In a previous entry I talked about how passion is not an over-emotional path to philosophical damnation, but a bonafide virtue in man. Something asleep that can be awakened. And, if you allow it, accept it and unleash it, passion will emanate from your lower body, adding thrust to your every worldly deed.

Passion, perhaps, is love of engagement. Love of the sheer engagement with life.

For context, you can read through that article here. Today I want to go into detail on how to awaken your lower body, your masculine edge, your virile nature.

Which means I’ve got a specific method you can follow—a plan—to ignite your passion, whatever age, relationship situation, or juncture of career you find yourself in.

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So how do you awaken your masculine edge? That pulsating aliveness in your body, your wholeness, your creative-erotic power…

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this question… Actually, after ten years doing (and refining) this work with men, I have more than a dollar for every time I’ve been asked that question. Plenty of data has been collected. This is my method for working.

What follows is an action plan, consisting of four different approaches, each of which you (ideally) do at the same time. Adding each of these approaches together, the fruits of your practice co-mingle, and unfold into the effect that you want: a dissolution of blocks and internal clenches, a release of vital energy, and a calming—and awakening—into the virtue of your passion.

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(1) Daily Embodied Practice — From the Bottom-Up

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The first approach to awakening you raw, embodied energy is through what we’d call a ‘bottom up’ body practice. Bottom-up means that you don’t begin with your mind, and any understanding comes from a result of exploration—not as a prerequisite. You simply do the practice, open and explore your body through the mechanics that the practice suggests, and your energy starts moving of its own accord and intelligence.

There are a range specific practices I’d give you, which start with the dense, and move into the subtle.

(1) We’d begin with a firm, muscular practice of opening areas of the body that are usually wound tight. Feet, legs, pelvis, hips. Twists and stretches that, as they open little-touched areas of the body, unleash a tremendous amount of hidden energy. This firm muscular practice involves postures from yoga, qigong, bio-energetics. The release—the sheer amount of energy that starts to move through you—can be uncomfortably strong at first. By stretching your muscles in these particular ways, it’s like you are opening the rusty doors to a long-untouched cage.

(2) Then, I’d then take you into breathwork to continue the release. Once energy moves through your body, your breath can deepen the flow of this unleashed energy, as well as teach the energy new pathways to run through. Emotions can start to open up here: anything from grief to the raw primal desire to fuck. Allowing the full emotional cannon to circulate through you is excellent practice, and as you control the unfolding of your energy and emotions with your breath, you stay in the driving seat of this new energy that’s released. With some added self-massage, you can continue to release muscular holding patterns as you breathe.

(3) Another body practice I find essential is Non-Linear Movement. I have some specific adaptations of this which start to merge movement practice, awareness of energy flow, with a state of meditation. In our NLM practices, you continue to get deeper contact with your body’s energy, while integrating it with more of your body. Unlocked, erotic hip energy can infuse itself with your heart, your legs and arms, your face: you start to circulate and expand this new, unleashed passion. Over time, you gain granular body-awareness through this practice. Non-Linear can also take you into a shamanic opening.

(4) We always finish with meditation. If you’re a beginner to practice, this is simply to rest and re-set your body, and let the energy calm down. As you become more advanced in practice, you can actually feel how your new-released energy travels and integrates within your body. Even as you sit and meditate, the process of your energy work continues to unfold.

I advocate for an ongoing mix of these four bodywork types, and you can comfortably combine three of these in one session. Ideally—if you truly want to unlock the virtue of passion in your daily life—you will create from this a daily discipline. As little as ten minutes a day will make a difference to your life. Make a ritual out of it, turn the mind off, and engage purely with your body.

Now, if you If you have the opportunity, here you could add things like bodywork or body psychotherapy as well. Even some forms of tantric massage—but make sure this ‘tantric massage’ is not just a euphemism for an oil rub with happy ending, but that your masseuse has a real understanding of armouring bands, how energy ought to move through your body, and how to work compassionately with blockages and release. This way, you’ll get more than a pleasurable couple of hours: you’ll get true integration from her touch.

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(2) Shadow Work — From the ‘Top Down’

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The second approach to integrated passion practice is to have a ‘top down’, awareness-based approach. ‘Top-down’ means you start with your mind, and, like a detective, you gradually collect clues until you can resolve your unconscious patterns. You might already have awareness of how certain patterns of emotion, body tension and control drain your life-force, or how your sexual energy gets tangled up. If not, awareness is curative, and when you see how your blocks and your energy flow functions, it becomes simple (almost automatic) for you to put things right.

