Men

Midlife Crisis or Finally Waking Up? The Truth About Your Midlife Crisis

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Midlife crisis or awakening?

What’s Real Is Always Real

Let’s not sugar-coat this one and get right into it:

Waking up in your late thirties or early forties and realising you’re not who you thought you might be at this time is one of the most jarring, destabilising, but sacred experiences you’ll ever go through.

Normally, when people talk about it, we like to call it a midlife crisis but what if it’s not a crisis at all?

What if it’s finally the beginning of something real after years – if not decades – of unreality?

What if it’s the first time you’ve actually started telling yourself the truth and so now you’re actually waking up?

What if it’s a sign that the mask is slipping and you’re stepping away from the dreamworld of the void and the false character that you’ve unconsciously being playing within it?

This article will help you to understand what your “midlife crisis” is really about and how you can start to turn it from a breakdown to a breakthrough and make sure that the rest of your life is one you actually want to be living.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your midlife crisis is a sign that the straight way was never yours in the first place.

Midlife Crisis or Breakthrough?: What We’ll Cover in this Article

Midlife Crisis: The Lie We’ve Been Living

Most of us are born into systems that reward conformity and comfort over the natural chaos and flow that comes with real life:

We learn how to be ‘liked’, how to be ‘safe’, and how to ‘succeed‘ by society’s standards and so we build a life on the foundations of what we’re told is right instead of what is actually REAL for us.

Many of the things that we end up chasing because of these social standards and promptings are actually ‘good’ things – a decent job, a partner, a mortgage, holidays abroad – but, unfortunately, we get conditioned to treat them as the ULTIMATE things and so they end up becoming nothing but distractions that keep the deeper answers we’re really seeking at bay.

When we put these things on a pedestal as being the ‘ultimate’ then we end up losing the only real foundation that can ultimately support us: the truth about ourselves, the world, and reality.

For a while – years, if not decades – chasing these ‘good’ things distracts us enough that we can feel like we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing and living a life that feels real and meaningful.

That’s until, somewhere along the way, the whisper begins:

It’s subtle at first – a vague sense of restlessness or a sense that something’s missing…but then it gets louder: the marriage begins to feels stale and lifeless; the job starts to feel like a cage; the body begins to ache with the tension of a life half-lived hunched over in front of a computer screen or slaving away in a place that only ever sucks your passion right out of you instead of lighting any new flames.

You look in the mirror and wonder:

“Is this it?”

“How did I get here?”

You already know the answers to these questions:

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“I gave up on myself”.

This is the moment many men fear and misunderstand – the so-called midlife crisis -but it’s not a crisis of old-age.

It’s a crisis of REALNESS.

The Real You Has Been Waiting in The Shadow Territory

Underneath the roles, titles, labels, and social masks, there’s a real version of you:

This version isn’t tied to your job title, your net worth, or even your family role – it’s the real you: the experience of being (not just an idea about it) driven by purpose, meaning, values, and a primal pull towards growth and wholeness.

You’ve always known what this version of you wants. You’ve felt it. In quiet moments it’s still there observing everything you do and – from time-to-time – you get hints or glimmers of what that awareness still looks like and then suppress it again because it doesn’t ‘conform’ to who you’re ‘supposed’ to be (even though, ironically, it’s the REALEST thing about you).

It’s right there alive in the passions you’ve ignored; in the relationships that never quite made sense; in the choices you didn’t make because they felt too risky, too uncertain (but that keep calling to you nevertheless).

This knowing is timeless…but it gets buried.

Why?

Because of two forces that govern most people’s lives without them really even noticing:

  1. Emotional entanglement: fear, shame, guilt, or even trauma that causes you to retreat from life and shrink yourself behind a mask instead of stepping into it.
  2. Social programming: expectations from culture, parents, peers, or institutions that shape your identity into something safe and palatable but, ultimately, false and unreal.

These two forces push you onto an unreal path and, to walk it, you need a mask (A.K.A ‘The Ego‘):

To keep the mask in place, you perform, you provide and you pretend. Meanwhile, the real parts of you -the artist, the lover, the adventurer, the man who wants to feel alive – get pushed into the Shadow Territory.

But reality has a way of reclaiming what’s real which is why wearing a mask will always eventually lead you to a midlife crisis.

What Is a Midlife Crisis Really?

A midlife crisis is what happens when the mask begins to crack – when you can no longer sustain the cost of the performance and the wasted time, energy, and attention that it drains from you…when the real self – buried in the shadow for decades – begins to scream instead of whisper and asks you to start ACTING LIKE YOURSELF instead of whatever it is you’ve been pretending to be.

It often starts slowly and creeps into your conscious awareness over time:

You feel the dull ache of discontent with yourself and the life you’ve build but you keep suppressing it hoping you can just maintain the status quo and nobody will notice.

You scroll more. Drink more. Work more. You try to buy your way out of the discomfort by buying things online that you don’t even need…but none of it works. In fact, the more you resist, the more vehemently the shadow self re-emerges and the harder it hits (because sometimes self-destruction is self-resurrection).

As the illusion of control begins to collapse, the identity you spent decades curating no longer fits and it begins to feel completely incompatible with who you can no longer deny yourself to be.

The ladder you’ve been climbing is on the wrong wall and so the existential dread starts to set in: you realise time is limited. Life is short. The pain of inauthenticity is no longer tolerable.

That’s the crisis.

But it’s also the invitation back home.

Crisis or Awakening?

The word crisis comes from the Greek krisis, meaning “decision” or “turning point” – that’s exactly what this is:

You’re being invited to decide – to either double down on the performance and risk implosion later or to wake up and start being and acting who you are in your realness.

Waking up means choosing truth over comfort; it means confronting the ways in which you’ve betrayed yourself. It means pulling the shadow parts of yourself – the longings, the disappointments, the grief – back into the light of conscious awareness so that you can start doing something real with them.

It means asking: What do I truly value? And am I living like it matters or just going through the motions?

The men who ignore this invitation usually ‘snap’ in the end as the pressure of being unreal becomes too much and so they have to release the tension by any means necessary:

They leave their wives overnight. Quit their jobs with no plan. Chase younger women. Blow their savings.

Why? Because they’ve suppressed the voice of their real self for so long that when it finally comes out, it does so with vengeance.

As the Old Chinese Proverb says: “Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are” – the more unreal you are under the weight of false expectations and ideas, the bigger the explosion when you release yourself back into relaxation.

It doesn’t have to come to an explosive end, though, as there’s another path: conscious integration and the cultivation of a strategy for putting yourself back on the right path.

Midlife Crisis: From Breakdown to Breakthrough

To move through a midlife crisis consciously, you need to follow three phases – the foundation of any transformational journey (I walk my coaching clients through these stages when we work together and they always get results): Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

Let’s break it down a little:

1. Awareness – Deconstruct the Ego

Start by recognising that much of your current life may be based on an identity you didn’t choose consciously because you’ve been identifying with the mask (ego) and not who you really are.

Look at the areas where you’ve been jumping through hoops to try and please others and perform instead of living in alignment with your own nature and the realness it has gifted you:

Where did you compromise truth for approval? Where did you settle? What are you holding onto that’s actually unreal? What realness is waiting to be expressed?

This stage is confronting because you’ll see your own cowardice and dishonesty but it’s also where your power begins because without facing these blind spots you’ll always be stuck on the same hamster wheel that’s keeping you where you don’t want to be.

2. Acceptance – Integrate the Shadow

The shadow isn’t evil – it’s just hidden so that you can feel safe and ‘acceptable’ in the eyes of the world around you.

It contains the parts of you that were deemed too wild, too passionate, or too ‘irrational’ to fit into the life you ended up constructing for yourself. These parts are both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but they’re the key to your wholeness because they’re all REAL.

Learn to accept them, befriend them, and to give them a seat at the table as you make decisions what to do moving forward.

This might mean grieving; it might mean letting some rage out; it might mean finally admitting that the life you built isn’t the life you want.

Good. That means you’re still alive and have something solid to build on.

3. Action – Trust Yourself and Life

Now it’s time to move – not recklessly or from a sense of panic, but from clarity.

This means that it’s time to pivot back onto your real path by taking calculated risks.

The simplest version of this is as follows:

Build a vision rooted in your real values, break it into goals, and then cultivate the habits that support growth and momentum day-after-day.

Take the actions that are yours and leave the rest to life by trusting that when you start showing up for reality, reality starts showing up for you.

This is where the flow begins and your midlife crisis starts to come to and end.

Chaos Comes Before Order

Make no mistake – this process will disrupt your life but that’s exactly what you want deep down (which is why you’re reading about your midlife crisis in the first place)

This disruption is just part of the process because when your ego shatters, so do the systems it built: your routines, your relationships, even your worldview and the identity it’s built upon.

Chaos in this case isn’t the enemy – it’s the threshold of your REAL life:

The sooner you learn to dance with it, the sooner you reclaim your power and allow your realness to break free of the false order you allowed the ego to create in your life.

Life will not give you back your comfort at this stage but it will offer you purpose and meaning (which is a by-product of having a real purpose).

And meaning is far more satisfying than safety ever was (because it’s way more real).

You Only Get One Life

No matter how long you ignore it, the question will return and keep returning until you give yourself a REAL answer:

What are you going to do with the rest of your life?

Will you stay asleep – numbing yourself with distractions, coping, and playing small – until death starts to creep up on you with a list of regrets?

Or will you wake up – take the risk of being real – and discover what you’re truly made of so you can go to the grave knowing that you learned the truth about things?

Practical Steps: Navigating Your Midlife Awakening

Here’s a roadmap based on everything we discussed in this article to help you move from breakdown to breakthrough:

1. Audit Your Life

  • Ask Yourself: What areas of my life feel fake or forced? Get rid of the ‘fake’ – as much as that’s possible – and focus on the hints of realness that you’ve already tasted.
  • Journal the difference between your current reality and what you truly want and start figuring out what action you need to take to make it happen.

2. Name the Shadow

  • List the parts of yourself you’ve suppressed to fit in: creativity, anger, sensuality, ambition, etc.
  • Explore what it would look like to integrate them healthily and in a way that lets you bring more of your values into your life.

3. Feel Before You Fix

  • Instead of rushing to ‘solve’ or ‘fix’ the crisis, sit with the discomfort and try to figure out what it’s teaching you about yourself and life.
  • Practice breathwork, meditation, or somatic therapy to reconnect with your nervous system so that you can relax and reduce unnecessary tension in your relationship with yourself and life.

4. Craft a Vision

  • What would your life look like if it was rooted in truth, not the need to pretend or where that mask?
  • Use your values as the compass, not the map: in other words, look for ways to bring your values to the forefront in whatever it is that you’re doing. The more your values are brought to light, the more real your life becomes.

5. Take Real Action

  • Break your vision into realistic goals that are aligned with your realness and not the mask.
  • Start small but stay consistent – action is the antidote to F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”) and the more you take small, real actions over time the bigger the results you eventually get.

6. Surround Yourself With Realness

  • Find people who reflect realness, not ego (your or theirs) – don’t hang out with people to fill the void inside yourself but to build something real together.
  • Get support – coaching, brotherhood, mentorship – from those who walk the talk and have gone as deep as you’d like to go yourself.

7. Trust the Process

  • Chaos is part of the transition and is a gift as the process of being shaken shows you what’s real and what’s unreal.
  • Every moment of discomfort is a step toward liberation if you stay rooted in your realness.
A midlife crisis means it's time to let go of the plan and to live life instead.

Conclusion: Midlife Crisis to Midlife Awakening

A midlife crisis is not the end of your story – it’s the moment the story gets interesting because it’s the point where the hero finally looks in the mirror and asks, “Who am I in my realness?”

You’re not your title; you’re not your past; you’re not what the world told you to be. You’re something far more real and it’s time you started living like it.

