Today, pirates are in Kyoto, Japan.

It’s a birthday trip I’ve wanted to make for a couple of years.

I’ve been going through shifts in myself—questions of midlife, I suppose—and I wanted to visit the last place on earth, the place I’d most lose myself, translated in an enigma that mirrors how I’ve been feeling within.

Strange that, beyond the squiggly alphabet, the vending-machine-everything—and the way the women dress—this country feels more mine than my own. And I feel more myself than I have for a while.

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Such is the nature of pilgrimage: a just dose of adventure is investment in the spirit. And the spirit of the road is as much one’s home as home.

What I invite you to explore with me today is a journey of identity-shift. I went through it about a decade ago, and some of you are going through it now. Though it left me without bearings at the time, I’m deeply relieved that I went through this. Closing this particular circle brought a fundamental energy back to me, so I could move forward in life with purpose, and build a relationship that sticks.

This is a longer read than usual, and it’s the last time I’ll reference Shame.

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Does Quitting ‘The High’ Make Your Love Life Boring?

In the last issue we discussed how Brandon opened to his deepest pain—his shame and grief—and, we infer, reconnects with his sister and with the long-exiled parts of himself. If you viewed the film the way I did, we cheer Brandon for this. It’s a positive movement, a happy(ish) end to a harrowing time, and we imagine it’ll remove the sexual compulsion that drove him.

We know character change has taken place because the director, in the final scene, circles us back to the beginning: Brandon sits again in the subway, the same stylish girl with chestnut hair opposite him. There’s eye-contact, tension. But this time, Brandon doesn’t rise to his feet to pursue her. He has a scar on his face, and his eyes look up at her, overwhelmed, almost in fear, while she, by contrast, seems more bold. The fresh-opened pandora’s box of Brandon’s emotional life has left him immobile: he is not the seducer he used to be. What does this mean for his future with women?

And it begs the question a number of you have asked me… I know I need to go the path of inner work, because I suffer, and I see myself cause women suffering, too. But can I still be a great seducer, after healing?

I appreciate the question on many levels, for I spent a long time in it too:

1. Healing too much would risk your identity: you love feeling yourself as a ladies’ man, and living life in a ladies’ man way. Your life has been about the rush that success-via-validation has given you.
2. A (young, wounded, but also truly excited) part of you has spent thousands of hours honing a skillset, and you don’t want this to be redundant. Besides, learning seduction has brought you friends and adventures along the way.
3. Even if the dynamics you create with women evoke anxiety, the incredible, life-giving highs you felt were some of the defining moments of your life. You’ve treasured them. Without the highs of chase or conquest, the future looks adult, boring, bland.
4. When you look at the men in your life up-close, it’s hard to find an inspiring vision for who you might become instead. You’ve got nice-guys to the left of you—powerless and unaware of the dance of lust—and over-responsible dried-out adults to the right.

With no greater vision for who you could be, it’s easy to see healing as a sort of castration.

So after your identification with the seduction high, what’s next?

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Over the Long-Term, the Sugar-Rush of Seduction is No Big Thing

Let’s be clear straight off the bat: Brandon, for all this seductive power, does not have a lot of fun. I’m sure he enjoyed his seduction of Elizabeth and many others—but these are not vast, heart-opening adventures that brim with feeling and meaning. He has no friend except a boss who uses him, and the sun never shines. I’ve been there.

I’ve also followed-up with women I had something casual with after a number of months. It’s the paradox of constant travel: in the short-run, little adventures—testosterone, oxytocin spikes. But come knocking at her door on a cold winter’s night, and I see her through the window under the tree, surrounded by family and friends, full of Christmas cheer, and I’m the orphan, the no-one, concealing that I stand there with my begging bowl, dying to warm my hands. No matter how swift you were in pulling her to that dark corner, the Elizabeths of the world move on; a night’s vice doesn’t replace a life connected.

I began dissolving my compulsion for women about ten years ago, and for the following two-to-three years I didn’t quite know who I was. Remarkably, I stayed connected with the Ars Amorata, where I saw (perhaps) the (active) majority of people use this message to feed their own version of Brandon’s cycle. It felt weird to watch everyone tire themselves out in pain-bound circles, without having broken all the way through to a new paradigm yet myself.

