacrificing. Never mind that the concept has a slippery, nebulous multiplicity of definitions, or the wide gulf between its folk version and its refined, skillful form (a characteristic it shares with all other virtues.) Culturally, we are surrounded by empathy’s many proponents and detractors, each of them outraged and accusing, each in the grips of a darkly-amusing certainty that precludes true connection with the other.

So let’s get precise: the definition for empathy that I will use in this essay is the ability to semi-accurately model what another person is feeling, both cognitively (rationally) and affectively (emotionally, to guess what they are feeling, and feel it along with them.) It’s a refined form of sympathy - the simple, natural human fellow-feeling, but a more primitive form of compassion, a holding of space for another’s suffering.

In most cases, I don’t believe that weaponizing empathy is an example of fighting wisely. Neither is foregoing it completely. I do believe that engaging empathy in a selective, discriminating manner is a necessary component of skillful confrontation - especially when you are deeply bonded with your opponent, as with your family or spouse. And most importantly, I believe that engaging in true empathy - not a performative sympathetic distress, nor a self-destructive abandonment of one’s own needs and boundaries - is crucial for generative conflict - the kind of fighting that strengthens and sustains relationships over the long run.

It takes real effort, moral imagination and education to master empathy. And it takes real courage, because it means confronting a harsh reality about the human instinct to fawn. Fawning - a nervous system response to stress - is a basic building block of our social behavior that greater society misunderstands as healthy and prosocial. Perhaps less well-known than its more famous relatives, fight and flight, it’s a fundamental human behavior in which we attempt to placate and please those we perceive to be powerful. Once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere. It’s an unremarkable feature of social relations: being a bit over-polite, laughing a little too loud at other’s jokes, being a little too attuned to the emotional fluctuations of others, especially those we perceive to be important. It’s the foundation of charm, and pervades every thin, rushed apology, every insincere forgiveness, every flattering exaggeration and elision of flaw we use to ingratiate ourselves to the successful, or soothe and inflate the egos of those we pity.

Most of us find that fawning feels gracious and even magnanimous to engage in, and (temporarily) pleasing to receive from others. Shaping it toward a useful institutional end is a critical component of American early childhood socialization, and when it develops over years in the context of rigid hierarchy, it becomes an extraordinary social tool, wielded by the highest of high society, the most alluring sexual icons, and the most dynamic executives, lawyers and politicians.

But because it is based, at its root, in fear - and because all boundaries in consciousness, fundamentally, are made of fear - fawning is always and everywhere a near enemy of the truth.

The Compulsive Fawner

Fight Wise is, first and foremost, an assertiveness training course. Most of the people who take it are constitutional fawners, which is to say, this is their most common, habitual response to social stress. Most of them have experienced that, in times of extraordinary stress and difficulty, the reality-distorting nature of fawning becomes profoundly self-defeating. Automatic fawners cave when they don’t need to, abandon their own interests and positions in order to please others, and struggle with powerful anxiety at the thought of someone they love being angry or upset with them. They talk themselves out of communicating their needs, and may even come to stigmatize and hate their own needs, rather than risk displeasing the people in their lives. At its most extreme end, when it becomes neurotic, fawning can mean accepting responsibilities we are incapable of discharging, seducing people who we do not truly want to have sex with, and even making life-altering relationship choices we don’t truly desire, for reasons we can’t bring ourselves to understand.

Women, in particular, find fawning easy and natural, for a variety of cultural and biological reasons. We socialize them to prefer this response to fear, and it’s also, often, the most graceful response to situations involving their frightening physical differential with men. (Unfortunately, women often fawn without understanding the self-destructive way it recapitulates the dynamics of childhood in their adult relationships, and can accidentally distort the concept of maleness in their mind as something rigidly, globally superior to themselves.)

But fawning is not purely a gendered phenomenon - anyone with a sufficiently frightening parent or older sibling likely learned to fawn in the pre-memory years of life. They were incentivized and trained, however unconsciously, to develop an attunement to the heightened emotions of more powerful people. This means that longtime fawners have often developed an exquisite skill for empathy. They have an extraordinary, preverbal ability to model what another person is feeling, and can predict potential relationship ruptures with incredible precision.

You might expect such a prodigious empathy, so widely distributed in the population, to produce an army of saints. And perhaps it would, if it were not also poisoned by ancient anxiety: a profound relic of early attachment system damage that precludes the ability to trust. Because compulsive fawners head off most conflict before it can erupt (and tend to end the rare conflicts they can’t avoid with spectacular, pent-up wrath), they are rarely able to master the advanced stages of relationship conflict. They don’t experience the special repair, growth and sacred bonding that uniquely strengthens relationships in the wake of a healthy breach. And so they struggle to both fight and remain in connection at the same time, with both themselves and their opponent. They don’t learn to establish the durable boundaries - and healthy respect - that carves out the distance at which they can best deepen into intimacy.

This is the great irony of empathy that is poisoned by fear: its possessor is damned to obsess over extraordinarily intimate minutiae of their loved ones’ behavior, but never to experience that intimacy for themselves. Because they vastly over-privilege others in their lives, and refuse to fight on their own behalf, they never achieve the closeness and depth of love that only comes about in the wake of well-bounded, wholehearted emotional violence.

Each person who can’t bring themselves to trust in the repair that follows rupture has a different reason that brought them there. But to an individual, almost all of them become masters of the art of people pleasing: Making themselves gentle, attractive, pleasing, overly generous, sometimes even seductive, all in the service of peacemaking and self-protection.

Let us set aside a few things here: that fawning often requires a litany of flattering lies and half-truths - a compromise of one’s own integrity, a betrayal of one’s perception, and abandonment of the self. That, beneath the veneer of kindly diplomacy and self-sacrifice is a Machiavellian sensibility that placates the temporary intensity of an emotional person - who may or may not be righteously upset - in order to wrest a quiet control over them. And finally, let us set aside the fact of fawning’s general ineffectiveness. Or have you not yet noticed that people-pleasing does not, in the long run, ever really please people?

In a more conciliatory tone: All human beings fawn, as a consequence of our hierarchical nature. It is a Jurassic behavior, preserved over the aeons by our oldest and crudest brain structures. One could call it an original sin, if one were religiously inclined. The evils it causes are not consciously undertaken. They are the inevitable results of this instinctive response, and the entire interconnected context of savoir-faire that springs from it. That is, the subtle dishonesty, pleasantry and faux-selflessness that constitutes much of the foundation of social reality. Nietzsche called this slave morality, and David Foster Wallace called it the water that we swim in. Unconscious social masking - reflexive, pre-emptive fawning - is so widespread, so unremarkable, such a part of our daily collective rituals that, perversely, we can feel inauthentic when we are not inauthentic in this way.

And yet, widespread as it is, fawning is not prosocial, not authentic, not virtuous. It is chemically identical to a growl. And it is certainly not sustainable - one can only wear a mask of vulnerability in a relationship for so long, until the burden of self-suppression ferments into resentment and becomes a hidden, roiling rot.

A Noble Ruthlessness

Empathy is a crucial component of nobility. This is not a religious encomium, this is a truth that warriors have lived by for millennia. There is nothing weak about the ability to imagine one’s self in another’s position - this is the ancient foundation of the military sciences, the fundamental skill of strategy. Sun Tzu is clear in The Art of War when he writes, “if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

No, what separates empathy from perfidy is a secret, saintly vitamin that vitalizes common fellow-feeling into genuine compassion: ruthlessness. It’s perhaps a strange thing to read, that ruthlessness is required for true kindness. Doesn’t that word mean precisely the lack of pity, the lack of compassion? Well, yes, and perhaps this is how you know that it’s true: in proper mystical fashion, it’s precisely the union of opposites that constitutes the Real. The loss of compassion bounds compassion, and therefore gives it definition. There is no differentiation without boundaries. And so we come to it: Without strategic, skillful ruthlessness, one’s sympathetic feeling toward other humans is unbounded, quite literally deranged, in the old psychoanalytic parlance. Without boundaries, empathy becomes poisoned with anxiety, and reverts to its more primitive, perverse, manipulative version.

Skillful compassion, then, requires a noble ruthlessness. More plainly: a willingness to inflict small ego injuries in the service of preventing great relationship wounds. It’s the willingness to speak a hard truth that causes another person temporary pain, thus sparing them long-term suffering. It’s the willingness to discipline an unruly child, the courage to enforce a boundary, the stark honesty to dispense with insincere pleasantry and have a difficult conversation that lets the truth come to light. It’s the ability to cleanly, pitilessly end a romance rather than drag it out, disappear, or end the affair in another messy, cowardly way - thereby making it far easier for both parties to heal and move on.

Ruthlessness is the ability to feel the fullness of sympathy, and do the right thing anyway. To be selfish with your empathy - to stop considering the other person’s emotions and needs in one situation, in order to preserve your ability to be compassionate toward them in a larger or more important context. Those of us who are constitutional fighters (I’m a hothead at heart) struggle with an enormous burden of guilt when we stop to consider the needs and feelings of others, and so we often selfishly suspend empathy out in order to fight effectively. We go into “killer robot mode.” This sometimes remains necessary when our opponent is intransigent or dishonest, or the stakes have risen high enough.

But compulsive fawners tend to do the opposite - they tend to be so attuned to others’ distress that they automatically repress their own needs, sometimes before awareness of those needs has even broken through to consciousness. They subconsciously transform the person before them into a much more powerful figure, placing them on a pedestal, or ascribing imaginary capabilities and responsibilities to them that they don’t have (and likely would never willingly take on.) The fawner starts perceiving their own needs and requests as unreasonable before they’ve even been asked to compromise.

In short, they harbor a deep-seated belief, internalized long ago, that the price of love is to abandon themselves, and they begin unconsciously preparing to pay it. It doesn’t matter whether someone has demanded this of them or not. The nervous system has its long-held shape, and if the impulse doesn’t break through to consciousness, the energy will flow into the neurons that offer it the least resistance.

This means that, in order to surface this, we must open up a space around the fawn response - a brief gap in between stimulus and response where we can choose a noble ruthlessness instead of a suicidal sympathy. To accomplish this, we must learn to stand, steadfast, in the sense of the self.

How To Fight As A Fawner

The fawn response is a special kind of nervous system response - one that activates both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems at the same time. At low levels, this can be fine, and even feel pleasant - hence how a people-pleaser can go years or decades without realizing that their behavior is a problem for them. It’s often extreme situations that tip them off that something is wrong. Extremely high stress that causes a hyperstimulated reaction in both the PNS and the SNS creates a dissociated feeling of unreality - also known as a dorsal vagal state. From the inside, this feels surreal or strange, perhaps like you’re watching yourself in a movie, or playing yourself with a hidden video game controller. You may start to think of yourself in terms of “us" - the disembodied entity that feels like “I” and the embodied entity that feels like “me.” You might have thoughts like, “this isn’t happening to me,” or have the pervasive sense that what you’re saying and doing isn’t coming from you, but from a mysterious elsewhere. And - crucially - this will all feel quite disturbing.

The first and most important step in learning to control the fawn response is to learn how stand firm in the sense of yourself at the beginning of the conflict, long before you approach a dorsal vagal state, and to never, not once, willingly leave it. This means your attention is on your own experience - your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions, and anytime you catch yourself lost in another person’s experience - whether trying to manage it or simply to analyze it - you gently return your attention to yourself.

This will mean some ruthlessness at the beginning, as you learn to balance your attention on yourself and others. It may come as a surprise and a shock to the people in your life who are used to the overly apologetic, deferent, meek version of you. You do not need to manage this in them. Let your first act of noble ruthlessness be letting your adult loved ones be adults. They can take it.

When it comes to holidays with your family, especially at first, it is more important to be present, rooted in yourself, than to be empathetic. If you can empathize with your parents and siblings without losing your sense of self, do so. If you can’t, do not focus on their needs. Be willing to be clumsy and cold about this if necessary. If you must consider others’ needs, do so rationally, or not at all.

This is not a license to be antisocial or cruel, or to pursue your own wants at the expense of others. Rather, it’s a choice to prioritize your integrity, and the integrity of your loved ones, over your other competing needs. This is the compassionate application of ruthlessness: being willing to settle for no one getting their way, for no one being pleased, so long as everyone walks away whole.

Take nothing that isn’t yours, give nothing that isn’t theirs, hold fast, and trust the repair that inevitably follows rupture.

Standing In The Self

Beyond the upcoming holidays, recovering your sense of a whole, present, centered self may take months or years of dedicated practice. This is made much more difficult by the present of smartphones and other ubiquitous distractions that pull us into hyper-absorbing, hyper-stimulating out-of-body experiences. The fascination of entertainment induces an artificial hysteria in us by offering us an artificial transcendence that quietly simulates the defense mechanism of repression. The average American now willingly chooses to lose themselves in distraction and ignorance for many hours per day, almost none of which they will later remember. We now spend the majority of our lives distracted, dissociated and repressed, and only experience brief moments of presence with the actuality of our lives.

I will not sit on a Substack throne and lecture you about the dangers of screen time. I am, myself, absorbed in media for many hours a day, despite my devotion to meditation and self-work. I only raise the point in case it was not obvious to you that every inessential moment spent in dissociated, distracted screen absorption is working against your efforts to put the world back together, to stand firmly rooted in your sense of self. So to the extent that you can, try and improve the quality of your transcendence, rather than trying to quit cold turkey. Instead of only distracting yourself with short-form video, add in some classic movies. Instead of only endless social media scrolling, try to read longer form writing that genuinely engages you. Instead of only watching Netflix, take yourself and your friends out to an art museum, to a concert, to the symphony. Find a beautiful monastery, a beautiful church, a lovely garden to spend time in and dream. You’ll find that higher-quality forms of transcendence naturally bring you to presence, instead of dividing you against yourself.