Your midlife crisis is a reminder that this is the truth and that it’s time to AWAKEN to yourself and life.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to navigate your own midlife crisis through the chaos of awakening and you’re interested in coaching then book a free coaching call with me and I’ll help you find some clarity and direction.

Craving Adventure: Reclaiming Realness in a World of Comfort

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How to Live as an Adventurous Spirit in a Spiritless World

Let’s be honest: a lot of people these days feel like something’s missing.

Sure, their lives are safe, predictable, and secure but deep down, there’s a dull ache that permeates everything they do – a quiet yearning, a craving that they might not always be able to name but that they can definitely feel (on this site, I often call this The Void).

In this article, we’re gong to talk about how this is often a hunger for adventure in a world that’s lost touch with the real human spirit.

Feeling this hunger is no accident – it’s not a midlife crisis, existential crisis, or any other label you might want to give to a crisis:

Instead, it’s the natural result of a life dulled by emotional suppression and social conditioning; when we cave in to shame, guilt, and unresolved trauma and buy into the cultural blueprint of safety at all costs and eventually end up building a life that looks stable but feels hollow.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The cave you fear to enter will give you what you need to stop craving adventure.

Craving Adventure: Table of Contents

The Comfortable Cage

Most people don’t even realise they’ve traded adventure for approval because it happens slowly – in increments, day-after-day over a number of years:

You get the job, you get the house, you follow the rules, and then – at some point – you stop questioning it because you’ve started to identify with it all (i.e. it becomes an extension of your ego and what feels ‘familiar’).

It’s the path of least resistance, and everyone applauds you for walking it.

As the years go by, though – and the spark fades – you start looking back on your youth like it was the “best time of your life”:

Your job doesn’t challenge you. Your relationships don’t inspire you. Your creativity is drying up. You begin to wonder if this is really all life is.

The answer is “no” – there’s definitely more to life than this but – in order to get it – you have to stop lying to yourself. What’s missing isn’t just excitement. It’s realness. You’ve become disconnected from the part of you that thrives on risk, stretch, growth, and meaning – the part that wants life to be an adventure.

Adventure Isn’t Optional – It’s Human

Adventure isn’t about jumping out of planes or quitting your job to live in a van (although it could be if that’s what you want):

At its core, adventure is about riding through uncertainty – it’s about leaning into life instead of only ever attempting to control it to try and make it conform to how you think things should be. It’s about staying open to possibility and being willing to change – not just your circumstances but your self as you surrender to the adventure and let it transform you by showing you what’s unreal and what’s REAL.

Here’s something really important to remember:

The ‘part’ of you that longs for adventure – the wild, risk-taking part – isn’t broken or reckless.

It’s an expression of who you REALLY are that’s been long buried in the shadow self – that part of you that got shamed, silenced, or pushed aside so you could fit in and be ‘acceptable’ in some way.

Until you reclaim it, you’ll keep craving adventure like a thirsty man craves water and your life will never feel like ‘yours’ because it won’t be…it’ll be your life according to whoever you let send you into hiding in the first place.

The Shadow and the Void

The reason you crave adventure is because you feel the Void – the sense that something is missing because you’ve become disconnected from the truth about yourself.

Most people attempt to try and fill this Void with external distractions:

They travel constantly, chase dopamine, sleep around, binge on cacao ceremonies (which, let’s face it, is really just hot chocolate), or spend thousands on spiritual retreats hoping to ‘find’ themselves (when, really, there’s nothing to find because it’s already there).

Some of these things can help temporarily but if they’re driven by ego – by the desire to keep hiding the shadow and to escape rather than integrate – they’re just more noise. When the distractions end, the Void gets louder and that’s when the dark night of the soul begins (when they reach the end of one version of themselves and lose it suddenly as reality crashes back in).

What you’re actually searching for isn’t out there: it’s within.

And the only way to stop feeling empty is to stop being fake – which, in this case, means to start living with more ADVENTURE.

The Real Adventure Is Within

You don’t need to do something wild to feel alive and to bring more adventure into your life – you need to do something real and real often feels like chaos at first because it goes against the script.

Even so, this kind of chaos is sacred because it’s the birthplace of change and growth:

You have to be willing to break the pattern if you want to feel whole again.

That could look like quitting your job but it could also look like telling the truth in a relationship, trying a new class, learning a new skill, or moving your body in ways it’s never moved before.

It could simply mean feeling your emotions instead of suppressing them.

Whatever it means to you, these are all adventures because they all push you beyond the safe and familiar identity of the ego and take you into territory you’ve never really explored before.

Remember this one:

Life doesn’t stop being uncertain just because you try to control it – it just stops being real.

Adventure as a Path to Realness

Your realness isn’t something you ‘find’ out there in the world (because the world is unreal) – it’s something you reclaim by letting go of everything that’s not authentic and aligned with the truth about yourself, the world, and reality..

Adventure is the vehicle that helps you do that:

It stretches you. Tests you. Forces you to adapt.

It exposes your fears and shows you who you really are underneath them and what potential you have to realise away from whatever BS and illusions this fear shows you (because most fear is F.E.A.R: “False Evidence Appearing Real”).

When you start living this way – when you let your natural sense of adventure become your teacher – you begin to feel something sacred stirring inside:

The purpose, joy, vivacity, and wholeness that comes from being REAL.

Practical Ways to Bring More Adventure Into Your Life

Here are some grounded, real-life ways to make your life more adventurous without running off to the jungle or blowing up your whole world overnight:

1. Do At Least One Thing That Scares You Every Week

Not recklessly but intentionally:

This could be anything from public speaking to posting something honest online to going on a solo walk somewhere new.

Adventure is a muscle and the more you train it, the more real your life becomes.

2. Stretch Your Body, Stretch Your Life

Your nervous system is the gateway to realness:

If you’re stuck in comfort, you’re probably stuck in a sympathetic (fight-flight-freeze) loop and so you might need to shake things up a little with cold showers, new movement patterns (like dance, martial arts, or trail walking), or anything else that gets your body into a regulated yet alert state.

In short, the more you learn to stretch your body and equip your nervous system for resilience, the more resilient you’ll be in life and the more of an adventure it will become as you start stretching yourself beyond the comfort zone.

3. Turn The Mundane Into Magic

Travel isn’t the only option you have when it comes to feeling adventurous – all you really need to do is to act like a tourist and try something new or to go ‘sightseeing’ where you already are:

Try something new today like a new café, a different route home, reading book outside your usual genre, or even just asking deeper questions in conversations in order to learn something NEW about the people you already know.

4. Face the Thing You’ve Been Avoiding

Real adventure starts when you stop running from the parts of yourself that you don’t want to look at and when you enter the unknown territory that’s been calling to you:

What conversation, decision, or truth have you been avoiding?

Go there and see what’s waiting for you.

As Joseph Campbell said: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek” (this applies to facing your shadow in general too).

5. Create Something Real

Write. Paint. Build. Speak. Design. Cook.

Use your hands and heart to make something that didn’t exist before – that’s real adventure:

Birthing form out of the formless and ideally learning about yourself and life in the process.

6. Ritualise Challenge

Challenge creates growth so make it a habit.

Monthly goal? Weekly stretch? Daily discomfort practice?

Choose your own adventure but make it intentional and keep it consistent so you keep growing daily and allowing the real you to keep emerging.

Craving Adventure: A Final Thought

If you feel like something is missing from your life, it’s probably is: YOU.

Not the superficial, surface-level you; not the socially acceptable version of you – the real you:

The one who’s unafraid to feel fully alive, to make bold choices, to lean into growth, and to embrace uncertainty as a sacred path to wholeness.

Don’t wait for an adventure to find you when you can live as one.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready for more adventure in your life and you’re interested in coaching then book a free call with me and I’ll help you figure out what your next real action to take is (and keep you accountable for taking it)

Semen Retention Benefits: How this Ancient Practice Can Help You Grow More Real

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Semen retention benefits

Why Semen Retention Helps Men Uncover the Truth and Align with Reality

Throughout all of human history, men have instinctively known that there’s more to their seed than just biology:

Whether it was ancient Taoists speaking of jing energy, Indian yogis practising Brahmacharya, or Christian monks channelling their desires into devotion, cultures across the world have grasped one central idea: a health and real relationship with semen matters – not just for making babies, but for making men.

In today’s overstimulated world, this wisdom has largely been lost under a pile of tissues and browser tabs:

Porn is everywhere, distraction is instant, and a lot of men find themselves trapped in a cycle of lust, shame, and spiritual flatness, wondering why they feel so out-of-sync with themselves and life.

Semen retention – the practice of choosing not to ejaculate unnecessarily – is more than a quirky internet trend. It’s a discipline that can recalibrate your body, mind, and soul.

Let’s dig a little deeper and find out why:

Semen retention is about mastering yourself and finding your true power.

Semen Retention: What We Cover in This Article

The Ancient Case for Semen Retention

Nearly every spiritual or philosophical system worth its salt has made space for the idea that restraint is power:

In Taoism: Sexual energy is seen as one of the foundational life forces (jing) and is to be cultivated and circulated, not carelessly wasted just for the sake of it. Taoist masters taught that the loss of semen without awareness depleted this vital energy, leading to fatigue, mental fog, and a weakened connection to life and its flow.

In Hinduism or Yogic Philosophy: Brahmacharya – often misinterpreted as celibacy – is actually about right use of energy and calls for self-mastery, not repression. in this view sexual energy is sacred and leads to distraction and spiritual dullness if unrestrained.

Christian monasticism: Wasn’t about hating the body; it was about giving the body over to something higher. For example, the Apostle Paul spoke about bringing the body into submission – not to shame it, but to elevate it. Even Jesus mentioned living in the “unforced rhythms of grace” (in the Message, a modern translation of the bible) – the state of flow that semen retention helps me to put themselves in when not distracting themselves and bringing unnecessary friction by not mastering themselves.

Stoicism: Advocated self-control over indulgence. The Stoics believed that clarity and freedom came when you stopped being a slave to your passions. Epictetus said: “No man is free who is not master of himself”. If that doesn’t apply to gaining mastery of your sexual energy, then I don’t know what does.

These teachings all say the same thing in different ways:

When a man learns to govern his lower nature, he aligns with a higher truth.

That’s why semen retention – and anything else that helps you cultivate self-mastery – is essential if you want to be the greatest man you can be.

Why Most Men Are Out-of-Sync With Themselves and Life

Let’s be real with ourselves for a few moments (and beyond if you get the message and needed it):

Most men today are caught in a loop that has nothing to do with genuine desire – they scroll, click, consume, and release – not because they’re brimming with passion and genuine horniness, but because they’re bored, anxious, distracted, or lonely.

Every time a man goes through this loop, his nervous system takes a hit that it doesn’t need:

The body gets a false signal – – “We’re about to make a baby!” – and so it goes through all the hormonal shifts, the dopamine spikes and crashes, and the nutrient depletion required in this beautiful and natural process – and then… nothing.

No connection. No deeper meaning. No movement towards purpose. Just an empty release because of boredom and having no real purpose in life.

Semen retention interrupts this unnatural and real loop – not because sex is ‘bad’ (far from it), but because men need to relearn the rhythm of their own bodies: the rhythm of life itself.

When you’re always reacting to ego-based triggers – like porn, insecurity, or proving your masculinity – you’re not responding to life, you’re reacting to a distortion in your own relationship with yourself (and then, by extension, life).

The Multi-Level Benefits of Semen Retention

1. Physical Benefits

  • Nervous system regulation: No more sending mixed signals to your body and hyping yourself up into fight-or-flight mode for no real reason.
  • Energy conservation: Semen contains vital nutrients and minerals and so retaining it gives your body a chance to reabsorb and reuse them so that you have energy to transmute into something more meaningful (like your life purpose).
  • Improved posture, clarity, and vitality: When energy isn’t leaking, it builds, and so you have a sense of primal magnetism that feeds into all areas of your life.

