Saturn Returns with Caggie - 7.6 What Defines Us and Male Archetypes with Pat Divilly

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Today’s conversation is a deeply insightful one as Caggie is joined by Pat Divilly; renowned wellness expert, author and podcast host. Pat opens up about his early life, candidly sharing his struggles with bullying, the overwhelming pressure to succeed, and perceived failures in his early twenties that left him feeling hopeless and lost. As we all move through our twenties we are often met with feelings of failure or desire to keep up with our peers, which can be incredibly isolating. Pat reflects on his own experience with this and how his life drastically changed after small positive moments began to create a new story for him as his career shifted into an outwardly very successful one. Caggie and Pat also delve into nervous system work, internal family systems and male archetypes. Pat shares his insight into how our past wounds affect our everyday lives and when we embrace who we are, recognise our previous patterns and create our own authentic space, we can unlock our full potential. --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. Today I'm joined by someone who I've been following for a while. I'm a huge fan of his work so I was very pleased when he agreed to come onto the show and he had just arrived off the plane from Ireland and that is the wonderful Pat DiVilli. I've been listening to Pat's podcast and reading into his work. I think it's so, so important what he's doing. In this conversation, we discuss a lot of stuff. We unpack his journey to where he is now, his struggles with school and bullying and kind of

this idea that no matter where we get to or how the world perceives us in our adult self, there's always a part of us that feels like that little child, that sort of vulnerability and whatever pain or experiences or wounding we have from that childhood experience we carry with us and how those wounds play out in our lives. I think simply having the awareness over this sort of thing is the first step and being able to have these conversations and allow people to recognize that it's very human and it's very normal and the work required to heal from it isn't easy but I applaud any of you who are going through it and I think simply by listening to this podcast shows that you are willing and ready to go there. We delve into nervous system work which is something

that I have been working on you know personally for a while as well and I think it's such an important key ingredient that kind of ties this whole thing together. Pat is also a big fan of internal family systems therapy which we've had a number of podcasts about but the way he explains it is hugely informative and another thing that I wasn't expecting to talk about but I'm so glad that we did was male archetypes. When I was researching Pat's work, I came across it and it really fascinated me because to be honest, I've done so much around female archetypes. I hadn't really paid much attention to what the male archetypes were. In fact, I didn't know until I read Pat's work. And so actually recognizing, I think it's super important to recognize like

the man's journey the sort of masculine like this audience is very female heavy and I think it's really important to bring men into these conversations and to platform them and to celebrate them because it's hard women tend to talk a lot more about stuff a bit more openly and so for men to do it it takes a lot of courage and so I really you know support Pat and everything that he's doing. So I'll stop rambling on but I love this conversation. Everyone from the team was super impressed and fascinated by Pat and the way he spoke so I know you guys are gonna love it. Enjoy. Hello Pat. Hello way he spoke. So I know you guys are going to love it. Enjoy. Hello, Pat. Hello, Keggy. Hello, London.

You've literally just come straight from the airport, haven't you? Yeah, pretty much. How are you feeling? I'm grounding. I'm not grounded. I'm grounding. Right. Are you feeling ungrounded because you've just flown in or generally? Oh, yeah, just because I've flown in. General life check-in, I'm in a good place. Good. And how do you find coming into London?

Because you said just before we started recording, you're from quite a small town. Yeah, well, I'm Galway on the west coast of Ireland, famous for the Ed Sheeran song. And that's like a slow pace of life, for me at least. Live by the beach, train jiu-jitsu, do some work, go for a sea swim. So London's hectic for me. I do like it.

It's nice to come for a couple of days and get the energy. Yeah, and then leave. Then leave. London's hectic for me, and it's been my home my whole life. But anyway, for those that don't know, would you be able to explain a little bit about who you are and what you do yeah I am so I'm 35 now which means I'm 15 years in the wellness industry um I lived in England for a year when I was 20 did a master's in exercise and nutrition science and the fitness industry back then wasn't really a thing this was like 2009 so the fitness industry back then wasn't really a thing. This was like 2009,

so the fitness industry hadn't really taken off at that point. But fitness for me was the first thing in my life that ever gave me confidence, and I'd always struggled with confidence and being bullied. I had a lot of insecurity as a young man, and having found some confidence in fitness, I said, this is going to be my career. And so I did the master's here.

I went back to Dublin, so I went from my small town of Galway to Dublin. And I had these notions that I was going to be a success story and everyone back home was going to see how special I was. It was all driven by insecurity. So I went to Dublin and I worked in a gym. I got fired from that gym pretty quickly because I would tell the clients, this doesn't really work. You to you know do things differently and I went out on my own at 22 in Dublin and I was kind of mad ambition I'm going to be successful I'm going to show everyone and looking back I realized nobody cared what I was doing but I had all this kind of young ego and I struggled for two years trying to get the business off the ground but didn't want to come home with my tail between my legs.

And eventually I came home at 24 and I've told the story a thousand times, but I came back home on a bus on Christmas Eve, borrowed money from my dad to get home. My mom's birthday was Christmas Day. I couldn't afford a gift. And for the next six months, I just went into like deep shame with having failed, having to move back home um not being able to buy my mom a birthday present on Christmas day and I was lost for six months of my life at 24 and I look back now and I'm like you're at 24. 24 everyone's lost at 24. Yeah yeah crazy. You had all this pressure that. Huge pressure. i put it was from the outside but it was actually sort of internalized yeah you were putting on yourself 100 and so i worked in a pizza shop for six months and part of the pressure came from the fact when i was in dublin i used to train all the models and i would train them for free early influencer marketing i'd say i'm going to train

you for free put me in the newspapers i'll be a celebrity trainer and so my friends see me training models and never coming home and they're saying he's made it he's successful and then six months later I'm in the pizza shop and they're like what's happened so anyway um really dark six months really dark and um eventually my dad kind of gave me some tough love and he said half your problem and half your struggles are the fact that you're obsessed with your own problems and struggles and if you went out there and you help people in some capacity you'd pretty quickly get past what you're experiencing and my mentality was I can't help myself I can't get out of bed never mind help anyone else were you in a real sort of yeah I was lost yeah yeah I was like yeah I was uh the darkest of days and some of the nights in

