Dallas Hartwig on Growing Up Men
In our materialistic, every man for himself, adolescent minded society, men have been left on their own. Sans the wisdom and the insistence of elders, to wrestle their own darkness. On today's episode author of the New York times bestsellers, "It Starts with Food" and "The Whole 30" Dallas Hartwig and I deviate from the world of nutrition to confront the stunted development of the masculine.
Referenced in the Show, and Further Reading
Dallas’s Bio
Dallas Hartwig has been many things: author, speaker, functional medicine practitioner, nutritionist, and physical therapist, but his true profession is a lifelong learner and teacher. He has presented over 150 nutrition and physical performance seminars, focusing on catalyzing positive change in people’s lives with research-based recommendations for healthy living. He is the New York Times bestselling author of It Starts With Food and The Whole30, and cofounded of the wildly popular Whole30 program in 2009. He has appeared on the Dr. Oz Show, Good Morning America, The View, and Nightline, and his work has been featured in hundreds of print articles worldwide. He is now exploring the themes of healthy masculinity, emotional literacy, and relational health.
In his free time, Dallas rides his motorcycles, and travels to photograph beautiful locations and to eat delicious food worldwide. He lives in Salt Lake City with his son. Visit Dallas’ site here.
Full Transcript
(music)
Sarah Marshall ND: Welcome to Heal. In our materialistic, every man for himself, adolescent minded society, men have been left on their own. Sans the wisdom and the insistence of elders, to wrestle their own darkness. On today's episode author of the New York times bestsellers, "It Starts with Food" and "The Whole 30" Dallas Hartwig and I deviate from the world of nutrition to confront the stunted development of the masculine. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall.
(music)
Sarah Marshall ND: Dallas Hartwig, Welcome to HEAL.
Dallas Hartwig: Thank you for having me.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah, it's a really good to be here and I'm going to do the thing that you can just tune out for the next couple of seconds, which is when Kendra and I first created the podcast and we had our very first meeting in her backyard of her old house. She was like, all right, I want your dream list. Like, who are the people that you would just like love? And you were the first name out of my mouth.
Dallas Hartwig: Oh, that's very kind of you. Thank you.
Sarah Marshall ND: And so it's a kind of a special day for me to have you in my house here doing this and taking it on and
Dallas Hartwig: well, that's nice to hear.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. And we have your accolades are on the bio and they're going to be on the website. And one of my favorite things is to not do that cause you're a human with awesome thoughts and a great heart and have become a friend, which I'm so stoked about projects yet to come and thoughts we get to bounce off of each other and I'm just really grateful to have you here.
Dallas Hartwig: Oh yeah. Do we swear here? Just so I know. Great. Okay. I was like, I should've asked you before we press play.
Sarah Marshall ND: This is all about self-expression, often authentic communication and connection. So if that's the expression, then that's the expression. Yeah, totally. So one of the things I'm really excited about today is I was actually meditating before this, to get myself in the zone.
And what just was coming through for me is I'm at this breaking point in my business where I'm not going to do the next 10 years, the way I did the last 10 years. Not that I'm not going to support people in their healing or work with people one-on-one but like I was in the, can I do it? Can I build it drive what I would call a very masculine model of living. With goal setting and, you know, action plans and all those kinds of things. And I've gotten good at that game. I've been successful at that game and I'm really expanding myself and I want to say pushing myself, but that's also coming from that model, cause it’s so ingrained in me to how can I live for me, true to the sacred, feminine, and keep success rolling in a way that is in alignment with me, but I've actually been engaging in a lot of conversations with people. They're like, you could be, you know, a seven figure coach. That's not a goal for me. I'm actually not committed to wealth for the sake of wealth, at all. I don't even want to put my life force that I'd rather have a 20 hour work week and a really rich life with my community. So that's also kind of one side of it that I know you have a conversation you're exploring on the masculine side of what does it mean to be an evolved and healthy masculine man?
