Let’s Talk About Men Baby

Hello and welcome to Daydio Ego Marioso podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Fina, and I am an Ego and Soul enthusiast. We can no longer be strangers to our egos and how they function. So come join me as we find out why and how this philosophy of dating your ego but marrying your soul is true and useful for you.

Today's guest blew me away with her unique perspective on a subject matter I never thought would exist or existed. I met with Reed Zirlo. She is a counselor and a coach and the founder of Men Matter Coaching. She's also a realtor in the Boston area.

And today she took time out of her busy schedule to talk to me about a subject matter that's very close to a heart. Men Matter. She explains so many interesting things to me about how men treat emotions and how emotions treat men. We discussed this within the context of a breakup or divorce but honestly, and you will see this when you listen to the interview, we ended up getting so much information on how men and their emotions work, what help they get offered, what their social conditioning is and how it's time for it to change.

After all, men do make half the population. So without further ado, let's listen in to Reed Zirlo. Well Reed, let me officially welcome you to the show. It is an honor, a pleasure, a delight and I'm so excited to have you on.

Welcome, how are you today? Thank you so much, Terri. I am so excited to be on your show. I remember when we first started talking about this a while ago and so I'm glad that it is actually happening.

Wonderful. That's great. So I'm glad that you're your mission with regard to counseling is and if you could tell us a bit about reward, that would be great. Absolutely.

I am very happy to have a chance to do that. So, men matter coaching is something that I've launched and in the process of still launching. I started working with men almost organically about 12 years ago and it has developed over the years alongside other work that I've done because I am a realtor as well in the Boston area and the men matter coaching really is very close to my heart because I have recognized how much men are left to the side in many regards having to do with their emotions, their spiritual life, their inner workings. I feel as though we've come a long way in many regards and it's time that we continue that moving along and awakening and becoming more and more conscious for everyone and each other.

So I've launched it. I work with men who are specifically going through divorce or break up, heartache dealing with the inner workings and upset that happens during that process. Oftentimes, if you go online and you look for help as a man, you're getting legal or financial and the rest of it is kind of left to the side in many regards. Very unlike women where we are constantly immersed, engaged, encouraged to talk to each other, show up with each other, get help, get support, go to therapy, go to a group, just chat with your girlfriends.

Guys don't necessarily do the same thing. They're not encouraged to do the same thing. There's not a lot of opening there as of yet and I'd like to change that. I'm doing that right now, man by man, conversation by conversation with my podcast as well and with folks like you.

I know your audience is mostly women but let's face it, we all have an uncle, a brother, a friend, a cousin, an ex that we even broke up with that we know is struggling and could use some help, could use some support, could use somebody to listen to bounce ideas off of and then leverage their heartache and their pain to move on to the next level in their life. That's what I like to help people do. That's fantastic and yes, the show is for women but having you on it seems to be giving me an opportunity to even talk to men out there and also for women listening, it's about increasing and expanding your understanding of what men go through and as a result being more compassionate when situations arise that don't always allow you to be patient with each other or compassionate with each other. So this is a major turning point for me in the show or a major unique perspective to get on the show because so far it has been all women.

And in fact, I was talking to a guest this morning, was talking about tapping which is emotional freedom technique and she was actually commenting on the fact that she has a lot of men come to her going through the wars who are very stuck. Also fathers who can connect with their daughters. So it's not just in the romantic sense, it could be in so many ways and then are actually quite blocked and I'm a writer so I do sometimes come up with crazy terms and indulge me. I'm a feminist, we could also have a manist or a manist, so a manist sounds better.

Could you share some figures on how much or how little support men receive from psychological and emotional point of view in modern day society? So the numbers I'm going to probably get a little bit wrong. I have written about that but I don't have the specific numbers at the top of my head but I can tell you that I have done research in that as an example and not to jump into the deep end immediately but suicide is something that is much more prevalent in men than in women. And when I learned that I was surprised and I actually spend a lot of time with men but I want to say it's like 35 or 34 or something like that percent.

It's significantly higher than women. One of the challenges in that and one of the things that the research has uncovered is that a lot of men once they take their path in life and they get to midlife and they think that they've done all the things that they're supposed to be doing and then they turn around and they're like they're not so happy at their job, they're not so happy with their family structure, they're not happy with their intimate relationship, they're kind of like what the heck, what's going on. And one of the biggest problems is that there's no real place to turn oftentimes for them. They kind of end up in this isolated mindset of unhappiness and what did I do wrong, failure.