2. Mental Benefits

  • Discipline sharpens: Every urge resisted strengthens your resolve and allows you to remain present and to make real choices in other areas of your life.
  • Mental fog lifts: Your thoughts are no longer hijacked by lust and the negative effects of having porn and release mess with your brain and so you can actually think sharply and with focus.
  • Gremlin-bashing: Those little voices whispering “just one more video” get quieter and you have time and energy to direct your attention on your life itself.

3. Emotional Benefits

  • No shame cycles: You stop wasting your energy and start feeling proud of how you show up instead of judging yourself and feeling like a failure.
  • Sense of integrity: You do what you say you’ll do and start acting with intention. This carries you over time towards your real potential.
  • Resilience: You start to feel solid because you know you can handle yourself and, therefore, can handle the rest of life by extension.

4. Social Benefits

  • Presence deepens: You’re less jittery and more grounded because you don’t have to worry about being “found out” (because you’re not doing things that you know go against who you really are).
  • Women become people again: Not objects, not fantasy projections – actual people that you can have interesting conversations with and real relationships with (depending on the woman in question, of course).
  • You stop judging others: Because you’re no longer at war with yourself.

5. Spiritual Benefits

  • You align with truth: Reality becomes more obvious – you can feel what’s real and what isn’t because you’re no longer making your relationship with yourself unreal (because you’re choosing purpose over distraction).
  • You learn to flow: Retention isn’t about repression – it’s about learning when to act, when to ride things out, and when to let go. This allows you to put yourself in the flow of life instead of always forcing things or distracting yourself from the flow.
  • Grace appears: Synchronicities increase. You’re no longer fighting life. You’re in rhythm with it.

Semen Retention as a Path to Realness

Let’s talk about what they used to call “idols”:

Many men today worship at the altar of sex, validation, and conquest – they don’t call it that, but their actions definitely speak about this kind of worship. It shows up in the compulsive checking of dating apps, the anxiety around sexual performance, the pride in being a “player” (which, really, just means that your self-worth is being outsourced to an arbitrary number – trust me, I know, because I used to think like this).

None of that is real – it’s performative and completely driven by ego.

And more often than not, it’s a distraction from deep pain and deep shame and the need to fill the Void these emotions up with something besides the only thing that can actually fill it: the truth.

Semen retention helps a man see through the illusion:

When he stops idolising sex and women – treating good things as the ultimate thing or the fragments as the whole – he begins to see the truth. This truth becomes the new foundation of his life – no longer swayed by urges, culture, or insecurity, he begins to choose who he wants to be.

He becomes anchored in reality instead of fantasy.

This balance is the reward:

He stops turning good things (like connection or sex) into ultimate things and when perspective returns, peace follows.

So What Does This Look Like in Practice?

Semen retention is not about never having sex – it’s about reclaiming the power of choice and becoming real enough to discern when an action is aligned or when it’s a reaction.

Here are some ways to get started if you’re new to these ideas:

Practical Tips for REAL ACTION

1. Set a retention goal.
Try 7 days. Then 14. Then 30 and beyond. Track how you feel physically, mentally, and emotionally.

2. Journal your urges.
Write down what triggered you when the urge came up:

Was it boredom? Stress? Insecurity?

Start to become AWARE of your patterns so you can ACCEPT them and then take ACTION on them.

(Awareness, Acceptance, and Action – it works every time!).

3. Create a purpose for yourself.
Transmute the energy into something more real:

Go to the gym. Build something. Write.

Channel your energy into a purpose that brings results and keeps you growing over time.

4. Cut out porn. Completely.
It’s not harmless – it trains your nervous system to react to fantasy, not reality. You’re better than that and so is your future if you want it to be

5. Meditate daily.
Stillness helps you ride the waves and teaches you to observe without reacting. This helps you to surf your urges when they arise so that you can stay focused in the moment and make real choices instead of unreal ones.

6. Tell a brother.
Accountability helps. Speak to someone you trust. Get support (book a free call with me if you’re interested in coaching). This isn’t a solo mission.

7. Honour sex.
If you choose to have sex, let it be conscious. Retention isn’t about shame. It’s about choice.

8. Connect with your body.
Yoga, breathwork, cold showers – all of these things (and similar) help ground the energy so it doesn’t stay stuck in your head.

9. Read sacred texts.
Whether it’s the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, or the Tao Te Ching, reconnect with timeless wisdom that puts truth at the centre and reminds you what life is all about. Do what you do anciently because there’s something timeless about us that never changes.

10. Keep perspective.
This is not about becoming perfect – it’s about becoming real and realness is a muscle you build over time. It might be hard to get a semen retention streak going at first but stick with it and you will see results.

Semen retention is about conservation of energy, not suppression.

Semen Retention: The Final Word

Semen retention isn’t a fad – it’s a return. A return to truth. To rhythm. To realness.

When a man retains, he doesn’t lose anything but he always builds something:

He becomes someone his future self will thank him for and – perhaps even more than that – he becomes someone the world can trust.

Not because he’s perfect. But because he’s real.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S If you want to level yourself up and could benefit from structured support over a four-month period then book a free call with me today and I’ll help you get moving right away.

Personal Practical Philosophy and Code of Conduct: The Return to Truth

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Philosophy and code of conduct

How to Create Your Own Practical Philosophy and Code of Conduct

Modern life is plagued by two silent but deadly forces that most men rarely talk about but feel every day:

  1. The Void – that lingering sense of emptiness, fragmentation, and of not being whole that shows up as restlessness or a chronic itch that can’t quite ever be scratched. It comes from being split from the truth – almost always due to underlying shame and having built an identity around things that aren’t real as a reaction to this shame.
  2. Moral Relativism – the idea that anything goes, as long as it feels ‘good’ or fits the identity that we’ve created to play a role in the dreamworld of the Void. Moral relativism exists because there’s no agreed-upon standard anymore – just a swamp of opinions, trends, and personal preferences because we fell into the trap of thinking that all ideas are as valid as any other (when that’s simply not true because some ideas point more closely to reality than others).

Based on what I’ve seen coaching people over the years, then if you’re man between 35 and 44, then it’s highly likely that you’ve likely hit a point where these two forces have shown up; you might not have had fancy names for them, but you’ve felt their pull and you’ve been questioning yourself and life trying to figure out what to do about it.

What I can tell you from the get-go is that the answer isn’t to numb out, chase distractions, or pretend that everything’s fine – instead of running away like that you need to start moving in the opposite direction and start running towards something real:

Both of these problems are caused by an unreal and unhealthy relationship with the truth itself and so the solution is to start finding a way to heal this relationship and repairing the damage of fragmentation that a disconnection from truth causes.

One way to start doing this is to become conscious of your own personal philosophy and, by extension, your code of conduct – a practical, living system that grounds you in truth, gives you clarity, and helps you live in a REAL way.

This helps you to overcome the Void because it returns you to the truth about yourself and it helps you to overcome moral relativism because it helps you see the truth about the world and reality.

Your philosophy doesn’t need to be original to be valid – it just needs to be real to you. You might borrow from Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, or something your grandfather once said – as long as it holds weight and has been tested in your life, it’s valid.

As for your code, that doesn’t have to impress anyone else either – it just has to stand strong when life throws storms your way.

That’s how you’ll know it’s working.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your personal practical philosophy begins with knowing yourself, the world, and reality.

What We’ll Cover in This Article

Why Philosophy Matters More Than Ever

Most people think philosophy is abstract, academic, or too fluffy for real life and that can definitely be true of those ‘philosophers’ in ivory towers playing mind games with symbols and language or whatever it is that they’re doing.

Practical philosophy, on the other hand, is just this: a quest for truth. And truth always matters – especially when you ACT on it.

When we commit to the truth, something radical starts to happen:

  • The Void begins to dissolve because truth restores wholeness and brings the fragmented parts of ourselves back into alignment. This allows us to be what we were supposed to be before we picked up shame (which is what leads to the Void in the first place).
  • Moral relativism loses its grip and we can stand on a solid foundation instead of always feeling like our life could crumble at any second. This is because truth – by its nature – is not subjective: our interpretations may vary, but truth itself doesn’t bend to opinion.

As an example, maybe you realise that constantly chasing short-term pleasure (booze, status, porn, ‘likes’) in an attempt to fill the Void has left you feeling more lost. What you start to realise as you dig into it is that the truth is that these things don’t lead to fulfilment. This being the case, your personal practical philosophy might include a code like: “I choose depth over distraction”.

Making Philosophy Practical

Philosophy only ‘matters’ if it can be lived (otherwise it really is just abstract and empty):

Life moves and circumstances change and so your philosophy can’t be rigid dogma – it has to be a living system that helps you navigate change while staying true to your values. At the same time, though, it will probably need to comprise certain principles that never change like the law of cause and effect, for example, or the idea that “the only constant in life is change“.

This means aligning your philosophy with principles about how life actually works – for example:

  • Everything moves: Life is in constant flux.
  • You don’t control everything: Your plans are only ever a best guess.
  • But you can still aim: You can walk the path with direction, grounded in your core values.

Your philosophy might include something like: “I embrace what I can’t control and focus only on what’s mine to act upon” – this stops you from spiralling when life throws you curveballs (illness, redundancy, heartbreak) and keeps you grounded.

It accepts the underlying principles but allows room for the surface of life to keep changing and evolving so you don’t lapse into dogma (that eventually would just hold you back because it’s static and real life keeps moving).

Trust in Something Higher

Every strong philosophy or theology has to acknowledge one basic truth: you are not the centre of the universe.

You can’t white-knuckle your way through life and expect peace – you need to trust in something beyond your ego:

  • God
  • Nature
  • A set of sacred principles or values (like courage, truth, humility)
  • Even chaos and uncertainty as long as it’s real to you and you know your reasons for trusting in these things

This trust reminds you that life is bigger than your own mind and helps you adapt with grace when things go off-script (which they always will because the map is not the territory).

As an example, your code might include something like: “I trust that life gives me what I need even when it contradicts what I want“.

The reasons it’s important to build something ‘higher’ than just yourself into the philosophy is because doing this embraces the fact that you can’t control everything in your life and that you don’t know everything in your life – sure, you know a lot, but in the gaps in your knowledge there’s always space for more reality.

A Path from Fragmentation to Wholeness

The point of a personal philosophy isn’t just to have better ideas – it’s to become whole again and to overcome the symptoms of the Void and the moral relativism that supports it.

Wholeness means integrating all parts of yourself:

  • The ego and the shadow.
  • The pain and the possibility.
  • The confusion and the clarity.

This is what all great religions and workable spiritual systems aim at: not perfection, but alignment, flow, and integrity.

For example, your code might include: “I welcome discomfort if it brings me closer to wholeness“.

This one simple sentence can radically change how you show up in conflict, work, relationships, and in whatever inner work you need to do on yourself: if you know that it’s all carrying you towards wholeness, then you can come from a stance of acceptance instead of resistance.

Questions to Build Your Philosophy

To build your own philosophy, you need to wrestle with deep questions so that you can really dig deep into the knowledge that you already have and weed out any unrealistic assumptions that are holding you back from truth.

Don’t rush this. Let it unfold. But keep coming back to it so that you can keep refining your relationship with the truth and going deeper into it:

Some questions to ask (sit down when you have some time and journal out your answers to some of these):

  1. What does it mean to be a human being? Are we here to consume, to love, to grow, to serve, or something else entirely?
  2. What do all humans have in common? Mortality, pain, joy, dreams? The journey that we’re on? Our nature? What makes sense to you based on what you’ve seen of this life?
  3. How do I make moral choices? Is it about consequences? Integrity? A compass deeper than reason? Wholeness? Relativism? What do you think?
  4. What values do I want to live by no matter what? Honour, truth, courage, compassion, discipline? Freedom, creativity, humour, flow? If you know your values you can take action on them and change your own life (and the lives of other people by extension).
  5. What assumptions am I carrying that might not be true? E.g. “I have to be successful to be worthy”, “I have to be beautiful to be loved”, etc. Weed out your limiting beliefs and the assumptions that they’re rooted in because they dictate your whole life.