But what is a pattern? Let’s not be vague:

1. You’re laughing with friends and a beautiful woman enters the room. In your body there’s a deep clench. Your humour goes, and your self-expression gets restricted. You wonder ‘why can I never be my best self with the real attractive ones? Why am I only in flow when I’m not so attracted to her?’

2. You’re on a date a woman you like, but the energy drains away. You haven’t told her quite how excited to you are to be with her, and you haven’t let yourself be seen as enjoying her looks and her figure. In fact, you’re keeping your eyes above neck-level only, working overtime to find the next interested question. You don’t notice the embodied aspect of what’s happening on this date, since you’re working so hard to get the conversation right. But your breath is shallow, and your entire torso has gone stiff. (Hers too, and she’s growing more tense as the minutes tick by.)

3. Your girlfriend’s been doing some things lately that cross your boundaries. You start to feel resentment, but it’s awkward to tell her so. You don’t want to be controlling; you prefer to be ease and delight. As the conflict remains unspoken, the intimacy between you hardens, and you start to feel more distant. Your body is tense, trying to keep down a burning awkwardness and rage. It’s complicated by a secret grief that you don’t seem to do any better. Your withheld truth has her feel more tense as well. This cycle tends to happen in all your relationships… until, at some point, you explode.

Now think of a pattern for yourself. What, in relationship to women or in the world, crumples down your life-force, restricting access to your best, passionate state of mind? Collect all the self-awareness you have so far, as in the examples above.

Patterns consist of external and internal factors. The way you behave (or can’t behave) on the outside stems from the way your muscles unconsciously clench, which causes a restriction of energy flow through your body. How do you heal a stubborn pattern of clench-and-restriction? Well, you can work on the clench to make the behavior go away—which is how we work with deeply ingrained patterns. Alternatively, you can correct the behavior to make the clench go away—and this, if you can do it, is quick.

You blurt that the woman is so attractive that you lose your ability to speak, and a beautiful, shy smile lights up the room. You tell her how happy you are to be on the date with her, and you allow her to catch you tracing your eyes down to her feet and back up. You tell your partner what’s irritating you. Speaking your truth is powerful because not only does it release tension in the relationship… it releases the clench in your body at the same time. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how much body practice or inner work you do: the easiest thing is just to speak your truth to that person, which can be enough to stop the whole pattern.

We don’t always know why we’re clenched up, though. Much of the time, we lack self-awareness, and we’re yet to formulate words to help us release the moment. A ‘top down’ awareness practice is important, then, in helping us discover what affects the flow of our inner freedom and passion. ‘Top down’ means that, through curiosity and observation, you become aware of yourself at the level of your mind, and able to convey your feelings and desires through voice.

A ‘top-down’ approach to unfolding your passion consists of:

(1) Contemplating solid ‘shadow-work’ questions, and recording your discoveries in a journal (this doesn’t have to take more than five minutes each day).

(2) Noticing what in life saps your energy, how it saps your energy, and when.

(3) Mapping out how your patterns function with precision, starting to add more body-awareness into your map.

(4) Resolving whatever you can through honest communication: there’s no need to go into a body-process when you can use dialogue to put things right.

If you become brightly aware of how a pattern works in you, and you can’t put it right immediately, then combining your awareness of the pattern, with some bottom-up work over tine, can work together to release it. With the next element—space—and, often, guided mentoring, I can explore with you how to do this.

As time passes, you uncover more of your patterns. Since questions are the fuel that drives your process of inquiry, the guidance of a facilitator or shadow-work coach will speed up the process, help you see blind spots, and tip you off on secret patterns that are beneath your current level of awareness to get to on your own. The ‘top-down’ approach steadily makes the underground aspects of your personality come to light, so you can heal the trauma and conditioning you find. When all four of the approaches in this method come together, now only will who you are and how you tick make real, tangible sense… but you gain the self-acceptance to love all parts of yourself, as well. Even the quirks that don’t change.

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(3) Space to Integrate

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You could do the lion’s share of this passion work if you’re a strong meditator with an appropriate technique. For other mere mortals, having brothers, sisters, on a similar journey to reclaim their passion—their wildness—or having a dedicated coach, therapist, or group, helps it all come together.