It's kind of lays on them in a very different way oftentimes than women and they kind of get stuck in that rut of not being able to get any help, any outside perspective. And so they go it alone. That's one of the main differences is that men are still geared towards going it alone. Yeah.

So I mean I think it would be safe to start off by saying that men don't have that much emotional and psychological support in one of their societies. They just don't. And that's the thing. The thing that strikes me is that when you talk to women about separation and even mothers, they often talk about failing themselves or failing the other person.

And it's interesting to hear you say that men feel like failures too. It's almost as if everyone ends up feeling like a failure but women have this opportunity to express their emotions more than men do and that makes a huge difference. Because men are just not supposed to cry or not supposed to express. I think that's absolutely correct and I think that it's even deeper than that because in my experience of talking to men, one of the main differences that happens with a breakup as an example of a divorce is that men tend to look at their divorce as a failure.

There's either an achievement or there's a failure. Whereas women tend to look at it like I mean I was saying I chose the wrong partner. We just grew apart. Men kind of take it online.

They failed at a project. And I know it's not a project to them per se but it is perceived and processed as a personal failure on their part. Whereas women don't usually take it on as a personal failure. They take it on as a if it is a failure.

It's a failure of their relationship. Or it's a mistake in choosing the wrong partner. So it really hits men in some different ways. And the problem is that so many people ignore the impact on the insides of a man because they just assume that they're going to pull themselves up by bootstraps or they assume that they're the powerful one.

They assume that they're the ones who have the strength. They're the ones who call the shots because they're the ones a lot of times with the finances and with the this and the bad and the legal and everything else. And so they kind of get almost swept by the collective, by an archetypal vision of this powerful man who's a warrior who's going to crush the woman and someone and so forth. In that storyline, what happens is the guy who actually has the insides like we do gets lost.

Right? The inside of the man, the soul of the man, the emotional life of the man, the heart, all of that gets lost in that vision. All that storyline might be true for some. It's equally true for women who are incredibly demanding and like, you know, pound the man for every single sentence he's got.

I mean, it works both ways. Absolutely. I think we're going to talk about the discussion around what women do to men and we'll come to that later. But the reason I think you're going to be so effective in this chosen field of yours is because you chose a podcast to start off with.

And I think, you know, while we're discussing that, men don't express themselves at the same time, they're very private. And so having a podcast with information that would help them deal with their emotions, connect with their own emotions, despite society's guidelines for them, would really help with their roles as human beings. So I would love to hear a little more about your podcast and you said it came about really organically. So please share with us how that happened.

Yeah. So the podcast is called Break Up to Break Through. It's one word, Break Up and then two and then Break Through is one word and it's THRU. It came about kind of suddenly and out of the blue, the podcast itself.

The coaching came out very organically. The podcast was sudden. I had imagined writing a book, kind of like your expertise of writing. And I had imagined that forever.

When I decided to do the coaching and launched the business, I thought, this is the time and this is going to be the topic. And I went about looking and researching because I really wanted to be serious about it and not just do it on my own. I wanted some help. I wanted to get some coaching through that process came upon several different programs, different coaches, then just happened to fall into the Brian Rose London Real podcasting class.

Digital marketing is quite amazing. I'm sure everybody listening has had the experience of researching suitcases on Amazon and all of a sudden you're getting like every single ad in the world about suitcases and you know, airline tickets. Well, that's what happened for me as well. I was looking for a way of getting my message out and before you knew it, I ended up and I hit this until London Real a lot anyways as one of those YouTube stations that I frequently did.

So it didn't take me long. It was something that it was like the universe showed up and I was like, you know, ready for finding a way to disseminate my message and honestly podcasting. It is so much more, I think, accessible and meaningful, continuous and ongoing that I'm super glad that I ended up choosing that path and that it fell into my lap so nicely and easily. Me too.

Yeah. I'm so happy you've done this because I do feel we owe it to the men in our society. So just for the audience and any men listening in or anybody listening and reading, what kind of topics do you cover in your podcast and what kind of topics could people hope to get help with? So the podcast is geared towards men about divorce and breakup and the journey back to life.

I interviewed men who have been divorced or are going through divorce so that other men can hear a man's voice, having some of those similar experiences, being able to open up and be vulnerable about some of the heartache that they experienced and most importantly, they are break through. I believe very wholeheartedly that having a breakup is definitely an opportunity where there's an opening and you know, you have a chance. There's an opportunity to have some light shed in areas that maybe you hadn't before. Yeah.