Dallas Hartwig: Well, yeah, so I am exploring that, exploring meaning still finding my way. Very much so. And it's interesting and I think it’s really insightful of you to notice that you have adapted to the world as it exists and the very success oriented, productivity oriented, economic, patriarchal way, and that's worked for you. You've done that thing, right? And also there's this whole other part of you that has been partially neglected that has not matured in step, in kind of you, you have a chronological aging, you have sort of this maturational age and in the, I think what I'm hearing you say, like in the feminine sphere, your maturational eggs age lags behind your chronological age. Right. Which is true actually for, I think both the typical man and the typical woman in the West and the modern world for different reasons sort of, but then kind of the same reasons, because when you focus on success and productivity and ultimately like individualism, hierarchicalism, domination, acquisition of resources, like really what is, you can kind of boil it down to the sort of young and I don’t mean immature necessarily, but young masculine of like protect and provide. Because what you did when building your business is protect and provide.
Sarah Marshall ND: and I was predominantly single through most of that time. And, you know, I might have people I was dating or in a relationship we had not really never in the context of like they were providing right. Or,
Dallas Hartwig: or protecting because in a way, It's not just the physical protection, right? Like having a 401k feels like protection, right? So we have this economic proxy for protect and provide and It's not just food on the table, It's also the sense of security beyond food on the table.
Sarah Marshall ND: And what I actually like concretely in my life noticed was, you know, my dad was very successful in his career. He built awesome medical based software company sold it, he's been retired for five years and I was watching this kind of what I would call like the young maiden who hasn't been married off to the next family. Like I still had the fatherly protection nad there was a breaking point a couple of years ago where my dad's like, well, yeah, but you'll always have us in this way and it's like, I'm grateful and I love you guys and I don't want it. Because it's like, I want to know I'm the one that handled, for me, one of the big ones is my student loan debt. Like, how am I going to be responsible for that? And inside my life and to like take on my future financial life but then when I started to get into that game, the masculine was flooding and even more with like how I had to save and how I had to create certain things and there was no magic. There was no mystery. There was no what I call the wild feminine. And we might discover there's a lot of masculine in that too. The spiritual aspects. And for the last two years as I've been dwelling in that, I've had more success than ever. And I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall with my daily way of being, and now in a new relationship with one of the things Justin and I are struggling with is not struggling, but up against is, how I have to turn off the killer at work all day long and become the girl again, or the woman that he is in love with. And when that doesn't happen, we don't connect well.
Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. I mean, because, and you can flip it in ways in different relationships, right? Like there's a totally appropriate opportunity or moment or a dynamic between in this case, a man and a woman where you could have the man be very much in his soft, gentle feeling feminine and the woman being her like structured leadership, masculine role.
And that's totally fine. That's not the most common successful pattern, right? But it's totally fine. It's certainly appropriate in transient ways because it can flip back and forth in that very polar way. But I think what I'm hearing you say is that's not the mode you want to exist in primarily.
Sarah Marshall ND: It’s not the most nourishing for me having now through my own development, through spiritual workshops and meditation work and, and education that I've gotten and had the experiences in my body where I've been able to drop really deep into a very sacred, feminine place, I'm hungry for that. I want more of that. I want to have that. And I also would like to start, that's my challenge myself, is to not have it be only in my off hours, that I have access to it.
Dallas Hartwig: Right. How do I bring all of that stuff everywhere I go. Yeah. The other thing I was thinking about just as like a second ago is you were talking about kind of differentiating from your parents. Differentiate and like, you know, saying like, Hey dad, thanks for like backing me up, but like, I actually need to know that this is my journey now. Which is really, I mean, that's a developmental process. That is what would happen with infants and toddlers in a securely attached relationship, you would say, I feel safe enough here to spontaneously leave this very sheltered place that I feel safe and protected and to actually start to explore the world on my own, knowing have a safe place to come back to. And so as adults, what we often do, where we create the sensation of safety, often through accumulation of wealth or some proxy for that. And we say, okay, I feel safe enough now, like I know my parents are there, my friends are there, my partner's there, whatever I can start being more of myself and differentiating and exploring the world a bit more.