Once you’ve brought as much presence and quality as possible to your digital life, there are three practices that will help you firmly root in your sense of self:

Za-Zen

To attain the physical sense of centeredness, once again, meditation will be the foundational skill. Tai Chi is especially good for this, if there is a good studio nearby. If you have the time, and there is a nearby Zen school that teaches the ancient, traditional Rinzai method of za-zen, which unifies the mind with centeredness in the gut (not all of them can), that’s the real shortcut.

I can’t teach you Tai Chi via Substack, but I can describe traditional za-zen. Though it’s best learned from the masters, if you can’t find one, simply follow these instructions and meditate in this way:

1. Sit somewhere comfortable, with your back straight, not leaning against the back of a chair or couch. If you can sit cross legged on the ground, do so. If not, put a pillow on the edge of a chair and sit with your knees below your waist. This is a stable, comfortable position to sit in for a long period of time. Lower your head so that you are looking at the ground a few feet in front of you. Keep your eyes gently open.

   Gently rest your attention on your gut, just below the navel. As you breathe, feel this part of your body rise and fall with your breath. If you can’t feel anything yet, go ahead and place two fingers there to stimulate the sensation.

2. Anytime you are distracted by thoughts, gently return your attention to the sensations just below your navel as you breathe in and out.

3. When you can feel somatic signals from below your navel without physically touching the area, begin the following practice: Inhale and feel every tiny moment of your gut expanding. Try to get especially intimate with the feeling of fullness and warmth that forms when your navel is fully expanded, at the top of your breath.

4. When you exhale, silently count the breath. Don’t think the word “one” quickly and then let yourself get distracted. Stretch the count out for the length of your breath, like “onnnnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”, until you’ve fully exhaled. Do this on every exhale, starting over every time you get distracted, or when you reach the count of ten.

5. Remember that meditation is not a practice of avoiding distraction, but noticing it and gently returning to presence, over and over again.

6. Try to keep your gut mostly extended while you exhale, by very gently pushing out your abdomen muscles. (It will deflate a little as you breathe out, but don’t worry about this for now, as long as you can get some extension.) At the same time, gently flex your pelvic floor - the muscle in your perineum, between your anus and genitals. Do this until the combined sensation of gut extension and pelvic flexion feels identical to the full, warm feeling you have at the top of an inhalation. These should be very subtle, gentle flexes, and it may take several sessions to get this just right. Release your muscle tone at the top of the breath, then repeat.

Do this for 30 minutes a day until you have mastered it. It may take you weeks, months or years - stay with it. When you have mastered this, you should maintain a consistent feeling of warmth and fullness in your gut throughout both inhalation and exhalation. This is re-connecting the body to the breath. By counting the exhalations slowly, all throughout the breath, you re-connect the breath to the mind. And by gently returning your attention to your gut when it wanders, you re-connect the mind to the body.

The purpose of this method of meditation is to create a consistent, collected, unified sense of self. By meditating this way every day, you’ll soon build an unshakeable feeling of centeredness in your gut that you can take away from meditation and into the daily activities of your life.

Social Mindfulness

When you are in the middle of a fight, or simply feeling anxious in a social situation, you may find that you can’t control whether or not you fawn, and struggle to stay present. If this is the case, it’s a sign that you need more practice. Release trying to control what’s happening and just try to stay aware. Recognize that if something is happening compulsively, even absent any other physiological symptoms, that you are triggered beyond a “threshold of regret”, and won’t be able to consciously re-assert control without retreating and regulating. Do what you can in the moment, then journal extensively about it when you get home. Learn everything you can about your instinct to fawn - the triggers, the sensations, the preludes to self-neglect that lead you to over-apologizing, enmeshing, fixating, seducing, or whatever your particular flavor of fawn may be.

The middle ground for practice standing in the self, between za-zen at home and a pitched fight with your family, is any group social outing in a venue that isn’t too loud - a bar, a house party, a night out at dinner with friends. If you can make time for 10-20 minutes of practice on these evenings, you’ll make excellent progress very quickly.

I have found that the best way to train my sense of self in a social setting is to sit in the group, smile often, but don’t say too much, and quietly note the sensations in my body as I listen to the conversation around me.

Just as in meditation, during this practice period, notice any time a thought comes up and grabs your attention. When you notice that it has, take a step back from it and recognize it as a thought. Neither good nor bad, just part of a constant process occurring within you. Not something that you are, something you have access to, when it’s useful to you.

NB: When I was coming to understand my own nervous system, I liked carrying around a small 3x5 Moleskine journal and a nice pen in my back pocket, rather than taking digital notes. I could easily record a few bullet points of data about my experience without the indignity of pulling out my phone in a social setting, and I find that it’s much easier to stay mindful and present with the experience of physical writing than with a phone. Plus, the experience is just a little more beautiful, and that doesn’t hurt.

Slowly, you’ll build enough awareness to recognize that you don’t have a single fawn process, but many of them, that take different forms across contexts and relationships. And each one has a different trigger. At first, don’t try to intervene with willpower. Awareness is usually enough to naturally gain influence, and then the ability to gently redirect individual processes. Forcibly wrenching your behavior or suppressing thoughts will work in the short-term, if necessary, but aren’t skillful or sustainable in the long term.

Once you have opened enough space around a process to see it arise before you immediately believe it or act on it, you will have the power to make a decision on whether or not you want to fawn. (It may still be your best option, if you haven’t yet learned skillful alternatives, or the stakes are high, but don’t let this become a rationalization.) When it’s safe, you can practice shifting your automatic habits away from fawning and toward down-regulating your nervous system so you can make a calculated decision. You’ll do this with intentional nervous system operation, just as we discussed in Part Two.

However, because fawning is slightly a different variant of nervous system activation, often coming with a degree of self-abandonment, you’ll need to do more than just soothe the autonomic nervous system. You’ll also need to bring your felt sense of yourself back online, by manually reconnecting your senses to the present.

Grounding

To do this, you’ll need to ground yourself in what Zen calls the true human body - the present moment, as you perceive it, right now. I have found the 5-4-3-2-1 technique very useful for this:

Take mental note of five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste, or remember tasting. This engages and connects you to all of your senses, bringing your attention to your own experience, where you need it to be. There’s not always a socially graceful way to do this, so you may need to excuse yourself to do it, but with enough practice, you’ll be able to do it automatically.

Once you are grounded, maintain a practice of keeping your attention on yourself, silently noting and naming feelings in your body, and taking distance (or “de-fusing” from your thoughts.) If you don’t have words for your emotions yet, simply note the sensations you feel - tension in the chest, warmth in the throat, tightness in the back, etc. In a social situation or a fight, this will make you less of an engaged conversation partner, and may be impossible, at first, in a confrontation, or an environment that’s too stimulating. There’s no sense wasting time on a poor practice, so use discretion on when and where to train.

Putting the World Back Together

These three practices - za-zen, social mindfulness and grounding - train the same fundamental skill: sensing the self, noticing when you’ve entered a different reality tunnel and lost touch with your center, and gently guiding yourself back. The more you master this, the easier and more fluently your sense of self will remain engaged, first when alone, then in connection with others. Soon, you’ll simply remain centered and present in awareness at all times, even when you are in conflict. And when the day comes that you notice your sense of self remaining warm, firm and grounded at the same time that you deeply attune to another person’s experience, you will know that all of your mindfulness, your diligence, your selfish empathy and noble ruthlessness have paid off. You will have made the world whole where fawning once fractured it. You will have healed.

This is Part Two of the series “How to Fight Your Family.” Once they’re uploaded, you can read the first installment here, the third here, and the fourth here.

Welcome back, fighters. If you’ll recall, in the first part of the series, we established five principles for fighting wisely at your family holiday celebration. They were:

1. Be Prepared

2. Operate Your Nervous System Intentionally

3. Empathize Without Abandoning Yourself

4. Fight to Win

5. Integrity Is A Win You Can Always Guarantee

Operating Your Nervous System Intentionally

Today, we’re going to talk about the second principle - operating your nervous system intentionally. I’m going to teach you everything I know about how to skillfully, reliably maintain grace under fire at your family holiday. Which is to say, how to keep your composure when the people who trained every flaw, quirk and imperfection in your attachment system are exerting an enormous amount of (unconscious) pressure on you to forget your best self and drop into your deepest, oldest, often most dysfunctional patterns.

In order to get the most out of this, you’ll need a bit of time before the holiday to collect some data on yourself and practice building awareness. A couple of weeks would be best, but you can make do with a week if that’s all you have. If you don’t have a lot of time, go ahead and skip the first two sections of this essay.

In this part, we’re going to cover four major topics:

• A Brief Introduction to the Nervous System

• Mapping Your Activation Scale

• Fortifying the Nervous System

• Combat First Aid

Let’s get started.

A Brief Introduction to the Nervous System

The above video is part of the introductory material that Rich Bartlett and I send out to everyone taking the Fight Wise course for the first time. If you are like me and don’t want to take the time to watch an entire video (you are here on Substack, presumably, for the experience of reading), then here is the summary:

Your entire nervous system gets involved whenever you are in a conflict - you are made for this, after all, as this is samsara - but there are two major subsets of the nervous system that are germane to our purposes: The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). These govern your arousal - which is to say, the release of stress chemicals that give you energy for the 5 Fs: fighting, fleeing, freezing, fawning and fucking. It can be helpful to think of the SNS as your gas pedal - it sends chemicals to the engine to give it more energy - and the PNS as your brake pedal - it neutralizes the stress chemicals and inhibits many of your body functions so that you can rest.

One interesting fact about the SNS is that your entire brain responds to its level of arousal by reducing its own functionality. The more you’re excited, the more your neural pathways get inflamed, and individual parts of the brain begin to shut down. This is for a very simple reason - the SNS ramps up in a survival situation, and the brain wants to save calories and chemical stores in case you need to fight for your life, or escape from a tiger hiding in the bushes, etc. If you are running out of a burning building, you do not need to do calculus. So the brain shuts down everything but the essential functions.

The problem, of course, is that the brain does not always accurately perceive a survival situation - it responds to threats to the ego (your symbolic self) in the same way it responds to threats to your physical, animal self. So in a holiday fight with your family, it’s going to perceive arguments and old triggers as physical threats, and begin to shut down the parts of your brain that would otherwise help you be skillful with the people you love.

Let’s take a quick look at the spectrum of activation together:

Provided we are not too overstimulated or distracted, we generally stay in a state of relative chill, by default. Both the PNS and SNS are active, but well-balanced. Our arousal levels hover around a 1-2 out of 10. In this range, we are curious, grounded and present. We care about what we’re doing, we have access to joy, and we feel compassion easily. A good place to be.

As the day goes on and we accumulate the natural stress of the day - helping the family get ready for work, small frustrations, traffic, etc. - we move into higher baseline levels of arousal. Think a 3-5 out of 10. We’re still in control, but we’ve got extra oomph in us. We might be a little irritated or anxious, or feel some real passion. It’s not a bad place to be - it makes you feel alive! The problem is that we can also be less resilient to surprise in this state. From an activation level of 1-2, we can take small spikes of stress in stride. From a 3-4, small stressors can push us out of the zone of conscious control (1-5) and into the realm of impulse and compulsion: 6 and above. In 6-7 territory, we start having automatic fight, flight, freeze and fawn responses. We emotionall shut down. We curse at bad drivers. We become anxious about things we can’t control. We promise self-sacrificing favors to others when we should say “no.”

At levels 8 and 9, we stop being symbolic and start getting physical - at this level we might see physical fighting, running away from conflict, total shutdown (freeze, or withdrawal) or compulsive, unconscious seduction. And at level 10, in general, you’re not making memories and you’re acting like a complete animal (“blacked out”, “completely frozen”, “seeing red.”) This is the realm of functioning at which traumatic psychological injury and PTSD occurs.

The more worked up you get, the poorer your brain works, and the less skillful you can be in a stressful situation. We all know this intuitively - we get stupid when we’re angry, anxious or horny (the three functions of the SNS.) So we obviously want to have as much control over our level of arousal as we can, to protect ourselves from bad decisions and potential trauma, to protect our loved ones from unskillful or unconscious actions, and to protect our relationships from damage caused by the drama and chaos we could bring about at high levels of activation.

And control over arousal is precisely where the PNS comes in. The PNS is quite complex, but there is one major piece of it that’s helpful to understand: the vagus nerve. This is a nerve that runs from our face to our gut along the our spines, behind our facial muscles and internal organs. It controls digestion, heart rate and many other functions - including activating the PNS when it’s stimulated, and decreasing our level of arousal.

Deep breathing stimulates the vagus nerve (the lungs inflate and physically make contact with it) as does eating a big meal (the stomach expands and touches the inside of the spine, which calms you down.) So does diving into water (an old, strange reflex from the mists of evolutionary time) and a variety of other interventions that we’ll cover later in the article.

