Engaging with the Inner Life (John Price, PhD)
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Oh, I adore John Price, who is a depth psychotherapist and the host of the podcast The Sacred Speaks. We share many interests—and some podcast guests. John also leads The Center for Healing Arts & Sciences with his wife.
John is someone I could talk to for hours. No, days. But when we sat down some time ago in October, I was particularly curious to talk to him about his work with men. John brings men together into community in very powerful ways that allow for deep understanding and intimacy.
In this conversation, we talk about his approach to establishing intimacy, what he makes of the current cultural crisis involving boys and men, and why he asks men about their inner lives as opposed to their feelings. And we explore what it could look like if we had rites of passage that honored the masculine and the feminine within each of us, in truly unique ways.
John also shares his working definition of spirituality, which is quite beautiful.
MORE FROM JOHN PRICE:
Center for Healing Arts & Sciences
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
JOHN:
What I was thinking about today, my thought about you and I is that there's a real similar interest, my judgment or projection onto you is that we have very kind of similar passions and drives, and so I thought, well, it's going to be a fun conversation. We kind of like to swim the same pool,
ELISE:
And obviously I found you because we have the same taste in people. So that's how I found you through searching for guests and wondering how the hell did he get Richard Rohr and James Hollis and
JOHN:
Yeah, this is lunatic. Yeah, I am sleeper
ELISE:
Who is the lunatic in Houston talking about the things that I'm interested in who also obviously is a pedigreed and licensed TE professional.
JOHN:
And that's something certainly to talk about is one thing that that I'm really actively working on a lot is how do we take these ideas from the ether and really apply them in the form of a healing dynamic, whether it's our integrative center or broader interests retreats and workshops and books and all that. I mean, there really is an attempt to hold the tension between the in spirited part of these ideas and how thrilling it is to be in that kind of thinking space and dreaming space and imaginal space, but then also when you really get into loving relationship with people who've been highly traumatized and are suffering deeply and are in the middle of crisis and how the experience of cultivating and creating relationship that feels safe. And the trick of it all is that you basically forget everything you learned in therapy school and just show up in genuine human relationship because we need to heal the wounds of relationship in relationship.
And so that's something that I think is certainly exciting. I stay very excited about that because as I build all the things that we're building and growing, I hold on very much to this sacred space of the Center for Healing Arts and Sciences, which is our space of being able to sit around the conference room with about 11 different folks that are involved in healing modalities from yoga therapy to acupuncture and herbs to psychotherapy of all kinds of different sorts like social workers and couples and Jungian analysts, and what are we doing and what's the value and what are we trying to provide people. And so asking real world questions application. So that tension, certainly you and I can walk and hold.
ELISE:
The way that I think about it is obviously I think you and I are both very interested in the vertical and the transcendent and the spiritual and
The larger context or structure that we're held in. And then how do you translate that? How do you bring it into the horizontal? How do you live it? How does it move past an intellectual or cognitive concept into something that can be experienced? And obviously we're a mental person, you're mental person. I mean, you're many things, but I'm not as much of a physical feeler. I'm not as much my Claire sentience is knowing and that's where I'm comfortable. And so I love all this heady stuff and I love all these concepts and I love a framework and stages and states and symbols, but where I try to bring my work and you do as well, is how does this heady stuff show up with the Starbucks barista or what's happening in us as we're watching CNN or Fox News or whatever it is, or engaging with someone at school pickup what's alive in us all the time, not so much here's our spiritual life and maybe we go and have that encounter once a week if we happen to be affiliated with the church. But how are the two coming together every day in our lives is very interesting.
JOHN:
When I was thinking about I essentially these 10 threads that I'm working on right now as far as talks and in preparation, I had this fantasy of defining spirituality with you. And so as we're talking about this, I want to throw out, I wrote this morning and it runs the risk of being laborious and verbose, but then I also simplify it. And so I want to try this out on you and see where we go.
ELISE:
Okay, this is fun. I like this thought experiment. Okay,
JOHN:
So spirituality is a practice of attuning to the often immeasurable currents and flow of reality, opening ourselves to moments of awe hidden within everyday life. It is an evolving personal dialogue with nature that fosters a sense of unity and connection, bridging the powerful paradoxes, the inner and the outer, the transcendent and the imminent. The vast and the intimate spirituality invites us to engage with mysteries beyond our comprehension, whether that be divine, the universe or the deeper layers of our own consciousness revealing through ordinary experience with nature, serving both as mirror and teacher reflecting our interstates and guiding us through its rhythms. And simply put, spirituality is a practice that invites profound meaning into our daily lives, finding the sacred and the ordinary. So I just think our conversation is right out of the gate getting to that, the transcendent and the mundane, and how do we do that?
ELISE:
Yeah. Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I hope some book editors are listening. Get this man a book deal.