Which invariably feels good because we're pointing at and, and, and finding parts of ourselves that have been largely ignored all the way along and sometimes even like suppressed into the shadow kind of stuff. But it's interesting to hear you say, you know, I created enough sort of well, security, to feel safe enough to step away from that sort of support from family to then go do something that feels more like a larger, more expansive, more authentic version of you. And like this happens in all these different timelines, literally like in the attachment sense when we're months and years old. And it happens all through life on different, it's like a fractal pattern, just stretches the timeline kind of stretches.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. And go and I feel myself go through those cycles over and over again. I mean, having my health alter this summer and stepping into what does it mean to deal with different constraints in my energy and my concentration levels had me go, I want to say the word backward, but in, into that place of like the security and the safety net of my family and my close circle around me was a lot of what made the difference when things were in the crashing mode.
Now I'm in a really. Solid sustainable place. And I keep improving week to week, I can notice things that are coming back online, but it, you know, so it's like, I, I'm almost going back through aspects of that process again.
Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. Well, that's the, I mean, that's again, that's the sort of secure base idea because a toddler will wander away from the secure base, the parent, that they're securely attached to and something will spook them and they'll come running back and that's what you're supposed to do. Like you, you know, when you're in that securely attached place, you know that you have a safe place to come back to and they're there for you just like you had with your family this past year.
So it's the same, it's the same pattern. It's not regression, it's actually just living. Because living is not start one place go somewhere else and never come back. It is out and back all the time. And when we don't have that really deep sense of security, both as children and then later as adults, we don't really leave the nest spontaneously in a fully letting go and exploratory way.
So the really like expansive thing and maturational thing is to play around with leaving and coming back and like, Oh, they're still there. Oh, cool. I can go a bit farther next time. I can go a bit farther the next time I can go a bit farther. And then at some point when you need something to come back to, sometimes other people aren't there for you and that's when you, along the way, you're internalizing that secure base, that, that stability and that, that like I'm okay in the world safety feeling. And if other people aren't there, it's a bummer, but you're okay, cause you've got it in you and you are the place you come back to. So it's all the same pattern.
Sarah Marshall ND: So what happens when that's not the case? I mean, like if we look out in the world right now, I don't have the perception of a lot of people that are, you know, helpfully attached and secure and safe in themselves in their nests to come back to, it seems like that's a lot of what, at the level of community, for sure, at the level of government, at the level of nation and then also, I always say the macrocosm and the microcosm are mirror images of each other. So what we see happening in group and in city dynamics is just a reflection of what is our, our internal conflicts and our internal lack of security.
Dallas Hartwig: Well, I actually had a conversation with a group of men that I have a weekly meeting with two nights ago, and then record a podcast on that exact topic yesterday, because that was my observation too, was that, when we don't have a sense of security in our own bodies, everything we put out is dysregulated and we not only cannot, co-regulate in a positive direction with anybody else, we contribute any sort of emotional ballast to anyone else, but we also spill over and infect everyone else with a dysregulation. And that's what's happening at the national scale right now. And so my kind of call and observation in that space was, every single one of us have to find ways to find more regulation internally. And if you have a really solid partner, they co-regulate really well with, take that smallest unit and do that too but don't expect that, you know, your neighbor and the coworker who you disagree with politically are going to be somebody you can co-regulate in a positive direction with. And I used the, the analogy of somebody who's fallen into a Lake and doesn't know how to swim and is drowning. If my seven year old son is that person who fell into Lake I'm big enough and strong enough and capable enough of a swimmer to jump in and have like the like ballast to save him. If I'm not a strong swimmer or I'm really, you know, I'm, I'm under nourished, I'm exhausted and stressed.
I'm I have less capacity to donate, to save him, or if he's a 250 pound lineman, it's going to be harder for me to do. And so the, the relative, kind of almost mass of those two individuals in that interaction doesn't matter. And so the task, I think, and I think this is actually quite a masculine task in that sort of leadership containment structural kind of way.