And some folks and a lot of men actually, it's really quite easy to get stuck. It's quite easy to get stuck in a lot of anger and resentment and hurt and fear, depression, anxiety, your whole world is falling apart. It's very chaotic. You're completely off kilter.

Most men end up having to move out of their house on their own and starting completely over. And I know that a lot of women feel that's the right way and so on and so forth that they're especially their children and so on and so forth. And I understand that mindset. That is what happened in my case, right?

I, my ex husband, didn't move out of my house. I think that it gets lost a lot of times at how much even just environmentally, right? They lose. They're no longer sleeping in that house.

They're no longer waking up in that bed. They usually, many times, end up with less time with their children, even though sometimes they end up with more one on one, right? But even then, they have to many times learn how to parent in a completely different way because a lot of men, whether we like it or not and still, they do somewhat, depending when there's a unit, they do kind of depend on the mom to do certain parenting things. And they've got to really learn and step into how do I do this now on my own.

And, you know, many men actually find a lot of opportunity in that. You know, they, they grow a huge amount just in stepping into parenting fully on their own. So there's a lot of things that we cover. There's a lot of things that we cover, but we do go through journeys of other people's of men's divorce and their experience and the reasons why they got divorced and what happened for them during that process.

I interview personal development experts as well as spiritual experts to offer tools and techniques, strategies, many of which that are very similar that some of your listeners probably use or would like to use or could use. Human skills, right? They're not gender oriented. These are things that need to help spiritually, you know, on deeper levels.

They're not just service. Yeah. You just keep getting the feeling from listening to you speak that you cater to your audience so well because men like things to be quite efficient and effective, don't they? They don't like the flowery stuff.

No, not too much food. Yeah. I'm going to get right to the heart of the matter. This is what happens.

This is what he's going through. It's normal. Here's an expert talk. Listen to them and you can get in touch with me for help.

That's very efficient. I love that. I'm quite curious about, I don't know if it's just heterosexual men. If I'm not being inclusive, let me just say men.

I think talk from a young age to not show emotions unless it's for, you know, is it instinctual or is it something? Learn because I can see my husband sitting in front of the TV with rugby and he will go red and have tears and he will sweat and I would do all of that in one fight with him. But he would not do any of that in the fight, but he will do that for rugby. Is it a talk?

Is it instinctual? What is it? What have you learned about men? When it comes to these things?

That's a fabulous question and it's actually one that believe or not I have given a decent amount of thought to. And I think the short answer is that it's both. I think that there's certain wiring that is existing. I know that we're in an age where gender is kind of almost under attack and there's a certain level of especially the millennials and the younger generations that are kind of like healthier you assume that I'm male, you know, whatever, you know, I get that.

And at the same time, biologically speaking, there's two parts that come together to make a whole in terms of a human being, another human being. And we all come here with masculine and feminine where none of us are one or the other. We might end up in a body that represents one or the other and equipment and so on. But we do end up with both pieces and energetically speaking.

There's plenty of women out there that are walking around that are very, you know, out in the world thinking should happen and directive and efficient and effective and CEOs, right? And there are men who are caregivers and take care of people and end up being a nurse practitioner or, you know, the stay at home dead. And that's becoming more and more prevalent. So when I speak about, when I respond to a question like the one that you just proposed, I want to say that there is no silver bullet for any of this and I understand that.

What I'm talking about is in generalities and typically in like some of these more traditional roles that said, I do think that there is some wiring, there's nurture and there's nature. And I do think that they collide with each other. The interesting thing about sport in particular is that I realized this several years ago. And I think part of it was watching my son watch sports and being around that and sitting in that with him, it finally dawned on me.

I was like any sport, okay, team sport specifically has an entire lifetime in it. It has a beginning. It has an end and it has all this stuff in between. It has tragedy.

It has triumph. It has mundane. It has the scores and the losers and the, you know, it's got every aspect. Yeah, there's blood.

I mean, these knees. Absolutely. So there's an entire life. When fans are in the stands and they're watching it, they are essentially experiencing an entire lifetime in the span of an hour or an hour and a half or however long it is, okay?

And they don't necessarily know that consciously, but that's what allows them to engage. It allows them to engage is both the ability to plug in and be very connected to something that they can then let go up, right? Because it's not forever. It's not something that lasts 80 years.