One tricky note: the PNS can restore calm, rational brain function pretty quickly, because neurotransmitters in the brain are nearly instantaneous. But stress hormones move much more slowly, which means we often have our higher faculties restored before we have the emotional experience of being calm. (One way to remember this is neurotransmitters are sent by e-mail, hormones are sent by post office.) So if you’ve ever been angry at someone over a misunderstanding, then gotten a good explanation, but still needed time to cool off from the initial emotions, you’ve probably experienced this for yourself. It might have gone something like this: you hear the explanation and realize you were mistaken. You feel surprised, realization dawns on you, and some feeling of tight constriction in around your skull begins to relax and widen up. Your eyebrows relax and your mouth opens slightly. You say “ohhhhh.” You start to think and say conciliatory things, maybe even apologizing for becoming angry. BUT. Your arms stay crossed and your chest is still raw and painful, like you just smoked a cigarette. Irrational suspicion still pings off the back corners of your mind, looking for something to seize on. Your hips and glutes are still tense as a rock. In other words, you’re still emotionally worked up, even though you now have the mental faculties to understand you were mistaken. You know it will take a couple of minutes to get all the way back to baseline, so you take a little space to recover. The time it takes to “pull yourself together” is the differential between neurotransmitters and hormones.

So it’s important to note, when driving your nervous system, that you can’t get an accurate measurement of your arousal level only by checking your emotional experience. You have to also monitor your thoughts to glean their character - when they’re aggressive, suspicious, strategic, etc. they are still coming from a place of arousal. When they’re reasonable, accepting, complex, compassionate, etc. they are coming from a place of inhibition. That means your PNS is working, even if you can’t feel it.

To recap: the SNS increases your level of excitement, corresponding to an old biological system used to detect threats to our survival. The lower the level, the more access to our highest human faculties we have. The higher the level, the fewer brain functions we have access to, and the more rash, impulsive and passionate we become, until eventually our animal nature overwhelms us. The PNS is what decreases/balances/stabilizes your level of excitement, and the most important component of the PNS is the vagus nerve, which you can directly stimulate to calm yourself down.

All of this is well and good, but as you well know, human beings are neither simple nor mechanical. Every individual differs in important ways, and there are countless cultural and biological conditions that affect how we respond to excitement. That means there’s no one-size-fits-all prescription for driving your nervous system. You have to build a set of custom tools that are right for you and your situation. And in order to do that, you first need to understand everything about your personal experience of being triggered.

Mapping Your Activation Scale

Previously, we conceived of arousal as a scale from 1-10, with 1 being joyful and peaceful, and 10 being traumatic overwhelm or rage. Here’s how Rich and I visualize it:

If it looks a little weird to you (why aren’t the distributions even?) that’s because we want to train you to become total masters of the 3-5 zone. To experience the fullness of your frustration, your passion, your anger, even your anxiety, while remaining perfectly in control of yourself and able to skillfully advocate for your needs. You might also notice two dotted lines. The first is “minimum threat perception” and refers to the first moment that something in perception feels wrong or off. It marks the point that calm absorption in the present subtly shifts to a resistance to the present. It often feels like a diffuse frustration, you want something to be different, but it hasn’t occurred to you yet what that is. Sometimes this feeling has accompanying thoughts like, “I wish I had my own office” or, if you’re the self-critical type, “I’m so bad at focusing.” This feeling often occurs at the level of activation just before you identify the distraction or frustration that’s bothering you - perhaps the tapping of a coworker’s pen, the sound of construction equipment outside the window, etc. Understanding this shift is a powerful awareness tool, because it signifies a shift out of the ventral vagal mode and into the lightest, most barely perceptible form of SNS-activated consciousness. To maintain maximum effectiveness in your everyday life, this is the moment you’ll want to start regulating your nervous system (we’ll go over those techniques later in the article.)

The second dotted line is the “threshold of regret” and refers to the point at which you lose full control of your words and actions, and begin to say or do things that are not coming from your best self, and that you may regret later. These include aggressions, insults, threats and so forth.

In Fight Wise, we stress that we want people to become masters of everything that occurs between Minimum Threat Perception and the Threshold of Regret. For the purposes of this article, I’d like to also encourage you to work within this range. While the exercises and techniques we’ll cover here will also work at higher levels of nervous system activation, you need safe, expertly controlled environments to train those effectively, and that’s out of the scope of either our course or this essay.

Discovering Your Personal Activation Scale

The scale, as we’ve presented it, will more or less conform to most people’s experience of activation, but everyone will deviate in important ways, so you’ll need to discover your scale for yourself.

The first exercise is to map your bodily sensations of arousal, and it starts with your journal: get out your pen and paper and spend a few minutes in silence thinking about what sort of things get you worked up - pissed off, scared, any of the 5 Fs. Then, try to think about it in the context of your family. What are times that a family member triggered you to a 3/10? How about a 4/10? How about a 5/10? Write a little about those scenarios and feel into your body. Does your pulse quicken a little, your blood get warm, your skin get a little sweaty? Is there energy in your arms, or tension in your glutes, or does your jaw lock up? What are the somatic signatures of tension for you?

Again, just to stress the point: if you remember scenarios in which you were at a 6 or above, which is to say, you got aggressive, you ran away, you gave something away that you didn’t want to - basically, you said or did things that you regretted later - don’t use those scenarios. They may be important to you personally, but they’re not useful for this training.

As you map your physical sensations associated with each memory, try and observe whether there are patterns. Is there more and different tension when you’re angry, as opposed to mildly frustrated? Is there a particular bodily sensation that springs up when you first feel anxious, as opposed to a mild unease? Try and plot those sensations on the scale from 1-10.

When you’re finished, you should have a rough outline of what it feels like to be at a 3, 4 and 5. Once you’ve got that, you’re ready to move on to a longer term assignment: Creating a day-long chart of your nervous system activation levels. Here’s an example:

You’ll start on the far left when you wake up, and take measurements throughout the day by checking in with yourself. In order to do this, I like to use an app called Mindfulness Bell, which is available for both iPhone and Android. It plays a little bell sound at semi-random intervals throughout the day (you can silence it for meetings and so forth, as necessary), so it’s impossible to predict and always a little bit of a surprise when you hear it. Get the app and set it to go off several times over the course of the next day. Whenever you hear it ring, take a deep breath and check in with your body. What level of arousal are you at? What was the trigger, or if that’s not obvious, what was your reaction to it? Make a little note, enjoy the moment of presence you’ve afforded yourself, and then return to whatever you were doing.

At the end of the day, you should have several entries you can plot on a simple chart like the above, and you’ll have a picture of what a normal day’s stress looks like. The sorts of things that trigger you - and the frequency with which they happen - may surprise you! In the example chart, the triggers and responses are mostly external, but you may find that you have just as much stress from your memory and imagination as you do from the outside world. Write it all down - anything you notice, anytime you notice. After a while, you shouldn’t need the Mindfulness Bell, because you’ll be well acquainted with your stress signatures, and you’ll have built a habit of checking in with yourself. The more of this awareness you can build, the more fine-grained your sensory clarity becomes, the greater and richer your data will become, and the more effective you’ll be in operating your nervous system intentionally.

Fortifying the Nervous System

There’s a reason we have an old cliche saying about “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” - it’s as true in medicine as it is in any context where preparation can accomplish far more than hapless, unskillful reaction to the vicissitudes of the moment. Conflict is just one of these, because you can actually store up calm and composure to be used later. You can’t decide what to spend it on - that’s up to life - but if you prepare well, take good care of yourself and get lucky, you’ll arrive at holiday dinner in a ventral vagal state, relaxed and ready to skillfully respond to anything your family can throw at you.

Fortifying the nervous system properly begins a week before you expect to fight your family. If you have the time, that’s when to begin extra self-care. Sleep is the most important variable here (and in nearly every situation related to mental health and performance) - you need to be getting a full night’s sleep every night, 7-8 hours at the least. The cleaner you can get your diet, the more emotional regulation you’ll experience, and the more resilient that regulation will become. Try to avoid any excess stress - just take it easy this week with plenty of tea and time on the couch reading a good book. Now is the time to avoid drugs and alcohol - even weed, even a casual drink - as they’ll stimulate and inflame your brain, which needs as much rest as possible right now. And to the extent that you can, try to avoid doomscrolling - this keeps you in a state of low-grade activation for as long as you’re locked in to your phone screen, and builds up a lot of unnecessary stress.

Regular exercise - daily, if you can get it - will help train the nervous system to tolerate high levels of stimulation, and importantly, will physically exhaust you, which makes it hard to get emotionally worked up about anything. This, in turn, reduces inflammation and stress in the brain and allows it to rest and heal in anticipation of the fight. I have yet to meet an emotional problem that I could not sprint out of my system. If you have an excess of anger, you can also spend some time working a punching bag or chopping wood until you’re exhausted, or you experience some emotional catharsis. Both are helpful for processing - I have chopped wood until tears started flowing on many an occasion, and felt much better and more regulated afterward.

Finally, as we covered in the previous part, meditation is crucial for fortifying the nervous system. You need to do it for at least 20 minutes per day in the week leading up to the family holiday. If you can do two sessions of 20 minutes per day, even better. On the day of the holiday, try and get to your family’s place a little early so you can sit in your car and meditate for 20 minutes before you go in - that will refresh your composure just when you need it the most.

If you don’t have an entire week to prepare, and you’ve just found this article on Thanksgiving morning, the most important thing you can do is get outside or to the gym and completely physically exhaust yourself. Afterward, eat a healthy meal, make sure you’re well hydrated and get a nap in. Then, avoid stress and stimulation the rest of the day. Get a good long meditation in before you leave the house, then another in the driveway, then turn and salute Caesar and make your way into the Colosseum.

Fortifying your nervous system is more important than interventions in response to triggers in the moment. Don’t treat it as optional - it’s the lynchpin of your efforts to fight wisely.

Combat First Aid

We wouldn’t send you into battle without a good first aid kit. There are many excellent, manual nervous system interventions you can use to keep yourself calm throughout the holiday. We’ll list our favorites here.

Box (Square) Breathing

A classic, used by psychologists all across the world to help their clients regulate and stay regulated. Breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, breathe out for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds. Repeat. You can do this the entire holiday gathering if you want, and it will help keep you soothed and composed.

Cooldown (Pursed-Lip) Breathing

Another breathwork technique, this one is for more acute attacks of excitement. If you find yourself suddenly worked up - angry, anxious or irrationally concerned about the emotional state of a family member, you might be pushing against the threshold of regret. Now’s the time to start cooldown breathing. Breathe in through your nose for 4 seconds, then blow the air out through pursed lips for 8 seconds, like you’re blowing through a straw, or trying to cool off a hot cup of coffee. Your lips should be pursed enough that you feel resistance - breathing out should be slow. If you have smaller or bigger lungs, just keep the ratio of 1:2 - smaller people breathe in for 3 seconds and blow out for 6, larger people inhale for 5 seconds and exhale for 10, etc.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation

One of the gold standards for anxiety management. Doing PMR means tensing up each major body part, then slowly relaxing them, to manually give your body a sensation of relaxation. Begin with your feet, squeezing and tensing them as much as you can without causing yourself pain. Hold the tension for a few seconds, keeping your attention on the sensation of tightness, and then slowly, slowly release the muscle. Feel every bit of relaxation as you let go, little by little. Repeat with your shins, then your calves, then every major muscle group and body part all the way to the top of your head. The slower and more deliberate you can be with this, the greater the relaxation, and the greater bodily awareness you’ll build over time.

Valsalva Maneuver

Interestingly enough, the same technique that unclogs your ears also stimulates cranial nerves in your face that are connected to the vagus nerve, which sends a signal to the PNS to relax. It’s very simply. Pinch your nose with your fingers and gently blow air into your nasal cavity. You should feel the pressure change, and some mild stimulation in your nose, sinuses and cheeks. It’s subtle, but do this for a minute or so, and you’ll notice the quality of anxious or frustrated thoughts begin to change for the better.

Mammalian Dive Reflex

A strange and fun feature of the human body - when we dive into water, our heart rate drops, we become calm, and our body completely relaxes, so that we can swim effectively. This happens even if our SNS is extremely active - if we were to tense up in water, we’d easily drown. You can use this to manage light anxiety or anger by simply splashing cold water on your face - that’ll give you a small response- but you can also manage panic and intense anger with this reflex. You do this by putting a bowl of cold water (ice water is best) on the ground, kneeling in front of it, and sticking your face in for as long you can hold your breath. Your nostrils need to be completely submerged for this to work. When done properly, the mammalian dive reflex will kick in, you’ll be able to hold your breath much longer than normal, your PNS will activate, and your body will begin the process of relaxing and regulating.

This one’s a little hard to do surreptitiously, of course, so you may need help from a sympathetic family member, or you may need to disappear into a room no one’s using to make it work.

Some people can make this work by holding a bag of ice to their face, plugging their nostrils with it and making sure to make contact with the sinuses, but this doesn’t work for everyone, so it’s worth experimenting with before you to visit your family.

Ice Pack Therapy

I save this one for emergencies. If you feel out of control in any way, or you even notice you’re past a 5 - thinking of mean things to say, or feeling aggressive, but you haven’t acted on it yet - remove yourself from the situation as quickly as you can. Go get an ice pack from the freezer (a bag of frozen vegetables works just fine) and head to the bathroom for some peace and privacy.

First, stick the ice pack on one side of your neck, and leave it there for 15 seconds. Then, stick it on the other side for 15 more seconds. Use cooldown breathing at the same time for maximum effect. If you still feel panicky or out of control, take that ice pack and stick it right in your armpit. This will be quite intense! Just like with your neck, leave it there for 15 seconds, then do the same thing in your other armpit.

There is one final last resort intervention available to you here, if you still feel activated, and you are afraid you’ll do something truly regrettable. Take that ice pack, stick it down the front of your pants, and put it directly on your genitals. I have never met a trigger that survived contact with an ice pack to the balls (or vulva), and I don’t expect I’ll ever hear of one that can.

(NB: Don’t do this with a fresh ice pack. Warm it against your neck and armpits first, and only then use it on your genitals. If the ice pack is right out of the freezer or still covered in frost, there’s a chance it could stick to something down there you really don’t want it to.)