The task there is to make my mass, my ballast as large as I possibly can so that when people are struggling and floundering and feeling like they're drowning, there's a lot of stability to, to co-regulate with. But that's totally internal individual process.
Sarah Marshall ND: What are some of the access points to that?
Like I know the personal growth work I've done the last 10 years. I never would have used this language, but as you're saying it, I can map it right on to like, the more work I did on myself, the more traumas I resolved, the more I checked myself on is that factor, is that opinion, is that actually what's happening now? Or am I living in some, you know, made up construct of fear or threat? Is there really a threat or is my body just responding from an animalistic point? You know, I dealt in those things day in and day out for years, such that I got really good at being able to do it quickly. To the point where now most of the time, I'm usually one of the most level headed in the room.
And most people around me will say, I just like being in your presence because I feel safe. I feel calm. It's always peaceful. They'll just come sit next to me. And they're like, can I just sit here? And I can look for myself, but I'm curious for you, like. How do you cultivate that, internal ballast?
Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. So there's, there's two pieces to it and I’ll backstep just for a second and the polyvagal theory because I think that's a way to, to think about this. So Stephen Porges kind of came up with this, this model of that that takes into account our evolutionary history on how the vagal nerve developed and what it does in terms of regulating our central nervous system and communicating with the viscera.
Sarah Marshall ND: and the vagus nerve is one of the cranial nerves that comes down and regulates a lot of like, yeah, Heartbeat, blood pressure, breath, digestion and all that stuff.
Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. So there's a kind of an older and a younger version of the vagal nerve and the newer younger version is the part that in sort of an evolutionary sense that gives us the safe and social, very human, very communicative, very open, very nuanced, very cognitive mode. And the more sort of, so there's kind of two, let's say there's three levels, if we will. There's the well-known sort of sympathetic nervous system fight or flight response, which is the mobilization energy for warm blooded mammals. You fight something or you run away and that's how you survive. This sort of little subset of the fight, which is basically like posture. I'm going to puff my chest and I'm going to have bluster. And that's the like actually adaptive response to fighting because fighting needs somebody, somebody gets hurt or both of us, or maybe we die. So it's way better just to posture. And so then there's the opposite side of that, which is submit. So what happens if you can't resolve the problem with posture or fight, or flight, you go into a more kind of deeper and more regressive and more primitive stress response which is the sort of freeze, fawn and submit parts of things. So if you have two mammals and conflict and one postures bigger or harder than the other, when you lose that response and you can't, for whatever reason, runaway, you go down into submit and it becomes soft and you're like, okay, you win. Which is better than fighting and dying. So all of, all of that to say, when I look out at the world, what I see is a lot of people really freaked out doing a lot of posturing, which is effectively threatening to fight a lot of that mobilization energy. And of course, anger is the emotion most correlated with that mobilization energy. We see a lot of anger out there and anger is the emotional response to feeling wrongs, to feeling boundaries, being crossed, to your safety or someone you care about safety being threatened. And that's like, it's a, it's a good mechanism to protect yourself in this space of being threatened.
Sarah Marshall ND: It could even be expectations that are not met. It doesn't even have to be quite so like literal threats. It can just be assumptions and expectations that, that boundary gets crossed and it's right there.
Dallas Hartwig: Right, and this is where perception of threat is, is an important concept because you don't have to have a literal tiger chasing you or someone literally pointing a gun at you. You can have the sensation of like threat of loss. And what's super interesting and I don't wanna go too far down this road only because it gets murky, but, but social and fiscal conservatives respond more powerfully to the threat of loss. Their stress response system is more sensitive to that perceived threat. Again, perception is everything here.
So one of the keys, if we, so then, going back to the sort of mammalian fight or flight and sort of reptilian the older, simpler, and much more isolating responses of the sort of immobilization responses of freeze and fawn and submit none of those things are relational. And one of the things that happens as the, as the nervous system gets kicked up there, is we lose nuance, everything becomes very binary and very black and white. We see we get, we get tunnel vision, we get hyper-focused on the thing that's right in front of us. It becomes all encompassing and all important and we utterly lose access to the prefrontal cortex and our executive function. And so again, I look out at the world and that's the story I see.