It's something that they can go and experience and have the nervous system that's raw that takes in all the sensory, right? And it's safe. Right? So they can be fully engaged.

You know, the next day they're okay and they can show their work. When they're engaged in a relationship, right, that's ongoing, it's not as easy for them to be able to turn off the TV and be like, oh, okay, we're done with that. Yeah. That was just the game.

Yeah. Okay. So the revelation of their nervous system, oftentimes I think because of the wiring and because of the environments and the messages that they get, the main message that they get when their nervous system starts to react in a vulnerable way is to shut that shit down because they've got to be a lawyer and make shit happen. They don't have time to be feeling and processing and, you know, going through the motions of internal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because they got to go out and they're directive.

They have to make shit happen in the world. They make the tangible world come alive. That's what a lot of their wiring and energetic is created to do while ours tends to be created to create and to be theirs is to make shit happen. There's a movement.

The energetic and the movement is relatively different for masculine versus feminine. True. Especially if they fall into very traditional roles, you know, as men and women when that happens. I mean, isn't it funny when men who are so organized about their life and their emotions?

I find men quite uncomplicated and it's great hanging out with them. It's always the friends that are the least complicated that find the women that are the most complicated, most manipulative, most not practical. And then you're kind of like, what the fuck did you just do? And get back and let it happen.

And you know, just be there to love and to support and do all of that. Talking about instincts and always reminding of my younger brother, you know, when we were kids going out, my dad, we went out. All the cousins, they would always say, oh, stop being a sissy. They'd always say that to the younger boys.

I did that once to my brother because I was older sisters. I was like, believe it. And I said, oh, you're just being a sissy. And no, I'm being sweet.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Oh my God. You know, even at that age, he told you. Yeah, that was profound.

You know, he put me in my place. And if more men went courage to do that, I think the world would be a happier place. And in fact, suicides in the UK amongst men are a big topic of discussion because it's rampant, especially men in their 30s and 40s. And it's just so sad every time you see that happen.

It is just sad because you know, there's a lonely human being that's just given up hope and didn't have anyone to help them. And it makes me sad anyway. It makes me sad too. And you're absolutely right.

I mean, I feel like what you were talking about in terms of like some of the men who are the least complicated and end up with a complicated woman. Oftentimes that's code for she's a pain in the ass, you know, or emotionally. She's not able to really necessarily regulate emotionally. I mean, that's how I kind of view it, right?

There's a certain emotionality that is really challenging. And I feel like I believe wholeheartedly that the universe is always trying to balance itself. When I have that imagination, I look at things like a pendulum that you drop from one extreme and you let go of it and it's inevitably going to end up on the other extreme, not to enter into politics, but I do believe whole hard way that here in the United States, we're having to deal with some of our political outcome. I feel as though, you know, what we're facing oftentimes now is the price that we pay for a president like Obama.

It's unfortunate. I feel like that that's the way that the universe is figuring out how to balance itself. But I feel like there's just such a clear opposition and opposite that has occurred. And I think that when you look through history, when you look through time, when you look at, you know, at a micro and macro level, you find that you find that they are trying to balance in all kinds of ways.

And our relationships are definitely an expression and reflection of what's going on inside of us. So if somebody is really uncomplicated, easygoing, a lot of times you might find that that person has disowned a lot of their complicated, more vulnerable emotions, right? Not that they never had them, but that they just kind of patting now. And then they end up in a situation on the outside of their life that is very reflective of that, which they've pushed away.

Because one way or the other, it's going to show up. We carry it all. Yeah, there's no escaping, you're absolutely right. I really like what you said at the universe is always trying to balance itself.

I think there's no other time that might be wrong, but for every individual to stand up for the universe right now, like the situation is in the US, because with everything that's going on, it's individual responsibility that's going to save the country. It's nothing else. It's about controlling your own prejudices, controlling your own eating habits, taking care of the environment. If every individual can stand up to do that, no Trump is going to destroy our world.

And that's where we are today. You know, it's the environment, it's the planet, it's become bigger than anything else that we've seen in the past. And that's why there isn't a better time than now to date your ego with Marius Sol. I totally agree with you.

I couldn't agree with you more. You actually have, I think, the best title of a podcast ever. Absolutely 100%. Absolutely 100%.