These questions are your trail markers as you answer them, you begin to build a clear map of your own realness and the philosophy that stems from it.

Uncover and Live the Truth (At Every Level)

The good life isn’t about being right – it’s about being real. That means doing two things every day:

  1. Uncover the truth – Let go of illusions, lies, conditioning and go deeper into wholeness.
  2. Live the truth – Act in alignment with it (and then go even deeper into wholeness).

You need to do this at all levels and your philosophy will (probably – it’s your philosophy, after all) need to reflect them:

  • Physical truth: What’s really going on with your body? Are you tired, inflamed, addicted? How do you see your relationship with your body and what do you need to do to improve it?
  • Mental truth: Are your thoughts clear or distorted by ego/fear? How are your beliefs holding you back? What mental gremlins do you need to bash? Are you identified with the fragments of the mind instead of who you really are in wholeness?
  • Emotional truth: Are you feeling your feelings, or suppressing them? Do you have a healthy relationship with your own emotions? Do you identify with them and stay stuck in them? Do you ignore them and pretend you’re a robot?
  • Spiritual truth: Are you living as if life is sacred or are you just passing time? What does ‘spiritual’ even mean to you? Why does it matter? How does it help you to deal with the Void and moral relativism?

For example, if your body is screaming for rest but your ego is chasing hustle because of some underlying emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, usually), the truth is clear: you’re out of sync with your own spiritual truth and you’re trying to find meaning in places you never can. In this case, your code might include something like “I honour the signals of my body before the demands of my ego“.

Break Free from Two Major Enemies of Truth: Social Programming and Biological Wiring

There are two forces that try to pull you away from reality every single day:

  1. Social programming – the web of messages that say: “You’re only worthy if you look a certain way, earn a certain amount, or follow a certain script”.
  2. Your own flesh/biological wiring – the part of you that craves ease, comfort, instant gratification. It isn’t evil, but it must be tamed like a wild horse and led in the direction of your vision.

You must train yourself to recognise these forces and reject their ill effects in your life when necessary – your personal practical philosophy will need to have a basic way of discerning between when these things are holding you back or not.

For example, your code could include “I am not here to be liked. I am here to live true” to help you overcome social programming and something like “I do what’s right, not what’s easy” to help you overcome the weakness of the flesh.

Writing Your Code of Conduct

Once you’ve spent some time exploring the ‘big; questions and peeled back some of the illusions that are stopping you seeing yourself, the world, and reality clearly, it’s time to distil your insights into something practical and real.

Your Code of Conduct = Philosophy in Action

Ideally, this needs to be:

  • Personal (true to you)
  • Clear (no fluff)
  • Grounded in truth (not just preference or opinion)
  • Revisited often (as life changes around you and you change with it)

Your philosophy may be endless but try and keep your code of conduct to about 5 basic points that you commit to memory:

Example Code (5 simple points):

  1. I tell the truth, even when it costs me.
  2. I treat my body like a sacred vessel.
  3. I take responsibility for everything in my life.
  4. I embrace discomfort as a teacher.
  5. I trust that life is unfolding as it should.

If your practical philosophy is based in truth then your code of conduct will keep you REAL.

Your practical philosophy and code of conduct allow you to program yourself instead of being programmed by the world.

Conclusion: Your Practical Philosophy Leads to A Real Life

Most men drift but a few decide to step up, face facts, and anchor themselves to something real.

Creating your own philosophy and code of conduct won’t make life easier – but it will make your life yours (instead of either the world’s or the product of living on autopilot to nowhere).

With it, you’ll stop outsourcing your meaning to society, trends, or your past; you’ll start walking a path that’s honest, rooted, and real, and that – in the end – is what makes a man unshakable.

Start today – not with the perfect answers (which is impossible) but with the willingness to seek and live the truth.

When you build a life around that… you’ll never go back to the Void.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Non-Duality for Men: Dissolving the Ego Without Losing Drive and Ambition

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Non-duality and drive

Non-duality and Real Growth: Letting Go and Staying in the Flow

If you’re a man who feels pulled between the hunger to achieve and the whisper of something deeper, then keep reading:

This is a totally ‘normal’ conflict that many men feel inside themselves in a world that often feels like it’s going ‘mad’ or has somehow become too far removed from what it really means to be a real human being in the first place.

When many of us become aware of this inner restlessness or the call of the Void, we start to ask questions and to determine what we really want from life. This raising of awareness is always the first step to any transformational journey but without any clear experience of something REAL along the way, we can just end up stuck in a kind of strange middle ground – craving stillness and peace but also craving ‘success‘ and dynamism.

When we’re ‘stuck’ between these poles we start to wonder if we’re losing our minds – especially as we start to become aware of the gap between who we think we are (ego) and who we actually are in our realness. This can often lead to us a decision-point where we’re faced with either letting go of the familiar identity that we’ve been filtering life through up until this point and taking a leap of faith or simply holding on and pretending that everything is fine (even though these old identities will just bring more friction, frustration, and misery the more we cling).

What holds a lot of people back at this stage – from taking that leap of faith into a deeper relationship with reality – is being aware of the ego and the possible benefits of ‘transcending’ it but fearing that if they do they’ll somehow become soft, passive, or irrelevant and lose all of the things that make them ‘them’.

This article is about the twist that a lot of us can miss: true non-duality doesn’t kill your drive. It purifies it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Non-duality is about stepping away from the fragments and experiencing the whole.

What We Cover in This Article

What Is Non-Duality and Why Does It Matter?

At its simplest, non-duality simply means “not two” – at its core, it points to the idea that everything is already whole even though it often appears to be fragmented and populated with entities and objects that are separate and independent from one another.

In other words, everything is whole (even if we don’t perceive or interpret things that way because of our fragmented bodies and brains:

Even though it might ‘look’ like it, reality isn’t split into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘me’ and ‘you’, ‘success’ and ‘failure’ or any other judgements we might ascribe to things. Those are all just mental distinctions that we use to function in the world and relate to it.

Instead of these ‘default’ approach, non-duality is the recognition that behind the labels, the posturing, and the inner battles, there is only this – life itself, unfolding. Always. In one big relationship having a relationship with itself as a set of interconnected systems within systems within systems.

For a lot of men, this can be a radical and uncomfortable idea because it goes against the way we’re both biologically wired and socially conditioned to define ourselves by opposition and assertion: be strong, not weak; win, don’t lose; dominate, never submit.

Non-duality says that all of that this is just an egoic structure – a house built on sand as we project our own fragmentation out into the world around us and experience something that isn’t really even ‘there’.

So… What Is the Ego Then?

The ego isn’t some evil entity you need to “kill” (as people like to say they’re going to do). You can’t kill it, anyway, because it’s not real in that way – it’s just a set of fragmented ideas and sensations that we bought into for a little while based on whatever it is that we think we’ve been through.

Think of it like a filter between you and reality:

It’s your conditioning, your beliefs, your biological programming, and your emotional scars – all wrapped up in a story about who you are, what the world is, and what life is.

It’s not inherently ‘bad’ (that would be a dualistic judgement) – in fact, it’s a useful operating system for helping us to survive and to navigate life. The problems arise when you mistake the filter for the whole view – when you look at the windscreen and get confused, instead of looking through it at the road ahead.

In short, the more identified you become with this filter, the more fragmented your experience becomes.

This is why the ego leads to suffering:

Not because it’s wicked but because it’s blocks our view of life and causes us to attach to the fragments of ourselves instead of growing through them into wholeness.

At the end of the day, life itself is whole and so – when you move through life from a place of ego-attachment – you’re trying to live a whole life through a fragmented lens which is impossible and just inevitably leads to unnecessary friction.

This friction starts as irritation, builds into frustration, and eventually collapses into misery.

The Trap of the Spiritual Bypass

Many men try to dissolve the ego by simply trying to convince themselves that they don’t have one:

They watch some ‘spiritual‘ videos online, read a few books, and then attach the concepts that they’ve picked up to their identity – instead of actually experiencing them – and start speaking in non-dual jargon and hope it fixes the inner tension that comes from not taking that leap into the unknown.

They churn out the catchphrases like “there is no self” and that “everything is just awareness” while secretly still raging at their ex, feeding addictions to validation, or numbing out on porn in an attempt to fill the Void that’s still defining their relationship with themselves and life.

The bottom-line with this kind of thing is that spiritual bypassing is just ego in disguise.

Real spirituality doesn’t avoid the world (or anything else, for that matter) – it’s about facing the truth head on and then riding through the mess that comes from whatever was stopping us from facing it in the first place. It’s about integrating every shadow, every pattern, every wound – not denying them.

And the only way you can start to integrate like this is by accepting that you have an ego in the first place (and that there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with that because it’s not about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but REAL).

Realness: A Path Through the Middle and into Non-Duality

The philosophy I explore in my books and use in my coaching containers with clients is REALNESS and realness is about truth. It’s also about recognising the tension between the ego and the shadow – the part of you you’ve pushed away and sent into hiding in order to maintain an image (ego) that’s ‘acceptable’ to the world around you.

Most men try to project a strong ego in order to avoid facing their shadow (even though facing it is what will set them free) but this just creates a deeper split and an increased sense of fragmentation.

The way back to wholeness is always through Awareness, Acceptance, and Action:

  • Awareness (Deconstruct Ego): See the pattern. Name the filter. Notice when you’re trying to control the uncontrollable, hide from yourself, or win some imaginary competition that really doesn’t matter.
  • Acceptance (Integrate Shadow): Let what is, be. Don’t resist reality because you’ll only lose. Own your flaws, your desires, your mess. Embrace your real opinions and the ways of the world that may initially be uncomfortable (because they don’t align with the ideals that your ego rests upon).
  • Action (Trust Yourself and Life): From this clarity, act. Let your action come from alignment with the whole, not the scramble of ego. Learn to take action that’s yours to take and let go and trust life to handle the rest in times of uncertainty.

Non-Duality Isn’t Passivity – It’s Power

One of the biggest myths men carry is that dissolving the ego will make them weak but the complete opposite is true: the ego is weakness because it’s illusory and the only power we can ever have comes from what’s REAL.

When you stop reacting from ego, you stop wasting energy because you stop resisting life and start accepting it (which alleviates the friction, frustration, and misery that ego eventually brings).

When you’re not fragmented inside, your actions become clean, clear, and impactful because they’re inspired by something whole.

In this state, drive becomes devotion:

You don’t hustle to be seen; you create because it’s real. You lead not to dominate, but to serve. You train your body not out of fear, but love, respect, and the intention to express more life and feel more alive. You set goals not to feel worthy, but because you already are and you want to revel in it.

This is what it means to be in the world but not of it.

From Vision to Wholeness: Non-Duality Made Actionable

The danger of goal-setting from the ego is that it always moves the finish line because it’s caught up in outcome-independence and so you’ll never feel like you’re ‘enough’.

When you act from that place of REALNESS, beyond duality, your vision shifts:

You aim not to fill a hole, but to express wholeness.

Here’s how you can start to do that:

  • Vision: What would your life look like if it flowed from truth and wholeness instead fear and fragmentation? Real vision arises when you start to ask yourself “What wants to come through me?“
  • Goals: Make them real, measurable, and rooted in contribution. They should stretch you but not enslave you as they carry you towards your vision.
  • Habits: These are your anchor to reality: Choose habits that bring you back into presence, back into the now, back into your body, and that help you to grow into the version of yourself that’s aligned with your vision.

The Discipline of Presence

Most men think discipline is about ‘forcing’ things but real discipline is about presence:

It’s about being here and to remain unshaken, no matter what arises. From this place, you can choose aligned action – not because you’re ‘proving’ something but because you already are something: a man plugged into the whole.

The world will still throw fragmentation at you and so your nervous system will still get triggered here-and-there but, every time you return to realness, you dissolve a bit more ego. You reclaim a bit more energy. You start flowing with life instead of fighting it.

And that? That’s non-dual.