Dublin there was a night in Dublin where I went down to the docks in the middle of the night and thought I was going to end it all. And yeah, it feels like a different life in a way. You know, it's hard to connect to that now. But anyway, I took my dad's advice and I started offering free training plans online. And 12 weeks after offering my first plan, a guy emailed me and he said, this is my results. He he said I don't know if it's any use to you but if you want to share the

pictures maybe I'll get you some clients and so I share the pictures and I said I'm going to start fitness classes on the local beach because I didn't have to pay rent so it was a free way of training people and five people showed up for my first class and it completely changed my life so that was like 2012 because i was so low and i felt like nothing and these five people believing in me sort of gave me a touch of i can believe in myself again yeah yeah hope and possibility um and so i invested you know i think at that point i realized I was still young and egotistical. I probably still am egotistical at least. But, you know, at 2021, I thought fitness was broccoli and sit-ups and push-ups and chicken breasts.

And that was what fitness was. And having gone through my struggles, then I recognized fitness was like a vehicle for community and change and all these other things. So I started with these five clients. I said, I'm going to be the best part of these people's day and within three months there was 100 people coming to the beach and within a year it had all turned around I'd opened a gym I'd brought out my first book and within five years within a year you did the book it was crazy just yeah so that that moment having those five people was that just completely shifted everything yeah and i tell people that now i think there's such a tendency to want to go from a to z and like half of our stress in life is this disconnect all of our stress in life is a disconnect i've got a picture in my head of where i should be and then

i've got reality well our expectations versus reality It's like that is what sets us up for disappointment a lot of the time. Exactly. Was it what your father said to you that really, you know, changed your perspective on things? That kind of shift from, and we all do it, kind of being in service of our egos or wanting to attain certain things for, you know, wanting to achieve stuff so we feel better or like we can be validated by those we know versus it being about service to others how can I support other communities and people around me was that a moment that really changed things yeah I think a lot of this stuff I look back and I can kind of make sense of it now at the time I was just going along with you know I think I reached a point of desperation where I said my way doesn't work so I need to start listening to other people so my dad definitely supported me in that way with

a bit of tough love there was a guy in the UK I used to follow all the famous trainers in the UK and I messaged them all and I said can you give me some advice like I need to be able to do this if you can do it I can do it and one guy got guy got back to me and he said, I'm going to give you a call. And I was so broke at the time. I said, this guy's rich. He's ringing me from England to Ireland. Like, this guy's made it. And he called me for 10 minutes and he just gave me a bit of encouragement.

And it wasn't anything I didn't know. It was just, you can do this. And that was another conversation. And it was these little things. And I guess you can have kind of downward spirals where one thing leads into the next into the next and you can also have the upward spiral so like one positive experience creates a new story and the new story creates a new feeling and suddenly it's gone up the way and also having the courage to make those steps

when you are feeling the lowest of the low to actually do that thing which might be reaching out to someone and asking them for help or advice that then starts creating the upward spiral which is the hardest thing to make that first step right yeah there is that thing if nothing changes nothing changes so i think sometimes you have to get pissed off enough it's your situation yeah and sometimes you have to get inspired enough by your situation and then funnily in recent times i've seen sometimes it's just times where it clicks and things just come together so there's kind of people often talk about desperation and inspiration as being great drivers but i also think timing as well you probably know more about that from the astrological side but um to trust the timing trust the timing yeah yeah i think things come when they're supposed

to between 2012 2016 a lot of my generation in Ireland had gone to Australia and America and Canada because the recession was pretty bad at home and so people started messaging and saying why is everyone on the beach with you like can I do this online and so I said I'm going to put this online and there was 20,000 clients between 2012 2016 that went through online training courses so my business blew up and between 24 and 28 my life just looked externally completely different it was like night and day failure to success bought a house bought a car met a great girlfriend had it all and at 28 i found myself going to psychiatrists psychologists shamans energy healers every type of person

because it was lost again and it was talk to me about feeling lost again because on the exterior you had all the things you'd you were successful by anyone's definition of it but you still felt as lost as you did when you actually didn't have anything or was it a different kind of lostness yeah i think there was two things in it like one was you can be driven by wounding or you can be driven by worth. So wounding is like, I'm a wounded person or I see myself as a wounded person. There's something missing in me,

but if I achieved the thing, then I'll feel enough. So that's me thinking that something outside of myself was gonna fill a void within me. And that drove all of my behavior. I'm not enough. I don't fit in. I'm weird. I'm different.

People don't see me that was my driver i was completely driven by fear worth is a sense of i'm gonna go and do this thing because i can because i want to so i think the energy from where i was coming was one thing um the other thing was throughout my life i had always had things i could point to for like struggles with mental health so i could point to the fact I was bullied. I could point to the fact that alcohol was a big part of my early 20s. I could point to the fact that I had failed with a business. And this was the first time at 28 where I couldn't point to anything.