That is, your ego and marry your soul is the key. I'm a big kind of knowledge absorber. I like to watch a lot of YouTube's and there's certain topics that I'm incredibly interested in and always have been. Technology, biology, gene, DNA, all the, you know, neurology, all those kinds of things.

They're just incredibly fascinating to me. And I have to say, I listen to, can I have to get the guys named, but I listened to Mind Valley. Yeah, was it was lifted? So Mind Valley is vision, lucky on who is saying it correctly, but he has this called Awesome Fest.

And each year he has this big gathering, which I'm totally going to go to, but he has this big gathering and he had a Google executive from their think tank on and they were interviewing him and they specifically asked him, they were like, look, you know, with all the technology that's coming down, AI and blockchain and everything else that's happening, what do you think is the most important thing for human beings to learn? His answer was so profound and made so much sense to me. It was simply that he believes, hardly, that the only way that humans will continue to be beyond the edge, beyond the curve of technology is our consciousness. Our being awake is what it is that's going to be that's our special recipe.

Our special zest is being conscious and that it makes almost perfect sense that technology would be moving at the pace that it's moving and that spirituality, consciousness, waking up, yoga, meditation, mindfulness, all those things would be going along in a parallel path, if you will, because in reality, it takes a certain amount of attention and focus to be able to be conscious and awake. And without the technology doing some of the other things that we used to do and spend a lot of our energy and time doing, right, it has freed some of our time, but it is going to require like the overwhelming majority of us as a race to be able to wake up. Absolutely. Technology will outpace us.

And really, you know, I mean, it's the one thing that distinguishes a human being from every other living being on our planet, our ability to be conscious, to be connected spiritually, to raise our energy, to our Kundalini, whatever. It is our one God gifted ability that no other living being has. We were not a tree, we're not a dog, we're not any of those beings. And while the sentient beings, this is our unique privilege and we've got to exercise it.

And now is the time with technology. Were you talking about Yubal Harari by any chance? Is that the guy you're looking for? It might be.

I have to look him up. The Israeli gay guy. Oh, no, he wasn't Israeli actually. He was Asian.

He was, I don't know if he's Chinese or Japanese. He's in Silicon Valley. And that's the thing, right? I mean, when Da Vinci was doing what Da Vinci was doing, who knew what Da Vinci was doing?

Not that many. That's basically how many people could know, right? It's over time and his work has been displayed. But in today's world, everybody, including myself, little old me, like sitting in my little corner of the world, right?

I can tune in and I can tap into the mindset of Elon Musk or I can tap into the mindset of Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or, you know, Vishal and Leckiana or any of these people, right? I mean, I have access. We all have access in ways that we never did through technology to be able to have those awakens, right? I mean, yoga, yoga meditation, when I was a kid, we were for the hippies that used to really, really, really love to get naked in countries.

What's basic? Yes. No, I don't think you're wrong. It was the same for us.

And I have a mom who actually at that time and decided to go to India to an ashram to learn yoga, to become a yoga teacher in the 80s, early 80s. I mean, that was like, by far the most whole in the head thing. I've, you know, watched any woman do and I've totally respect and she opened up a whole different world for all of us as a family, you know? And I really admire her for doing that.

But coming back to men. Yes. Men men men men men men men men men men men men men men men men. Exactly.

The men who are looking to connect with their emotions or are curious about this whole thing, you know, how easy is it? And I mean, you're the expert. They're ways to do it. What would you say to Amanda saying who's like, I don't want to give it a shot, but you know, I don't know where to get started.

There's a lot of tools and techniques out there. you can, it requires the capacity to want to be curious about yourself. You don't have to display yourself and put yourself out there in a way that is going to break you. Being vulnerable does not have to be open heart surgery.

You can do it in steps and in phases, and you can do it to the point where you're checking in with yourself and you're understanding what feels like, okay, I can take this step. I'm curious about asking myself the question of, this marriage is not working, and what part of this is a reflection of a pattern that I've always had. If you don't, as an example, a lot of men get the message that they're not enough, I mean women get that too, but it's kind of a human condition, but men get the message a lot from their wives oftentimes that they don't pick up their stuff enough, they don't pay enough attention to them, they don't care about their wives feelings enough, there's a lot of stuff that they end up kind of taking away as a belief system of who they are, and believe it or not, it impacts them. I know a lot of women feel like, oh they're just selfish and they're self-centered and so on and so forth.