It’s REAL.

Practical Integration: A Roadmap for Non-Duality and Realness

Here’s how to bring this down from the clouds and into your real, day-to-day life:

1. Daily Awareness Practice

Spend at least 10 minutes a day in stillness:

Ask yourself: What am I believing right now that is creating resistance?

Breathe. Observe. No ‘fixing’. Just notice that ego filter and how your identity is distorting your life.

2. Shadow Work Journal

Every week, write about what ‘triggered’ or activated you in some way: Go deep.

What fear or unmet need is behind it? What part of your ego was being defended? What is it time to let go of? What is it time to accept?

3. Choose Real Goals

Check your goals and figure out if they’re motivated in ego or in something real. Essentially, you wanna make sure that your goals serve growth, not approval (or any other unreal strategy for filling the Void).

4. Create Flow Habits

Build 3 daily habits that anchor you into presence:

  • Breathwork or cold showers to reset your nervous system.
  • Resistance training to stay grounded.
  • Time in nature to remind you of the whole.

5. Commit to the Dance

You’re not trying to be perfect; you’re not trying to become enlightened by next Tuesday; you’re just dancing with life and observing it as it unfolds.

Sometimes you’ll flow, sometimes you’ll fall but realness is always in the return so commit to it.

As the old Japanese proverb says: “Nanakorobi yaoki” (七転び八起き) “If you fall down seven times, get up eight”.

Non-duality is about giving up the ego so you can grow real.

Final Word: Truth Dissolves Ego and Non-Duality is Reality

There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with wanting to build, achieve, or impact the world – in fact, the world probably needs more men who do that from wholeness.

But you can’t bypass your way there:

You have to face your filters, you have to stop fighting reality, and you have to let go of the image of the man you think you should be so you can finally be the one you are.

That’s non-duality: not an escape but a return.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in tapping into your real drive and taking action and you think that coaching might be for you, then book a free call with me and get moving.

Why Sexual Polarity Dies in Relationships (and How to Restore It)

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Sexual polarity and realness

What is Sexual Polarity in Relationships and Why is It Important?

This is a quick article about why sexual polarity sometimes dies in relationships but – before we dive into that – let’s quickly clarify what we mean by polarity:

In the context of relationships, polarity refers to the magnetic interplay of opposing but complementary energies.

Some ways that this is commonly described are as the pull between the masculine (yang) and the feminine (yin), the active and the receptive, the assertive and the surrendered, or in terms of many other opposites. We all embody in varying degrees with biological males tending to have more masculine energy and biological females tending to have more feminine energy (seeing as that’s how nature generally made it so we can keep on propagating the species).

This kind of healthy and real polarity is what creates attraction, intimacy, and deep connection and is the force that allows us to come together in a way that feels exciting, dynamic, and true.

When polarities – whether masculine/feminine, yin/yang, or assertive/receptive – are in motion, they create the spark that draws people together and keeps the relationship moving towards deeper wholeness and realness.

Without this interplay, relationships can feel stagnant or disconnected, and intimacy can start to fade until it dwindles completely.

Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s explore why polarity dies in so many relationships and how we can bring it back to life.

Sexual polarity is about owning your nature and working with it, not against it.

What We Cover in This Article

The Myth of 50:50

When it comes to relationships, we’re often sold the idea that a ‘healthy’ partnership is a perfect balance of equality (“50-50” is the common phrase we like to use)

Here’s the thing, though: no relationship is truly 50-50 when it comes to polarity.

If both partners were to share equal energy, the result wouldn’t be a dynamic, thriving connection but would instead be boredom and stagnation.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that partners aren’t equal in worth or respect in a 50:50 kind of way – just that true intimacy can’t grow if both are operating from the same frequency and there is no movement or growth. In order for there to be any kind of interplay – which is what polarity creates – the energies need to dance and shift so that they can create some kind of spark.

Polarity, the dance between opposing but complementary energies, then, is essential to attraction, growth, and intimacy.

But when this natural force fades, it can lead to a “dead bedroom” type of scenario where the excitement is gone and frustration starts to take its place.

Once this stage is reached, the relationship begins to feel disconnected, lacking the realness and vibrancy that once defined it.

So, how did it all go wrong, and more importantly, how can we restore that dynamic spark?

Let’s dig a little deeper to find out:

The Shadow of the Ego: Why Polarity Dies

The short-version is that polarity in relationships starts to fade when both partners resist growth:

When we get too attached to ideas about who we think we are and lock ourselves into rigid ego roles, these roles – rooted in fear and control freakery – prevent us from expressing our full, authentic selves (including our real sexual energy). Instead of embodying the flow of our natural essence, we hide it away in the shadow territory of our unconscious mind and the disowned ‘parts’ of ourselves.

If you don’t know already, the shadow self is a psychological concept where we bury ‘parts’ of ourselves that don’t fit with our self-image, often out of shame or fear of rejection.

It’s this buried energy that blocks the authentic attraction and connection needed to sustain true intimacy. This means that when people cling to a stagnant, ego-based version of themselves, they effectively turn off the magnetic force that keeps the relationship alive.

Without polarity, the relationship becomes flat, and the sexual and emotional connection withers.

This is completely unnecessary because all we need to do to rebuild the connection is to start being REAL again.

The Dead Bedroom and the Frustration That Follows

When polarity dies, it’s not just the physical intimacy that’s affected – there’s a deep emotional frustration that grows for both partners.

This is the feeling of being ‘stuck’ and of no longer experiencing the exciting pull or dynamic connection that once brought you together. Both partners might feel frustrated in this situation – not because they don’t love each other, but because they don’t know how to feel real with each other anymore. This is purely because he energy is stagnant and – when energy isn’t moving – neither is the connection.

This frustration might manifest in physical ways, like the infamous “dead bedroom” where physical intimacy has become a rare occurrence, or in more subtle ways, like emotional distance, resentment, or apathy.

However it shows up, the the core issue remains the same:

When sexual polarity fades, so does the authenticity that allows for true connection.

Authentic Relationships: Growth Into Intimacy

What makes authentic relationships different is that they’re about growth towards more wholeness: specifically, in this case, growth into intimacy.

This isn’t just about sharing experiences or memories; it’s about evolving together, moving deeper into each other’s worlds, and becoming more vulnerable, real, and even exposed (but unconditionally accepted).

Sexual polarity is a key driver for this growth process as a whole:

It’s the interplay of energies – the dance between masculine and feminine, between assertion and surrender – that allows us to release unreal fragmentation and move closer to who we truly are in wholeness.

In other words, polarity helps strip away the ego’s distortions, creating a deeper, more grounded intimacy.

We can think of it like this:

When the masculine energy asserts itself and the feminine energy surrenders, the coming together of these polarities creates a powerful, dynamic force that creates something neither energetic polarity could create on its own.

It’s a force that draws out what’s real and strips away what’s not and so the relationship becomes a living organism that evolves, growing deeper into realness with every interaction.

David Deida, Yin & Yang, and Shiva & Shakti

Now, you may have heard about David Deida, whose work on sexual polarity and masculine/feminine energy has become the foundation for much of today’s conversation around intimacy:

Deida suggests that men and women have distinct energies – masculine and feminine – and that the interplay between these energies is essential for sexual and emotional fulfilment. Unfortunately, Deida’s work often gets oversimplified with the internet cult that is spiritual bullsh*ttery and so what’s missing from many interpretations of his teachings is the understanding that polarity isn’t about rigid roles or ‘performing’ masculinity or femininity but instead about embodying the true essence of these energies, allowing them to flow, evolve, and interact in ways that create dynamic attraction.

The same principles of polarity can be found throughout history in yin and yang – the ancient Chinese philosophy that represents the complementary forces of opposites. In this school of thought, Yin (feminine) and yang (masculine) are not static or fixed; they are dynamic, ever-changing forces that need each other to maintain balance.

Similarly, in the Vedic traditions of Shiva and Shakti, we see the dance of the divine masculine (Shiva) and the divine feminine (Shakti). This ancient wisdom shows us that polarity is not about dominance, but about mutual respect and the active flow between energies as COMPLEMENTARY forces – i.e. forces that need each other to reach the full expression of their realness.

Again, it’s not about rigid roles but about a dynamic, ongoing exchange that drives intimacy and connection as everybody involved grows more real.

Sexual polarity comes naturally without ego.

How to Restore Sexual Polarity in Your Relationship

Now that we understand why polarity dies in relationships, we can start to bring it back to life.

Here’s how:

1. Reclaim Your Authentic Energy

Start by reconnecting with your own masculine or feminine essence:

For men, this might mean grounding firmly into your purpose, building confidence by taking real action, and learning to embody your sexual energy by developing presence.

For women, it might involve embracing your sensuality, intuition, and the power of surrender.

Whatever it is, don’t hide behind ego-based roles and choose to get in touch with the energy you really are.

2. Let Go of the Ego’s Grip

The ego wants control, but authentic intimacy requires surrender to the truth itself:

Allow your partner to lead when it’s their time and allow yourself to surrender to the flow of the relationship.

This might be uncomfortable at first, especially if you’ve been stuck in patterns of control or living up to a certain (unreal) image of yourself but true intimacy requires vulnerability and trust which means letting go of the masks and allowing the polarities to interact freely.

3. Cultivate Emotional Vulnerability

Real intimacy grows when we’re willing to show our actual emotions (eww, I know, right?):

Start having deeper, more authentic conversations (a real conversation can change your life, after all) – share your fears, desires, and joys without judgment or fear.

Polarity thrives when both partners feel emotionally safe enough to reveal their true selves and both step up to be real.

4. Embrace the Dance of Masculine and Feminine

Finally, don’t fall into the trap of static roles:

Embrace the flow.

Sometimes the masculine leads, sometimes the feminine surrenders, and sometimes the energies shift (though there will be a dominant pattern for masculine and feminine that usually prevails).

Keep the dance alive by being present, flexible, and willing to allow the energies to shift based on what’s actually happening in reality – not what you think needs to happen in your head.

In the end, polarity is about allowing the natural interplay of energies to flow and that’s it.

It’s not about fixing yourself or your partner into rigid roles, but about creating space for growth, intimacy, and realness.

Let the reality waves take you where you need to be and then be there.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. f you’re interested in coaching and you’re ready to be the realest version of yourself for yourself and your family and friends, then book a free call with me and start taking real action.

Presence: Why You Struggle with Being Present and How to Change It

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Presence leads to realness

Realness, Presence, and Purpose are Deeply Intertwined

The world is not reality which is one of the reasons we find ourselves in an unreal world that idolises the hustle, glorifies busyness, and confuses productivity with true purpose.

The result of all this is that we have generation of men who are rarely – if ever – truly present. In fact, many of them actively fear presence and so they’re constantly running around distracting themselves and trying to escape life by any means necessary (whilst still looking ‘busy’, of course, because ‘busyness’ is one of our core cultural values).

Let that sink in for a moment:

When was the last time you really felt right here, right now?

Not scrolling, not overthinking, not worrying about something, or getting ready to do the next thing on your list whilst you’re currently doing the current thing – just here.

In your body. With your breath. In this moment.

Chances are, it’s been a while and – if you’re like most men – it’s not your fault (though your lack of presence is a CHOICE that you keep making):

You’ve been conditioned away from your natural state of presence and taught to feel, think, do, and even BE something that you’re not.

That sounds a bit dramatic but there’s some good news too: presence is your birth-right and it can’t be taken from you because it’s just you REALNESS (and what’s real is always real).

It’s the secret sauce behind every great life, every true connection, and every meaningful pursuit…and you can reclaim it by starting to shift your focus.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Presence is essential for realness which is vital for mental and physical health.

What Is Presence, Really?

Presence isn’t just sitting cross-legged on a meditation cushion and fingering your bellybutton – nor is it staring blankly at a tree, pretending you’re enlightened.

Real presence is about being with reality as it is – not as your mind filters or manipulates it.