JOHN:
Hey, thanks. Yeah, yeah. I'm in that process right now, and so that's kind of what I project onto you. You've been such in the literary world, it's so exciting, and I've got your book sitting on my desk
ELISE:
And I want to boil the ocean. I really, I'm always trying to understand the ultimate container and who can help me understand this container with more depth and with a wider and wider and wider and wider frame in part because we live in a particularly right now, incredibly highly polarized time, and our instinct is to exclude or to quote our favorite. I think I can say he's our favorite comparative religion, professor Jeffrey Kripal.
JOHN:
You can say it,
ELISE:
All right, to take everything off the table that we don't want to consider. We're in this frame of just like exclude, exclude, exclude, eradicate, exterminate. I don't like you don't belong. And meanwhile it's like, no, no, no, we are all here. So we need a bigger umbrella, bigger tent, bigger context, everyone belongs. And so doing that and creating a framework that is truly inclusive and of wildly divergent worldviews and belief systems and it's so fun. But as you know, it's so hard and it's so hard to do it simply. And I know that Father Richard Rohr is also your buddy, but he does it exceptionally well.
JOHN:
I feel of all
ELISE:
The writers, it's so clear and just blindingly clear.
JOHN:
And so you and I definitely can kind of levitate on the same people that we respond to Well
ELISE:
And trying to do the same thing. And where, I mean, obviously our work is different and you bring something totally different in the sense of doing work directly with groups. I feel like that's, I want to go there with you now. I want to talk about your work with men.
JOHN:
Yeah, good.
ELISE:
In part because I am very concerned about men. I recognize the unfolding, slowly unfolding, ever present crisis that's here and growing, although maybe not growing. I think maybe we're just becoming more conscious of the fact that there are a lot of boys and men and a lot of pain who are then behaving in ways that are wounding. I don't really understand it. I see it as what's happening is just this pronounced fear of their own internal feminine, and they identify it in the external world. And so women are the problem. And any gains that women have made culturally, even though we don't yet have equity, are the problem and are affront to some men. I'm talking about sort of the extreme right manosphere situation that's happening. And then there are just men who are generally wounded by patriarchy. Can you tell us what you think is happening?
JOHN:
What an incredible subject and what a valuable subject to explore. So young did something really beautiful with this. He was a product of his time, but he did something beautiful, which is talk about the tension of opposites that exists within us. And so you're articulating that. Jeff certainly talks about our cultural lens that we filter everything through. And so certainly we're born into a culture that has been so solar, so everything is measurable, is identifiable, is external, is surface. So if we take the gendered component out of it, we can just say that our culture as a whole has really prioritized the solar mentalities and the lunar mentalities. That of course, this moves into gender dynamics where we say, okay, the more intuitive, the darker, the more chthonic and earthly dimensions that we tend to look at, mother earth, father sky, right? The transcendent and the mundane.
What we've done I think is literalized that, and it's played out in our cultures. And so men, as you know, have been subjected to, well, a great deal of criticism early on in life. The two primary words that I won't say here that most men are very familiar with, essentially signify being weak, equate that which a man shouldn't be with gayness or womanness. And so men grow up not learning who we are, but learning who we shouldn't be. And so it's a process of negation where we're saying, don't be that. I mean one radical reality, and I'm fairly certain this is right, so anybody like fact check me, that's fine. But this is something I heard a while ago, which was the first degree that the humanities released in masculinity studies was done. So in 2014, I'm pretty sure that's spot on. But regardless of that, the underlying nature of it resonates deeply, which is men have largely defined themselves by what we're not, rather than explore with curiosity who we are.
And men certainly have prioritized the external world. And so yes, the feminine gets projected onto women, but as you said, it also desperately hurts men. And so we're all participating in this wounding dynamic where men are needing to go into the more lunar elements of themselves, the intuitive, the inner, they're feeling nature. I just circled up with a group of men today in this office, a Jungian analyst in the practice. We facilitate two men's groups each Thursday, and we were just talking about asking men to not go into their story, but get into the feeling of the experience. And so don't tell me about what's happening, tell me about what you're feeling right now. And when you ask someone, people tend to struggle on this, but men certainly struggle more. When you say, get to the feeling, a lot of men are going to say, what do you mean? And they'll say, well, I feel like this really sucks and I don't like that thing. I am like, whoa, that's not a feeling, right? That's your narrative that you've got. And oftentimes that's facilitating you getting disconnected from what's really genuinely true about this discomfort, sadness, anger, resentment, fear, rejection, abandonment. We'd much rather tell you the story about how we're dealing with it, what's going on out there, what the solutions are guilty, by the way, than to be in relationship with people as we are desperately suffering. So men tend to suffer in silence as Jim Hollis often quotes. So when you take that and broaden it out pretty far, I guess that's an issue sociologically that we're experiencing. But you asked about archetype. James Hillman offers a really great summation of what's happening on some level. He says, we no longer have mythology to orient us. Mythologies are storied ways of representing currents of energy that are universal. This is what the gods are. The gods are that don't suffer the burdens of life and death. And so they're universal in every time and experience of our human consciousness. Are they transhuman? Probably, maybe not, I don't know. But what the gods are, at least in our conscious human experience, is all these currents and energies that we all experience. And so what mythology does is it allegorize or encapsulates these narratives so that we can relate with them and we can understand what the underworld is and what rage is because we know Aries and we know what Athena is when it's more of the feminine cunning, strategic orientation to war and strategy, which is a total reduction, but those are powers and forces.