Sarah Marshall ND: Prefrontal cortex being our judgment center, our ability to actually like slow it down and look at the big picture, take out things from another direction and other viewpoints.
Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. And, and through it, it's also the way that we can mentally and imagine what it would be like to be somebody other than we are in a different space.
Sarah Marshall ND: put ourselves in someone else's shoes.
Dallas Hartwig: Totally. So what's apparent to me there is, when we have lots of dysregulated people in some mix of those states, none of those dysregulated states give us access to nuanced thought. And if we have complex nuanced human problems, which we do on a grand scale, we need complex nuanced human thought to do that. But if we are thinking as less, less advanced mammals or even more primitive reptiles, there's absolutely no problem solving going on there and there's no conversation that can go on there.
And, you know, Sam Harris says, and I'm kind of paraphrasing, but he be like, look, we can have either conversation or violence. This is, these are the two paths we can choose, and I think that's correct. And conversation is, I agree with that conversation is the way is the alternative to violence, but you can't have conversation when you're trying to get to reptiles to talk because they don't do that. They don't have complex nuanced language and executive function and all that stuff. So what's apparent to me there, is we individually need to find ways to get ourselves closer to a safe and social neurological state to pull ourselves out of that, either a fight or flight sympathetic response or that kind of deeper shutdown, that immobilization response, if we have any hope of real conversation. And that is where personal responsibility comes in. And it's interesting, I've, I’ve often hear personal responsibility being kicked around as a catchphrase, especially among conservatives. And what I hear a lot of times in that space is not, I'm taking more responsibility for myself. What I hear is I'm taking no responsibility for you. It's a severing of the connection being like I'm and you lose.
Sarah Marshall ND: You do yours, I do mine…
Dallas Hartwig: That's not personal responsibility. That is I'm looking out for me. And I get that that's a very barbed sweeping generalization, but that's what I see when I, when I talk to people who say personal responsibility is a core value. And humans for all of our evolutionary history up until the last few thousand years have been deeply collectivist. That's how we became humans. That's why we have this complexed, nuanced and exquisitely sensitive social network, the way that we can connect with each other and we have micro-expressions and we have all of these different gradations of emotion that ex express different things to each other, without even saying words.
Sarah Marshall ND: And we have the sensitive physiology and neurology to go along with it, except it's been so inundated and bombarded, more recently between physical toxicity, chemical inflammation, which a ton of which just comes from food. Like I, I just had a new client who came to me and she's, you know, been struggling with probably a version of polycystic ovarian syndrome or a pre version, we can't quite nail it down and no matter what she did for diet and exercise, she kept gaining weight, gaining weight, gaining weight. And without going into all of that, she comes to me and to be totally honest, I've been super busy lately and I wanted to like dive in really deep, I sent her off with a treatment plan and two months later she came back. Right. And I was like, okay, where are we at? And all these things started to shift and like, she's sleeping better. And her menstrual cycle is better. But one of the things she said is like, I'm thinking more clearly, I'm remembering things. My memories come on. Names are sticking with me. And like, like we just were able to tweak some things going on with her liver and rebalancing, and we've only just gotten started. So I have a lot of experience watching people's brains come online and their capacity for that kind of thinking. Cause I do think when we're under threat or we're literally in a state of trauma physically or emotionally, our body is in survival mode and it's gone, taken those aspects offline.
So I know for me, a lot of how I feel like I've gotten access more and more to that has been, I live by being responsible. I never use the phrase personal responsibility, I'd never even, it's interesting, it hasn't even ever occurred to me, but just being responsible and there's what I can be responsible for and then what, I don't have the capacity. But the more I've been responsible for my own health, my own emotional reactions to things, my own nutrition, my own finances, quite frankly, which I know is one of the biggest things that'll throw me into a trigger, is when that goes out, I'm like, ah, and I very much have money and love collapsed when I'm not conscious of it. And so I will, you know, it doesn't really threaten me physically, it threatens like I'm going to lose people or I'm not going to be able to connect to people, which is like the greatest threat for me personally.