I had it all. I had ticked every box I ever wanted. You know, I had the business I wanted, great people around me. And I went to a psychologist, psychiatrist every every ist under the sun every shaman energy healer again was that new new territory for you i was always quite open to all that stuff there were certain things now looking back where i'm like oh it makes a bit more sense you know like some of the energy healers would have me doing uh mantras 108 mantras you know to remove obstacles uh chanting to ganesh

all this kind of stuff that at the time i was like i don't know what this is but i'll do anything at this point but i went to a psychologist and she shared this analogy and i always share it with people since and she said that we have a fire alarm in our house and the purpose of the fire alarm in the house is that when there's danger your fire alarm goes off and it says there's danger get to safety and she says sometimes the fire alarm breaks and you're using your toaster or the oven and the fire alarms beeping and you're saying oh this is pain in the ass so there's a malfunctioning fire alarm and she said you've got a fire alarm within your system that's there to trigger anxiety or a stress response within the

body when you're under threat or you're in danger and she said sometimes that fire alarm is being triggered when it's not supposed to be and she said that's what's going on for you she said you're getting triggered by every little situation and going into a fight or flight response you're hyper vigilant and that was kind of my experience at that time it wasn't so much depressive at that time it was more just anxiety couldn't sleep couldn't look people in the eye couldn't switch off couldn't slow down couldn't enjoy the moment uh couldn't stop moving it was like high functioning anxiety i was fine when i was going but alcohol was the only thing really that could quieten my mind on the weekends

and slow me down yeah yeah and then that becomes a vicious cycle because it it said momentarily alleviates the anxiety but charges you interest the next day. Yeah, I like that. Charges you interest. Jesus, yeah. I paid off my interest. Yeah, it is that like the cycle of addiction is, you know, uncomfortable feeling. I'm going to reach for a temporary escape.

There's consequences. And then there's shame. And then I'm in the shame. And then I go back to the addictive behavior. And this becomes the cycle. Yeah. and then I'm in the shame and then I go back to the addictive behavior and this becomes the cycle yeah so and I think then being in the fitness industry at the time there was also a bit of shame around the fact that I'm a fitness guy I shouldn't be partying like this on the weekends

so right there was a lot going on and then the other piece which will lead me on to I suppose what I'm doing now the other piece was that I could point to all these things intellectually the reasons I should be happy I've got a house I've got a car I intellectually, the reasons I should be happy. I've got a house, I've got a car, I've got a business. I should be happy. There was all these shoulds again, so expectations. But the reality was my system, like my nervous system, my body was just not in a good place. And so I put it to people sometimes that if I've got kids

and my child says to me, I'm scared, and my response is to say don't be scared don't be silly there's this weird disconnect that happens for the child because they're experiencing sensations in their body they're being told that it's not true that's not true valid yeah and then later in life we do that to ourselves so I'm experiencing anxiety but I'm saying I shouldn't be anxious I should be happy I should be fine um so at that time I just started reassessing everything and kind of changing direction and again it was this case of i think at that point it was time to look at the wounds so like what are these wounds that are driving me like my fear of not fitting in my fear of judgment

all these things i'd run away from for so long i had to go and address them and so the last seven or eight years has been shadow work and inner child work and meditation and breath work and compassionate inquiry with gabor and um so you really went fully into this stuff from that point because you speak a lot about internal family system therapy and i can see a lot of references even in your language around it is that something that came into your sort of vocabulary and understanding when you were doing this therapy at that time uh probably not seven or eight years ago but i have a good friend josh that lives over here in the uk he's an amazing guy josh connolly he does great work and we came across a book a couple of years ago called self therapy by jay early and that was ifs so internal family systems but it had practical exercises.

Myself and Josh had our little boys club and we'd meet on Zoom every Monday for two hours and do therapy on each other. I love that. It was amazing. It was like, that book is great actually for starting to dissect the different parts. And I had a conversation with Dick Schwartz

a couple of years ago. And even the language in internal family systems, for anyone who's not familiar, it's just that idea that we're composed of all these different parts. And one part of me is motivated and other parts scared. And sometimes they say I want something, but I do the opposite.

And the parts work helps us to understand, like, why is there this carnage and chaos in my mind? Why am I driven in some ways? And yeah, that's been really helpful for me uh it's been really useful and i do a lot of men's work now and and the parts work is supportive in men's work as well because it helps us understand the different aspects of the psyche i think it's a powerful modality and the ifs stuff yeah and you've spoken you spoke a second ago about you know our wounding and how that's often can be our driving force towards things. And I definitely

know from my own experience personally, and also what I witnessed mainly in my time when I was living in LA, which just epitomizes the perfect facade. Everyone had so much and everyone seemed to be living these great lives, but a lot of them were very deeply unhappy because I think without realizing it, we are often driven by fear more than worse. You know, that thing of feeling like at school we weren't enough or if we were bullied or anything like that. And no matter what we become, what version of ourself we present to the world,

internally, there is still that feeling of of lack of that wounding so what did you kind of discover from your own personal wounds and how did you shift that so much i think i think the ultimate one is you know they often talk about the first seven years of our life will shape a huge amount of our conditioning so at that point we're largely emotional beings we don't have a lot of language we don't have a lot of perspective we don't have context and so we're quite black and white in our thinking so if I get bullied I'll give that a you know a meaning I don't fit in it's very black and white it's not oh well maybe that person's going through struggles and maybe they've got challenges it's it's black and white I don't fit in if people

laugh at me in school, okay, I'm either the funny guy or I'm the funny looking guy. I'm going to come up with a label around that. And so we start shaping our worldview in those first couple of years. And I was just running actually a shadow work workshop this past weekend

and talking about how you can think about your family structure as being the first set of filters. So what my parents and my siblings think of how the world should look, that's going to influence how I show up in the world. There's aspects that will be celebrated within me and there's aspects that will be judged and shamed within me.

And so I quickly learned this is good, this is bad. Put this in the good box, put this in the bad box and keep that hidden away for the rest of your life. And what were those things? I think the same things there for a lot of people. Emotion was one that I was told not to really express. Be too emotional, yeah. Yeah.

And I was highly sensitive, you know, I was sensitive. My emotions were close to the surface myself. I'd be able to stand in a group and know what was going on for different people. It's become my superpower, like a lot of these things that we hide. But at the time, it was definitely boys don't cry, you know, just get on with it, keep the head down, all that kind of stuff. But we get shaped, I think, in those first couple of years by our family, and then the school structure, there's more rules and filters added, and then culturally, through religion, through media, through all these different things.