Ahem. That said, one final thing to keep in mind is that, if you’re so activated that it requires an intervention as dramatic as this, you might be better off politely excusing yourself from the holiday celebration and heading home early. Better to suffer the embarrassment and disappointment of a celebration cut short than to damage an important relationship.

Looking Ahead

That’s it for Part Two! In the next installment, we’ll cover the third principle: Empathize Without Abandoning Yourself. In this, you’ll learn how to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and understand where they’re coming from, without caving on what’s important to you, or losing your nerve. Once it’s uploaded, you’ll be able to find that installation here.

If you’d like to come practice with us, we still have a few seats available for the upcoming cohort of Fight Wise. You’ll be able to rehearse scenarios with others, build your courage, and try out new orientations toward your loved ones that open up your inner resources. You’ll also get the chance to work directly with both Rich and I on any difficult particulars of your situation.

We’d love to see you there!

This is the first installment in a four-part series called How to Fight Your Family. Once they are uploaded, you can find the second installment here, the third here, and the fourth here.

When Rich Bartlett and I started teaching Fight Wise, our conflict/assertiveness training course last year, we had an intuition that family holidays would be one of the hardest challenges our students would face, but we knew it was out of the original course’s scope. Everyone’s relationship with their family is so different, so fraught with triggers and unexpected regressions (as Ram Dass said, if you think you’re enlightened, spend a week with your family) that we thought, this needs to be in some kind of advanced, emotional black belt program. We shelved it for another day.

Fast forward to this summer, when I was working hard on understanding my own attachment patterns and family dynamics. I stumbled upon a wealth of knowledge about how to re-pattern my relationship to my family - that is, how to change how I habitually construct my internal models of my family members. The techniques involved were fairly experimental, but theoretically sound. I ran them by my psychologist friends, got a few curious and interested nods, then asked a few game coaching clients who were willing to try the techniques out. We were all floored by the results. Every single person I worked with changed their model of a difficult family member with whom they had struggled mightily in the past, found catharsis, and was able to access a wiser, more humane, more mature version of themselves. Extraordinary work.

I brought Rich in, and we agreed it was time to teach a Family Holiday edition of Fight Wise. So we redesigned the course, not only to incorporate the new techniques, but also to accommodate the sensitivity and complexity of family conflict.

Then, we decided to just give away all of the content.

Of course, Fight Wise is still worth attending - ask anyone who has, and they’ll tell you that what makes the course special is the container, the people and the practice. There’s no substitute for learning your triggers, exposing yourself to them in a safe way, and practicing courage and composure in the face of all the emotional bluster and tempest that arises. (If you want to sign up, you can - there are still a few tickets left but they will be gone soon.) But the theory is still very useful on its own, and could be helpful to many more people than we have the capacity to teach. So in the interest of peace on earth, goodwill towards men, and good content marketing, here is the first installment in How To Fight Your Family. May it help you find your backbone - and thereby bring you peace and joy - this holiday season.

The Five Principles of Fighting Wisely

Rich and I believe that following five simple principles will help you show up to life’s inevitable conflicts as a wiser, stronger, and more mature version of yourself. These principles are:

1. Be Prepared

2. Operate Your Nervous System Intentionally

3. Empathize Without Abandoning Yourself

4. Fight To Win

5. Integrity Is A Win You Can Guarantee

We’ll take each one individually, each in an upcoming Substack post. But today, we’re going to focus on the first and most important of the principles:

Be Prepared

Preparation is the antidote to anxiety. That’s so important that I’m going to say it again: Preparation is the antidote to anxiety. With enough preparation, you can remain composed and skillful in nearly any conflict that life brings you, no matter whether you’re ambushed, or you start the fight on your terms.

There are three components to preparing for any conflict: Meditation, reflection and rehearsal.

Why Meditation is Essential

Meditation is the single most powerful tool you have for effective, wise fighting. It calms the nervous system, re-oxygenates the brain, cools down neural inflammation, and gives you outside perspective on your problems, your relationships, and especially your ego. A daily practice of at least 20 minutes is best. You don’t have to get fancy - guided meditations are just fine. And if you start meditating the week of Thanksgiving, 20 minutes in the morning, and then throw in an extra session just before you show up to family dinner, you will see and feel immediate benefits. There’s no substitution for it.

There are far too many excellent resources around the internet for me to spend any time teaching you techniques here. My clients often enjoy Sam Harris’ guided meditations on the Waking Up app, and I have always been partial to this cheesy Alan Watts guided meditation on YouTube. (It runs a little short, so if you decide to go with it, spend an extra five minutes in silence once it’s finished.)

The Master Strategist’s Field Manual (Your Journal)

To create your master strategy, all you need is your memory, your imagination, and something to write on. You can use a dedicated journal if you like, or make a binder, or buy a cheap composition book (I buy boxes of these in bulk.) Whatever you choose, designate it your family conflict journal. In it, you will both reflect on past conflicts, as well as factors that contributed to them, and rehearse future fights. If you give it enough time, attention and courage, you can also reconsolidate old memories, recontextualize old wounds, and renew your inner environment - all with a simple pen and paper. (I do not recommend journaling on a computer - our brains treat word processing fundamentally differently than handwritten words on a page.)

When reflecting on relationships with family, the task is simple: write the truest, most complete version of your past fights with them that you can. I recommend a four-perspective essay - here’s how you do it:

The Four-Perspective Essay

First, pick a family member that you expect to have conflict with this holiday season. Maybe it’s cruel, boorish Auntie Fascist or virtue-signaling, priggish Uncle Marx. If you have multiple family members you expect to clash with, you have your work cut out for you - but for this exercise, just pick one to begin with.

Now, think about all the conflicts you’ve had with them in the past. Of the lot, which one had the worst consequences, for you and for your relationship with them? Now, get your pen ready - we’re going to reconsider that conflict from four different perspectives.

In the first, you’re going to take a deep breath and be as neutral as humanly possible. Try to tell the barest, most stripped down, factual version of the story, like you were a detective investigating, or a mystic meditating. Just the facts, ma’am. No opinions or projections, only a cold, bare record of events. Who said what when? Who did what to whom? No assumptions, no interpretations, no context, nothing you couldn’t prove happened in the actual real world. Do as much deep breathing and take as much space as you need to get this as neutral and objective as possible. Then, you’ll move on to the second perspective: yours.

Here, you’re going to write the story of the fight the way you experienced it. Feel free to get as colorful and emotional as you like. If you find yourself being kind or generous or empathetic, stop it. Don’t make any excuses for the other person, don’t make any apologies, stop being reasonable for the duration of this exercise. Just really get into your anger and sadness and stress, and let everything out on the page, no matter what comes up. You won’t hurt anyone by privately journaling difficult or even insane thoughts. It’s much more important that you feel the feelings all the way through than rehearse any virtues at this stage.

When that’s finished, you’re going to write the third perspective. What’s your family member’s story about your fight? How do you think they experienced it? This one’s hard, and may take a lot of referring back to the objective record to imagine what was happening for them. What do you think were they feeling when they said each thing? How did you appear to them during the fight? How did they receive and experience what you were telling them? The point is not to get this right - the point is to try to humanize their perspective as much as possible. Imagine that they are being totally selfish, totally in their feelings, the way you just were about them. The point here is not to agree with them, or cave to their point, or countenance their beliefs that you think are fundamentally wrong or immoral. The point is to fully understand their position, so you can better predict what they might think or do in a future conflict. Sun Tzu wrote “if you know yourself and you know your enemy, you need not fear the outcome of a thousand battles.” Who knew that empathy was required to fight well?

When you have written the first three perspectives, put the project away for a bit, take a walk, have a bite to eat, meditate, whatever you need to do to get some distance and fully calm down. Then return to it after a couple of hours (or days, if you have the time) and write the story of the fight from the fourth and final perspective: an imaginary version of you that is the very best, wisest, and most successful. Imagine yourself in your eighties, still in excellent health, surrounded by grandchildren, in the home of your dreams, a long and accomplished life behind you. What would that version of you say about the fight, with all their perspective, humor, grace and wisdom, many years after the political and cultural fights of the present are obsolete? What is the most humane way to tell the story about both participants? And - crucially - what was it that younger you needed to learn from that fight, in order to grow into the wisest and best version of you?

With that finished, as emotionally difficult as you may still find it, you will have access to a much richer array of perspectives on your conflict, and a much richer store of data with which to make predictions. Repeat this process on as many difficult situations as you can remember clearly, until you have a maximally comprehensive history of your fights with this family member.

Then, it’s time to begin your training.

Rehearsing Future Conflicts

Dwight Eisenhower, the American general that defeated Nazi Germany, once remarked that “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Which is to say: it’s essential that you make plans for the conflicts you anticipate this holiday season, and every bit as important that you do not expect those conflicts to go according to your plans. The point of planning is to align resources for potential problems and contingencies, and so you can rehearse. So you can practice, practice, practice in preparation for those conflicts, and be ready for anything your family can throw at you.

Here’s a framework for rehearsing holiday dinner before it begins:

Just as before, imagine the family member you expect to have conflict with. In your journal, write down what you think the conflict will be about. Write what you would normally like to achieve - your goals in the fight, or win conditions - if it weren’t the holidays. And then write out what a peaceful, joyful holiday would look like if the conflict were avoided, or skillfully managed.

Next, try to picture the setting of the fight as vividly as you can. What room? What time of day? Record as many sensory details as you can, down to the smell of the turkey in the oven and the sound of college football on the TV in the background. The more of these you can visualize now, the more you reduce your natural anxiety about the unknown, which (paradoxically) will make it much easier to respond to surprises.

Then, write out how you think the fight will go. Based on your past interactions with your family member, what do you expect them to say and do? How do you expect yourself to react or respond? Try to list at least five potential triggers that would make you escalate, fawn inappropriately, or foreclose on the conflict without maintaining your integrity.

Write at least three possible scenarios in your journal - a best case, a worst case, and one that’s mixed. Then, read them out loud, both your lines and your family member’s lines, with as little reaction and judgment in your voice as possible, like you were reading out of the phonebook. This is detachment practice. Anywhere you notice that you’re getting emotional, or can’t read something neutrally, take a deep breath and try again (we’ll cover more regulation techniques in the next installment.) If you still can’t do it, take a break, calm yourself down, and try again when you’re back to your best self.

If you can, consider what the trigger is about, what it’s connected to in the past. Then, remind yourself that you are not going to heal that old wound by fighting about it at Thanksgiving. If you’re going to have an opportunity to break the pattern and resolve it going forward, it’s going to be once you’ve been able to be strong and self-assured, and when you’ve been able to let go and let their actions be about them, not you. Once you no longer have to take it personally, you’ll be in a position to find a solution, if there’s any to be found. But it won’t happen right away.

Finally, imagine that every scenario ends with everyone finding a way to enjoy a peaceful holiday together - even in the worst case, which may take some imagination. Imagine that each scenario ends with you leaving on good terms, with your integrity intact, your relationships healthy, and your self-respect preserved.

If you only have one day to do this, you’ll still get a small benefit from these rehearsals, but you’ll get even more if you can practice them for 15-30 minutes a day, from now until the holiday. Combined with great self-care, meditation and deep, comprehensive reflection, these rehearsals will put you in the best position to skillfully navigate what could otherwise be a very difficult, painful family feud. And with some luck and cooperation from your family, you might even pull off a big win: an unforgettable Thanksgiving or Christmas that lives on in your hearts long after everyone goes home.

Looking Ahead

In the next installment, we’ll cover the second principle: Operate Your Nervous System Intentionally. In this, you’ll learn how to recognize your triggers, you’ll create a scale for yourself to measure where your level of activation is at, and you’ll learn how to fortify your nervous system in the week leading up to the holiday. We’ll also talk about nervous system interventions you can use in the actual conflict to keep your composure and remain effective. Once it’s uploaded, you’ll be able to find that installation here.

If you’d like to come practice with us, we still have a few seats available for the upcoming cohort of Fight Wise. You’ll be able to rehearse scenarios with others, build your courage, and try out new orientations toward your loved ones that open up your inner resources. You’ll also get the chance to work directly with both Rich and I on any difficult particulars of your situation.

We’d love to see you there!

​As you may already know, the first cohort of Project Crucible - my in-person boot camp oriented toward masculinity and mental health - begins in six weeks in Boulder. From a wild lark riffing on a QC tweet to now, it’s been quite a journey bringing it together, but the event has finally taken shape.

Project Crucible is open to people of all genders! If you’d like to join us for a week of beautiful scenery, intense camaraderie, discipline building and skills training, we’d love to have you. Send me a message here or better yet, send me an e-mail at gabrielcoeli@gmail.com.

Let’s begin:

Course Content

In a future post, I’ll break down the content of all the masculinity and mental health courses, but as I’m still working on those, I just want to make a few things clear in the meantime.

First things first, just to clear it up: This is a boot camp, which means group physical training, hikes and a lot of education. The training will be occasionally hard and stressful. But this is not a Full Metal Jacket-type situation where Gabe will be yelling and being cruel to participants. Project Crucible is here to build you up, not tear you down.

Secondly, to clarify the goal of the boot camp: It’s to help you understand masculinity - both as culture defines it, and your own conscious and unconscious attitudes toward it - and to help you reframe it as something mythological that you can take possession of and use for your own benefit (and the benefit of those around you.) Mythological doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist - it means it operates at a very deep level of the psyche, very near to religion and beliefs from childhood, so it has a special emotional resonance that can either strengthen or damage your character, depending on how you approach it.