Dallas Hartwig: For everyone actually. Yeah. And you know, in different ways.
Sarah Marshall ND: And so, as I've done that, the higher and higher levels of what I would call my integrity of like my life works and the more my life has worked, the more people around me lives have been able to come up. Like, I have a terrible time hiring personal assistants. Because every time I hire one within six months, they start fulfilling on dreams that they'd been waiting to do for 20 years and then they leave me! And so it's like, it’s awesome but I'm like, okay, I need somebody that's like solid, you know, in this. But I had my last one moved to Hawaii and started her whole life in Maui after 17 years in San Francisco.
And I love you, but it was, you know, amazing experience, but yeah. Is now it's like in Buddhism, they talk about putting yourself at the center of the Manila. And I know from my inherited conversations of selflessness, because where I was raised from, it was like I would help everyone else at the cost of myself, but really with very little capacity, ultimately, and as I've been flipping that around to me at the center, and then I just beam as big of a light as I can. And now my game is how far out can I get. Still sustaining and nourishing myself.
Dallas Hartwig: Totally. It makes me think again of that kind of the metaphor of someone drowning, because if someone that is drowning has so much kind of big chaotic dysregulating energy, and I know that they sort of outweigh me so to speak, it's actually irresponsible and unloving of me to jump in there to try to save them. Because I, the almost guaranteed results aren't going to drown and so are they. And so there is this space and it's, it's, it's a funny space for me, because I certainly grew up with like selflessness, self-sacrificial, kind of moralized Christian perspective. And so it's hard to tease those things apart, but really if we don't have enough ballast to give where we can continue to stabilize ourselves in a co-regulatory self-regulatory sense, we have no business trying to help somebody else because we will fall to the lowest common denominator. If our margin is so small there, it doesn't take much because dysregulation is highly infectious. And you were talking about people just wanting to like, come sit next to you. What they sense in their non-verbal subconscious nervous system is, she has ballast that will stabilize me and I just want to be close to it to, to have that experience which is such a beautiful demonstration of exactly what we're talking about. Like, you're just looking to your point, like your life just works, things just work and it does spill over to people next to you. And that's what I'm calling for for everyone to do more of. Not to have more conversations about politics, not to try to convince your neighbor to neighbor to see your perspective. Not even to like, try to have non-violent non-confrontational problem-solving conversations when you're in a dysregulated state, because that's not going to work. Both of you are going to drown. And so there's sort of a, I think we have a cart before the horse problem, that if we want to have good problem solving conversations about society, we have to come to it individually and collectively in a far more regulated state than we are right now. And it's not like we will not be regulated by the conversation. We have to be regulated to come to the, to come to the conversation. And I don't hear people saying that and it concerns me because there is this like, well, we have to talk, well, we shouldn't fight, but we should talk. And like, we know we shouldn't talk. We should actually stay where we are and pull back and really work on settling ourselves. Like when you were talking about, you know, currently in your own process and then people consent, they can come sit next to you and they might just want to sit next to you, but they might also want to talk and then you can actually have a conversation there. But if we do it in the wrong order and we are collectively dysregulated, everyone individually gets dysregulated and then we bring guns to state capitals and things get wild. Right. It, it absolutely devolves at that space. So,
Sarah Marshall ND: and, and so I know there's a, I know there's a connection. So how does this connect for you to, the evolution of man of masculine and feminine and us?
Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. I'll, I'll sidestep the conversation of feminine because I just don't know enough about that yet. I'm learning, I'm observing. I can't quite speak to it intelligently yet, so I'm just going to Dodge that one altogether. It's starting to take shape in my head but I’m getting there, but not yet.
But the, the, the sort of maturational process of the masculine and again, we're talking about things in a sort of societal and global scale, so I'll start there. This sort of Economic patriarchal hierarchical system that exists virtually everywhere on earth now and has since agriculture and civilization got started as a primary, like it's the primary paradigm.
Sarah Marshall ND: So structure, we used organizer for sure.