So there's an author back in the day called Robert Bly, he's an incredible guy. And he would talk about how the first 21 years of our life, we're sort of hiding all these different parts of ourselves. And then the rest of your life's work is about bringing those parts back out into the light. You know what's so interesting about that? Because obviously the podcast Saturn Returns, I don't know how much, you mentioned astrology before we started recording,

but basically your Saturn Return happens in your late 20s, so around 29 but we also have Saturn squares and oppositions so 7 14 21 are these like initiations in astrology from Saturn and if you actually think about it and reflect on your life they are such pivotal milestones where we get sort of confronted with themes of authority, responsibility. So you saying that makes a lot of sense in the context of, you know, the brand and Saturn Returns, because I definitely feel, for me personally anyway, up until 21, I was trying to fit in and then felt very lost throughout a lot of my 20s

whilst I was trying to reclaim or discover my authenticity. So is that kind of a journey that feels similar to you? Yeah, for sure. You know, we have this battle between will I be myself or will I fit in? Well, it's the gabon mate thing, isn't it? Yeah, for sure. Authenticity versus belonging. Yes, yes. And we will abandon our authenticity in order to feel like we belong sometimes in the wrong places. Yeah. And the more we do it, I suppose, the more we kind of abandon our true self, if you will, or the further we become disconnected, we can wake up. So the midlife crisis is in some ways you've like hidden all these parts of yourself and you put yourself in this tiny little box and you wake up and you say is this this can't be it like is this all there is so carl jung would talk about that same idea first half of your life is kind of like coming

into the material world and like getting a job and maybe finding a partner and doing all these things second half life is about the spiritual side and really discovering who you are beyond i suppose the the conditioning which again i think normalizes for a lot of people that are going through that transition to make it feel like it's more of a universal thing because I think as you know when you are going through that it can feel very isolating and very confusing because you have this sense that everyone else has has it all figured out and you're the only one that doesn't whereas I'm sure it's been your experience through your work that most people feel very similar. Yeah, I mean, I think life is about these initiations,

like these calls of, you know, Joseph Campbell talked about the hero adventure, the hero's journey and the call to adventure. And in school, we start school together with our friends, and then we graduate and we go to secondary school or high school with our friends and then we go to college or we go to work and there's these kind of initiations early on in life that everyone around you is doing it so it's like at the same time yeah easier but then you're older and you're like okay maybe i'm not happy in my relationship but you have to do that initiation on your own but i like the idea that every initiation brings you a bit closer to soul to your like truth um but you

got to go through those and that's a big part of initiation is going back into the wound so again whatever the wound is but i want to circle back around you you asked about um uh how did how do you start to recognize that the wound or do the work on the wound i think those first seven years recognizing what were the core messages that you took on and then looking at the years since how have those messages played out so if one of my core messages in those first seven years was they don't fit in how has I don't fit in played out in the chapter since so there's lots of different external situations and experiences but the the narrative will be similar because it's almost like putting

on a pair of sunglasses and everything now looks darker and it's not that everything out there has changed just my way of seeing the world has changed and that's what our stories do to us that's what those early conditioning can you give me an example of where that narrative perhaps a personal one for you played out later on in life yeah for sure um i'll give an exercise with it actually if that's okay of course exercise called the the chapters of life and the chapters of life is you would divide your age by about six your first chapter is the early years in your life the sixth chapter will be the most recent years in your life and the other chapters will be everything in between so I'm 35 let's say I'm 36 divided by six so first six years of my life will be chapter one next six years will be chapter two and

basically for each chapter I'll just look at what title without thinking too much I don't want to like be trying to get this right I always tell people it like inner work don't be a researcher that's trying to get it right. I always tell people with like inner work, don't be a researcher that's trying to get it right. Be an explorer who's trying to get curious. So without thinking too much, what chapter title would I give three or six years of my life? And what couple of sentences could I use to give the plot? And I keep it really simple. Who were the main characters? What was the plot? What was the chapter title? You could have two children that had very similar experiences that came up with very different interpretations.

An example sometimes given is two kids that grew up with alcoholic parents. One becomes an alcoholic because he says, well, that's all I ever saw. The other never drinks in his life because he says, that's all I ever saw. So our interpretations are everything. So look at chapter one, chapter one title, Comfortable at Home. The plot is really happy at home. Everything's going well. The main characters are my parents and my siblings. And then it moves to chapter two and chapter three and chapter four and when you do this exercise oftentimes what you'll find out is the earlier chapters will

really often inform the later chapters and so we're living in cycles our environments change our situations change our relationships change but oftentimes the core narratives are the same and the invitation once you've done the six chapters, is to consciously choose, because the idea is we've been unconsciously living out cycles, but with awareness, we've got choice, and awareness can bring change. So I have a choice now, what's my next chapter going to be called? So I recognized that early on, a belief I took on was that I don't fit in, and I'm not enough. And I played that out time and time again. And so there was external success. There was external changes. There was lots that happened in my life, but that story was always below the surface.

And so when I looked at chapter seven, my next chapter, I said, I don't care about external success as much as I care about rewriting my life script. Because that's what it is, is your life script. It's the movie script of your life. And I said, chapter seven is going to be about connection, about leaning in, about being brave, about having courage. And the plot is he changed everything,

you know, and who are the characters? I find that a powerful exercise. It shows you your patterns and it gives you choice. And those two things, those two things alone, figure out your patterns and give yourself a choice and those two things those two things alone figure out your patterns and give yourself a choice i love that i think that's such a useful exercise for people and the chapters of our life when when you say that definitely for me my personal experience i i can automatically kind of figuring out okay that chapter was that that chapter was that and do you think because you know how they often say that zero to seven