Another goal of the boot camp is to help you understand good foundations for mental health, differences in psychology between the sexes, and best practices for men to care for themselves emotionally and psychologically. All of this will be framed in a context of dedicated action, discipline-building and skills training.

Locations

We will be running both cohorts out of Gabe’s home, a secluded and scenic farmhouse in North Boulder that he is in the process of converting into a retreat center called Nameless Mountain. This location will allow for the highest quality experience in terms of education, lodging, meals and so on. In particular, it allows for easy meal preparation for those with allergies and dietary concerns, accommodations for those with special needs, and it also ameliorates the worst of altitude sickness, as Boulder is only ~5,000 ft. above sea level, and most camps and campgrounds in Colorado are much higher, near 7-8,000. Participants will sleep on cots at Nameless Mountain, and have access to electricity, showers, cold plunges, laundry, and a full kitchen.​

For construction education, we will use the Nameless Mountain wood shop, as well as the property. We will learn all the skills necessary to build a lean-to shed, and then erect it on site. For self-defense education, we will also stay on the property, learning the basics of striking and grappling, as well as basic instruction in Sumo wrestling - one of the easiest and safest martial arts, and an excellent tool for getting people in touch with their warrior spirit. And finally, we’ll conduct mental health and masculinity education here as well, as there is plenty of room and easy access to electricity and large screens, for high-quality presentations. ​

​

For wilderness survival education, we will pile into Gabe’s school bus and head out to one of Colorado’s beautiful trails to learn the basics of camping, fire building, first aid and more. On the final day, we’ll head out before dawn to a summit trail, conduct our final assessments, then climb a peak together, and return for a warrior’s feast. ​

​

Accessibility

We have heard some concerns from people with accessibility issues and want to be sure Project Crucible is available to as many people as possible. If you have some condition preventing you from participating in Project Crucible - whether it’s a disability, or you don’t believe your fitness is good enough for the full program - we want to work with you. We have an alternate program set up that is less physically demanding - it’s a scholarship-level ticket ($750), you can still attend the construction and mental health portions of the program, and during the physically intense activities, you’ll help set up other events and activities for your fellow participants. Depending on your condition, you are also welcome to attend the wilderness survival training on Wednesday and Friday, which both include 3-4 hours of hiking with a lightly loaded backpack. If that’s not possible, that’s okay! You can stay back at the farmhouse and rest, reflect and work on alternative materials.

Schedule Update

The main updates to the schedule are: addition of meditation and tai chi for those who want it, re-organizing the classes around "field trips" to the wilderness for survival education, and ending days a little earlier to make sure participants get enough sleep.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll write more details about the curriculum and content in future posts, but I’m still nailing down specifics, so I don’t want to jump the gun. Below is the schedule as it stands today.

If you have any questions, comments, or want to join us for Project Crucible, message me here or send me an email at gabrielcoeli@gmail.com.

Monday

Time

Event

0500

Meditation + Tai Chi (Optional)

0600

Wake + Hygiene

0630

Orientation Class + Breakfast + Coffee

0830

Construction I - Foundational Concepts

1030

Build Event #1

1300

Lunch + Change (Shorts)

1400

Self-Defense I - Sumo and the Warrior Spirit

1500

Freshen Up and Change

1530

Masculinity and Mental Health I - Perspectives on Masculinity

1730

Dinner Prep

1830

Dinner

1930

End of Program - Quiet Time

Tuesday

Time

Event

0500

Meditation + Tai Chi (Optional)

0600

Wake

0615

Group Physical Training + Hygiene + Change Clothes

0800

Construction II - Breakfast + Coffee In Class

1000

Build Event

1300

Lunch + Change

1400

Self-Defense II - Stance, Movement, Strikes

1500

Freshen Up and Change

1530

Masc and Mental Health II

1730

Dinner Prep

1830

Dinner

1930

End of Program - Quiet Time

Wednesday

Time

Event

0530

Wake/Hygiene

0600

Breakfast and Coffee

0700

Load Bus

0900

Arrive at Trail - Begin Hike

1000

Wilderness Survival I

1100

Resume Hike

1200

Wilderness Survival II - Lunch in Class

1300

Hike Back

1500

Load Bus

1700

Freshen Up and Change

1730

Dinner Prep

1830

Dinner

1930

End of Program - Quiet Time

Thursday

Time

Event

0500

Meditation + Tai Chi (Optional)

0600

Wake

0615

Group Physical Training + Hygiene + Change Clothes

0800

Construction III - Breakfast + Coffee In Class

0900

Build Event

1300

Lunch

1400

Self-Defense III - Defense, Takedowns and Throws (Cut if More Build Time Needed)

1500

Freshen Up and Change

1530

Masc and Mental Health III

1730

Dinner Prep

1830

Dinner

1930

End of Program - Quiet Time

Friday

Time

Event

0530

Wake/Hygiene

0600

Breakfast and Coffee

0700

Load Bus

0800

Arrive at Trail - Begin Hike

0900

Wilderness Survival III

1000

Resume Hike

1100

Wilderness Survival IV

1200

Hike Back

1300

Lunch

1400

Load Bus

1530

Self-Defense III/IV - Ground Fighting

1630

Freshen Up and Change

1700

Dinner Prep

1800

Dinner/End of Program/Quiet Time

Saturday

Time

Event

0400

Wake/Hygiene

0430

Breakfast and Coffee

0500

Load Bus

0630

Arrive at Trail - Begin Hike

0730

Assessment - Self-Defense

0830

Resume Hike

0930

Assessment - Wilderness Survival

1030

Resume Hike

1130

Summit: MMH IV - Lunch in Class

1230

Hike Back

1530

Load Bus

1700

Freshen Up and Change

1730

Dinner Prep

1830

Warrior’s Feast and Closing Ceremony

1930

Celebration

- Masculinity is a religion, or more accurately an accessory cult, that performs essential social functions

- This includes the regulation of male intersexual and intrasexual behavior, and it's why feminism has failed to dislodge it. They have no plausible replacement and don't even appreciate that they need one.

- The feminists are essentially correct that masculinity as we construct it in media and American culture is inseparable from two centuries of imperial and nationalistic propaganda. Most men are *used by* masculine ideals and people who can skillfully manipulate them, because they believe masculinity to be something outside themselves that they need to conform to. They believe it's a property of the Other.

- The idiotic black and white thinking of media reduces ideas of masculinity to either "evil oppressor," "Christian dominionist," "femgooner fantasy" or "harmless goofy Dad."

- performing a masculine character is still the fastest way to social status for a man. There are a few sanctioned ways to perform alternative masculinity that can also gain status but will not allow admission to elite circles

- The most successful men are those who conform to masculine standards in ways that work well with their character, and who defect in key ways that help them transcend rigid structures

- essentially, those who rescue masculine ideals from the Other and apply them to their own individual context, and the organic relationships in their life, are the ones who do well.

- Most men who are highly concerned with masculinity are in fact anima possessed, and are primarily looking for a way to earn the validation and approval of women. This is sometimes deeply buried under a few levels of repression, but it ironically is what separates them from true masculinity

- The liberal conception of masculinity is thinly veiled hysteria, not emotional intelligence (I could write a book on the pompous travesty that passes for "emotional intelligence," especially among liberals and urban women)

- True masculinity is an expression of individual character unencumbered by self-consciousness or performance. It's fundamentally different from femininity in this way. It's a character that reveals itself in a man's actions when he is focused, competent and full of joie de vivre

- a mature man is one who has integrated his femininity, and there are almost zero good cultural depictions or role models of what this actually looks like

I don't think all of this is going to necessarily make it into the course content as I want to focus in on helping men take masculinity as object, use it for their own benefit and the benefit of their families, and be able to hang it up when they don't need it. Seeing it as a skill or a tool to deploy when a situation calls for it is the correct relationship, in my opinion. It allows for possession without identification and, crucially, it allows a man to begin to master it. And mastery is the true signifier of masculinity.

The course is not going to be all male gender studies, we're also going to be learning the basics of construction, wilderness survival and self-defense over a week in the Rocky Mountains. If you're interested, we still have slots open. Send me an email and I'll send you more information.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy catches a lot of shit for the way it's abused by the system, and ok, fair enough. But no one who's doing it well is using it as a standalone modality - which it is not designed for - or forcing people into ill-fitting, cookie cutter treatment plans.

CBT, at its best, is a rigorous, comprehensive study of human ritual, performed at the closest possible level, undertaken by the subject themselves and guided by a scientist-artist. When it's done well, it unveils a beautiful, sui generis record of a life lived. Combined with Zen Buddhism, it has become a lifesaving treatment for people who suffer from extreme suicidality and extensive trauma. Combined with psychodynamic therapy, it's made extraordinary breakthroughs in treating obsession and addiction.

The founder of CBT, Aaron Beck, was clear that it's not intended to be used alone - it's not as effective and could even be harmful. He mentions this twice in the first ten pages of the book he authored on the modality! Beck certainly never intended for it to become about regimens, worksheets and AI therapy scripts. This misuse is a monstrosity that HMOs have invented. In a way, the troubles of CBT are the troubles of Western psych writ large: a tradition brimming with vitality & potential, constantly corrupted by the institutions who ostensibly administer it. This is religion's problem, too. It is an Achilles' heel of subjectivity.

The reflexive condemnation & dismissal of "checklist therapy" is a tragic missed opportunity. Perhaps the strictures of institutional self-concept can be effectively transcended via apprehension of institutional tools. Haven't we all seen for ourselves how mastering a subject makes us calmer, steadier, more present and reasonable when we approach it? How could it not be the same for life skills?

As part of a holistic, multimodal approach, CBT has more than earned its place in the clinic and in support/healing relationships across disciplines. Instead of resisting it, why not take a position of "it's better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it?"

This article was adapted from a tweet thread, originally published on January 9th, 2023.

The nervous system is a canvas. It's an art medium - one in which you can turn the rituals and endeavors of your life into a masterpiece. You can train yourself to care about anything. You can train to find beauty and meaning everywhere in your life. But there's a catch: You have to practice caring about something for a long time before you actually *feel* like you care about it. You have to put aside your concepts and your boredom, and practice reverence, care, deep love. It has to be ritual, mindful and intentional. In this way, you can infuse your life with meaning, and reveal the shining, gorgeous, sacred unconditional love that lies at the ground of being. You can do this with anything: tweeting, making tea, changing a diaper, writing software, making love, fistfighting.

Thich Nhat Hanh, channeling Brother Lawrence, once told a Western student to wash the dishes as if each of them were the Baby Jesus. The point is that sacred and profane are empty when they are alone, as mere concepts. They need you to co-construct them. Decide, and they arise.

It's hard as hell to consistently treat the ordinary like it's sacred. Absent ritual and aesthetics and acoustics and ceremony, it means overcoming difficult emotions and resistances, and persevering when it's difficult. There's a reason it's a virtue! But it's worth it. The value is plain to see in any of the Zen-inspired arts. The tea ceremony, Japanese flower arrangement and gardening, aikido, bonsai, wabi-sabi: all of these practice locating the transcendent in the ordinary, over and over, until it just feels incontrovertibly *there*.

In one view, the nameless, infinite, timeless, gorgeous Divine *is* just there, at hand, everywhere, at every moment. We can't see It until we remove our blinders. It's waiting, beholding us patiently, setting an example for us. When we follow suit, It reveals Itself. If you're a committed rational type, you can just as easily say that the human mind can be trained into a trance that perceives the holy in everything. It's human practice, slowly conditioning the mind toward the human conception of the transcendent.

Truth is always paradoxical. The more of it you are strong enough to handle, the more the inherent sacredness of everything reveals itself. I don't personally give It a name. And I'm definitely not perfect - I forget a lot. The practice is the remembering.

Each and every moment is personally delivered to you, in a spirit of unfathomable love. It is there for you to reflect that love back - artfully, in context, as skillfully as you possibly can. This makes no sense. It is beyond the mind to grasp. It takes a leap of faith. It also takes a long period of grappling and gritting and difficult practice. You have to wrestle any habit, any thought, any conditioning, any trait or ability, any demon or angel that gets in between you and whatever God has put in front of you, here, now.

But pretty soon, you get with it. Pretty soon, you stop getting in your own way so much. You fuck yourself over less. You stop creating the conditions that pull you out of the here and now, out of the deep bond of love. It becomes easier to stay with it than to stray. There's just you and God. Then, there's no you and no God. There's a world, alive, pulsing with a holy gorgeous thrum, for all eternity.

You can start anytime. You can choose it, or remember it, right now. The nervous system is a canvas. You can make and unmake it into a thing of surpassing beauty. You can choose to give it back to the divine - to the Universe and Everyone in It. A little gift, to say "thanks."

(This article is a republication of a tweet thread originally written on December 6th, 2022.)

In Part 1, I covered the first twenty principles I’ve laid down for 2025. In this, Part 2, I’ll cover the last twenty-three.

Part 3 will outline the changes in my experience and thinking that led me to make updates in the first place. Part 4 will cover my process for distilling principles from my experience and writing them in aphoristic form, as well as practical advice for creating your own list of principles. And Part 5 will cover brand new principles as I continue to process reflections and outputs from the previous four years.

Thank you for reading - I hope you will enjoy it.

1. TAKE EMOTIONS SERIOUSLY, NOT LITERALLY

   1. Life comes with a rich tapestry of emotions that are to be savored, cherished, investigated and understood. They contain essential information, insights and intuitions that are indispensable for living.

   2. It’s important to take my emotions seriously, not literally

   3. When appropriate to the present moment and its conditions, emotions are essential for wise understanding and action. Emotions fueled by memories, trauma or anxiety about the future must be welcomed and endured, but never acted on without reflection.