What about attractiveness and beauty and war and politics and all these dynamics that show up mythology helped us relate to those powers and forces in storied form because something beautiful about humans is that we story, we are stories, we are storying, we story each other. And so we may as well story the gods. Unfortunately in modern time, we don't have mythology that's living any longer. This is Nietzsche's point. We have dead mythologies, so they're about a previous time. And James Hillman, his point is that we have depth psychology now to understand these realities and currents of our lived experience. And so I think we're in a period of time that's really trying to resurrect what was lost as our myths. Were dying to try to say, how does the masculine function in culture, self and other without a guide rail or guideposts or men's communities?
And Joseph Campbell said that the day, the men's club, he didn't mean it in a negative like power seeking way. He meant it in that men need to go outside of their bowl to get outside of the city center and be wild together and be expressive together and participate in dramas because we don't have the kind of physiological blood that women have that sets them up with the cycles of nature just in born into their physiology. And men, we don't have that. We don't create and give birth to children. So we have to create and give birth to drama and to tension and to rites of passage and to powerful experiences that we share together. And without that, we're lost. I think that's what's happening in our current culture. We've got a bunch of lost boys, and we're desperate for leadership that's not dominant, but it doesn't help us conquer, but helps us go inward and understand how to be with the forces of energy that exists inside of us.
Beautiful.
ELISE:
Didn't young say something like the mythologies or the gods are now showing up in us as pathologies? Yeah,
JOHN:
The Gods left Olympus and landed in the solar plexus. Yeah, spot on. And have you ever heard this quote, this is my favorite young, he says, to this day, God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or for worse.
ELISE:
I mean, that's suffering in a nutshell. Those are the little deaths of our lives that we don't necessarily want.
JOHN:
No,
ELISE:
No,
JOHN:
No. So what comes up for you, as I was saying all that about men, I mean, you're so invested in the work with women and one of these days, I want six hours to just think with you is I think what's called for. Yeah. So yeah, what comes up for you?
ELISE:
Well, first it's interesting in the context of men needing their own spaces, because I think we all recognize that women, we need our own spaces as well. And within my work and within my book, a lot of men have not read my book or engaged with my book, which makes me sad. I think that they don't think it applies to them or they're scared or they think that it's an anti-male book in some way. But really it's absolutely not. And if anything, it looks to shift our focus on within our very binary culture, particularly right now of men are the problem, men are doing this to me or slash
Women,
And this whole male thing must be resolved in order for me to emerge and or be myself in the world. And as I was starting to work on the book and really understand the roots and sorts of patriarchy and where did all of this come from? And I had to get really honest, yes, there have been many women in my life who have been ardent supporters and mentors and teachers and leaders, and there have also been an equal number of men. And that in my own life, things didn't sort out quite so tightly as we would like to. I think collectively sometimes presume that patriarchy isn't out there, that I am engaging with it and living it and substantiating it in my own life and policing my own behavior. And it's not so much an external structure as an internally enforced system. And so I had to get really clear about that because it's not as tidy.
It's so much easier to say, oh, I can project all of this onto another entity. I can blame someone else. If they just were to go away, everything would be resolved. Meanwhile, and this, as I go and talk about this book with groups of women around the country, love to talk to men too, what women really want to talk about, it doesn't matter where the conversation starts, it invariably comes back to the pain that they've suffered at the hands of other women. It's not actually, I'm not hearing about a litany of abuses at the hands of men. I'm not saying that there aren't nefarious men in our midst and hyper patriarchal men, but there are hyper patriarchal women and women engage in cruelty. It might not be as overt or visible or we're not murdering people at the same rates, et cetera. But there's a lot of pain amongst women suffered at the hands of other women.
And so that's what I think that women need to address truly. I think that when I look at where women are, one, we've made a huge amount of gains. And yes, we've lost rights. And I'm not at all suggesting that our work has done or that we live in a truly equitable society. But I think about what's possible. And I think that one of the primary factors that's inhibiting us is our own ambivalence about that, our own envy, our own projected anger, and our own internal, yeah, it's an internal ambivalence that shows up. So that's the work for women. And then I am as mentioned, I have two boys married to a lovely man. I have one sibling, a brother, and I'm very concerned about boys and men, not because I'm so worried about whether my children will have the same privileges, et cetera, and whether they'll wield power, I don't care.