like very formative and they kind of set us up in our behavior and how we're going to view the world and everything but would it not be valid to say that it's actually the chapters that had the most amount that happened in do you know what i mean as in like zero to seven if you just were playing games with your siblings and mom and dad was there and whatever that perhaps wasn't as huge as seven to twelve where you got bullied and you had these humongous lessons and experienced a huge amount of pain that then set you up for the next chapter that meant that you were then going to wear a mask do you see what i'm saying like as in it's rather than it just being zero to seven it's like where was the time and i think like for those

listening we all have something that we go to that was a moment in time, in our history, in our childhood, whatever it might be, that for whatever reason was really formative in our decision-making. And often when we are in heightened situations in life, whether that's in relationship, which can often bring up all of that stuff to the surface, we feel that way again, you know? And you said for you that, and if you're happy to talk about it that school and having that experience being bullied does that

is that still something you have to manage and confront that plays out in certain scenarios in your life today yeah for sure you know the the concept of inner child work we hear a lot about inner child work and you know i think with any type of work we hear a lot about inner child work and you know i think with any type of healing work it can be nice to think about getting it done like ambition is the enemy kind of thing where i'm going to achieve this like that was my approach when i came to this work was oh i'm gonna like take it off the list to get this done like i don't have time to be spending too long on this but the reality of inner child work i'm working with these different parts is it's a relationship like you're having an ongoing relationship with a part of yourself and so if

you think about a time where your inner child which is your younger self got overwhelmed the way I think about it is it's like that part of you frozen time and now when you're experiencing similar situations that part feels activated and I often ask the question who's showing up and who's showing up is the question of is it 35 year old Pat that shows up to do the podcast or is it five-year-old Pat who's like overwhelmed by his experience or whatever it is and if it's the five-year-old I take a step outside and take a few deep breaths and be with that part of myself and it's an ongoing relationship you'll have many of those different parts in different situations but that's what you know people talk about trauma a lot you

know it's become a bigger and bigger word over the last couple of years. I think trauma is when the experience is too much to integrate and process and understand emotionally in the moment so again that part freezes we have a freeze response and there's an opportunity potentially to come back to it in time when we're resourced you know trauma happens when we're not resourced we don't have the capacity to handle what's there but maybe if we create the space later in life we can do i always tell people don't go and do your inner child healing or your shadow work when you're moving house or you've got craziness going on

in your life because you need to be resourced in order to heal grounded yeah yeah you need those anchors i suppose um one of my mentors talks about emotion almost being like the banks of the river and it's like crazy flow of the river and you need to build the banks which is your resources you need to have time in nature you need to have people you can turn to you need to have your therapist or whatever it is if you're going to go into the the fast-flowing pace of those old emotions and those old stories. Which is also why a lot of people seem to feel that when they're in a healthy relationship or work going well, that suddenly stuff comes to the surface that's very historical

and they think, why is this coming up now? But I guess that's just the body's way of saying we feel ready to release this to integrate it because it feels supported enough for it to you know come to the surface yeah i have a belief the psyche is not going to give you anything you're not ready to handle yeah and you've probably seen have you seen the the video the polar bear the dislodging trauma have you seen that video no i just go down the youtube rabbit hole and presume everyone's watched so within the this this i think this is a useful piece in general it kind of comes back to the fire alarm

piece that i talked about earlier where cognitively you can look at your life and say i shouldn't be stressed but there's stuff going on in your body. But there's stuff going on in your body, there's responses going on in your body that can leave your system feeling like it's stressed. So in the animal kingdom, an animal will be relaxed and chilled out and they can hang out with their animal family and everything's good. But if a threat comes into their environment, they'll have a physiological response to keep them safe. The first response will be fight. So if I'm bigger than you, I'm probably going to fight you. That's my safety strategy. If you're bigger than me, I'm going to run away. If you're so much bigger than me that I don't have a hope in hell, I'm going to fall over and play dead and freeze or fawn and appease you or keep you happy or

whatever it might be. What you'll see with the, there's an amazing video of a polar bear and there's a helicopter with researchers on it and they've got a tranquilizer gun and they're tracking this polar bear to check for different things they're measuring. So the polar bear sees the helicopter, has the fight or flight energy and starts running and running and running. So it's a protective strategy. The fire alarm has gone off. But once the polar bear gets to safety and he starts coming back out of the paralyzed state or the tranquilized state, he starts quivering and shaking. He's kind of mad to see and you're like, what's going on there? And it's him dislodging stress.

It's the body having a chance to complete the arousal cycle. So for many of us, we have stressful situations and there's a big response in the body. My boss shouts at me, for example, I feel this big surge of energy but i freeze because i can't run or fight my boss but you don't shake it out i just it just sits there in my body and now suddenly i go back into the world we see this a lot with soldiers right that have been in a hyper vigilant state for months or years and then try to come home and be domestic you know and try to be caring and compassionate and loving with their family it just like doesn't serve you you can't i think this is the big

piece that we're moving into now in the coming years is like learning to be with the nervous system and to give ourselves what we need um don't you know donna lancaster i think you spoke to her recently did you yeah and she she does a lot of sort of somatic work and she was saying you know a similar thing about animals and how they they shake and they'll have those responses and it was fascinating because i'd never really thought about it before but it goes to show that we do store all of that stuff in our systems and nervous system workers it's becoming more and more in our vocabulary but it's still quite untapped to the masses, but such a key piece to our overall wellbeing. We see it, you know, if you're nervous before a talk,

you'll see your hand is shaking. This is your body letting go. It's called neurogenic tremors. So it's something that's natural, but it gets socialized out of us. There's an amazing doctor, David Berselli. He came up with trauma release exercises and he talked about, he was sat in a war bunker.

He was working in war-torn regions. And he was sat in a bunker with bombs going off in the background. And he had two toddlers on his lap. And the toddlers, every time a bomb would go off, they'd shake. So they would quickly dislodge the stress because they're in the safety of his arms. So there's a sense of regulation and co-regulation through. And they would naturally do that. They'd naturally shake.