   4. When emotions fueled by the past or future drive my behavior, I rarely get the results I want, and most often end up self-sabotaging or perpetuating a traumatic pattern.

   5. I seem to have stronger emotions than most other people, or perhaps I am more aware of them, as well as a propensity for action, all of which makes for a dangerous combination without good self-mastery. It makes me passionate and dynamic, but can also make me impulsive and dramatic. For this reason, among many others, daily meditation is non-negotiable for me.

2. PLANS ARE USELESS, PLANNING IS INDISPENSABLE

   1. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, and life constantly subverts my expectations.

   2. Two is one, and one is none. Have a backup for backups.

   3. Appropriate planning for reasonable contingencies allows me to respond skillfully to events that I can foresee, and even to events that I couldn’t, because I am better able to stay centered and rational.

   4. Planning, training and preparing in a way increases my general flexibility and readiness is usually superior to investing heavily in preventing specific scenarios, unless those scenarios are likely and catastrophic

   5. Expectations are premeditated resentments, but it’s possible to plan for contingencies and risks and hold them lightly without expecting them.

   6. It’s good to have three months’ worth of emergency supplies and savings on hand.

   7. It’s good to have my vehicle stocked with emergency supplies and supplies for comfort and health

   8. It’s good to teach the people I love how to prepare for risk and difficulty, so that they can assist me, or be okay without me

   9. Keep an eye on the chatter in proven bellwether communities.

3. BE AS CONSISTENT AS NECESSARY

   1. Trust is built on consistency

   2. If I don’t consistently enforce my rules and boundaries, people will not respect me. But if I don’t consistently make wise exceptions to my rules and boundaries, people won’t love me.

   3. Only the very foolish and the very wise are always consistent.

   4. I am not very wise.

4. CONFLICT IS HOLY

   1. Love may be the Ground of Being, but conflict is the principal activity in the realm of the Lord of Death.

   2. One can not serve life without simultaneously serving death.

   3. Conflict must therefore be sanctified with my life, used mindfully and wisely to destroy what is unhealthy and unrighteous, to perpetuate life, to bring justice, to protect those who can’t protect themselves, and to uphold the Dharma

   4. It is almost always better to attempt to solve conflicts peacefully than it is to fight

   5. Don’t attribute to malice what is adequately explained by ignorance.

   6. Don’t attribute to dishonesty what is adequately explained by unconscious defense or character weakness.

   7. In the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, the most successful strategy is the Copy Kitten: Cooperate by default. Forgive one defection. If a person defects twice, never cooperate again.

   8. I don’t have to fight liars and people who are not strong enough to take accountability for their actions. But I shouldn’t cooperate with them, either.

   9. If I have to fight, I should fight to win.

   10. If I have to hurt someone, I should do it quickly and proportionately, without cruelty. Pain is unavoidable but I should avoid causing suffering as much as possible.

   11. If I cause another person to suffer, I will suffer. In addition to harming my own integrity, they will become vengeful, a blight on my reputation, and a future liability, especially as I am now in a public-facing position.

   12. If I am defeated, I need to accept it with all the grace I can muster.

   13. Justice is a necessary social reality. If there are no mediating systems or parties to help deliver it, then all peaceful options must be exhausted before fighting.

   14. If I can’t move another’s heart with my suffering, and a desire for mutual dignity can’t deliver peace and respect between us, then honor may demand vengeance.

   15. Revenge can create and perpetuate cycles of violence, so if I have to resort to it, I need to do so in as quiet, honorable and thorough of a manner as possible, to discourage any further retaliation, and prevent unnecessary fallout in adjacent relationships

5. THINGS FALL APART

   1. Everything but awareness is impermanent, unsatisfying, and only a surface representation of the Great Self.

   2. The world is always in a state of constant flux and change; therefore attachment to any particular configuration of it will hamper my ability to be skillful with it.

   3. Human beings live fleeting lives full of grief and delusion. We are worthy of one another’s compassion

   4. First do nothing; seek wisdom: to understand human behavior, it’s important to first suspend moral judgments long enough to understand the situations, circumstances, environments and systems in which the person is embedded. Once I have the facts I need to feel reasonable and confident in a judgment, I can then make one.

   5. Human relationships are extremely complex and difficult, and require extraordinary amounts of forgiveness and forbearance to work.

   6. My odds of survival over the long-term are directly correlated to my ability to change and adapt.

6. PROTECT AND DEEPLY CARE FOR RELATIONSHIPS

   1. Relationships are the psychic soil from which our self-concepts grow.

   2. I want to conduct myself in relationships with the utmost integrity, so that I honor the infinite image of God in each human being.

   3. A commitment from me is valuable - I shouldn’t waste it on someone who isn’t worthy of it.

   4. Someone must be almost as spiritually tall as me to earn a commitment from me.

   5. Keep friends and lovers separate.

   6. Don’t cheat, and don’t stay with a cheater.

   7. Avoid relationships with possessive people.

   8. If an aspect of a relationship elicits controlling behavior between partners, rather than genuine self-mastery freely given, that aspect is unsustainable as it is co-constructed and will eventually sabotage the relationship.

   9. Relationships persist even after physical presence is over, so the way I end connections will influence the quality, intensity and duration of the grief that I feel, and that others feel.

   10. To end a relationship well - quickly, mercifully, kindly - is an act of great kindness

   11. The only relationship I can be sure I will have until death is my relationship with myself

   12. Everyone dies alone.

7. SEX IS SACRED

   1. Sex, like violence, is inherently Dionysian, an eruption of chaos that creates the conditions for new life and order.

   2. The psychosexual realm in the human mind is inherently chaotic, violent and dangerous to myself and others

   3. Because it is such a vulnerable and destabilizing force, it is a necessarily chthonic force, and needs to be safely mastered and tamed. When not skillfully handled, it inevitably destabilizes individuals, relationships, families and entire communities.

   4. The transcendence that sex offers is not the highest form of transcendence - it is more on par with drugs and medicines than with spirituality. But it is connected to some of the most tender parts of the psyche, so I need to sanctify it and treat it as a sacred relation that honors the interiority of both parties

   5. Life-changing (and life-ending) STIs are real.

   6. Hookups are thin ego gruel that cheapen both participants.

   7. People regularly, carelessly inflict serious damage on one another in the form of sexual assault and abuse, as well as accusation, slander and lies.

   8. Having sex with someone necessarily gives me power over them, and them power over me. Most people are not worth the responsibility of having power over, and are not worthy of the responsibility of having power over you. So it’s important to be choosy about whom I share this with.

8. KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN TO OTHERS

   1. It’s important to be careful with anyone smaller than me, physically or spiritually

   2. My culture expects me to perform equality with many people who are not equal to me. Most people are scarcely aware of this and mostly blind to their entitlement to it. This is annoying but not fully their fault, and the social costs of violating this norm are very high to me, so it is a normal, ritual cost of participating in society

   3. In order to be skillful with others, I need to be aware of how others perceive me, what roles they assign me, and what they expect from me.

   4. If I get close to someone, it’s important to understand the feelings that they transfer onto me, and what dramas and patterns they unconsciously try to re-enact with me

   5. In order to flourish, I require a diversity of environments and relationships in which I can play multiple roles - both student and teacher, both father and son, both friend and enemy.

   6. The more identified with a role I become, the less skillful I am able to execute its responsibilities

   7. If I have no outlet for the shadow that a particular role creates, it will express destructively and unconsciously within the role

   8. No relationship except that between a parent and child should trap me in a static role. This is a form of objectification that is unsustainable between adults.

9. GENEROSITY IS A TOOL

   1. Acts of generosity are one of my most potent tools to be of benefit to a social landscape, as well as to increase my own social status and attractiveness. Generosity can also make me vulnerable to those who envy me.

   2. I should be wise and discerning about displays of generosity, carefully control my giving in a way that benefits the recipient maximally, and be sure not to affect my status in a way that’s disadvantageous within my ecology and web of relationships.

   3. It’s important to take care with the size, context and nature of my giving, so as not to introduce feelings of resentment or inferiority in the recipients of my gifts.

   4. Extravagant gifts can often cause hard feelings in others, but thoughtful gifts rarely do.

   5. I don’t owe any individual, by virtue of my identity characteristics or relative privilege, anything at all. However, I do admire duty, noblesse oblige and gratitude in others.

10. BE A GOOD PARENT

    1. The duties of fatherhood are sacred.

    2. Keep kids safe, secure, well-fed and long on love.

    3. Accept kids for who they are now, who they have been, and who they are becoming. Always, always insist that they do their best.

    4. Be kind but honest, patient but focused, gentle but firm, and model great humanity for them.

    5. Give them the attention they need, and ensure they learn how to enjoy solitude.

    6. Help them come to see failure as a necessary catalyst for growth.

    7. Harshly punish dishonesty, so that they learn to greatly fear compromising their own integrity

    8. Most of what constitutes good health and spiritual growth boils down to parenting one’s self in much the same manner as one parents a child.

    9. Everyone, no matter how mature, will occasionally be childish, or possessed by the violent emotions of childhood wounding. This is normal and sane.

    10. If a person is exceptionally sane, they will often be childlike without being childish.

    11. If I don’t parent myself well, I can’t parent a child well.

11. GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD SELVES

    1. A boundary is that which, when crossed, necessitates a response. It is by its nature nebulous, porous and impermanent, but must nevertheless be upheld.

    2. A healthy ego expresses genuinely through skillfully practiced constraints - boundaries in the relationship with the self - that generate emotions, desires, thoughts and responses that are well aligned with my highest sense of Quality and the sacred conditions of the present moment

    3. Boundaries create the distance I need to safely love and relate within a given relationship. This distance will change from person to person and over time with the same person, at different seasons of life.

    4. I will always require a measure of solitude, to attend to in myself what my relationships can’t satisfy

    5. Healthy relationships of all varieties are only possible when all parties have good personal boundaries that each and the other respects, as well as mutually agreed upon constraints

    6. Testing boundaries is a normal human behavior. Violating boundaries is an act of aggression that must be met as such.

    7. Those who do not consistently respect personal boundaries are unworthy of a relationship with me.

12. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH THOSE THAT WANT THE BEST FOR YOU

    1. People who want the best for me will:

       1. Treat me with respect

       2. Understand that I have different feelings, opinions, and desires, and will want me to express them honestly.

       3. Want me to set my own priorities and communicate freely about them.

       4. Express myself and my emotions honestly, without attempting to manipulate me

       5. Not withhold connection, attention or affection from me to get what they want

       6. Deal fairly with me, keep their promises and give me what I pay for

       7. Not threaten me - physically, mentally or emotionally

       8. Want me to be happy and healthy

Read more

A little more than four years ago, I set down a list of forty personal principles on Twitter that became the core of Vivid Void’s “Table of Contents” - my earliest online index of my work. Shortly, it also became the backbone of my self-manual - my personal study of my self-concept, in pursuit of healing, strengthening, connecting and transcending it.

Now, I have been writing, counseling and studying spirituality full time for the last four years, as well as living and suffering and loving and grieving, and I have some updates to make. Part 1 will cover the first half, and Part 2 will cover the last. Part 3 will outline the changes in my experience and thinking that led me to make updates in the first place. Part 4 will cover my process for distilling principles from my experience and writing them in aphoristic form, as well as practical advice for creating your own list of principles. And Part 5 will cover brand new principles as I continue to process reflections and outputs from the previous four years.

Here is Part 1 - I hope you will enjoy it.

1. I AM

   1. I am, fundamentally, the void that is all things, that which dances and is still, which knows and obscures, which creates and destroys, which is the center and the centerless, the brilliant, eternal awakeness of the universe

   2. The same is true for every human being alive, and everything in creation.

   3. This particular locale of the universe is called Gabe. I am as much him as I am the universe, because we are inseparable, and yet in that unity we are undeniably distinct. My story is, fundamentally, one of coming to understand oneness through difference, by studying myself and the universe, and coming to love and care for both. I am learning to skillfully navigate life’s loves, joys, sorrows and madnesses, to empty myself out and become a vessel for devotion to what is True, to become my own child, parent, lover and mentor. I am learning, by way of love, to become Real, and in so doing, I am making the entire universe Real.

2. KEEP IT REAL

   1. The Real is Quality, Quality is the Dao, the Dao is the Dharma, the Dharma is the Good, the Good is the Truth, the Truth is God.

   2. Quality is the ur-phenomenon, that which grounds the continuous eternal process of creation and change, the context of discernment that precedes time, energy, motion and matter. It is the fundamental reality that enables human judgment (“self” and “Other.”) It is the catalyst for Being itself, that which enervates life and enables movement, perception, thought, emotion, concept, representation and language.

   3. Like God, the Dao, and Reality, Quality can not, itself, be captured or defined.

   4. Quality is the bridge between the rational and the emotional, the left and right brain, the head and the heart, the male and female. It’s the tantric union of opposites, the inseparability of yin and yang, the holy perfection of masculine and feminine. It is immanence, the Monad, ever re-arranging its Form according to its unfathomable Preference and Nature.

   5. The felt sense of the presence of Quality is peace. The felt sense of alienation from Quality is anxiety.

3. STAY TRUE

   1. The shape of all virtue is feeling the fullness of one’s human experience and staying True

   2. Truth is unspeakable, unknowable, unrepresentable - it can only be felt when it resonates with the cells.

   3. Truth is most clearly perceived in silence and solitude.

   4. The ego is incapable of apprehending a capital-T Truth, but it can move ever closer to a capital-H Honesty, and in the marriage of thought, word and deed, can attain a capital-I Integrity.