But I am very worried about their emotional health, their ability to create and maintain intimate relationships for them to feel like other people care about them and that they can feel comfortable expressing their care for other people and and their ability to enter into and maintain long relationships with the people of their choice. And to maybe have children and be incredibly engaged parents. I'm not worried so much about will my child be the primary breadwinner and maintain his sort of patriarchal privilege? I just worry about their emotional health because I think it's an epidemic of emotional pain, or that's what it feels like to me of men and boys who are completely dislocated. They've left their feelings, they've vacated the premises.
JOHN:
Thank you for that. I have so many thoughts just to jump in with you. And the first is that when we talk about feelings, sometimes that word is almost a four letter word with men. And so when I sit with men, I tend to say, your inner life, what is your inner life? Because I have this group of folks that I work with a number of pretty powerful men, and I'll say, look, in order to get to where you are, you had to achieve a great deal in the outer world. And man, you've got that down. You got it down, but you've had to make a lot of sacrifices, conscious or unconscious to your inner life. And that's what second half of a life is really work, where it's like, Hey, I got all this stuff. Of course this is the privileged socioeconomic class, but it's irrespective of that.
What happens in midlife is we say, oh, I thought I was going to get all those things and be at a certain place, but I'm not. And that's a crisis, of course. But the thing really to get at here that comes up first, just I sent you that stuff from the Jerry folks, the folks I was just interviewing. Then one of the things gender equity their work is doing is really trying to say, Hey, let's put men and women together and let them grieve publicly and then observe each other. And so men are able to see women's pain at the hands of men and vice versa. And all of a sudden compassion is created and it's a real powerful pathway to deal with. Let's go depth psychology for a second shadow, because as you were talking, one thing we're really at risk of doing when we start talking about women and men is we're literally participating in a cognitive distortion, a problematic mode of communicating.
We're lumping in an entire network of nuance into this generalization, and we're doing it with total unabashed freedom and liberation to just feel totally valid in my hatred of that subgroup or that large group, and vice versa, because everybody does it. We're all participating. And so I think the beauty of what you were getting at is that we're really talking about doing shadow work, and we're talking about paying attention to the exaggerated feelings, to the reductions, to the judgments, to the dise that we have that no doubt, in a very helpful way, is providing you an exhaust system for the amount of pain. But Richard, one of my favorite things that Richard says is what we don't transform, we transmit. And so then we're participating in a hot and cold war at the same time and playing hot potato. And so collectively what's happening is the same thing that happens in every single marriage all over the place, whether it's male and male, female and female, male and female, non-binary and binary or poly or polyamorous, it doesn't matter. Back to James Hillman's point, when we're not conscious of our shadow, we dart and zap other people in our spaces, and then they're hurt by that. So they do the same thing. And before we know it, we've got a massive war that's happening. And who knows why we're fighting.
ELISE:
Yes, a hundred percent. And I was nodding vigorously as we were talking about the tendency to essentialize and how frustrating that is, right? For any man who's listening right now who's deeply in touch with his inner world, I love that reframe. I think it's really profound and saying, not all men, but yet this is how we talk about culture. This is how it comes across in the news. I can certainly say as a white woman, there are a lot of white women and there are a lot of varieties of white women in this country and in this world. And yet sort of the ease with which we've, I don't know if that's a word, but we've ified a whole massive group of highly different women across all sorts of measures is extremely frustrating. And then yes, as you said, it creates an abundance of shadow, and then you're trying to create distance from that identity, and you are looking to lash out or distinguish yourself or prove your moral virtue in a way that is exhausting and
JOHN:
Draining
ELISE:
A waste of time and
JOHN:
Energy. Yes. And again, I think depth psychology can certainly be conscious of its shadow, and I tend to run in circles that are very interested in paying attention to that. But I also find it to be an incredibly elegant system that helps us understand that I wish we used on broader scales because to have in your pantheon of orientation to have shadow dynamics where your work is to actually be conscious not only of other people's shadow, which everybody's really good at, but to recognize that you have a shadow. And the shadow is, as we're talking about this, I do want to define it. It's that which doesn't fit in the ego ideal. So shadow is not evil, shadow is not bad. Shadow is not undesirable. If I'm a kind person that engages in culture in loving ways, but I go to prison, my kindness goes into my shadow because my protector steps up
And vice versa. If I'm a kind person in culture, what goes out? Well, my violent aggressor, and do I have that? Of course I do. Of course, I'm capable of things like that. Of course, I am. The real value is in not using it. And so being able to recognize that I have that capacity inside of me. But I think it's to remember that we all possess parts of ourselves that don't fit into this ego ideal. And that's our successful side too. We're all scared and terrified on some level of implicating ourselves in the world as a quote, successful image of ourself because it changes things. So shadow is the part of us that certainly is repressed, certainly is rejected, but it's not always so dark in its evil form, it's dark in its unconscious, unknown, unfamiliar form,
ELISE:
Unrealized,
JOHN:
And
ELISE:
Yeah, it's so interesting, even this idea of kindness, which is so core to so many women, and this need to be seen as nice all the
JOHN:
Time,
ELISE:
Which of course is not a reality, but we think to these identity
JOHN:
Factors, it's such a defense.