It does affect them, and they walk away feeling like they're not enough, and then they're expected to go out in the world and not only be enough, but be a winner and bring it home. Yeah. So if a pattern like that, which oftentimes it really sinks in deep with a man, it's not every single man, but it sits in you in that way, then the chances are that that's a pattern that you've had for a really long time, beyond your marriage, okay, starting maybe when you were younger and your mom was telling you X, Y, and Z, or your dad was saying, don't be a sissy, or whatever the case might be, this is a pattern that existed in you for a long time. So when you're going through a breakup and you're going through a divorce, it could be an opportunity for you to kind of question and be curious about that and say, okay, so if this is something that I feel and this is something that really got underneath my skin and I couldn't stand it because it always felt like she was nagging me, nagging me, nagging me, nagging me.

She might've been nagging you, and it might've also been something that was already in you, and you can go and kind of seek that out and ask yourself a couple of questions, like, okay, so how long have I been feeling this way? And talking to people like me, a coach, that understands some of these patterns, where even talking to maybe you have a friend that you're willing to kind of say, hey, what do you think that is? And not just laugh it off, like it's nothing, not just always depend on like humor to kind of laugh it off, oh yeah, women, they're so nagging. But being willing to have a little bit of a curiosity about what's going on for you, and then utilizing that as a catalyst to move on.

I know that journaling can be really, really helpful. There's a lot of men that won't sit in journal though. It's not really something will, I mean, there are some writers that will totally, I would submit to you that most writers are a little bit more emotionally engaged because they kind of have to be in order to be a good writer. If you're talking about like a construction guy or you're talking about like sometimes, a financial guy, some of them, not even through their work, do they get to really kind of tap into that more emotional, like a logical side.

And in fact, they need to border that shit off, they need to wall that off in order to do their work. In that case, oftentimes not only working with a coach can help you, but there's certain physical activities within a mindfulness attached to the activity that can help you kind of engage energies, the practice of where you put your attention to focus to, which is something that a lot of times I'll help a lot of men do. Because a lot of what I do, because again, I'm not a therapist, but a lot of what I do is I show up in a way where I help them engage their curiosity. I help them engage their mindfulness so that they start paying attention to different things in their day other than what they're typically paying attention to.

As an example, there's a guy who, you know, many guys who come in and they're just separated, but they're starting to date. So I ask them simple questions, like, if you're dating online, just start to pay attention and tick off in your little notebook. How many times a day you press bumble or tender or hinge or whatever other online dating thing you have? Just start paying attention to it, not to make a judgment, not to pass an opinion, just to pay attention to when it is that you're pressing that button, right?

And then we talk about that. They come back in, they have a little check marks as to how many times and then they're like, oh, well, you know what? I realize every time I was bored or every time I was hungry or every time I was alone, I just didn't feel like being alone. So I press tender.

So just those kinds of little things can start to spark little, you know, awakenings. Oh, so this is what I'm doing in life. If they're not aware, then they fall into the same cycles with the same. And for anyone listening who is sort of thinking, oh my God, I'm probably going to have to pay all this alimony and childcare, I wouldn't really encourage you to spend the money on yourself.

If you're worth it, would you encourage listeners to do that? And also, how expensive really is it in the big scheme of things, you know, the large scheme of things? Well, that's a really good question because how expensive is it? How much do you want to be in this life with all of you?

Yeah, because it's not what we're here for. You know, there's alimony, there's living expenses, there's child support, someone and so forth. And then there's you. And you are the one thing that you have for your entire life.

There's no other you. So investing in knowing yourself, owning yourself, being able to have more autonomy, ability, capacity, efficiency, effectiveness, strength, courage, you know, to actually own who you really are, to truly step into who you really are, regardless of how life is showing up. That's priceless, really. I mean, is it not worth that?

And if you have to go through a breakup and you have to go through that kind of pain because at the end of the day, you don't always have a choice. No. You have to then leverage it, harness it, make it something that is worth your heartache. And do it right.

If you're going to break up, do it right, protect yourself, you know, invest in yourself because it's going to stop you from doing it wrong again. So that's the message. For men who are listening, who are going through a breakup, who are having a tough time with partners, who are blaming them, who are often families joining, or they are feeling like a failure. Are there some ways that men in those situations can protect themselves?

Other things they can do, just simple things. How do they keep the noises out? You know, yeah, I feel like, you know, those kinds of questions are genderless in many ways. So there's a whole lot of mixed up feelings in a breakup and a heartache, especially if you've been married or you've been in a relationship for a really long time because the entanglement, the unity of an individual human being and another individual human being coming together often create a third entity almost.