It’s about tasting something WHOLE instead of just the little FRAGMENTS of experience that we identify with and get used to.

Presence isn’t passive.

Presence isn’t bland or empty.

It’s a dynamic stillness that allows you to act without force, speak without fear, and love without condition. It’s when your mind, body, and spirit are all pointing in the same direction and not tearing you away from your real life.

It’s when you’re really ‘here’ in the now and not just lost in your head, your blocked emotions, and your interpretations.

When you’re present, you can actually see and be seen:

You see your partner, your kids, your mates. You hear your the voice of your own REALNESS and feel connected to something whole and true instead of getting lost in a fog of fragmented thoughts.

The opposite of presence is distractions:

An often involuntary (because you’re running on autopilot) where you miss out on your own life because you’re physically there but emotionally and spiritually AWOL.

This distractionism is the default state of the modern man: a ghost in his own skin – haunting his own life in the Void and wondering why everything is so quiet and desperate instead of being filled with colour and glory.

Why Men Struggle with Presence

Presence is our natural state but it’s not our normal state anymore for various reasons (there are probably way more):

1. We’re addicted to doing instead of accepting of our being: From a young age, we’re rewarded for performance over presence: school grades, sports championships, climbing the career ladder, and chasing achievement.

The more we do, the more we feel like we actually are something but this is only because we’re detached from what’s real about us and so we think that we need to ‘achieve’ our realness when all we really need to do is reach out and receive it (and still take REAL ACTION).

Slowing down feels like death to the ego which is why most of us are running around like headless chickens. The irony is that when we do slow down we can see what’s hiding behind the mask of ego and start being who we really are.

2. We’re terrified of stillness because in the stillness we find flow: Stillness can be a confronting experience – especially if we’re a human doing instead of a human being – because, when we stop, we hear the noise inside ourselves and have to face all the things we’ve been trying to distract ourselves from:

The judgements. The shame. The unresolved emotions. The shadow parts.

Presence forces us to feel, and many of us have never been taught how to feel safely and so we keep running. If we don’t feel, though, we can’t allow what’s actually real about us to emerge and so we’ll always be lost to the Void and feel a lack of actual presence in our lives (we’ll be living in a projection instead).

3. Our nervous systems are fried and so our thoughts and actions become erratic: Many of us live in a chronic state of fight-or-flight and so our nervous systems are stuck on overdrive (we have what’s known as Sympathetic Dominance).

In this state, we constantly feel on edge because we experience hypervigilance and overstimulation. We’re constantly scanning for external threats like emails, bills, and social rejection but also internal ‘threat’s like our own emotional ‘stuff’. In this state, presence is nearly impossible because our biology is hijacked and taking us away from reality instead of towards it.

4. The ego hates presence because the ego is unreal: The ego wants control and so it thrives on the past and the future, regret and worry.

On the other hand, presence requires surrender which dismantles the ego’s illusions and reveals the truth: that we’re already whole, loved, and enough because we’re already REAL and what’s real is always real.

What Happens When You’re Not Present?

When you’re not present, you’re living through the lens of a fragmented self (ego) placed between yourself and reality – a bundle of reactions and roles rather than a real, rooted identity.

Here’s what that leads to:

  • Shallow relationships: People can’t connect with you. You might be charming, charismatic, or whatever but you’re not felt because you’re not there.
  • Poor decisions: Without presence, you act from fear, habit, or impulse – not truth. You also end up trying to force life because you can’t trust (because your nervous system is screwed up) and so you lose a sense of flow.
  • Missed opportunities: Life is always offering you something real like a next step, a new opportunity, or a lesson in letting go but if you’re distracted, you won’t see it.
  • Inner chaos: Without presence, your mind runs wild and you become reactive, anxious, and out of alignment as the Gremlin takes over and pulls you away from yourself, the world, and reality.

The Masculine Power of Presence

Here’s the twist: presence isn’t just a feel-good concept that’s for hippies on park benches – it’s a masculine superpower:

True masculinity isn’t just about dominance or bravado -it’s about groundedness.

Being grounded means that you’re unshakeable enough within yourself and your thoughts and emotions to penetrate reality with clarity and strength…no matter what it throws your way.

Really, this means meeting life on its own terms instead of according to your own judgements or expectations. It’s about embracing that sometimes It is what it is and So be it.

When you’re present like this, you can hold space – for your loved ones, the challenges you’re facing, and your purpose.

Presence is the difference between force and flow:

It’s what lets you lead, love, and build something real without losing yourself in the process (though you’ll probably lose your ego in order to find yourself).

In short, presence is how you face chaos without becoming it.

Remember what Jesus said: “Be IN the world, but not OF the world” – that’s presence: engaged in this world of ours without being entangled in it or ensnared upon its thorns.

Awake but not overwhelmed.

Presence: The Portal to Potential

Presence is also how you unlock your potential because when you’re present, you’re connected to reality.

This is important because reality is the only place where anything ever happens (real always works, after all):

It’s the only place you can create, heal, grow, serve, love, lead or do anything even remotely true.

It’s where your purpose lives and where you’ll find yourself at your best.

When you’re present, your energy is focused, your instincts kick in, and your creativity flows; you stop being ruled by fear and start acting from wisdom.

You become more REAL.

How to Cultivate Presence: The Three Levels

Presence isn’t something you ‘achieve’ once and for all – it’s a practice of constantly tuning in and receiving what’s already and always there (reality).

It’s like a muscle that – like any muscle – strengthens with repetition and care.

Here are three levels of work to start integrating and becoming more present in yourself and your life:

1. Master the Mind

  • Learn to distinguish between real and unreal thoughts: Use tools like journaling, mindfulness, or the Thought Log (available for free on this site) to expose unreal ego patterns and shift your focus onto something real.
  • Question the mental noise and keep checking in with yourself: Ask: Is this thought true? Is it helpful? Is it even mine? Is it coming from a real place or from unreal fear and doubt?
  • Anchor to now with breath: A simple practice: 5 slow breaths through the nose, focusing only on the inhale and exhale. Repeat until you’re regulated (not just relaxed) and then keep going.

2. Regulate the Nervous System

  • Build awareness of your stress states: Notice when you’re in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn so that you know when you’re being present or not.
  • Use somatic tools: Breathwork, cold exposure, movement, or grounding exercises are all good (personally, I think yin yoga is the best practice for nervous system regulation).
  • Develop daily rituals that signal safety to your body: E.g., slow walks, stretching, silent mornings, etc. Check out the Morning Routine Generator on this site for more ideas: Morning Routine Generator: Pick n Mix Morning Generator for Realness.

3. Live with Purpose

  • When you’re on a real mission and know you’re vision, presence becomes natural – you’re not floating around wondering what matters. You’re actively engaged in life, riding the reality waves that come you’re way, and moving towards your vision.
  • Make sure that when you create a vision that it inspires you. It doesn’t have to be perfect—it just has to be real.
  • Ask yourself: What’s the realest action I can take today that aligns with who I want to become?

Three Practices to Start Today

Let’s make it practical – here are three presence-building habits to integrate from today onwards (if you so desire):

1. Daily Presence Check-In (3 minutes) Set a reminder on your phone, stop what you’re doing, close your eyes. Breathe deeply and ask yourself:

  • Where am I?
  • What am I feeling?
  • Am I ‘here’ now or lost in unreal thoughts?

2. Presence in Conversations Next time someone speaks to you, really listen. Like, really. No interruptions. No fixing. No thinking of what to say next. Just receive them.

Presence is the most powerful gift you can give because it’s REAL.

3. Digital Fasting Choose a daily window (e.g., first hour of the morning or last hour of the evening) to go completely offline. No screens. No stimulation. Just you and life.

These three things are all simple but totally effective – especially over time as the results keep compounding on themselves.

Presence is the key to riding the reality waves and finding wholeness.

Final Thoughts: The Return to Realness

You weren’t born distracted; you weren’t born fragmented – you came into this world fully present, alive, whole, and real.

You can start to return to this state of presence any time you CHOOSE.

Presence isn’t about becoming something new – it’s about remembering who you are underneath all the noise and unlearning the conditioning that keeps you from this.

You don’t need another hack or hustle; you don’t need to do another course or watch another thousand videos about enlightenment. All you need to do is to be here. Now.

That’s where your power lives because it’s where you’ll find your realness.

It’s also where your purpose lives and were you’ll feel most alive.

Stay real out there,

If you’re interested in coaching and you want to develop more presence and purpose in your life, book a free call with me and get started.

Overcoming Distraction: How to Stop Using Escapism to Avoid the Void

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The Wages of Distraction is an Unreal Life

In a world overflowing with entertainment, stimulation, and endless options for distraction, it’s never been easier to lose yourself in empty and meaningless activities that have nothing to do with your real purpose (and not the ‘good’ kind of “losing yourself” where you eventually find yourself):

One moment you’re checking your phone, the next you’re deep down the YouTube rabbit hole or bingeing a Netflix series for the three-thousandth consecutive evening.

You know it feels ‘wrong’ at some level because you know that you’re really only doing it to escape from your life or because you’re not quite sure what to do with it – either way, you attempt to justify it to yourself by saying that you “deserve a break”, that it’s “harmless”, or that “everyone’s doing it” (so it must be the ‘right’ thing to do – given the world is in such a great state and all).

Deep down, though, a quiet voice nags at you from down there in the Shadow Territory:

“Is this really the life I want?“, “Is this the REAL me?“, “Is my life really supposed to be like this?“.

What you don’t want to accept in those moments of endless doom scrolling and bingeing is that this voice is real and it’s asking the right questions.

It’s trying to wake you up and call you back home because the truth is that distraction isn’t just about relaxing or having a break.

It’s about wasting your life.

Distraction and escapism lead to lives of quiet desperation.

The Void Behind the Distraction

Every man carries the Void within him at some point in life – that sense of hollowness, of something missing – an itch that can’t be scratched or a restless feeling that something indescribable needs shaking up in a big way.

We often try to patch the void up with dopamine hits in an attempt to overcome it:

Social media, porn, video games, processed food, alcohol, drugs, mindless scrolling, gossip, even overworking or anything else you can think of.

(Literally anything can be used as a substitute for the truth (the only thing that can really fill the Void) – see my book which talks about this in detail: Trust: A Manual for Becoming The Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace).

Despite our best effort to fill the void with these things, our efforts prove to be fruitless and the void lingers in our lives like a dark cloud. It doesn’t even shrink. It just keeps growing.

And the reason is simple:

Distractions offer a release from being unreal with ourselves, not the relief of our own REALNESS.

In other words, they give us a momentary escape from the tension we feel when we’re living a life disconnected from the truth about ourselves, the world, and reality but they do nothing to resolve the cause of that tension – a detachment from realness.

And why are we detached from our realness in the first place?

It’s always because of shame.

Shame makes us hide behind the mask of the Ego. It makes us pretend. It convinces us that who we really are isn’t ‘enough’ and so we start constructing a false self in order to to ‘survive’ in the world without ever really feeling connected to it.

This may protect us in the short-term but the mask can’t feel real love, real joy, real meaning and so – instead – we chase substitutes in the form of distractions.

We do this so we don’t have to feel the grief of what we’ve lost: our REALNESS.

Addiction by Another Name

In my opinion, distraction is soft addiction.

It’s insidious because it doesn’t always look dangerous but over time distraction can eat away at our lives until we’re totally off course and have become detached from our own flow and potential:

Watching TV, scrolling Instagram, or even endlessly researching self-help tips doesn’t feel bad but what it costs you when you add up all those hours spent on such activities is enormous: your presence, your power, and your potential.

We simply don’t realise how much these small, daily habits keep us locked in stasis:

They might numb us from the friction we feel – the discomfort of living out of alignment with truth but even this is a small irony because we need that friction because it shows us where the work is to be done and where there’s room to grow.