ELISE:
I was laughing. This is a very small example of where you can start to recognize this in yourself, but I was driving my kids to school and someone was being sort of slow and not paying attention, and I was like, oh, aggravated, et cetera. And then not four minutes later, I'm at a light and I'm talking to my kids and I'm not paying attention and someone has to honk at me to get me to move. I mean, that is how we move through the world at once. Judging other people for the behavior that we exhibit.
JOHN:
I don't do that.
ELISE:
You don't do that. I'm sure you're way too evolved.
JOHN:
No. Yes. So evolved.
ELISE:
But it is one of those things like when you catch yourself in those moments, judging, feeling resentments, so often it's for things that you are likely going to do or have done and the previous 24 hours, it's that present. And yet so fun to sort of identify it out there. And
JOHN:
I want to go dark for a second. When I was doing my dissertation, there's a fellow down at University of Texas, David Bus or bus, bus. He studies evolutionary biology and human behavior, and he's written a number of books on murder. And I dove deep into this. And in the United States of America, every year there's about 16 to 17,000 murders that are known and reported, and it's estimated to be many more that are never reported. So the trivia question for the day is, if we brought together all of the subgroups of police violence, serial killers, gang violence, organized crime, mass murders, if we put all those together, what percentage of murders do you think they account for in the United States every year?
ELISE:
God, I have no idea. 1%.
JOHN:
Yeah. Close. You're amazing. This blows my mind. It's 5%, 5%, 5%. And what blows my mind about that is that we see the big murder from school shootings to serial killers. We see it all the time, but it is a very small percentage of actual murders. Who is it? It's the person next door. It's crime of passion. They were happy, they were good. They were, what are we talking about? It is murder by folks that are unconscious that their murderer and they haven't put into right relationship. So pent up, at least the Greeks did it somewhat, right? They had Aries in the Pantheon. That was a God. So you had to tangle with that. Your rage, your unbridled rage, Winnicott, early psychoanalytic theorist called it murderous rage that he wrote about. That's in all of us. I mean, suicide, homicidal thoughts, all those kinds of dynamics are pretty natural. And in fact, one researcher I read years ago said that about 80% of us are going to contemplate suicide on some level at some point in our lives
And having that thought because suicide and homicide are on the same energetic system, right? One is an introverted version of murder and one is the extroverted version of murder. Either way, you're killing somebody. And it's from a psychic perspective, it's a solution to end discomfort. I've projected my shadow onto somebody and I dislike them and I want to kill them, or I've projected my shadow onto my interior and I'm only shame, I'm only inferiority, and I want to end that too. And so those dynamics that exist and are alive and well in us need to have their seat in the holy pantheon if we relegate them to this idealized image of divine. And Jeff Kripal writes a lot about this where he'll say something like The angel and the demon are no different. They're both sacred. We did that. We split the world into these dynamics of kind of all good and all bad, but psychoanalysts call this splitting. This is an unhealthy dynamic. I just think that's so important for us to recognize. And certainly it maps on to what's happening with men and women that if women can conveniently blame men, which is not to say that men don't have a lot of responsibility for their part in this dance, it's simply to say that by allowing for your projections to hang on men, you're disowning the opportunity to recognize, as you so eloquently said, the patriarchy that exists, the dominant power, power oriented, dominant part of ourselves, we never have to tingle with it.
ELISE:
Not to get too biblical, but this idea of Satan, which in the Hebrew Bible, in the Torah, in the Old Testament, it's has Satan, it's adversary, it is part of God. He is one of God's messengers, right? Who goes to job, et cetera. And it's this adversary. It's not a foreign evil demonic presence. It it's a totally different worldview in which of course you're going to have to face off against this. This is part of who we are.
JOHN:
Elaine Pagels wrote a book called The Origin of Satan. I love that
ELISE:
Book.
JOHN:
I taught a class on it once, and the class was actually the origin of Satan and the nature of projection. Love that you brought Satan into this, because my understanding of one of the roots of that is the object thrown in one's path. And so we're talking about a little Ganesha talking about obstructions or what zen would call hindrances and bringing them into the sacred dance as opposed to trying to evacuate them because we don't want to look at that and we say, oh, they do it. And talk about one of the most atrocious dynamics in our human history, of course, is what happened to females and the feminine with the witch trials that happened all over the place. The inquisition, I mean the demonic projections onto these, my projection women who are dancing in the moonlight sacred moon rituals. Come on. I want a sacred moon ritual.
ELISE:
Yeah, I just pulled up my Elaine Pagel's notes
JOHN:
On my book. Nice. She's so good. Yeah, so good. At least you're organized as hell if you're happy. It's amazing that you're just cruising through your book notes on there.