And pulling that apart can be surprisingly difficult, painful, and you don't even realize how many threads are connected, right, until you start taking them apart. I feel like the number one way to protect yourself, actually, in one of those situations is to take the dive into exactly what I'm talking about, which is to leverage and use that opening to know yourself more, to own yourself more, to learn what it is that is showing up in your life so that you, A, don't do it again, so that B, you do have skills to protect yourself against some of the negative stuff, because some of that is just a matter of consciousness. And some of that is just kind of getting down to the bare nuggets of why do I have to be engaged with this person? Why do I have to communicate with them?

Because sometimes you've got to just cut down the communication. You think men are kind of wired to protect and honor and provide, right? And so some men actually keep on feeling that way, even while they're breaking up, and it's really hard for them to disengage from that. And it's like, you have a right to disengage from that.

Just because you're assumed to be XY or your XY has texted you does not mean that you absolutely have to respond to her, right away. You can take your time. You can decide whether or not it requires an answer, and just answer those things that are 100% necessary and make sure you're not engaging in any kind of ongoing connection because it's habit or because you feel like you should, or because, you know, well, she asked, you know, so sometimes protecting yourself means you've got to know how to stick with boundaries and how to stay to them and how to recognize them. Sometimes protecting yourself means that you go and you start a new practice of, yes, that inward meditation, you know, and there's lots of different types of meditation because they don't all work for everybody.

They don't. But there's so many different forms that you're about that in time practicing different ones, you're going to find one that works for you. And that's the key, is to find the one or the two that work for you that you can go to because that allows you to sit inside yourself. And the more you can sit inside yourself and own that piece, the more you can protect yourself.

If you can't own yourself and you can't sit in yourself, it's much harder to protect yourself because what's happening is your anxiety is like out there attacking for every single little thing because it's hard-buyer to do so and it's ultra sensitive. So learning how to sit within yourself is really, really important in terms of being able to protect yourself, send boundaries, making sure that you're engaging in your life and the things that, you know, look, you have an opportunity, your life has changed, your whole life is upside down. It's completely different. It's not going to look the same and it's not supposed to look the same.

So how are you going to design it moving forward? So yeah, those are a few things, right? Those are all very useful, I'm sure, for a lot of people listening. And essentially, if men do want to tune into their planners and their performers as they're meant to be, this is sort of setting a plan for their future, you know, following these techniques.

It's very pragmatic. It has its benefits. In a lot of ways, I think we in Western society are open to turning East to look at various therapies or various practices and actually having grown up with spiritual practices in the East, I can tell you the definition of masculinity in the mountains where there are loads of people just dedicated to the spiritual path, either from meditation or, oh my God, millions of practices, is very different to the way it's viewed in the West. You know, masculinity isn't about earning money at all.

It isn't about providing for your family. It isn't about being the hero for your family and all of that. It's more about how you tackle the battles within you, the emotional battles and the mental battles and how you overcome the distractions that exist in the world around you and how despite all that, you're able to make a connection with yourself and men who find things about spirituality very woo-woo in India, especially connect with Lord Shiva. And Lord Shiva is the epitome of masculinity in terms of strength, in terms of value, in terms of spiritual strength, in terms of insight.

I think a lot of men end up worshiping his energy to gain that strength. You know, for anyone listening, there's always so much in this world that we live in that's so different to draw from. You know, there's only men doing it in so many different ways. It's just, as you said, opening up and finding out.

There's so many things you've said that have just like hit all the right notes for my curiosity when it comes to men. And something you said earlier as I want to draw on is about the soul being sexless, you know, the soul is sexless. There is no male and female and soul that we are born and male or female or we can identify as we do now. And so it's either or.

But for men who are blocked, who can't connect to their emotions, who are scared, who are in a breakup situation, it's important to realize that they do have them and the energy is within them. And we just have a few comments from you about how they could benefit from connecting with their family inside and becoming familiar with it. I'm already touched upon it, but just not to feel shy about doing it. Yeah.

So I think that it's really, really important for all of us to kind of own all those parts. And energy is energy. I mean, I look at it in terms of energetics. The way that I explain how one of them, you know, the primary workings of the world is that the majority of what we experience, whether we acknowledge it or not, is energetic.