For many, Bucharest represented compulsion-central, and I saw many men you might consider ‘great seducers’ smash continually up against similar glass ceilings. Six nights a week, well done, a different girl. But inside, a gnawing emptiness. I never find one that’s better than me; I never find one I really like. When you run a woman through a well-oiled seduction process, and you bed her without revealing much of your heart, it’s hard to respect someone you consumed as validation fuel.

Amazing, then, how the majority of these men eventually wandered into their own experiences of healing.

The benefits of healing your seduction-fuelling pain are many:

-> No more believing you need a woman this week to take away a certain numbness or prove something to yourself;

-> Other addictions and low-level lifestyle habits become easier to quit;

-> You stop that callous indifference towards women, that if they so easily sleep with you—a man so calculating and uninvested—she cannot be worthwhile anyway;

-> Living for a shot of testosterone in the evening makes you discount the sheer beauty of the day. Did you ever spend a week in some foreign city, only to see no museums or natural attractions, but spend all day texting local girls? You know it isn’t right!;

-> During the week you stop compulsively checking your inbox because a) you no longer rely on a girl’s interest to soothe some inner distress, and b) your communication skills improve—you filter for more mature women—so you clarify when you’ll call each other, and when you’ll be off-line. You no longer get wrapped up in flakes (the futile addiction of conquering the unconquerable!) that causes the anxiety-cycle in the first place.

The chase-the-vapour high is not there anymore because, whatever the seductive pyrotechnics you pull off, you know the cheapness of the hangover. But you will not live without colour: as I drop the ‘love-highs’, a sustained sense of subtle, more existential pleasure comes. Beauty is not a woman’s hotness, nor the point of conquest or orgasm against which every other experience is grey. Without the fixation of getting somewhere with some particular woman, the rest of reality is enhanced!

It’s holding hands to classical music in a gallery, versus bathroom sex with a stranger at a rave. Sure, both have their place. But what relief to feel beauty, in more of its forms, more exquisitely, and yes—I still experience the erotic dance, but in heightened nuance, with different women, whether we consummate such feelings or not. I experience the dance of seduction in high-definition from the first uncertain encounter—and it’s not a journey I need to speed up, nor a peak I’m hung up on hitting at the end. And I know how the joy of a night of intimacy can bring more meaning than a night of sex. This is something even Brandon discovers. (And yes, women respond far better to me now than ever before.)

I will admit that feeling new textures in the dance of relating is a process stranger than traveling to a new land. You will feel utterly disconcerted as you reorient your sense of self, and your approach to life, through healing. This is why I want to introduce such themes to you through movies so you can develop your palette, and build your frame of reference of a new world of intimacy in advance. My work exists so you can make the transition of identity, from ego-fueling to soul-nourishing, feel much less fearsome and disorienting.

On the other side of healing, the impact that women have on me is a hundred times more real—they are dynamics I don’t have to prey upon or figure out: I simply trust—and when you learn how to harness real connection, the feeling it brings is a hundred times stronger.

Being ‘efficient’ or ‘mysterious’ as a seducer is clearly not better than being awake to the beauty of life as it is.

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Coming Home From Exile

Kierkegaard once wrote (and I’m paraphrasing) that when a man is done with his ‘aesthetic pleasures’, i.e., his personal hedonism, he begins reflecting on those pleasures he has had. My image of this is Casanova, aged 60, writing the histoires of his life. I too look wistfully back on my brief glimpses and toxic highs, and smile that I’ve been graced by sensual light. I even replay those little highs when I write this newsletter—those humid days of being wild—in which I held a grain of beauty in my hand, if only for a second.

But I would not go back to living in exile.

Once you have connected and connected truly with a good woman who loves you, and once you’ve given her in turn your heart, you discover the meaning of home. And a life of rotating homelessness (just ask Odysseus—surrounded, even, by the nymphs!) becomes a life of mounting distress.

Sissy is the home that catalyses Brandon’s healing. But let’s turn to Marianne (do you like your sugar? tap tap), a figure who offers Brandon a radical invitation.

If you remember, Brandon fails hard in first date with Marianne, and it gets inside his head. The stuff with Sissy and David and his work computer wobbled him, but Marianne’s adult presence is a destabilising force. She is interested in Brandon, she challenges his basic assumptions, her curiosity is a space where his true self can come forth.

