Earn It
A Study in Devotional Masculinity
For a long time, I leaned on the women in my life. The tricky part was that I wasn’t aware I was doing it. This truth was one of the gifts my former partner left me at the end of our relationship. When I look back, I was relying on her for my stability—emotionally, spiritually, and logistically. When I look back even further, I see that I’ve always done this, with all my past partners, and since I was born into a life of enmeshment with my mom.
I learned recently that I had unconsciously defined “safety” for myself as “the availability of and attachment to the feminine.” Whether that was the literal presence of my mom, grandma, or girlfriend, the more ephemeral internal attachment to or obsession with a crush, or my reliance on porn, in each case I gave my safety away. My ex helped me to realize just how much this was undermining my capacity to be in right relationship to myself, my work, and to the women in my life.
For the last six months, I’ve been sitting with the uncomfortable reality that I’ve never fully taken ownership of my own life. When things have gotten hard, I’ve always collapsed into the women around me, into sex or relationship, into being held by ‘mother.’ It hasn’t been an easy truth to accept, but in finally owning it, it’s like I’m being released from a lifetime of self-induced suffering. I’m finally earning my masculinity.
To explain, I’ll paraphrase a line from a book I’ve been listening to, The Path of the Warrior Mystic, by Angel Millar; he writes essentially that ‘women have natural initiation processes built into their bodies. When they receive their periods or when they carry and give birth to children or go through menopause, there are hormonal initiations happening. For boys, we need to earn our man bodies through carrying water and chopping wood, through hard work at the gym.’
I haven’t been able to get the idea out of my head. When I first heard it, I was resistant. As I’ve let it sit, and I’ve gone to the gym more and increased my capacity for discipline, it’s felt more and more true. I do need to earn my manhood, and it is hard.
Last year, I was made aware of a chronically repressed, and thus fragile and frail part of myself; my Warrior. John Wineland, a tantra teacher and men’s work practitioner, speaks about warrior consciousness. In one of his teachings, he asked: “What would you die for? What does it feel like to embody that primal masculine capacity to die for that which you love?” The first time I heard him say that, I was in London still. I breathed into it, felt a tiny glimpse of power and rightness, and then felt myself immediately break under the weight. I couldn’t ‘hang with’ the question. It made me feel small and incapable. I buckled and almost cried.
My collapse was a recognition that were a lion, tiger, bear, or bad person to attack me or those who I love, I wouldn’t be able to fight back; or, I wouldn’t be able to win. There was a lack in me, and I don’t use that word without extreme intentionality. I literally hadn’t earned my strength yet, and I knew it. I knew that I couldn’t live up to my inner capacity for warrior-ship, and in the event of danger, I would likely let harm come to myself and my loved ones. It felt terrible, but I wasn’t ready to confront it yet.
In my relationship with my ex, this was a point of tension. Looking back, I think that she wanted that capacity from me, as any woman would when discerning if a man is the right one to father children with. I’ve learned that women respect a man who has the capacity to ‘kill,’ and chooses not to. It makes them feel safe. I would want that too. I would want a man who could protect my children, or me, in the event of danger. Six months ago, the concept intimidated the heck out of me. Now, it just feels true.
When my ex first introduced a concept she called “Edge” to me, it brought up that same sensation of lack and collapse. She spoke of something that martial artists have, but I never really got it. I knew it was important, and asked her lots of questions, but all the while felt myself get smaller and smaller. The more we talked about it, the less it made sense, and the more insecure I felt. Today, after months of contemplation and practice, I’ve earned a working definition for myself:
Edge is the capacity to not only sacrifice one’s life for what is right, but to make that sacrifice matter.
There are a few pieces of this that are important to define further.
“Capacity” - Edge is not the act itself, but the ability to choose that act. It is not the choice, but the will to make it. Sure, the choice and act matter, but they’re more like reps in a workout that lead to a muscled body—the muscled body is the Edge, not the lifting of the weight.
“Sacrifice one’s life” - One could argue that it would be better as ‘give one’s life’ or even ‘live for,’ and while these are beautiful intentions, it is the death process inherent in sacrifice that makes it valuable. Without the will to die, the will to live is weak and lacking. It’s how I used to approach life. I tried to live fully and joyfully. But without the rooting in death, and thus sacrifice, there is an emptiness to life and an inability to go ALL in.
“What is right” - This is a tricky thing, because ultimately, it is subjective. At the root of wars is often a deep disagreement about what is right. And, despite my advocacy of warriorhood, I am not an advocate of killing each other in battle, except in extremely dire circumstances. I’ll speak to this more later, so for now, suffice it say that how we arrive to this idea of right is a key part of the journey, and one that takes humility, patience, and the willingness to fail and try again.