It’s a compass pointing us back home but if we’re too busy distracting ourselves to look at it then we’ll just get more-and-more lost – only to find ourselves looking back at our lives one day and wondering where it all went wrong (there wasn’t a singular event – it was a death by a thousand cuts caused by years of distraction and escape instead of facing reality head-on and building with it).

The World Wants You Distracted

Let’s be honest: we live in a culture that profits off your pain, disconnection, and shame. It keeps you pacified and passive so that you’ll stay in your emotions, never really solve any of your problems, but keep endlessly scrolling and clicking on things to give you that temporary release.

Free entertainment isn’t really free. Free porn isn’t free. Free social media isn’t free.

As they old saying goes: “If the product is free, then YOU’RE the product”.

‘Free’ distraction always costs you something: your vitality and your purpose.

And the longer you choose escapism over embodiment, the harder it becomes to find your way back.

But the way back is always there because what’s real is always real.

The Real Choice: Become the Void

When you’re feeling the void, you’ve got two basic choices:

  1. Distract yourself from it and stay stuck.
  2. Become it and transform your life.

What does it mean to become the void?

It means you stop running and sit with the discomfort so that you can face what’s underneath and start to reconnect to your own raw humanity.

It means letting go of the mask and, in doing so, reconnecting to the natural drive toward wholeness that’s always unfolding as you unconscious mind tries to make itself conscious and connects you to life as a whole.

This isn’t a one-time moment. It’s a lifestyle that involves putting yourself in the process of life as a whole and building flow (rather than just distracting yourself with tiny fragments).

Becoming the void means trusting that your realness is enough, that your emotions are not your enemy (just e-motion, energy in motion), and that purpose is found not in escaping tension, but in walking through it and growing a little more real day-after-day.

Your Distractions Are a Mirror

A lot of the time, the things you reach for in times of stress or boredom are showing you what you’re avoiding:

That compulsion to pick up your phone when you’re alone? That’s a clue. That third coffee you didn’t need? Clue. That endless string of YouTube videos you’ve watched this week? Clue.

Ask yourself: What am I avoiding right now?

And more importantly: What would I be doing if I was living from my realness?

The gap between those two answers is the work.

(If you’re interested in coaching then, book a free call with me if you want to start resolving this tension within yourself).

How to Break Free from the Grip of Distraction

If you want to stop using distractions to avoid your pain, you’ll need to rewire how you relate to discomfort, identity, and purpose by learning to better manage your thoughts, regulate your nervous system, and create a sense of purpose in your life.

Here are three powerful strategies to help you get started:

1. Master Your Mind: Learn to Distinguish Real from Unreal Thoughts

Believe it or not, not every thought in your head belongs to you:

Many of them come from the conditioned self – the ego trying to protect you from feeling exposed as your unconditional self (realness). The more you believe these thoughts, the more power they have over you because they affect the way that you feel and act (which leads to whatever results you get).

Use tools like the Thought Log (a tool I use with coaching clients) to separate the lies from the truth. You can also just write down some of your thoughts throughout the day, label them as ‘real’ or ‘unreal’ and practice focusing only on the ones aligned with your purpose.

You’ll be shocked at how much mental clutter dissolves simply by getting your mind right.

2. Regulate Your Nervous System: Get Comfortable with Discomfort

If your body is always tense, you’ll always be looking for a quick release and distractions (and addictions) offer the fastest route to that.

Training your nervous system to feel safe in discomfort by engaging in activities like breathwork, cold exposure, yoga, and meditation can help you to stay regulated so that you’re way less likely to suffer the negative effects of carrying physical tension.

Take daily pauses. Breathe deeply. Practise slowing down. The calmer your nervous system becomes, the less you’ll crave artificial stimulation and the easier it is to avoid distractions.

3. Cultivate Purpose: Find the Thing Worth Suffering For

When your life has purpose, you don’t need distractions – you’re too busy living fully and you also know what you want and so it’s easier to stay disciplined.

Start by asking yourself: What kind of man do I want to be? What kind of impact do I want to have?

Then reverse-engineer your daily habits to align with that vision and create a routine for yourself that supports your growth from one day to the next.

Purpose isn’t found in your head – it’s found through action:

Serve others. Build something real. Move your body. Speak truthfully. Get uncomfortable.

Rinse and repeat.

The Voice of Distraction vs. The Voice of Truth

You’ve got two voices inside you:

  • One whispers, “Just one more episode. One more scroll. One more hit”.
  • The other says, “This isn’t who you are. I’m more real than this”.

The first is a Gremlin – a parasite feeding off your stagnation and keeping you where you don’t wanna be (by feeding on your unexpressed potential every time you choose distraction over opportunity).

The second is your Real Voice and your job is to listen for it and act on it.

Your real voice won’t shout or beg – it’s calm, clear, and true.

The more you obey it, the stronger it becomes.

Keep asking yourself: “Who am I becoming with this behaviour?” – the answer to this will show you if it’s real or not.

Distraction can be overcome by removing the unreal and focusing on the real.

Final Thoughts: Becoming a Man Who Doesn’t Need to Escape

You weren’t born to live a life of avoidance or escapism.

Nor were you born to be tame, compliant, or endlessly entertained and pacified.

You were born to live with courage and purpose.

Escapism is just a habit that can be unlearned and on the other side of it lies a life that’s actually worth living…your REAL life.

Don’t settle for a life that gives you temporary relief from being fake; create a life that gives you lasting freedom by being real.

The void isn’t your enemy. It’s your invitation.

Stay real out there,

If you’re struggling with distraction, interested in coaching, and want to shift back into your real life, then book a free call with me to get moving again.

Loneliness and Men: Why Men Are Struggling to Connect

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The Epidemic of Disconnection, Fragmentation, and Purposelessness

We’ve all heard about the irony of the modern world:

There has never been more technology aimed at connecting us and yet men have never felt more alone and disconnected from themselves and each other.

We scroll through feeds, swipe through dating apps, get in endless textual relationships, spend all night on video calls, and send emojis instead of expressing anything real (with actual words).

All of this distraction can even be ‘fun’ sometimes and even feed into our egos but – when the noise dies down and the screen fades to black – many men are left facing a silence they can’t quite explain: the heavy emptiness of the Void and the loneliness that this brings.

This is no longer just a side issue or a ‘cultural talking point’ – it’s a modern epidemic and it’s getting worse and worse.

Let’s dig a little deeper into this issue and what we can start to DO about it.

Male loneliness is a serious problem.

Loneliness vs. Solitude (Ego vs. Realness)

The first thing that we need to understand to make sense of all this is that there’s an important distinction between loneliness and solitude:

Loneliness is being alone with your ego – the echo chamber of unprocessed shame and the internal critic’s greatest hits on loop. In this sense, loneliness isn’t just the experience of being cut of from others but also being cut off from your self.

Solitude, on the other hand, is a sacred place for real growth: It’s where you reconnect with the part of you that isn’t posturing or pretending and where you can taste your own realness. It’s where the mask slips off and you remember who you really are.

In solitude, you are alone with purpose; in loneliness, you are alone with pain.

Most men spend their lives avoiding solitude because they confuse it with loneliness but, paradoxically, the less solitude you have, the more likely you are to be lonely because you’re never really with yourself.

And if you’re not with yourself, how can you ever truly be with anyone else?

The Hidden Root: Disconnection from Purpose Leads to Male Loneliness

At the heart of male loneliness lies something deeper than unmet social needs: disconnection from one’s real purpose.

A man who doesn’t know his purpose is a man who feels lost – even in a crowd.

Many men today are living on autopilot, ticking boxes handed down by society:

Career, money, fitness, sex, status…but these are all surface-level pursuits (which means you could pursue and even achieve all of them without ever learning about your own realness).

If your life is not aligned with something real, you’ll feel the absence of that realness in every interaction and this will be projected out into the world around you:

You’ll attract people who match your mask, not your soul; you’ll be surrounded, but unknown – and that’s the most painful flavour of loneliness there is.

Purpose is magnetic because when a man reconnects with truth and acts on his purpose, he naturally attracts those with similar values, interests, and mindsets. That’s when a real tribe starts to form – not from effort, but from alignment.

Ego and the Shadow Self: The Great Saboteurs

So why do so many men stay disconnected from purpose?

It’s because it’s buried behind the Ego and hidden in the Shadow:

The ego is the part of us that wants to look good, win approval, and avoid shame at all costs. It builds a persona designed to be liked, admired, and accepted.

On the other hand, the shadow is everything that we have to disown or hide to keep the illusion of the ego in place: the fears, doubts, wounds, and insecurities we’d rather not face but also some of the more ‘positive’ things like our true goals, values, qualities, and emotions (the shadow can be comprised of both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’).

Most men construct their identity to avoid the shadow but the paradox is that your real purpose is often hidden inside the very parts of yourself you’ve rejected. Until you face your fears, your loneliness isn’t going anywhere. Because the people you’re meant to connect with can’t see you – only the mask that you wear in order to keep hiding.

In short, you can’t form real bonds while wearing armour because intimacy requires realness and vulnerability. These things can’t exist with ego and this is the main reason so many people find themselves being lonely: thing think they are the ego and forget that it’s just something that they have and can change any time they like.

Loneliness and the Transactional Mindset

There’s another reason men feel disconnected: we’ve been conditioned to treat relationships as transactions and so we look at things in terms of tit-for-tat instead of realness.

Modern culture is obsessed with ‘value’:

We’re told to optimise everything – including ourselves and so dating advice becomes a marketing strategy and friendships are evaluated based on utility and social capital before the basic human level of connection. Even spirituality is sold like a lifestyle brand and about using God as a kind of vending machine to get whatever you want by pressing the right buttons (read more about this kind of spiritual bullsh*ttery here: SPIRITUAL BULLSH*T & DIVINE NARCISSISM).

The result? We show up looking to get, not to give.

But real connection doesn’t work like that.

Loneliness thrives when we approach others thinking, “What can I get from you?” but real connection happens when we ask things like “How can I give you something real?“.

When you lead with presence instead of performance, people feel it and can relax around you and be real and authentic in return.

This means that the right ones respond to you and the rest fall away – which is good, because they were never your people to begin with.

What you’re left with is your tribe.

Real Connection Requires Realness

Most men say they want deeper relationships but what they actually want is to feel safe being real (because that’s what a ‘deep’ relationship is: one or more people being real together).

You don’t get there by chasing connection. You get there by becoming someone who lives from truth.

That basically means:

  • Dropping the act.
  • Being honest about your struggles.
  • Speaking from the heart, not from the script.
  • Valuing presence over polish.
  • Giving and receiving, not just taking.

This often means being the first to go deep, even when it feels risky and being the first to name the thing nobody else wants to name. The first to say, “I feel that too” and shining some light onto those places that people fear because of the darkness (even though they’re completely real and just being avoided because of everybody’s shadow ‘stuff’).

Sure, this can be super uncomfortable but it’s also powerful because realness is magneticL

It also leads the way to others diving in and doing the same.

And that’s when connection happens – not through performance, but through the resonance of realness meeting realness.

The Power of Brotherhood

Loneliness often feels like a personal failure that reflects on us badly in some way (another reason that loneliness is usually time spent alone with our ego instead of our realness).

But it’s not. It’s systemic. The truth is that modern life isolates men because – for whatever reason – we’re not taught how to build brotherhood.

Instead, we’re taught how to compete, how to tough it out, and how to do it all alone (even though nobody is really alone in reality so it’s a flawed strategy to facing life in a real way).

The truth is that men are not meant to live in isolation because we’re tribal creatures:

We’re meant to grow alongside other men who challenge us (“iron sharpens iron”), witness us, and walk with us through the fire.

A real brotherhood doesn’t demand perfection – it demands presence.

If you’re struggling with loneliness, ask yourself:

Where are the men I can be real with?

And if you don’t have that yet, be the one to create something: Start a group. Share your truth first. Reach out. Take the risk.

Because the alternative is spiritual starvation and that’s the loneliest thing in the world.