And then he looked around the room and he said, once they get to five or six or seven, suddenly they stop doing it because they're socialized to, you know, in all the ways we're socialized. It's funny, you talked about the seven year cycle. One of the ways I think about the seven year cycle is the first seven years of our life is very much about emotion. Like everything's experienced as emotion. I can show all of my emotions.

Everything's welcome, hopefully, to a certain degree. The second seven years when I go to school, everything becomes intellectual. I'm tested on my intellect. Then I come into puberty, so everything comes about physicality, maybe. And then in theory, we might come into more of a spiritual realm

as we get a bit older and hopefully as adults. The spiritual piece is to find a bit of my purpose and to turn my purpose or turn my passion into a purpose so like my passion is what i love and what i'm willing to suffer for and then my purpose is taking what i love and bringing it out into the world and contributing to the the bigger um system doesn't always work like that a lot of people's message and i think purpose has become such a big word at the moment and more than now more than ever people want to do something that aligns with their purpose and obviously you have managed to

create a career that is very much in alignment with your purpose but what would your advice be for people that perhaps are doing something that just doesn't feel right for them or they aren't really doing their true calling it's a couple of things i think the main thing is um i think one of the ways we trap ourselves in a lot of things is putting things in boxes so saying i'll be happy when and putting that in a box and putting happiness in the future saying i'll be confident when or i'll feel successful when and purpose kind of is the same there's this idea that someday i'm going to stumble upon my purpose. I think the secret, if there's a secret,

like I'm really grateful to get to do what I do today. I work with men's groups in particular. So helping men to facilitate healthy conversations and safe spaces where they can let go. I do a lot of corporate work in healing stuff, which is something I never, I did lots of things I get to do that I never, never planned, never thought I'd end up doing whatever, but how it came about was started teaching fitness classes and then took the I did lots of things I get to do that I never planned, never thought I'd end up doing, whatever. But how it came about was I started teaching fitness classes and then took the fitness classes online and then became a coach.

And it was step by step by step. And every, not every step of the way, but a lot of the time I felt like, oh, I found my purpose now. And then it would go a layer deeper, like layers of the onion. So I think the advice would be to just lean in and take the first step I think there's a whisper in all of us it kind of gets drowned out by the noise because there's so much external noise in our lives if you can start creating a little bit of space through journaling or meditation and just start listening to that whisper we talk about confidence talk about

purpose talk about all these things all of all of this trust in ourself comes from listening to the deeper part of yourself and then acting on what that part of you tells you to do and then you come back and you do it again you do it again and you do it again and suddenly everything's very different and it doesn't need to be a big grandiose leap you know sometimes people think i need to leave my corporate job i I need to get emails every day from people. I'm a doctor and I want to become a coach. I'm like, no, don't do that. It's, you know, lean in, start a nighttime course, you know, start reading a few books. You just take consistent action in the direction of what feels right.

And but really, I think letting go of the grandiosity of, you know, purpose being this thing that you're going to find I don't know that makes a lot of sense and for you when you started leaning into this work was there a lot of fear or expectation in terms of you know I don't know what it's like as a man to kind of go into this stuff but I know that the conversations are probably more common for women because we do just tend to create these spaces where we'll open up about all this kind of stuff and that is very second nature for us whereas I know for men it's still a little bit tricky and they don't know how to have these conversations

or they haven't been socialized to do it so what has that been like and for you personally in terms of like your family dynamic and everything like that how was it stepping into this space it's been a it's been an interesting few years i like i went through so many certifications and trainings where i was the only man on the training and go you to go through a year-long therapy training and again was the only man on the training. And go through a year-long therapy training and again, be the only man for a year in the course and stuff. But again, this idea of the hero's journey that I mentioned earlier, which is,

we feel a call to shift something in our life and to change something. And so we step away from the ordinary and we get mentors and we meet challenges. And the last part of the hero journey, which you can't forget, is you come back to your ordinary world and you bring back the gold that you got on the quest so for me to have done all

these courses over the years where i was the least experienced i was the least emotionally aware i was the least you know all this kind of stuff the final chapter for me and that is to come back and like share that in a practical way with men that otherwise wouldn't get it so powerful yeah it's fulfilling you know it's it's i think that's where your life purpose comes from i think your purpose comes from sharing your gifts and your gifts come from your wounds so it's kind of this cyclical thing go into the wound learn and grow and heal and then come back and help the people that are coming with you um but i find men are you know men are ready to talk. They just need to feel safe in the space. And so there's different ways you do that. You know, you just,

it was funny for me, you know, coming from the fitness space, I moved from that into more coaching and personal development for a few years and kind of traditional goal setting and time management and all those kinds of things that were a bit more heady. And then it went more into emotional work and more soul work. But at first it was all women coming to my seminars because most of my fitness clientele were women and there'd be a few men in the room and i'd say i'm sorry you were dragged along lads and they'd say we were dragged along and then eventually over the years the dynamics started shifting where half the room would be men and i said okay i need to start doing you know men specifically um so it's, wasn't a plan.

It was kind of just. It happened naturally. Yeah, yeah. Just, I think just keep showing up and be brave, I think is important in your life and start creating the spaces that you want to go to. You know, sometimes we're waiting for the perfect space. We're waiting for the perfect community.