   5. Courage is staying true in the face of fear. Faith is staying true in the face of doubt. Hope is staying true in the face of despair. Grace is staying true to form, insight is staying true to experience, concentration is staying true to intention.

   6. Presence is staying true to eternity.

4. INTEGRATE, INTEGRATE, INTEGRATE

   1. The process of integration - growing and co-creating a self that is as aligned with the Real as possible - is the telos of human spirituality and perhaps the truest possible meaning of human life

   2. The transcendence of the ego to Union with the Real is the truest desire of the human heart, that which underlies all other desires

   3. Integrity, simply defined, is my present capacity to align myself with the Real

5. BRAVERY IS THE FOUNDATIONAL VIRTUE

   1. The process of integration, at its core, requires facing, enduring and understanding fear. All boundaries in consciousness are made of fear, and therefore all freedom depends on bravery.

   2. Fear is also the lowest of all psychic vibrations, the mother of hatred and atrocity, and the executioner of love and wisdom. Not all fear is evil, but wild, untamed fear will wreak havoc in the self until it’s mastered with great love, patience and bravery.

   3. Once mastered, fears become impeccable allies - extraordinarily sensitive guardians, protectors and intuitions, as well as guides to the parts of myself that are vulnerable, and that need more protection and training.

   4. It’s essential for me to regularly examine my weaknesses, attend to my fears, and train my ability to protect myself, both physically and psychologically.

   5. If I don’t stand up for myself, no one else will, either.

   6. Anyone who demands I abrogate my fundamental duty to myself and my integrity, no matter what they promise in return, is not my friend.

   7. Conformity is the lowest form of transcendence and the most insidious; it freezes fear in place, demands the sacrifice of self-possession, and offers the illusion of safety, glory and immortality in a false collective self.

6. EVERYONE IS A WORLD

   1. The root of the word “world” is vir-eld, or, “the lifespan of a human being.”

   2. Everyone experiences and expresses themselves through the self - a uniquely constructed microcosm of the world that only they will ever understand and experience.

   3. Each self reflects a momentary, divine, infinite image of God. So each action we take in relationship to another human being, we take in relationship to the Dharma.

   4. The shape of the self is that which at first separates one from Union, until it is understood as part of the Whole

   5. The only way to change the world is to change your self.

7. SEE FOR YOURSELF

   1. Truth is an experience you must seek out for yourself. No one else can have it for you, and no one can gatekeep it from you unless you agree.

   2. Because truth can not be represented, I can’t accept anything as true on authority alone.

   3. If I have experienced something True for myself and a teacher or spiritual friend verifies it, I can proceed as though it were Real. If I have experienced something True for myself and the world’s great holy scriptures contain an account of it, I can proceed as though it is Real. If I have experienced something True for myself and neither a teacher, a spiritual friend nor scriptures can verify it, it’s unwise to proceed as though it were Real.

   4. Believe the people you trust, but always provisionally

   5. Assume nothing.

8. THE FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON IS NOT THE MOON

   1. My relationship with the Real is always mediated by the limitations of perception, representation and interpretation.

   2. It is the nature of Quality to defy attempts to capture it. Truth can be experienced, accepted and understood, but never represented.

9. THOU ART CYCLICAL

   1. The transcendence of the self and the experience of Union is always temporary; the experience of pure relation with God cyclically degrades to a joyless apprehension of the world of objects, the world of Form, which the Daoists call “the 10,000 things.”

   2. The cycle renews itself by grace and is not under my control; However, I can influence it - the more I stay true, the more often and easily grace comes.

10. THE UNIVERSE MEETS YOU IN THE MIDDLE

    1. The line between what I do and what happens to me is arbitrarily drawn for the benefit of the ego. The closer I can “carve reality close to the joints,” as Plato put it, the stronger and truer I become.

    2. So it’s a sacred duty to do my best, and trust the universe with the rest.

    3. As my mentor, Samuel Stem, used to say: “Go with the flow. Don’t try to go against it. If the flow is not working for you, change the flow.”

Read more

A quick note for my subscribers - I have been slowly turning my ship of habits away from the extended meditation of winter’s isolation - and healing of the difficult griefs of 2024 - and toward greater engagement with study, books, ideas and longform writing again.

While I won’t be restarting the Mystic’s Almanac in its original form, it’s still a fine name for a Substack newsletter, and I expect to continue using it as it is. At first, I will be cross-posting longform work between here and X, as well as publishing irregular book reviews, short pieces listing what I have learned and what has caught my eye recently, and collections of links I have found interesting. All of these are in the interest of increasing the quality of my scholarship. I am taking a gamble that you may also find something of use or interest. If I happen to write something longform, I will be very happy, but I know myself well enough to know that committing to that right now will not result in a balanced effort, and therefore will not be sustainable long-term.

Whether or not it’s a fool’s hope, there does seem to be a very concrete feeling on X that it’s important to wind back the platform’s throttling of links, and perhaps even its relationship with Substack. Whether or not the sovereign listens to his people is another matter, but my sense is that for all of his faults, he has generally been responsive when power users have clamored for a change for long enough, and there is a chance that we may see some synergy restored between these platforms. We can hope without attaching to it.

I don’t have a definite direction for where I want to take this space. I am only recognizing its potential value for my personal development and my overall career, and setting an intention and direction with the hope that the Dao will deign to surprise me in a pleasant - or at least interesting - way. I have toyed with the idea of writing books or writing for legacy media, and neither of them seem as important or vital as simply writing blogs and tweets, especially given the ongoing training of large language models on the existing corpus of internet writing. I don’t know if this is myopic of me - we shall see if it ends up having been a mistake - but in the meantime, expect to see many more updates from me soon.

With love,

Gabe

The Dharma teacher Wystan Bryant-Scott and I have teamed up to create a summer backpacking meditation retreat in Colorado this year. We will spend five days in the mountains, getting as close to our experience of hiking, camping and being in nature as possible. It’s not a terribly difficult hike - we’re focused on practice, not fitness - but it’s a very beautiful trail, close to Estes Park and the Chicago Basin.

Our focus will be on practice - walking meditation, as well as movement practice in the morning and formal meditation in the evening - but we have also carved out plenty of time for community and 1-on-1s with Wystan and me.

We have room for 15 attendees and we expect it to sell out quickly, so I’m announcing it here and on my Discord before broadcasting it on Twitter.

More information and the sign-up page can be found here.

I think this retreat will be really special - the sort of event we’ll remember for the rest of our lives. If you’d like to join us, I would love to spend time with you in the mountains.

Faithful,

Gabe

In the service of uncovering these unconscious layers and clarifying them in light of awareness, I’ve created a document I call the Relationship Manifesto. It’s a way to catalog the most salient beliefs and subsystems that direct your attraction and attention. I’ve posted a blank version here: you can make a copy for yourself and fill it out at your leisure.

I’m posting my own below, in full, as an example of what one can look like after many years of refining it. May it be beneficial to you.

RELATIONSHIP MANIFESTO

Relationship Philosophy

One of my deepest beliefs is that people exist to make their spirits manifest, and that business is between each individual and the universe. Romantic partners can, at best, be accomplices in each other's unique spiritual process. This doesn't mean we aren't responsible to one another. It tells us something about devotion. We direct devotion to the *space* between our beloved and the divine by withdrawing from it, and being a refuge for them when spiritual life cyclically degrades into the objective.

A relationship is a container in which two people can draw each other's spirit, through love, up from the depths and near to the surface of Being, where it can most easily be accessed and made manifest. To honor the natural sacredness of love is first to honor one's own, until one can recognize it in others, and include it in the scope of one's spiritual practice. Creating, nurturing and safeguarding the space in which others can become, with divine help, completely themselves. This is the telos of love. To create a masterpiece of space so generative & perfectly suited to one another's individuality that your spirits can't help but pour themselves into the world, via art, works or children. 

In order to do this, ego integrity is paramount. We must be true with each other, maintain strong boundaries around our own independence, protect one another’s solitude, and attend carefully to our own actions and our contributions to the relationship environment. When we inevitably make mistakes, we need the strength to take full accountability, without defensiveness or manipulation, and make necessary amends and changes.

I do not think a relationship can survive unless each partner views the other as an equal - not perfectly equivalent, but well spiritually balanced. Each partner should expect to be held to equal standards, to receive equal treatment, to do equal work, to be held to equal accountability, and to take equal responsibility. 

Relationship Structure

I'm not interested in either polyamory or default, unexamined monogamy. Both are, in the vast majority of cases, breeding grounds for unconscious animal narcissism. The structure I believe is most conducive to conscious relationship and mutual spiritual growth is reconstructed monogamy: one where we've both learned from relationship anarchy but prefer to give our abundance to only one partner, and maintain the bond with self-mastery and mutual devotion, not control and manipulation.

I would like a relationship to begin slowly, with care and reverence for how we integrate it into our lives. I would like a relationship that is oriented, in total, toward bringing into the world what the spirit is calling from us - whether that is children, art, service or something we can’t yet fathom - and a partner who is flexible and creative enough to build a bespoke structure that supports that in both of us. 

Lifelong monogamy is my strong preference, but I recognize that life and relationships are infinitely strange. If, many years in the future, in an entirely secure and healthy relationship, some need arose for an affair or external sexual relationship, I would be theoretically open to discussing it, so long as it did not threaten the family or the primary bond.

Relationship Purpose

I believe the purpose of a relationship is to create a unique, exclusive partnership that attends to those aspects of life that only partnership can: intimacy, deep trust, affection, companionship, sex, and mutual support - emotional, physical and material. The relationship should be a vehicle that brings out the best in both of us - that assists us in deepening into our spiritual practices and life callings, both individual and shared, and that fosters mutual interests and values. 

I want my partner to be family to me, with a bond as powerful and sacred as though she were my own blood, even if we cannot or are not ultimately called to have children together.

Ideally, in all major domains of life, both my partner and I will be fully capable of independence, and beyond: our life skills are such that we regularly produce unique beauty and abundance, and want to share our surplus resources with the relationship project, out of love, as a way to enhance and beautify life for both partners. 

There are, of course, dark periods in life, of misfortune, injury and illness, where we can’t stand fully on our own, and have to rely on others. These are inevitable, though usually temporary, until late in life. In these cases, the relationship should act as a material and spiritual reserve, not only for the unfortunate partner, but for the supporting partner as well, that both can draw on, for as much as they need to weather their difficulties, until they can once more stand on their own and begin contributing to the relationship. The optimal amount of duty is not zero, and I believe that partners in a long-term relationship owe one another their best and most virtuous presence, especially when it is difficult to do so. 

A relationship in which one or both partners are dependent on the other for the basic functions of life, without reasonable cause, is a project of inferior quality, unsustainable without intolerable levels of manipulation and personal control, and not ultimately preferable to a life lived alone.

Goals 

I would like to build a shared spiritual practice with a partner, a place of solace and refuge from the grasping, egoic world. 

I would like to build an evolving, ever deepening practice of intimacy with one another. We should be constantly in the process of increasing our vulnerability, honesty and communication, with ourselves and with each other. We should constantly be working on being as self-aware and as open with each other as we can tolerate, and being compassionate when this is difficult.

I would like to build a shared household, with a mutually created collection of household rituals and traditions that sacralize our familial devotion to one another. 

I would like to travel to see natural wonders of the world, to make pilgrimages together, to seek out experiences that challenge us and enrich our ability to make our spirits manifest in the world. I would like to share creative practice and time with one another, to collaborate on spaces and supportive structures that inspire our imaginations. I would like to take sweet road trips together, to camp and hike and ski and enjoy the beauty of the natural world. 

I would like to support my partner - and receive support in - bringing anything into the world our spirits are called to bring forth: personal practices of self-mastery, works of art, religious vocations, healing practices or even professional endeavors, although I do not want to go into business with my partner.

I would like to have more children with the right person, if we both feel spiritually called to bring children into the world, and we believe we would both be good parents. 

Sex

When I was younger I was sexually adventurous, and have tried just about everything under the sun that is safe, sane and consensual. I no longer think of sex objectively, independent of my partner - what I will or will not enjoy will depend in large part on the dynamics of my present partnership, and the sexuality of my partner. I am primarily interested in the spiritual dimensions of sex - in intimacy, transcendence and mutual satisfaction, more than in mechanical or infantile matters.

In recent years, eroticism has also become important to me. I am just as interested in play, narrative, creativity, aesthetics and intimacies that stimulate my imagination as I am in those that thrill my body. 

Historically, I have enjoyed a variety of kinky activities, and I would be open to exploring these with a partner, especially after our sex life has matured and deepened. I have a great Kink Worksheet that I think would be joyous to explore with a partner if our dynamic was amenable to it, or evolved that way over time. (Like the Relationship Manifesto worksheet, you can make a copy and fill it out for yourself. Fair warning: it is a comprehensive view of human sexuality, and gets quite intense in places.)

It feels important to me to stress that at this place in my life, kink is not essential to me. I am at peace with the range of “vanilla” heterosexual intimacies, if the spiritual dimension is present and attended to. I don’t require any fetishes or extreme acts to feel fully satisfied. 

Things That Make Me Feel Loved

Some of the things that make me feel loved and cared for include: 

• Seeing someone practice empathy by putting themselves in my shoes and really imagining what it’s like to be me, then relating to me with that information in mind. 

• Investing time and effort into thoughtfulness - considering me and my life situation, understanding my responsibilities, challenges and desires. Not stopping at a shallow or categorical understanding of me - as a body, a sex, a profession, a role, an identity - but thinking sensitively and genuinely of me as an individual in possession of these things. Ways this can manifest are in the quality of mutual support, and the thoughtfulness of gifts or romantic gestures.