ELISE:
She writes the root Satan means one who opposes obstructs or acts as adversary. The Greek term Diablos later translated Devil literally means one who throws something across one's path. And this goes to an earlier point that you made in the conversation. I think it was young, talking about everything that ever goes wrong. Sometimes you are forced off the road, you suffer some sort of small death to your identity, job, relationship, whatever it may be to put you back onto the path that's appropriate.
JOHN:
So two things. First of all, again, ACEs Elise, that was awesome. I love your skill. I love your skills. That's amazing. So the second thing is back to this kind of mythic framework that when you get into ayahuasca traditions and you're looking at different native traditions and certainly the Greek traditions, and when you look at the mythologies that are present, what'll happen is that they tend to have an underworld that is very much of this world. When we have an underworld that is here and present and accessible, we're able to navigate. We've got a map, and granted the map is different from the territory. I can know which direction I'm going, but then I've actually got to climb that mountain. And that looks a little different on the map, but with a mythic framework, we've got a map. So we could say that the underworld is when somebody has a parent who dies by suicide and they are in high school and they are navigating the complexity of social development, and none of the jokes they used to think were funny or funny, none of the people understand what they're going through. Everybody starts to avoid them and starts to be confused and doesn't want to talk about what they're going through. And for a child, a young person to go through that, that is the underworld. It is an unfamiliar, dark place where you are suffering the burden of alienation, of aloneness, of fear, of terror, of horrid abandonment. And how are we to navigate that when our current understanding is pathology,
When what we do is we take symptoms like shame and grief and anxiety, and we medicalize them and pathologize them with the assumption that you need to get rid of it. So hurry up and get over that. Get back to acting like everybody else is acting so we can feel comfortable around you. That is an issue of the most profound effect. And that's just one example. There are a multitude of examples, and anybody who's listening, just search your own experience and try to contemplate what your underworld journeys have been. And because we don't have any framework, we get anxious about our anxiety, we get shame about our shame, and so we have no story to help orient us. And even you brought Christianity. I mean, one of the major problems of Christianity is it's back then, it's not now. The best theologians I know and the most amazing priests and ministers that I know are all making the myth living.
They bring it into current day, but they need to do some flexing with that. So what Hillman is really trying to say, and what Young's comment about the gods of descended from Olympus and landed in the solar plexus is that we pathologized our nature. We pathologize our symptoms. And so as the Buddha says, don't get stung by the same arrow twice, we're consistently getting stung by the same arrow. My suffering is bad enough, but to suffer the suffering, now I've got a panic attack. And that I think is necessary. When we think about depth psychology, mythology, and these orientations, certainly men and women, we no longer have maps to orient us. And so on one level, it's valuable. On one level, it's not on the level that it's not, it's we're left to do it on our own. We've got to figure this out. We've got to bump up against each other, bump up against our conscious experience, struggle and wrestle with all of the tensions that show up in the political and the sociological and the psychological and the spiritual. And the blessing of that is we've got to go it alone. We've got to create it. We've got to bond together and recognize that the human is psychological, biological, social, and spiritual. And this part of it has been forgotten.
ELISE:
The spiritual part.
JOHN:
Yeah, totally. Yeah.
ELISE:
So what's the map then? I feel like women have maintained some connection to our map. As you mentioned, those initiation rights are baked into who we are, and I think that we are much more comfortable with an expression of both masculine and feminine or to user language, the interior life and the external life. Were I think, quite fluid in our ability to move back and forth between the two and to recognize that we really need or want to be expressed in both of those worlds, even if it's hard to do it simultaneously or over the course of a single day. What's the map for men? You mentioned going into the woods and engaging with drama. I think instead of identifying the feminine out there and trying to destroy it, it is coming to peace with the feminine inside. But I don't know what that looks like to actually get that into a cultural process. What is the map?
JOHN:
Well, thank you. Gosh, what a great question. I don't know first of all, but I'm going to take a stab at it immediately. What I started to think about was the religious orientation of very early Christian and pre-Christian in that neck of the woods. And certainly you can look at other tribal and native communities and see the way that they structure their social systems. And interestingly enough, their social systems are structured in small systems that connect in a kind of network. Anthropologists have identified this. You'll probably know this, 150 is the number of human beings that can convene until the systems start to fall apart. And so there's a real value for us living in small community. So early Christian literature has Christianity, as it was called, the way. It was a totally different approach. So it was very small communities. And Aldi Huxley also wrote about how overpopulation is a really big problem for us because we lose our social systems that are collectives because we are all reduced to these singular images of who we should be.
So with that said, I think that men are desperate to find small communities of initiated men because you can see this play out in the negative with gangs, for example. You'll see the same kind of rites of passage, ritual, ingroup, outgroup kind of dynamics, ways of dressing. You'll see those things manifesting in gang culture, and the gang culture will exploit that. But what we don't have are healthy initiated men that are convening other men. We do. I mean, it shows up in various places, certainly from, I know the Mankind Project does some amazing work. Richard has done some incredible work with Men's Rights of Passage. Bill Plotkin is a guy who's doing some incredible work. I don't think it's just for men. He's taking people out into nature. So what we're needing are these systems that exist to take men out to participate in these dramas with rites of passage.