It's intangible. There's stuff that's going through me right now as I sit here that I'm not consciously aware of. There are all kinds of waves of energy. I mean, even if you just looked at it from, you know, cellular, right?

I mean, you've got cellular meaning, biology, but also cellular meaning. You've got a person who's probably on the other side of this wall who's texting somebody who's ready to be over there and it's going through me. So there's all kinds of energetics that are moving through me. And yes, my body has come here in this form and I'm appreciative and I fill in the feminine womanly space that it provides me, but it balances me, right?

To own the masculine, just as a man, right? It balances them to own the feminine. So the difference between, and one of the main ways that I experience, and I think a lot of this experience, the difference is that, you know, the masculine energy and the feminine energy have a different, essential movement to them, right? So if you imagine movement as energy, you've got masculine energy that moves into the world in a very projecting way.

Now I'm not just talking physically, it's a projection, it's outwardly extended in a way where there's utilization of impacting outside worlds in very concrete ways. They are asked traditionally, okay? They are asked to use the raw material of the world, of the earth, to create tangible things that provide and protect, okay? And that's a really cool thing.

That's a really cool thing. When you think about the fact that we have inhabited this earth in all of these structures, let's just take building and construction, these structures that contain us, that shelter us, that hold us overwhelmingly throughout the world have been built by men, and they're drawn and they're strengthened, they're muscles, they've taken their body, they've put it together with raw material and they have created our spaces in which to raise our family, yeah, protect us from the weather. That's a really profound energy, right? That has moved to the world, that doesn't really get much attention.

It doesn't, right? Feminine is very much about being in the present inward because we inwardly create life literally. We take inner stuff, biology, cellular, firm, egg, put it together and we create a life, right? That's really profound too.

So both of us are needed, both of those energies are needed in order for us to really move in the world as a whole, each individual, right? I mean, men being able to go inside and own themselves and take pieces together, put it together and then be a whole human being in their spiritual, emotional, psychological feeling, right? They can take their sensory and own their feelings and what it is that is happening inside of them, right? So how do they take their external focus and their energy that is used to go and put together the world versus how do they then take their energy back into themselves and figure out themselves so that they can show up as a whole human being and parent their children or show up as a whole human being and be in a relationship with somebody that they feel is important to them, whether it's a guy or a girl or a friendship or a wife, right?

How do they own all of them and then how do women go out and conquer the world, right? Those are the things that we're experiencing now in this time of our history, experiencing the difference in how feminine and masculine energy work inside our own individuality, right? Inside our body, how do we bring that masculine energy into a feminine body and then make shit happen? Yeah.

And how does a man bring in some of the feminine and own the feminine inside themselves so that they can have more authority over themselves, like just awareness over themselves. Let's just start with awareness. Yeah. It's fascinating.

It's imperative, I think, that those energies get developed in both genders and I feel like that kind of feeds into what I was just talking about, which is human race, right? Needing to be conscious and aware in order to help pace what's to come, what it is that we've already created. And right minds, actually. That was very beautifully put, by the way.

And something you said at the start of the conversation would be a great place to conclude that point about feminine and masculine energies and their unique roles. And I think it's inspiration, you know? One can be so inspired by what the other does, that it could really inspire a lovely dance together of energies and that we all can benefit from the world, and then we are forced to recommend it. We are self-protecting, we are growing, we are conscious, we're moving spiritually, and I think then we're advanced as a race.

We've sort of run out of time, but I would hate to leave the audience without a way of reaching you. So could you tell us what the best way to reach you is? Yes, absolutely. So the best way to reach me right now is probably email, and you can find me at readreid, zurlowzurlow, at msn.com.

And I always respond to my email, so certainly if somebody reaches out, I definitely, I follow up, so I hope to hear from folks. Yeah, and I hope folks pick up a card and send your email because you're such an easy person to talk to, really. So any man out there, end out, just write an email to read. And you can read it.

So any man out there, end out, just write an email to read. So just straight away, if you have a problem. No, she won't. No, she won't.

Well, thank you so much. I'm going to just leave by saying that I was so enjoyable. I've learned so much. And I'm just thinking of the various ways that I can get this soul we've created today out to men.

I'm going to try my best to get it out. Maybe people connected to you as I can. So thank you so much. There are people on your show.

I'm so excited. You are so excited. Take your ego, marry your soul, boy. All day long.

She said it. Not me. Well, you have a lovely rest of your day. Thank you.

Bye.