• A genuine desire to support me when I am experiencing difficulties - I have a painful history with feeling like I need to do everything alone, and I feel enormously relieved and cared for when my partner recognizes this and takes the initiative to offer me support.

• Seeing and appreciating my contributions to the relationship, and showing gratitude for those, not taking them for granted. 

• If we have divided household or any kind of labor into roles, seeing someone attend to the work with a real devotion to Quality, as though they were working on a masterpiece.

• Listening when I speak, remembering when I have said something that’s deeply meaningful or important to me. 

• When feasible, helping me with errands or tasks that are otherwise difficult for me. 

• Getting on the same side of problems and building a sense of “us”, the spirit of our relationship, that incorporates and represents both of us. 

• Mutual, good-natured roasting

• Backscratches 

Expectations around Communication and Conflict

I think the time to work on relationship problems is when things are good. If we identify the need to work on something during a fight, we absolutely have to follow up on it after the fight. We can’t bask in the glow of reconciliation and hope the problem goes away. If we have a problem that is out of our skill level to reconcile, we should see if there are books, courses or counseling that we can do together. 

When we are in conflict, I think it’s important to express ourselves authentically and passionately, and to provide generous, well-regulated space for each other’s full expression. However, the boundaries around that space need to be kept sacred: No matter what, we need to refrain from attacking each other or the relationship. 

To that extent, I think it’s very important to be aware of our own triggers, of the relative intensity of our nervous systems, of the general pitch of the conflict and its dynamics, and also of one another’s triggers and emotional states. We should not walk on eggshells with one another, but we should be gentle and generous with mercy and forgiveness. 

One absolute necessity for me is a mutual willingness to take as many breaks from a conflict as we need, for as long as necessary, for the purposes of cooling down, regulating, reflecting and refining. I have very strong emotions, especially around attachment issues, and often need these periods of space to ensure that my actions preserve the integrity of our bond. I do not want these breaks to be used for punishment, withdrawal or “silent treatment” - even if we are taking space, I think it’s necessary to make or request small gestures of affirmation or reassurance from time to time. 

Another necessity for me is a firm commitment from both partners to exhaust all possible options at reconciliation before ending the relationship. We should both be able to feel secure that the other will try everything before giving up. This includes relationship counseling, workshops or retreats, refactoring boundaries, etc. 

Exit Strategy

To the extent that it’s possible, in the case of break-up, my goal is to follow the campsite rule: to leave my partner better than I found her. I would like to break up consciously, with a lot of love, and with great respect for one another’s grief and need to heal. Generally, it is better for me to have a period of little-to-no contact for about a year after a break-up, to fully heal before attempting a friendship. However, I think it’s important for ex-partners to make themselves provisionally available to each another in the period following a break-up, for limited, loving conversations that will aid in healing or closure.

Respect for my partner’s privacy and reputation is of the utmost importance to me, and I hope it will be for my partner as well. I confine all of my processing to professional relationships and very close friendships, and do my best to protect the solitude and good name of my partner. My only exception to this is in the case of abuse or infidelity, in which case I consider it a duty to warn my community about my partner’s offending behavior. 

Personal Considerations and Weaknesses

I grew up in a difficult, codependent household, and have some deep, complex, traumatic patterns from that time, so I need to be watchful for unhealthy patterns or dynamics in myself. For myself, I choose to maintain active work with a therapist while in a serious romantic relationship, at least once a month. This isn’t always necessary, but it ensures that the contributions I can make to the relationship are of the highest possible Quality.

My core relationship wounds in my adult years revolve around dynamics of betrayal and infidelity, so I need extra care, communication and sensitivity around my ability to feel secure, especially around issues of transparency, faithfulness and devotion. 

I sometimes struggle with communication about difficult subjects. I may need to ask for help or patience with these. Some of these subjects include: 

• My relationship history with controlling, anxious or highly sensitive partners who became emotionally unstable unless I “walked on eggshells.”

• Anxiety about a partner leaving or losing desire for me if I am not “high-status” or “high-achieving,” or if I can’t sexually perform on-demand

Red Flags

Codependency

• Relying on someone else to meet needs that she is capable of meeting on her own

• Enabling a partner’s immaturity/irresponsibility/addiction/under-achievement

• Giving up hobbies or things she enjoys outside of the relationship, or demanding I do

• Letting outside relationships (friends and family) fall off

• Making extreme sacrifices for a partner (i.e., financial security, family, etc.) or demanding the same

Narcissistic Behavior

• Self-absorption or preoccupation, with insufficient regard for others

• Overwhelming need to feel special or separate, or to receive praise and reassurance

• Victim mentality/inferiority complex

• Excessive preoccupation with appearance, status, wealth, privilege or especially power

• Low or no capacity for accountability and empathy

Abusive Behavior 

• Unjustified, explosive anger or rage

• Significant dishonesty or violation of integrity

• Taking advantage of someone in a compromised state 

• Any prejudice that prevents seeing another person’s individuality because of their identity. This includes traditional prejudices as well as progressive identity politics.

• Especially avoid female chauvinism, women who engage in man-hating or who view white people, men or straight people as a structural “oppressor” class. 

• Physical abuse (slapping, striking with an intent to cause physical pain) 

• Psychological or emotional abuse (gaslighting, twisting, humiliating, withholding)

• Sexual abuse (physical or emotional violations of sexual safety and integrity)

Addiction or In Recovery 

• Do not date anyone with an untreated addiction or significant problem behaviors around substance use, including self-medicating or compulsive use.

• If they are in recovery, evaluate their behavior carefully: especially in early years, there is often rigidity, codependence, controlling behavior and emotional instability.

• If they haven't solved the issue that led them to substance abuse in the first place, they're still an addict; "dry drunk."

Shallow Spiritual or Religious Beliefs 

• If a person is into astrology, tarot or "witchiness", evaluate them carefully. The same goes for unreconstructed faiths in organized religion. These are often signals of immaturity. 

• Shallow spirituality does not spur substantive personal development and allows for spiritual bypassing. It is sometimes a signal of poor or lazy intellect, sometimes a signal of poor or arrested moral development. 

My Ideal Woman

My ideal woman prioritizes integrity above all other things. She has a strong will, is my spiritual equal in mutuality and complementarity, has dauntingly high expectations, and an equal capacity for grace. She is radically honest, with me and with herself. She holds her commitments sacred, does everything in her power to keep her promises, and makes amends when she fails. She is mature, recognizes her own fallibility, and takes responsibility for herself, her actions and her desires. She holds me accountable, and accepts being held accountable with grace and dignity, without denial, defense or manipulation. 

She is not self-absorbed, or obsessed with shallow pursuits like career, money, status, and self image. She understands that the relational is superior to the objective, and has oriented her life accordingly - she feels called to be a mother, a passionate lover and a responsible, generous, creative partner to the person she loves most. She skillfully balances her worldly desires by situating them within the bounds of deeply held principles, upon which she has staked the integrity of her identity. She understands discipline and drive, but does not sacrifice the people and pursuits she loves to passing flights of ego.

She is considerate, kind and thinks often of others, without abandoning herself. She is devoted to a life of the spirit, a life of love, and suffuses everything she does with that devotion. She has a mature spiritual practice that deeply grounds her and brings her ever closer to the Real.

 She has a healthy relationship with her mind and body, treats herself wisely and kindly, does not allow illness to go untreated, self-destruction to proliferate, or excesses to go unchecked.

She is neither my student nor my teacher, and expects me to be a partner, lover and a spiritual friend, not a substitute father. She contributes as much to my understanding of the world as I contribute to hers. She maintains her distinct integrity when in connection with me, and considers it a sacred duty to guarantee mine.

She tends to our love life with great appetite and skill, can befriend, employ and flaunt the Mystery, and is secure in her femininity. She has a great capacity for and love of solitude, expects me to protect and foster that in her, and expects to do the same for me. She understands that I am as unknowable to her as she is to me, and doesn't let that stop her from recognizing herself in me, putting herself in my shoes, and creating mutual practices around understanding each other as best as we can, futile as it may be.

Negotiable In A Partner:

• Pretty

• Funny

• Doesn’t own a dog (I’m mildly allergic)

  ---

You can get your tickets here.

We designed this course with habitual people pleasers, fast folders and automatic fawners in mind. We start with a bit of nervous system theory, and then put you in simulated conflicts to help you find your backbone, learn to stand up for yourself and your needs, and fight in a wise, fair manner that preserves both your relationships and your integrity.

Here are a few testimonials from previous participants who were happy with the course’s results:

We’re already about a third of the way sold out, so don’t wait too long, or you might miss it. Once again, you can get tickets here.

Thank you,

Gabe

I disagree with Grimes’ now-deleted post that men are fundamentally "beasts of war" because I believe that ALL humans are. Violence is the principal activity in Samsara, the realm of the Lord of Death. The fact that women are physically weaker and more subtle in their violence does not make them morally superior - only less destructive. It's an old patriarchal myth that "women are wonderful." History and psychology bear this out when you can find scholars willing to look it in the eye. Women are every single bit as evil as men.

I also disagree with her that men do not hold each other accountable. Our world is remarkably peaceful, because men constantly hold each other accountable, sometimes through mutual responsibility and sometimes through detente and threat.

On a more personal level, at least in my social circles, nothing will destroy your status quicker than mistreating a woman. The men I know are terrified to show a bit of excitement or emotion in public lest they be judged to be unstable or frightening to women. I'm willing to believe that the men I know are not representative of the men that Grimes knows, and vice versa. The application of collective guilt is a fundamental error, often rooted in trauma. Which I also have plenty of!

I often feel pain about antisocial female behavior, the apparent lack of accountability among women for it, and the often blatant cultural celebration of it. It sometimes seems like a huge blind spot for many women around the ways that they easily, deeply wound the people that love them. Of course my nervous system loves to light up and blame all women for this. So it takes a conscious effort for me to remember that they are individuals, and that, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line between good and evil runs through the center of every human heart. Where I agree with Grimes is that freedoms are precious and tenuous things that have been secured with blood, and that no one can take for granted for long. We can choose to live in a world in which men and women feel responsible toward one another and work to uphold one another's rights. Or we can choose a world where the sexes abandon our responsibilities to one another and stop working to keep each other safe, prosperous and free. This is a disaster for both men and women, but perhaps particularly for women. The current cultural fever pitch around the Battle of the Sexes is totally unsustainable & skirting catastrophe. The ideals of prosocial masculinity & femininity are quickly disappearing, leaving a bare smudge in our cultural unconscious and governing structures.

I don't know the solution. I'm afraid that many people are going to suffer totally unnecessarily. If we're going to find a way through, it's going to be because we show up for each other, especially when we don't want to, as much as we can possibly bear. We need to hold our own sex accountable and show much, much more grace to the other. We need to deeply question not just cultural narratives of traditional gender roles, but countercultural narratives of suspicion, critique and reflexive deconstruction, and whether they're serving us. And finally, we need to focus on what we are grateful for, in our world and in each other, and decide for ourselves how we are going to protect that. Because everything precious we have, and everything good that is yet to come, is ours to lose.

Therefore, an undefined, individually constructed femininity that feels no reciprocal responsibility to men is a unilateral, antisocial defection from civilization. It is fundamentally atomized and exploitative, and totally unsustainable, because it lacks a concept for compensating men for the gendered labor of protection, provision and, crucially, self-control.

Many women are basically fracking the forbearance and goodwill of the men in their lives, taking for granted that methods of social control will keep male behavior in line and male sacrifice flowing. But as the cultural narrative of masculinity weakens, and the historical construction of male character is eroded by resentment and cultural revolution, women will soon find nothing left in the masculine persona to put to use for their own ends. The cultural concept of a prosocial masculinity is already so spent that it's basically coasting on hyperreal fumes and scant historical momentum. It is on the brink of succumbing to individualism and becoming as selfishly, extractively constructed as the contemporary feminist character. Once the majority of men find even the thin gruel of idiosyncratic fulfillment more satisfying than the thankless work of provision, self-discipline and sacrifice, we no longer have stability. We no longer have a population willing to do the dangerous, violent, difficult work that civilization requires. Even more crucially, we have a massive population with a lot more testosterone and a lot less oxytocin who is no longer sufficiently motivated to discipline or restrain the worst of their animal impulses. And who will be sufficiently motivated to risk his life to enforce the law?

Civilization as it is currently organized depends on the masculine mystique. Most men do not mind this! Yes, we see that it's an "empty" "social construct." Yes, we see that it is often violent, stuffy, oppressive and idealistic. But it's also a deeply fulfilling story. We want to give our lives for civilization and the people we love. This is a life well spent!

Men can not be solely responsible for the maintenance of masculine self-definition and responsibility, because we are not solely dependent on it. Men and women are interconnected, part of the same Whole, not meaningfully separable in real terms. Women can not perpetually defect, holding abstract freedom as the highest good in their own life, and expect the social structures that sustain them to hold up. If women do not decide what their mutual responsibility to men will be, as a cultural construct, and willingly take on a gender role that emphasizes that mutuality, prosocial masculinity will disappear, and with it, so will any method of organizing society that we currently recognize.

We have had a women's rights movement, and many men, including myself, supported it wholeheartedly. I do not mind admitting that I was a progressive in my 20s and 30s and that I still hold many of those ideals of freedom and equality close to my heart. Now, men need women to finish their hero's journey, return from the wild, and put their newfound gifts into service: to their communities, and to the men who love them and exist in interdependence with them. The world as we know it depends on a women's responsibilities movement - if such a thing is possible, and if it's not too late.