And frankly, I think the people that are taking that on are folks like me because our religious systems used to do it. But religion has been a bit confused. Our religion currently, certainly in the West, is more about belief system. And so we will somewhat tribally organize our social systems based upon a particular belief pattern. And so we congregate based upon our beliefs. And one of the things that I'm certainly working to do, and I'm connected with a number of folks, including Richard and a lot of the men that I circle up with, what we're all trying to do is congregate people based upon the ways in which we suffer. And those are different questions. And so when I circle up with men here, it happens where you see a man who finally can't contain it, and he purges in public. It's one of the things that I urge men to do all the time.
I'm like, no, you come up here. You circle in. You purge in public, you face the circle and purge, because we typically purge. We want, it's a shaming experience, so we want to go away and purge outside. And what we need to learn to do is purge in public. So I think that's at least part of the process where we start to convene men together. And then one thing that I'm certainly doing is retreats, wilderness spaces. I just led a retreat with my friend Robert, who we involved equine therapy. We involved target practice. We involved some really powerful carpet work, very powerful, engaged, experiential work. And so I think certainly the king warrior magician lover provides an incredible map. It's an archetypal map of the forces and currents that exist in all men and getting in right relationship. I think that monotheism is an unfortunate theological and philosophical orientation because what it does is it reduces the pantheon to the singular univocal process as opposed to a more polytheistic orientation, which says, I am many
And I need to put those many into right relationships. So certainly Jung's active imagination is a good process. Internal family systems, and IFS provides a really great process. I also want to sit for a moment and just women considering that they have their core blood, right, built into their physiology. And this is not all women, right? There are ways that women don't have that, but I just mean in general, and there's a self creative component to it being in relationship with that blood, right? Men no longer have those spaces, and that's part of the problem because men have been dominant from a power position. We've become suspicious of when men congregate in masculine or male only spaces. And so there's a real tension there because we need to share power. If I'm philosopher king of the world, one of the first things I would be doing is setting up.
I'd be reestablishing the red tent, totally bring it back. I'd be reestablishing sacred masculine rituals where there are pretty radical rites of passage that tend to be discomforts involved, isolation, going out in the wilderness alone, having some kind of painful experience that one has to endure, and then returning to the culture transformed. And then we would have the men and women community come together. And so ideally, it's that kind of yin and yang dynamic where the two become one. And right now when we're so adversarial, we are lacking in our capacities to inseminate and incarnate the divinity in self and other in the ways that we have as our potential.
ELISE:
And again, to get really essentialist about gender, which I know what is gender, right? This is one of the conversations that we're having, which is interesting to think about how much of it is driven by biology,
How
Much of it is society cultural in terms of what a boy should be or what a girl should be, et cetera. And then recognizing that we all have that, women have this internal masculine men have an internal feminine, et cetera. Is there a version where you feel like there's two rites of passage for both women and men? Yes, it's red tense, but it's also this sort of primal masculinity for women and for men. It's also this essential or primal femininity.
JOHN:
I had a fantasy as you were talking about, if our culture really were able to be self-reflective, this is my fantasy, and this may be to egalitarian or something, but my fantasy is the women would sit on a council that would initiate women. The men would sit on a council that would initiate men, and then you would be over. The women would be given over to the men, sacred leaders in that tradition, and the women would be initiated into their masculine self. And then vice versa, the Sacred Council of Women would initiate the men so that we get connected with the nuances, and then we come together in a sacred dance and we participate in rituals together that allow for us to maintain the sacredness of this experience. I mean, gender is, it's so hard to speak flippantly about this subject. It makes us a little insane, and we need to pay attention to that.
Let's not live out the discomfort. Let's get curious about where the discomfort comes from. I yearn to be initiated by a sacred community of women. I yearn to participate and provide sacred initiation process for men. And what does that even mean? Well, it means to be initiated into yourself. It doesn't mean to become their version of a boy or their version of a girl, but to become your version of the truest expression of you. And then you learn how to contribute that to the culture at large in a healthy way. And so our systems just aren't set up this way. I think that Jerry works certainly gets close because they're interested in dealing with and holding sacred space regarding the energies where men and women have both been hurt deeply, and they need to be witnessed by each other. And that's the thing that we get so triggered.
Great word, annoying word. We get so triggered by it that we forget that we don't explore our trigger. Why are you triggered? Why are you overwhelmed? Why are you losing your shit? Why are you yelling at another person? Why are you spewing your beliefs over somebody else? Why aren't you getting curious about why you're upset? Are you scared? Are you feeling inferior? That's what we don't tolerate in the inner space. So I think as a culture, we really need to provide people the capacity to become acquainted with these forces and powers that exist inside of all of us, and to take seriously that we need to become the unique expression of who we are, and not just fall into some cultural conditioning that says, this is who you are. This is how you learn. This is what,
ELISE:
Yeah, no, I think that's really important. So I'm just going to write, turn us out of our conversation. We'll obviously have to do this again, and I'll include links on my substack to the things that we're talking about.