We're waiting for all these things to show up in our lives. And my experience has been oftentimes you have to build it yourself. You have to build the community. You have to build the tribe. You have to build the tribe. You have to build the village. You have to build the culture. There's a lot of disease in the bigger culture. One of my mentors says that if you put an animal in the zoo, the animal gets sick. And it's not because there's anything wrong with the animal. It's the environment is a sick environment. So the animal is going to get sick. And in many many ways the way that we live can be a bit like the zoo a bit toxic yeah and so we have mental health issues and we think there's something wrong

with us maybe it's not us maybe it's the environment what if there is one or any of the main sort of things you feel from your experience and the work that you do what are the things that men are struggling with at the moment i mean i always think it comes back to the i'm not enough story i think that's there in some capacity i'm not enough i won't ever be enough that's the big piece there's four primary wounds the way the way i i work with men one of the tools that i use with men at least is the idea of the male archetypes this is what i wanted to talk about yeah i'm so glad that you mentioned it because i you know the work that i do and the people that i've had on the show there's a lot around female archetypes and it's it's work that i try and embody and i find super interesting but i

have never had anyone come on and talk about male archetypes so i would love you to just for us to discuss that for a minute nice yeah um there was a book written back in 1990 by two youngian analysts and they broke down these kind of four primary male archetypes and for me it provides a lovely map of the male psyche and a way of understanding our core wounds our shadowy behaviors and what mature masculinity could look like so the idea is these archetypes again almost like parts or energies that live within us and they're always there they're just being played out in conscious or unconscious ways. So we talk about king, warrior, magician and lover those are the four king, warrior, magician, lover. The king in your life is the part of you that has

vision and purpose and has a sense of what your kingdom looks like. So that's a sense of clarity, a sense of vision, a sense of purpose, a sense of I am enough. So that's a healthy king. And when you're in your healthy king, you experience joy. So it's not temporary happiness that might come from eating an ice cream. It's a sense of joy that I'm living a life that's true for me. So that's the healthy king. The shadowy versions of the healthy king, when you don't believe that you're enough're enough will be you become a tyrant where you try to hold power over other people so you try to prove through well i am enough i'll show you how enough i am and there's kind of this

power battle which i would say is a lot of the political uh world and when people talk about toxic masculinity i think that's like yeah, and that's what you're looking at is tyrant king. It's not true masculinity. It's not mature masculinity. It's a different thing. It's trying to hold power over others. Or you have the other expression. So if you don't believe you're enough, you have two ways you can respond. Again, you can desperately try and prove by having power over others. Or you can say, you're right, I'm not enough. And you kind kind of give up so that's the weakling king so that's our first one the king vision purpose that's that's my um my sense of direction in life and a key tenant for the king is that when i'm in my healthy king i can bless

other men and i can say you're doing a great job there's not a sense of competitiveness because i recognize you're doing magic in the world he's doing magic she's doing magic i can see the beauty in other people because i've accepted the beauty in myself. Whereas when I haven't accepted that, I don't feel I'm enough. Life's a competition. Then you've got your warrior. So it's great having a vision, great having an idea of where you're going. But your warrior is a protector. So if you think about a kingdom, the warrior is the one that keeps out the bad guys. So in our own lives, the healthy warrior is about protection. It's clean anger.

So the expression of clean anger, sometimes men are afraid of their anger because they've been taught that it's wrong to be angry. But anger is what allows me to say, no, that's not okay with me, or to put boundaries in place, or to even take action and get pissed off enough to create change,

like any change that happens in the world as a result of anger, typically, protests. But sometimes the warrior is, again, shadowy. We don't have that sense of wanting to protect. We want to destroy. So that's when a man becomes the overworker, like he becomes obsessed by, just completely driven by his warrior tendencies, always in a state of doing.

That's a real common pattern, doing, doing, doing. I only find value when I'm achieving and doing things. So they're caught up in that. Or there can be the opposite, which is the people pleaser or the nice guy, where we have a sense of, well, I'm a nice guy. I should get all the things I want in life. But there's a manipulation that comes with that

because I'm telling you what you want to hear. I'm not expressing myself authentically. So that's the warrior. So king, vision, warrior takes action on the vision. Magician is kind of the part of us that can find perspective and challenge things and create transformation in our lives. So when we come up against fears, our magician is the part of us that can take a step back and say, okay, where did this come from? And can maybe, like the chapters of life exercise I shared earlier, that's kind of magician work, like shaman work, coming to the edges. The magician works at a different pace to the other parts. The world is very fast, but the magician is able to step back and kind of say, where am I going?

Sometimes in its shadowy forms, it can be quite manipulative. And then finally the lover. So if the king, the warrior, the magician are kind of very future focused, if we live in those archetypes and we don't express our lover we can find ourselves always trying to get somewhere else, not enjoying the journey. So the lover is all about connection, connection to myself, connection to other people, connection to nature. The emotion associated with the lover is grief and the idea is that if I don't allow myself to feel my grief, I become numb to all of my emotions and I struggle then to feel, I struggle to connect, I struggle to experience the moments in life. And the shadowy forms of the lover are the addict. So the addict is the man

that's completely overrun by his feelings. he's just desperate to feel something and maybe his wound is he doesn't think he knows how to love and so he might go to a substance or an addictive behavior and try to seek connection through that rather than trying to open himself up to someone else and the opposite to the addict then is the impotent which is when a man's kind of feeling flat and empty in life and lacking umph if you will technical term so these are the archetypes um king is the leader in your life warrior is the action taker lover is the sense of connection and magician is the problem solver oh that's so fascinating do that does that work that you do with men's circles does that really land for them as in can you very clearly see out sometimes yeah so does it sometimes feel it's like it's a lifetime of work to understand those

archetypes there is so much in it you know um but i think some guys it really clicks they're just like wow particularly the warrior and the lover these are two that are kind of in contrast like that's your kind of if you were to think archetypically of the warrior is the lover these are two that are kind of in contrast like that's your kind of if you were to think archetypically of the warrior is maybe the london-based banker who's just achieve achieve achieve achieve achieve like do do do do do do do and maybe then think about the lover as being an artist who never finishes a piece because he's just got no structure so there's one that's very flowy the artist artist is very flowy, but lacks structure and discipline in its extreme. Lacks boundaries, is just very go with the flow,

moseying through life. And then the person who's very much in the warrior is always trying to get somewhere, always trying to achieve. And there's a kind of balance between those two. It's like, can I have structure and discipline in my life, but also have freedom and flow? So I think that's the one that a lot of guys will relate to yeah but you asked earlier about where a guy is struggling

the four wounds the wound of the king is i'm not enough so at some point we picked up the belief that we're not enough the wound of the lover is i don't know how to love or i'm not lovable so again that would be a belief that was picked up early the wound of the warrior is i don't exist so that's the idea that if i'm not doing i don't exist yeah that i that i don't well that i don't matter that i'm enmeshed with other people that uh i'm not a strong sovereign individual in the world um and again there's two responses to that i either kind of give up and become the people pleaser so i don't express my needs in any way or i really relentlessly try to prove that I do exist. Those are the responses.