Here’s what I mean by having ‘space to integrate’. As you do your ‘bottom-up’ practice—stretching and breathing and moving your body—energy and emotion gets released from within the muscular cages of their suppression. As you open your body, your unleashed energy will feel like something. It will have its own memories and its own direction; its own desires, and where it wants to go. Lower-body energy can be destructive, full of urges, volatile. What you find might be disturbing, identity-threatening, taboo. If you’ve domesticated the tiger within you, you might be shocked by its appetite when unleashed. Mental sanity—psychological balance—is, to me, of prime concern. To know you’re not alone, and that you’re celebrated in your discoveries, benefits greatly. It is vital to have a social space to share what gets uncovered throughout your process, where you can allow these aspects of you to integrate.

Left to your own devices, practicing body things in secret in your bedroom, you might not know how to give adequate space to your process. Why this matters is that you might shut newly-emerging parts of you down, or avoid them. Or, another pattern comes into play, shuts down all your progress, or funnels new energies into another pattern somewhere else. Every person you can share your progress with, who listens immaculately as you talk about your experience, helps to keep your process unfolding, holding you in such a way that you stay grounded and connected to yourself, so the integration of often strong and volatile energies can continue on through.

When someone you trust reflects your process back to you, you gain self-trust. The energies you’ve worked hard to release start to integrate in such a way that you feel them as normal, that you’re aware of them as you’re in general conversation with other people. In a space made sacred by the quality of your listening, you easily ride the horse of your explosive inner passion, rather than have that horse ride you. It’s also inspiring, as you’re doing your top-down shadow work and you learn many uncomfortable truths, that you have someone who wants to hear about these things. When you discover patterns in yourself, this often leads to secondary emotions that also need to be felt through: shame, sadness, grief, etc., and all the time lost through being in the patterns that held you before.

It is crucial for healing, then, to have a space, a partner, a buddy, a therapist, a coach, who can hear that all these aspects of your journey as they unfold. Not many people in this world are good at ‘holding space’. In regular conversation, most people divert the conversation back to themselves, or give off apprehension and judgment (spoken or silent) that have you clench back down on your process as a form of self-protection. All the while, it is the act of pure listening that keeps your inner process moving enen more.

One thing we practice in our retreats and workshops, then, is to finish a practice and have an intimate conversation with a practice partner—with the right kind of empathy and listening skills—because that can continue to evoke even more primal energy from you, and help it take root in your regular way of being. For this kind of listening to have alchemical effect, you simply sit, still your mind, and do absolutely nothing. The fuller your attention, the more the person you’re listening to’s energy moves. This is the exact same dynamic we practice in sexual polarity: it is the steadfast, all-accepting presence of the masculine that encourages a woman’s energy to wilden, and expand.

Pure listening may sound uneventful, but it’s the space where so much happens. A half-smile from a listener might invite you deeper into your self-expression. Any kind of story you want to tell, as you do this verbally with someone who holds a big open space for you, can help you deepen into ever more mysterious corners of your emotions and psyche, almost like they beckon you there, until you find rock-bottom or spiritual depth. One stern look on the other hand might offer you a sense of challenge. We grow most comprehensively in the human mirror.

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(4) Embody Your Passion with Artistry — Real-World Feedback

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Ok, say you’ve unleashed, understood, and integrated a lot of passion that used to be clamped down and hidden inside you. You’re brimming. There’s a more carnal, more driven, alive quality to your being. It’s like you swapped out an old second-hand car for a Porsche, and the engine’s humming. The fourth approach to passion work, then, is to take your new bodymind out for a spin, testing the fruits of your practice in the world. When visceral passion—lust for living—runs more freely through your veins, this will express itself in everything you do. Particularly in your relationship to others, to women.

Flirting. Intimacy. Attraction.

You can do your shamanism and your psychotherapy, but interpersonal skills are an arena that a solely inner approach to change is going to miss. And yet, the interpersonal determines how you connect with your sexual energy in the world. And this needs to be optimally calibrated.

So you’ve been practicing the first three approaches for a number of months. You feel different to yourself. But what happens now when you speak to attractive women who arouses a strong amount of passionate energy within you? Thanks to your work, your body composition, and your sensitivity, your intuition, is different. How do you now wield the energy of your attraction? Does a beautiful woman’s presence still shut that down? In that case, there’s still more work and releasing to do. On the other hand, you might find that your red-blooded energy makes you shy. You might find yourself feeling overwhelmingly cocky. This is all something else to work with, and enjoy.