“Making the sacrifice matter” - This may be the most important part of the whole thing. It seems meaningless to throw yourself in front of a train to protect your family if the train just crushes all of you anyway. Edge requires that one’s sacrifice not be in vain. It requires disciplined, diligent, and consistent training so that when the moment comes, the sacrifice will actually make a difference.
(Please excuse this interruption from one of our sponsors, you! Writing is one of those things that I would gladly do for free, because I love it. That being said, my birthday was 2/28, and so, for the next month, I’m offering 25% off all my paid Substack subscriptions. If you feel called to support my work, and you have the means and desire to sign up. I would be grateful! Thank you!)
Now, to recap, Edge is the capacity to not only sacrifice one’s life for what is right, but to make that sacrifice matter.
The process of Edge requires Earning It. It’s the readiness to die, and the ability to kill. Importantly, it’s not necessarily literal, as even the spiritual Edge comes from training one’s ability to fight for what they believe in, to ‘leave it all on the field,’ and risk death or loss. Edge is not a guarantee that someone will win, but a commitment to try. It is not a superpower, but a slowly built and well-earned ability to create impact.
When I was with my ex, I wasn’t ready to earn my Edge. I was scared to confront myself. And, honestly, that’s part of what led to the end of our relationship. I knew deep inside that I needed to apprentice myself to the warrior in me, and that to do that, I couldn’t rely on the her to be my source of stability. I needed to face the fear of providing for myself and earning my own groundedness. Otherwise, the relationship would always be undermined by my own doubt in myself. I needed time to be alone, to go deep inside myself and to heal the part of me who has continuously sought to find safety in ‘Her.’
To that end, I did something John Wineland calls a “feminine cleanse.” With a couple guys from my men’s group, we intentionally and consciously abstained from the feminine: no dating, no sex, no porn, no flirting, and ideally, not even any eye contact with the cute barista. For six months, my intention was to insulate myself from the women around me so that I could see how I had been relying on them, and find my way back into wholeness in myself. It was painful, difficult, challenging, and one of the single most important choices of my life. It’s felt right.
Over my lifetime, I’ve learned that the most challenging part of my life is to continuously choose what is right instead of what is easy. This too is part of Edge, of earning it. The more reps I’ve made of this choice, the stronger my Edge has become, and the more I’ve trusted myself. So, while the pain of my relationship with my ex ending and my ensuing aloneness has been deeply confronting, I’ve needed it. The pain has been teaching me how to love and trust myself, and how to become a sovereign man.
Paradoxically, despite that some of my most important relationships have had to end to find this capacity for Edge, it’s actually the only stable place from which I’ll be able to build sustainable relationships from. It’s the only place where I’ll be sure of myself, and trust myself to deeply and truly commit to sharing a life with another, without the doubt that I’m doing it from a place of lack.
This masculine Edge is what’s needed for safety in relationship. It creates the mountainous capacity for sacred masculine presence, which builds a container for the feminine to feel safe and to surrender into her flow. There is a Divine polarity that begins with the man’s choice to lay their preference down and give their lives to what is right, to their path, their God, their Truth.
This is a deeply personal process for each man, and I don’t believe that what is True for one will necessarily be true for another. That being said, I believe that some of the processes by which we can find and learn to embody our truths are the same. The spiritual path leads each person to the same feelings in different words, the same experiences in different flavors. All are welcome.
Now, in confronting myself every day, I am earning my Edge. My training has been physical, but also mental, emotional, and spiritual. It’s been a consistent choice to do the hard thing—work out, cold plunge, kill the big spider, be > seek, turn to brothers for help instead of women, contain and sit with my anxiety, feel it all—to do what is right, not what is easy. And it doesn’t always feel good. It sometimes feels like shit, like hell.
I went through moments in the last six months of literally sobbing and shaking on the floor because I wasn’t letting myself collapse back into my patterns. Because, my nervous system was releasing decades of stuck energy and fear. But, because I was holding myself to a higher standard, because I believed in myself, I paradoxically gave myself permission to feel everything I needed to feel, which in turn freed me from my fears. Sitting with the pain built me up, made me stronger. Now, what was nearly impossible to bear is a just merely excruciating for a moment, and then shows me a path to move toward. What was “too hard” is now more fun, because of the challenge.
The gym has become a second home. Cold plunges fill me with life. And sitting with myself when I’m feeling terrified, and not turning to the feminine is starting to feel safe in my nervous system. Slowly, things are changing.
Yet, I haven’t always been successful. Sometimes I’ve caved and returned to compulsion or addiction. Sometimes I’ve let myself flirt or fantasize. Sometimes I’ve spent hours unconsciously dreaming about how I could alleviate my own suffering by returning to my reliance on women.