And finally, the wound of the magician is shame-based. It's I'm bad, I'm inherently bad in some way. And so my thinking parts will try to come up with strategies throughout my life to hide my badness, to hide the parts of me I don't want you to see. So again, I become these different parts. So you don't see the parts that I'm afraid that you'll reject me for.

That's a lot of work for people. We have lots of issues. I mean, seriously, so do we. And to be honest, I relate to a lot of those things myself. I think that the piece around the not feeling enough is just a very universal and human one but i would say that men gonna generalize massively but hide it a bit better or it might not be as obvious to us that men feel that way and maybe it's as superficial as the fact that men you know are strong and they

present themselves as whatever successful would they how they want to move through the world and so when we meet them we would never think that man doesn't feel enough does that make sense unless it's actually said and i think the tricky part is actually because of so so much around what men feel is masculine is not to show that vulnerability and that is the the piece around connection between men and women is that actually when they do it softens everything and it's i'd be curious to know it's like a final piece for our conversation your thoughts around and it's i'd be curious to know it's like a final piece for our conversation your thoughts around and it's not something i like to give a huge amount of um energy to because i think it's got you know it's got a lot of negativity around it but the sort of andrew

tate movement of today with someone like that for those that don't know he's sort of a deeply misogynistic character that has created a huge online following and i just even though people you know he's been in a lot of trouble recently and stuff you just think what is going on that that what's happening to create a following do you know what i mean like why what's the wounding that's drawing people to someone like him? What does he represent that's facilitating some kind of giving them purpose? Do you see what I'm saying?

So what are your thoughts on that? It's the father wound. So there's the idea of traditional initiation for boys. Are you familiar with this kind of idea that traditionally in most societies or most uh tribes or uh there would have been an initiation once a boy got to a certain age the boys 12 13 14 within the tribe or within the village they'd notice there's something changing here this like there's an energy in him so in the west we say oh he's hormonal or he's he's been a pain

in the ass or whatever but in the village they'd say oh oh, he's hormonal or he's been a pain in the ass or whatever. But in the village, they'd say, oh, there's something shifting here as he's coming into puberty. And up to that point, he'd spend a lot of his life with his mum. So he'd be largely influenced by his mum and maybe female teachers in school if they had schooling there. But once he comes to his initiation, all of the men in the village would dress up and face paint and stuff. And they'd come in and they'd snatch the boy from his mother's arms in the middle of

the night. And the mother will be in on it. So she'd start crying and they'd snatch the boy from his mother's arms in the middle of the night and the mother will be in on it so she'd start crying and don't take my boy and don't take my boy and the boy would be brought out into wilderness and it was different there was different initiations for different you know areas sometimes they'd have to walk around and survive for months go on walkabout for months sometimes they'd have to hunt and kill an animal sometimes they'd have to teeth knocked out so there was always pain involved. There was confrontation involved with difficulty. There was meeting difficult emotions involved. But there was also the support of your elders,

so the men within the village. Your father typically wouldn't take you out to initiation because the energy was too close. There would always be a bit of tension there. But your uncles, your granddads, other men within the tribe. tribe but anyway what this was about was killing the boy so you could become a man um because biologically girls have a clearer change and so for boys this was about the boy going out tackling his what we've talked about today going into his wound and recognizing his gold recognizing the the messages and the lessons in his wound and recognising his gold, recognising the messages and the lessons in his wound, being supported by elder men. And then he comes back and he serves the tribe. The initiation wasn't for him. The initiation was under the recognition that

if boys don't turn to men, then the village burns to the ground because you don't have people stepping up and stepping into their roles and going past their insecurities and their fears and actually serving humanity. With the industrial revolution and things changing then, men went to work in factories and there was no longer men in the village. And so boys now were raised by women in the household and then mostly female teachers in school, I would say. And so there was a lack of, a lot of us will have got the worst of our fathers, you know, fathers doing their best, again, in a sometimes sick society, to go out and make money

and like balance all their pressures and struggles. But maybe dad's tired and he's stressed when he comes home. And for young men, I think the thing that they want is the blessing of older men, because you're confused and you don't know what's going on in the world. You just want an older man to say, you're doing good, you're doing okay.

That's what's led, I think, to boys feeling lost and just craving something, like someone show me a way to be in this world and to show up in the world. So I think the men's groups are a step in the right direction, like bringing men together. There's some initiations now being done for younger men, so hopefully that becomes a bigger thing. But it's the father wound it's it's the blessing of what it comes down to i think is if i believe i'm not enough

my life will be a competition and i'll compete against other men and i want to win and i want them to lose and so i can't bless them and say that they're beautiful and that they're doing a great job and so now they live in fear I live in fear we all live in fear so rather than supporting one another we're competing with one another so if we can learn to see each other's goals which starts with seeing our own goals I think that's when everything starts to change yeah that's really powerful well Pat thank you so much for joining us i enjoyed it you're a calming influence keggy yeah apparently i do have a calming influence but anyway thank you very much my pleasure coming on

the saturn returns podcast and for sharing your wisdom i found it tremendously useful myself so i'm sure our audience will too thank you thank you so much for listening to this episode of Saturn Returns I hope you found it useful and if you did I would love it if you could share it with a friend because that is really how we've grown as a podcast and I'm so so proud of this community and all of you guys for your support so thank you so so much and a big thank you to pat for joining me on this week's episode as always remember you are not alone goodbye