Practical Steps to Reconnect

Here are some ways to move from loneliness to connection:

1. Reclaim Solitude

Stop avoiding time alone with your ego. Instead, make space for solitude that’s intentional and linked to your purpose, not passive. Go for a walk without your phone. Sit in silence. Journal without a goal. Let the noise settle so you can hear what’s underneath and figure out your next real moves.

2. Audit Your Life for Realness

Where are you being fake to gain approval? Where are you hiding parts of yourself? Get honest about where the mask is still running the show and begin to take it off, bit by bit. This is Shadow Work and will level you up hard because it will help you integrate whatever you’ve been avoiding that is actually essential for you to feel real.

3. Create, Don’t Consume

Instead of numbing loneliness with distractions, channel it into creativity:

Write, build, move, make.

When you give something real, you reconnect with yourself and others feel it.

4. Join or Build a Men’s Circle

This can be life-changing. Spaces where men speak openly and without judgement are rare but they are growing.

Don’t wait to be invited or give up if this is something you know will serve you: If you can’t find one, create one. All it takes is a minimum of two men and a willingness to be honest.

5. Shift from Transactional to Relational

Next time you speak to someone, drop the agenda. Focus on PRESENCE instead and listen deeply. Only speak if it’s real. If connection is your intention instead of acquisition the whole dynamic shifts.

6. Lead with Vulnerability

This is a superpower because the more real you are, the more you magnetise others who are ready to meet you there. Yes, some people will reject it (because of their shadow etc.) But those aren’t your people so whatever – keep going.

7. Reconnect With Your Purpose

Ask yourself: What would I be doing if I wasn’t afraid? What do I feel called to give, not just get? Start small but start acting. Purpose isn’t a grand performance – it’s a quiet returning to truth that will help you grow more real every day.

Loneliness is a consequence of blocking ourselves from our own realness.

Final Thoughts: You Are Not Alone

If you’re a man struggling with loneliness, hear this:

You’re broken, you’re not weak and you’re definitely not the only one.

What’s actually happening is that you’re living in a culture that taught you to hide, to numb yourself with distractions, and to perform instead of acting from purpose.

But that’s not the end of the story:

You are also ashamed of your REALNESS and this is preventing you from acting in the world in a real way that will connect you to your people.

The moment you begin to choose solitude over self-abandonment, realness over ego, and presence over performance is the moment you start to reconnect – not just with others but also with your self.

This is when everything changes because the opposite of loneliness isn’t company. It’s realness.

And that’s what the modern man is truly starving for.

Stay real out there,

I can help you to shift away from loneliness and into your real purpose – book a free call with me to get started.

The Fear of Being Seen: How You Hide Who You Really Are

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What if the World Could Really ‘See’ You?

Have you ever walked into a room or amidst a group of people and immediately felt the need to put on a different version of yourself?

If so then it might be that you have a fear of being seen.

There are myriad masks that we can wear in these kinds of situation:

Maybe you act a bit cooler, a bit tougher, a bit less emotional, or a bit more successful; maybe you downplay your interests, change how you speak, or mask your uncertainty with bravado and by turning up the volume.

If so, you’re not alone:

Millions of men do this every day – often without even realising it (because it’s an unconscious coping mechanism to deal wit the stress and uncertainty of being in an uncomfortable situation). We shape-shift to fit in, attempt to manage impressions by curating our interactions, and avoid saying what we really think.

Beneath all of this unreality is a common, haunting fear:

What if they really ‘see’ me?

This article will help you to understand what’s going on here and what to do about it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The fear of being seen is always about not being who you really are.

The Inner War and The Fear of Being Seen: Judgement, Shame and Projection

The fear of being seen isn’t just about social awkwardness or introversion (though that’s often what people get told and then end up being prescribed anxiety meds or whatever to mask the core issue) – it runs much deeper and to the primal level of our relationship with ourselves.

Even though everybody really wants to be ‘seen’ in their realness, the fear of being seen is always about conditioned shame – the persistent sense that who you really are isn’t good ‘enough’ because of some BS that you picked up somewhere along the line.

When you’re driven by this kind of shame, you start to believe that if people saw the bigger picture about who you are – your doubts, your sensitivities, your past mistakes, your deeper dreams – they’d turn away in disgust and never want to look at you again.

What hold so many people back here is that they don’t even realise that shame is what’s running the show because they’re so used to experiencing themselves and life like this that they just think it’s who they are (in other words, they identified with the symptoms of the shame and assumed that was their real personality).

Instead, of feeling the actual shame and then seeing it for what it is – an illusion – they distance themselves from the actual feeling and start to experience it as judgement.

Not just fear of being judged but the act of judging themselves. Harshly, relentlessly, silently, and endlessly.

This usually shows up as an inner gremlin or voice that is constantly playing a broken record of accusations and negative thoughts that keep them stuck and locked inside themselves.

To make matters worse, this judgement is often projected out into the world around us which just serves to reinforce whatever the judgement of ourselves (caused by the shame) is telling us about ourselves.

In other words, we imagine others are thinking the exact same critical thoughts we have about ourselves:

  • “They’ll think I’m weak if I show emotion”.
  • “They’ll think I’m stupid if I speak up”.
  • “They’ll think I’m arrogant if I own my gifts”.
  • “They’ll think I’m not good enough unless I act like them (instead of myself)”.

This projection just leads to chronic self-editing:

You never quite say what you mean. You hide behind jokes. You tone things down.

Or maybe you overcompensate by defining yourself by performance alone, power trips, or perfectionism- anything to earn approval without risking exposure of the real you and what you’re all about in truth.

To make matters worse, over time, that becomes the version of you the world sees and starts to think that you actually are (in the worst worst cases, you start to believe this about yourself because you forget that you’re just wearing a mask).

But here’s the (romantic) tragedy…

You Can’t Love or Be Loved If You’re Not Known (Because of the Fear of Being Seen)

When you hide the truth of who you are, the world can only connect with the mask.

And what happens next?

  • Your friendships feel surface-level, because they are (seeing as the deeper truth about you is being hidden).
  • Your romantic relationships never quite click, because you’re not really showing up (and so you can’t have the real intimacy that relationships thrive on between two whole people both moving into deeper wholeness).
  • Your work lacks fire, because you’re not building it on what matters to you (because you’re only focused on what makes you ‘acceptable’ to society and not your own realness).
  • Your opportunities feel hollow or off-track, because they’re matching the persona, not the person (and so you never seem to get a ‘break’ and think that means you’re broken).

The mask might get rewards here-and-there but not the ones your soul is looking for.

Underneath it all, the shame remains – in fact, it often grows louder, because every success you achieve while hiding reinforces the belief that the real you isn’t ‘good’ enough to earn those things…and so the cycle continues.

But it really doesn’t have to be this way.

The Real Problem Isn’t Fear or Being Seen – It’s Avoidance

Fear is human and is sometimes a good thing because it can save us from physical danger (though we often confuse emotional discomfort for actual danger and this causes all kinds of problems).

Either way, the problem isn’t the fear itself – it’s how we respond to it.

Most men feel fear and try to manage it by staying comfortable, shrinking inside themselves, or by being fake. These things might work in the short term but in the long term it always backfires.

Why?

Because it reinforces the shame.

Every time you avoid being real, you’re sending yourself a message: “The truth of me in my realness is either too much or not enough.”

You’re telling your unconscious mind – the thing that really determines the course of you’re life and what you really intend – that you’re better off hidden.

Doing this isn’t ‘noble’ or ‘humble’ in some way (despite how the Ego might try and sell it to you) – it’s just a clearcut case of self-rejection.

And no amount of external success can soothe the ache that creates and the Void it causes you to spend the rest of your life ‘living’ in.

The Solution: Real Action Dissolves the Fake Self and the Fear of Being Seen

If shame is the glue holding your fake self (ego) together, realness is the solvent that sets you free.

But here’s where it starts to get practical:

Being real isn’t just about talking about your feelings or being ‘vulnerable ‘on social media – it’s deeper, more embodied, and much more powerful.

Being real means aligning your actions with the truth of who you are – even when it’s uncomfortable.

You can’t think your way into wholeness; you have to live your way into it.

Day-after-day.

That’s why the only real antidote to the fear of being seen is ACTION – not forced, performative action but real action—the kind that chips away at the false self and invites the real one to emerge from the shadows over time.

Real Action Looks Like This:

  • Speaking up when it matters – even if your voice shakes (as the meme goes).
  • Sharing an idea you truly believe in – even if it’s unpopular or misunderstood by most people.
  • Following a calling that excites and terrifies you – even if no one else gets it (because you know that it’s between you and God).
  • Letting a friend or partner see your flaws – even when you want to run (because you know it will take you deeper into intimacy in the context of the relationship).
  • Setting a boundary – even if you’re scared to upset someone (because you know it’s real and you have self-respect that goes beyond the fear of emotional discomfort).
  • Choosing integrity over image – even if it costs you approval or other things that really don’t matter in the scheme of things as a whole.

These are the moments where the false self of ego starts to show cracks and the realness hidden underneath can start to breathe again.

The more you act in alignment with the truth of who you are (your realness), the more that truth becomes the only ‘thing’ that you need to identify with – not just in your private life but something the world begins to see, feel, and respond to wherever you are.

What’s real is always real and this applies to you too.

Why This Changes Everything and Helps You Overcome the Fear of Being Seen

Once you stop hiding from yourself, something strange and beautiful happens:

You become magnetic.

Not in a superficial “look at me” sense but in a deeply human sense.

People are drawn to realness like oxygen – and, especially in a world full of facades, authenticity stands out.

It also opens the door to the kind of opportunities that only the real you could attract:

  • Conscious relationships.
  • Creative collaborations.
  • Work that lights you up.
  • Growth that feels rooted in realness instead of forced.

This is the ‘stuff’ that nourishes the soul – not just the ego.

But none of it’s possible if you’re still wearing the mask.

Maybe it’s time to ask yourself:

Am I ready to be ‘seen’?

How to Start: 5 Practical Steps to Break Free of the Fear of Being Seen

If all of this is resonating, then here are some grounded steps you can take to start peeling back the layers and living in a more REAL way:

1. Name the Shame

Start with radical acceptance of yourself:

Where in your life are you hiding? What parts of yourself do you feel aren’t ‘acceptable?

Write it down. Get to know your inner critic. Once it’s named, it starts losing power (especially if you stop feeding it).

2. Notice the Mask

Begin to track when you’re slipping into performance mode instead of presence:

Is it at work? On dates? With your mates?

Ask: “What am I trying to prove right now?” or “What am I afraid they’ll see?”

Awareness is everything and the first step in transforming your life (followed by Acceptance and Action – book a call with me to learn more).

3. Do One Real Thing Daily

Commit to one small, real action every day – something that breaks the pattern:

Maybe it’s saying what you really think. Or wearing what you actually like. Or asking for what you need.

Momentum and strength builds with reps so keep doing one real thing daily and watch your life get more real.

4. Find Safe Mirrors

Surround yourself with people who reflect back realness, not an image (because of their own shame). This might mean upgrading your circle. Most likely, it might mean going first – showing up as you are and inviting others to do the same.

5. Build from the Inside-Out

Allow your purpose, business, career or anything else to be built on the truth – not the mask.

Stop chasing what looks impressive and start building what feels real.

That’s how your outer world begins to match your inner world and you can finally be ‘seen’ without being afraid of what it looks like.

Final Thoughts: You Were Never Meant to Hide or to Suffer the Fear of Being Seen

The fear of being seen is ancient, primal, and totally understandable in an unreal world.

But it’s not the truth.

You weren’t born with shame – you were taught it. And now you get to unlearn it based on the CHOICES that you make – not all at once, but moment by moment, choice by choice, truth by truth.

There’s a version of you that doesn’t need to impress or perform, that doesn’t need to explain or prove, and that doesn’t need to hustle for validation.

That version is already here.

Waiting.

Stay real out there,

I can help you to overcome the fear of being seen and to step into your real life – book a call with me to start moving forward right away.

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