JOHN:
Thank you.
ELISE:
But I have this speaking of shadow, just kidding at night, because I tend to read intense nonfiction. I like to watch Love Island and play match tile games, and while my kid falls asleep, and I like to watch the UK version of Love Island, I'm relatively new to the show. I doubt you've ever seen it, but it's fascinating. And one of the things that I love is just watching this group of horny 20 somethings just being, it's
JOHN:
Being filmed all the time with all your impulses
ELISE:
Being yes, and pursuing love with each other. And I find it to actually be quite a kind show and to defy some stereotypes that I think we would have about communities of girls and communities of boys in the sense that they all really do end up loving each other. And it's one of my favorite challenges near the end of the show is that they wake up one morning and they're in their couples, and there are those fake babies that they have to take care of.
And for the day, they each get a child. And without fail, these boys, they're all semi-professional soccer players and rugby players and of that ilk. But these boys are the ones invariably, who are really tending to these crying plastic babies. And in that sense, I think it's amazing programming because it's a bit counter-cultural, not what you would expect. And the girls are like, ah, no, no, no, no, no. I don't even want to have kids and put that thing down. And the boys are naming, I don't know. It's an interesting experience, John, but it speaks, I think, to this idea that you can take this quintessentially high testosterone, beautiful 22-year-old professional athlete, put him in community with other boys or men, and then watch his heart melt for his baby named Donna or whatever it is. We are all to say so much more complex. And I think that there's something healing truly about Love Island uk. I am just going to put it out there in terms of watching these people defy cultural expectations, or at least mine. It's not what I thought it would be.
JOHN:
The thought that comes to Thank you for sharing. The thought that comes to mind is how sensitive boys are in early infancy. There's a sensitivity
ELISE:
There,
JOHN:
An emotional
ELISE:
Sensitivity. More sensitive. Yes.
JOHN:
Yeah, totally. And that's validated and backed up. And I just, as a human being and as a man, I can experience profound intimacy with my wife. And I've been able to cultivate, we're in a radical marriage, which is wild and exciting and beautiful and hard. And there's all the things in it, all the human things that we experience. And I am grateful for this partnership that we've established. And I love her deeply. And I am in it. I'm totally in it. And the intimacy that I've established with men that I've been in sacred relationship with is profoundly powerful and different, and it's necessary. And I, I don't think I'd be as capable of the intimacy with my wife as I would if I hadn't established intimacy with the men in my life and vice versa.
And so what is, I have a sea of riches in relationships because I am a relationship person. I value relationship. I talk to every one of my patients about friendship, and I think that it's a sadness that I have that men have been reduced to these caricatures of themselves when I am in circles currently with men who are profoundly feeling toned, that are profoundly generous and compassionate and loving and deeply connected. Just today, I've probably sustained and loved how the Gottman's have that thing like hug until you relax. I've probably done that with 15 men today already.
Just beautiful, connected intimacy. And I'm not just talking about physical intimacy, but my wish is this map that we're creating here for the masculine and the feminine, is that we did deeply invest in intimacy with both the women in our lives, the men in our lives, and whatever kind of gender expression also shows up in life, because all things, all people, as Richard is so fond of saying everything and everyone belongs. And so we need to have that as our ethos and our approach. So that would be my 2 cents for our map. And I think that's what you probably see in Love Island is that, whoa, we don't tend to see men being intimate like that.
ELISE:
Yeah, there's a lot of physical touch, a lot of hugging. Totally. It's I think, quite powerful in the context of showing these men as both highly desirable and coveted and also deeply relational. It builds over the course of the season. And God, we go high and we go low. But it has been one of the really fascinating things about watching.
JOHN:
I got to check it out, that show.
ELISE:
It's quite compelling. Some of it is, it's wild. My kids, it drives them nuts that I watch Love Island.
JOHN:
Such a devotee's beneath me.
ELISE:
Yeah. But I think that I hold a very high, I hold the intellectual standard in my household so they could elevate their own watching material too. I'll just say that. Alright, well we'll do this again.
Thank you. This is so fun.
JOHN:
I love being in conversation with you. Thank you so much, Elise.
ELISE:
Don't be a stranger.
JOHN:
I don't.
ELISE:
I'll include links to John's center and Houston and along with the books and resources that we mentioned in our conversation. I love John's podcast, the Sacred Speaks. He's very interested in psychedelics. That is where your curiosity lies. He has done a lot of conversations about the sacred and the psychedelic. That's a big focus of his work. It's less interesting to me, which is why we didn't go there today, but maybe he'll come back to talk about that down the line. And yes, he's done conversations over the past few years with a lot of my favorite thinkers as mentioned, including Father Richard Rohr.