But, at each turn, the process remains. At each slight misstep, I’ve come back to the path. Now, the me of six months ago is unrecognizable. It may sound cocky or strange, but I have changed. I am no longer that boy, though he is still in me. Where before, I acted compulsively as the boy, always looking for safety in the arms of ‘mother,’ now I hold myself, sit with myself, or ask for support in non-codependent ways from the people who love me.
A couple months ago, I experienced a small moment that I will always remember.
I was walking down the street listening to Slayer’s 1986 album, Reign in Blood. I had been to the gym, and lifted heavy. I had knocked a coaching call out of the park. I felt good. I realized while I was walking that I FELT Edge. There was a feeling best described as, “Come try me. Fuck me up, I dare you,” followed by a total trust in myself to be reliable, to have my own back, to mean it. I was strong. I was capable. I had Edge. And miraculously, the collapse that I had always experienced before didn’t come. I just kept walking, head held high, smiling.
In that moment, I knew I needed to write about this.
After months of dedication to my own discipline practice, to my body’s strength, to my mind and heart’s devotion, I finally feel an inkling of having Earned It—that capacity to live, die, and serve for what I love. And looking back, without this feeling, I’ve been a castrated version of myself, unable to follow through, unable to commit, unable to focus, unable to conquer myself, and unable to truly embody the Royal, Sacred Masculine.
Like I wrote in my first book, “with the fear of death, comes a fear of life.” In other words, as long as I’m afraid to die for something, or if I don’t believe in myself to make my death matter, I won’t really live for anything. Being willing to die, and able to choose it creates the capacity to live all in, to bring a fullness and utter aliveness to life. That’s the path.
I’m not done with the work though, and, if anything, I believe that this will take a lifetime of integration and continuous practice. But that momentary acknowledgement of Edge, when I didn’t collapse into fear, doubt, or lack of self-belief was a huge step in my journey. It means that the work I’m doing is working.
Another sign of this is the shift in how my mom and I are relating. A few weeks ago, she and my sisters were visiting me at The Lake (Atitlan). I told my mom that I thought “the masculine in our family had been repressed from a place of fear.” I told her that “I had been unable to fully step into my masculine because of her fear of it.” Surprisingly, she immediately got it. She agreed. Without hesitation, she said “Go for it, bring the masculine strength back to our family. We need it.” There was no defensiveness or codependency in her answer. She was fully ready to empower me to grow, even if it meant a change in our relationship.
When I was a teenager, and started to feel testosterone pumping through my body, there was no space for my self expression, and no shaping of my power into loving strength. I remember the feeling of my arms clenching and unclenching, like I wanted to rip the whole world apart. But, every time I would let that feeling out, somehow I would wind up feeling hurt and hurting my mom. I never learned how to harness my power, and so I suppressed it… until now.
Now that I’m feeling like I can control the channel, and harness it, there’s a capacity for wholeness in me. I’m welcoming back in my power, and it feels right, like there’s been a waiting space in my soul for this part of me. And, it also feels unfamiliar still, like learning how to drive or dance for the first time. There’s a rawness to the experience, and a vulnerability to my actions. I might fail. In fact, I probably will. I might get it wrong. But I’m trying something new, and it’s right.
I share all of this because we’re living through an age where there are so few masculine role models, so few men who truly embody both their hearts AND their bottomless pits of primal power. It’s a brilliant time for us men to reflect on ourselves, do our healing work, and again step into leadership from a place of service, of being willing to die for what we love. We need more men to choose this path.
(If you are a man, or know a man who wants help to step up into this level of sacred masculine embodiment, let’s connect about how I can support you/him on the path. Email me here.)
I’ll close with an acknowledgment of complexity. Much of this warrior energy in our world is channeled into war. War —> Warrior. Makes sense, right? Well, when I looked into the etymology of “war,” it originally translated into ‘confusion or disorder’ and ‘conflict or hostility.’ We might perceive these things through the lens of ‘evil,’ but what if to be a Warrior is to confront the innate confusion and conflict in life, which is always there? And, what if, millennia into humanity, we’re only just learning how to do that well?
For a long time, being a warrior meant killing ‘enemies’ to protect friends, defending ‘our’ ideology against theirs. But, what if we’ve been doing it wrong?
We can channel and harness our capacities for warrior-ship as men to go into conflict with the utter confusion of certain death, the conflict inherent in sharing finite resources, the disorder of power imbalances, and the hostility of being a living creature in a dangerous world. What if, instead of pointing this warrior energy at each other, we use it as a protective skill that can be practiced as a source of safety for all people, all creatures, and all life? What if being a warrior and developing ‘Edge’ doesn’t have to mean conflict with others, but rather a steadiness in the face of failure, loss, and danger?