We need places where we can recalibrate what our body and energy system does when it mingles with other human beings. We need heightened awareness, to match our heightened energy flow. Because your new state of embodiment will create a change in your behavior, it will shift other’s perception of you, too. What’s the best way to practice artistry in intimate conversation? Well, you could go to the bar a thousand times and notice a change in the quality of your interactions over time. And if you have a big release during practice, this shift might happen quickly. But what’s always more effective is when you stand with women who are direct mirrors, who give you honest feedback, who tell you precisely how they feel in your presence, offering adjustments so you can practice different modes of being, expanding or making more subtle your approach, so you become hyper-clear on the impact you have on women. This is the gift of receiving feedback that’s clear, sensitive, and intuitive. What value would this feedback have for you? For most of our lives we’re starved of this truth.

We all know that the way we communicate is tinged with the composition of energy in our bodies. 7% of communication is verbal, and in passion work, we radically alter the other 93% of your physical and energetic structure. As you can imagine, this does everything to change the impact your words and approaches have in the world. In fact, with 93% of your composition altered, it makes being present and doing nothing simple catalysts for influence and attraction.

In some relationships, all you need do is make a splash. Who cares whose sensibilities you upset when your entire presence is more… ballsy? But in other contexts, delicacy is needed. The power of your body will start to shift things around you. Some women might fling themselves over you. Other people—particularly men—can get jealous. Projections can happen, where people start telling stories about you that aren’t true. Compassion, for others and for yourself in this process, is important.

So the fourth approach in passion work is integrating your new vitality. We need the world to reflect back our impact. Sure, you feel an inward shift. But excellence is about truly knowing the effect you have on others, as you have it. When you’re this dialed into your influence in the moment, you can adjust according to what’s needed, and what you want.

It is time, as ever, to practice flirting. How are you with the process of seduction now, after an embodied change? What happens when you allow others to see you as a more sensual man? What old habits did you use to lean on to flirt—and do they even have any validity anymore, now that you feel your body through and through? (To the embodied me today, the flirting skills of the disembodied me seem appalling, over-compensatory, and immature!) Now that you’ve got your vital energy ticking over in a new way, does this rewrite the rules of interacting with a beautiful woman? What are the new rules, or principles? And therefore, what are the most artful ways you can use that express your force of attraction?

Come and try out for yourself in our hall of mirrors: our team of feminine women are waiting to reflect what they feel from you back to you.

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Practicing for Passion (Bringing it all Together)

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There you have it: the foundation for a passion practice that will take you a long way forward. Within each of these approaches are ingredients that can have you not only unleash the wild power of your erotic, creative drive… but also learn to rest into this force, harnessing it, turning it into a humming virtue, and not some addictive streak.

As you walk this path of awakening the virtue of passion, you will be working, consistently, on each of the four fronts. You will have a daily ‘bottom-up’ body practice, releasing and moving raw energy reservoirs in your body. You will have a practice of ‘top-down’ awareness-based reflection and self-observation, taking care of patterns as and when you become capable. You will also create a space in which to process what you’re discovering with allies who listen well, allowing your journey to deepen and integrate. And you will step into the real world to fine-tune how you wield your passion, getting feedback from people who see you.

Passion is an awakened virtue. When you feel passionate, you naturally engage with life in a full-bodied, enthusiastic way. We all know how this feels. Without passion, life is malaise, grey. Putting time and attention on the right practices can change your life. Awareness, loving-kindness, deep empathy for all beings. But what if you practiced passion as a way to live your life fully? What if you build a path to develop the spiritual, yet deep and visceral force of passion within you, as a martial artist might practice their craft?

How long does it take? Depending on your starting point, much can change in an inspired three or six months if you’ve got the availability. If you’re in the middle of family life or a busy career, it might take a little longer for you to create the opportunities in which to practice well. This kind of work is like a piggy-bank, though. Every bit of practice you do seems to add up to a kind of retirement fund, and it benefits from compound interest. Put in ten or fifteen minutes per day, relax any attachment to immediate success, and your energetic constitution will change over time. It’s like diet and exercise. It’s like saving. Follow the protocol, and you will get the result.

I mean, even if you’re so busy you can’t do more than ten minutes per day, with some space-holding with a practice buddy once every two weeks, a 15-20% increase on your daily vitality will cause all kinds of improvements in your life.

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Your Next Step

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Want to practice? Then why not get started right away.

Passion work is central to everything else that I offer. Whenever you’re ready, join me for a 4-hour deep-dive into all aspects of this topic. Simply click the image below, and sign up today.