And Brandon loves it—he loves being with Marianne, adult and soft, oriented to the ‘here-and-now’. He becomes so playful and nice that he forgets how to kiss her: we should do this again sometime! Marianne doubts, realises this man’s not as sexy as she had imagined him, and walks into the subway, leaving Brandon hanging. Conclusion: it is hard to be vulnerable and interior—and bring your A-grade sex-addict seduction game—all at once! Bringing these split sides of the human character together—the vulnerable and the sexually leading—takes a lot of growing into. And Brandon’s only a baby at glimpsing his more authentic self.

But when you give him a minute, Brandon knows what nice-guyism is, and at work he reasserts himself—impeccably—by taking Marianne by the hand and leading her to a tremendous hotel suite (look and learn!). Yet minutes later, as their love-making gathers a little pace, Brandon seems to break down, ejects himself from the double-bed, and takes himself over to the window where he sits with his head hung down. He cuts a closed figure as Marianne, and the opportunity she gave him, walk out of his life. What happened here?

We might call it a spiritual test—and invitation to a certain homecoming—and he failed. He’ll have to wait until Sissy’s near-suicide to crack him open. But while Marianne gave an opportunity that Brandon failed, but what I love about this scene is that I lived it: Marianne was a spiritual test that, while not easy to stay open in the face of, I actually passed. But more on that in a sec.

If you remember, moments after Marianne leaves, Brandon calls over a hooker, and sport-fucks her against the window in a display all Manhattan could see. He makes up for his shame of failing Marianne by putting in a stellar sexual performance. But when it’s over, the callgirl declines his invitation of a simple drink, leaving him alone to his sunset view: it’s easier to perform when the heart is closed.

But when Brandon makes love to Marianne, pay close attention to it. There’s nothing sexualised there at all. It’s love-making for characterisation; there’s no eroticism to titillate us, the viewer. They’re clumsy. There are moments of shyness, vulnerability. It’s what sex is really like when two people are connected, disrobing for the first time, getting to know what this new creature’s all about. It’s a sort of sex I’d rather be having. Anyway, the connectedness of it all is too much for Brandon. He feels something bubble up as he enters into Marianne, and the sensation he feels is too strange for him to take, to mention. What does he feel in that moment? Whatever it was, he closes entirely down because of it.

The thing with shame is that the feeling of it is ghostlike. Virtually invisible, but it shapes so many of the contours of our lives. If only we were conscious of shame as it coarsed through our bodies, we might take different kinds of action. But as it is, most men are ruled by shame, and have no awareness or agency over it. When it’s there, they simply shut down, and cope.

One night, I found myself in bed with a Marianne. Super-available and connected to me, giving me her whole heart—I could see her pupils, her whole face swell, as if love simply poured through her. I remember girls at school looking like that: so much icky, yucky love pouring through their silly girl-faces. I hated it. Moments later with my Marianne, I increased my thrusting. I was soon banging away. As I lost connection to her, to the moment, she so graciously asked me to slow down, my love, to come back to connection, to come back and simply feel with her. Which I did. And out of nowhere, they came through, all of them. Thousands upon thousands of tears. Unstoppable. While hard, and still inside her. And she wrapped her two hands around the back of my head, and then onto the back of my heart, and my lower back. She pulled me closer, into her, and I sobbed.

Now excuse me for the way I end this here (as I mentioned, I’m in midlife, I’m prone to these sorts of puns), but to be shown, so directly, that I was good enough in sex if I would just be, that I was loved even if I didn’t perform, and that I was worthy—even if the depths of me were so toxically riddled with shame—well, that night was my real birthday.

~ Jordan

‘Healed’

As you know, Hollywood is all about milking sequels and intellectual property these days. That’s partly why I asked you, if you were to write Shame #2—the next chapter of a more healed love life—how would you write it?

What is the story of women that you are ready to throw away?

What new vision of self, sex and love are you ready to call in?

If you have been touched, challenged, inspired by this recent email series, come and join me for the winter Mastery course.

We will take the same depth of exploration we’ve been through together with the movie Shame, and do it again with 8 entirely new deep-dive films.

This is more than a study-group about cinema. This is about working, together, in a great group of like-minded men, as you contemplate, visualise, and then create…

… entirely new ways of relating to love.

T-7 days: the Mastery Course, Season #2 kicks off.

This is your opportunity to train how to build relationships of soul.

Also, if you prefer, 1:1 coaching to walk you through the work. Book now to secure a spot for the New Year—my calendar’s starting to fill up.

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