In Iron John, Robert Bly talks about the difference between soldiers and warriors. He shares how in many traditional cultures, boys are initiated to manhood not through battle, but through dance, and through a deep confrontation with their inner shadows. We as men are not training to be soldiers who merely follow orders into battle. We are training to be Warriors of the Heart, men who are willing to do the hard, right thing. Warriorhood does not mean only the capacity to fight and die, but the heart and love to know what to fight and die for.
That takes a clear inner pool of self-knowing, and a level of comfort with our own failings as men. It takes a vulnerability to admit when we don’t know the answer, and to listen to our elders and partners, and to the marginalized around us. It takes owning the pain we’ve felt and created as well as the love we’ve shared. It takes admitting that we are privileged, and asking how we can best show up to serve.
But it is not the warrior who sacrifices from a place of obligation who we admire, it is the warrior who knows himself as a sovereign being, and chooses from his core to sacrifice for what he believes in. To say yes with our whole beings, we must tend our capacity to say no. To give our lives, our lives must be ours to give. We must free ourselves to give ourselves.
Warriorhood is not sourced from a desire to win, to prove, or to seek, but from a deep capacity for loving sacrifice. It requires an ongoing and intimate relationship to Truth, to the depths of suffering and the peaks of ecstasy. Masculine warriorhood demands an embodied man, a man who knows, not from a rational place, but from a primal place, a sacred place. Warriorhood is pure, abundant, and true. As my friend Mathew says, it is the “Samurai Sword” of our lives which will cut through all, to clear the loving path for Life to flow.
Recently, I wrote “for a long time, my desire to grow came from an internal scarcity of self-worth. I thought that I needed to grow to be loved, to be worthy.” I continued, “Moving forward, I want to source my drive from self love and a desire to care for myself by doing the hard work to actualize my life’s potential to manifest my authentic gifts. I want to serve.” It’s important to understand what ‘self-love’ is beyond the woo-woo definition. What does it mean to actually embody it, and how does it relate to service?
This is the essence of a warrior. It’s a relentless devotion to what is right, to fight for that internal sensation of love, and to actualize Truth into the world. It’s courageous and vulnerable and tender while also being strong and firm and capable. It’s a risk, because at any moment, death could come. These deaths may not be literal, but sometimes emotional or spiritual. Warriorhood demands an acceptance of death, of change, of letting go.
And as I’ve apprenticed myself to my warrior essence, I’ve found a deep sense of peace and sturdiness internally in the face of those losses. Where before, I would avoid them, run from them, and fear them, now I’m learning to stand before them, and say “Hello death, I am ready for you. Let the battle begin.”
It is still just the beginning of this journey for me, and I find myself in moments of utter fear and terror, still sometimes desperate to be held by “Her.” But, so far, I have, at each moment of desperation, managed to bring myself back into regulation. I am learning to believe in myself, and for the first time in my life, know that I am safe as I am, alone with myself.
I am still only a fraction of the man I feel I will become, but I have found a path that is right, clear, and important. It is a path I believe I will walk for the rest of my life. And, in our suffering world, we need more men to choose this path. We need more men to hold ourselves to be our highest selves, to sit with our fears, and to own our need to grow. We need to start cultivating our Edge, our warrior essence, our capacity for loving, devotional sacrifice.
To that end, if you or a man you know is feeling lost or directionless, alone or without fire in his heart, please know that there is a path, and I am here to listen, to share, to collaborate, and to discover. We need a band of men, an army of loving warriors. We need a revolution of masculinity in our world. I am here as a loving friend, a peer on the journey, a sacred masculine coach, and maybe even a humble teacher. Know that I will make myself available for you, if you ask.
And, for the women who have been wounded by us wounded men, know that I and others are working to build a world where you will feel safe to express your truths to us without our collapse, rage, or denial. Without the courage that the women in my life have shown in confronting me, I would not be here. So, thank you to you who have called me up into a better version of myself, and into the man who I am becoming.
Thank you, dear reader, for being here along the journey. I am grateful to be able to share some of the experiences I’ve been through. May you receive all the blessings on your path, and may you Earn your own felt and real sense of self love, of power, and of Edge. May you become the Warrior.
Love,
Faolan
Before you go, some logistics:
If you enjoyed Earn It, please subscribe and share it with someone who you know would benefit from reading it. I’m trying to build a real career as a writer, and every little thing helps.
If you feel so called, I invite you to offer a small contribution each month, so that I can continue to write these pieces from a place of more and more abundance.
Thank you,
Faolan