Dallas Hartwig: For sure, it is. As I see it, it is a very immature masculine structure because it's based on principles of hierarchicalism, and I just sort of one up one down domination. It's based on individual success glory in a sort of heroic adolescent sense, glorification of self and you know, zero sum games you know, us versus them, like all of these things that everywhere you look like, that's, that's, it's nationalism, it's racism, it's sexism, it's everything. Yeah. It's all of those things. Right. And, and when boys don't get initiated through usually highly structured and external rituals that are put upon them by some external force which is I think an important distinction because for women generally speaking, they're initiatory thresholds of, and again this is really broad, but initiatory thresholds of onset of menses, childbirth, or becoming a birthing, something, whether it's a career or a child and then later menopause are intrinsic that we talk about the biological clock. The clock is, has it’s own internal timeline. Absolutely, it is, it is doing its thing, right? Men don’t have that, men are initiated by external forces and it's largely involuntary because we don't like to move forward because it's scary and there's ritualized deaths and there's like turbulence and it's disorienting. So it has to come to us and choose us because we're not going to choose it and it's not truly intrinsic. So the first initiatory threshold there is of boys being kind of smacked about the head by the elder men and being like, ‘Hey, stop being a dickhead’ in, in this competitive, abusive, individualistic way and reorient to the collective.
And that's the primary shift that takes place in that, in that moment. And that almost never takes place in this society. And in fact, the patriarchal organization actually disincentivizes us from doing that because patriarchy, by and large, now it's become a very economic system, that's the primary ethos there.
It, it views humans, but especially men as economic units, as units for productivity. And it used to be the sort of warrior, archetype was the, you know, was that because it was part of the protect and provide young men's kind of experience. Now that the physical protection is less of a focus, protect becomes accumulating 401k, so I feel safe in the world about the future, and it just becomes an economic story. So protect and provide, get merged into the economic productivity. So. Because patriarchy is that system we're actually disincentivized from moving past that place. So there not only is there, has there been dissolution of the eldership particularly the elder males where we just devalued them and they don't even become elders. They become frail elderly, but not energetically elders. So there's no one to look to and every generation for hundreds of generations now are effectively marooned in adolescents and young adulthood. Like they're stuck. There's nothing, there's no external elder force to push them to different places because it has to happen involuntarily.
The only way that kind of, sort of excruciatingly works, is failure after failure after failure and utter breakdown of one’s life that prompts, eh, the development of an internal masculine, almost a father figure internally, maybe even elder internally, where there can be some slow indirect and certainly less efficient self-initiation through those thresholds that we didn't get in our teenage years and young adulthood. And that's, I mean, I'm 42. That's what I'm doing now. I'm doing the thing that I wish would have happened to me when I was 13. And that's, and this is kind of where like secure attachment overlays with this, because so much of the earning, the secure attachment occurs through being a parent to yourself in the way that your parent wasn't there when you were a child.
So it is again that, creating an internal adult to be able to progressively walk the younger version of myself through those initiatory thresholds. So there's this, there's a bit of this internal split where there's one part of me doing a thing to a different part of me, because nothing else in the world is going to do that to that younger immature fragmented part of me.
So that's kind of where I am with the sort of patriarchal masculine stuff. And then once you then move from the sort of literally boy hood into being reoriented to the collective and this sort of, that the stages of initiation there really are just as James Hollis work ritualized death, ritualized, rebirth, something new, then you take this very young and fragile new thing and the elders teach this new, this new person, this new man the wisdom, the, the, the spiritual Lord, the wisdom of the tribe, the things that they need to know to be a man in that particular society. And then they take that, those learnings and they go test them in the real world and they go on a walk about vision quest, hero's journey kind of experience it's solitary, that's terrifying, that's lonely and that legitimately we could fail. Like there's a real potential, like that real reality. There's a real potential, which is why it's so scary. Which is why the hero's journey is so, so testing. You're really testing your metal against dragon world nature, whatever. And then the last and really important part of the, that sort of initiatory experience, is the coming home to the village, as a new person, a new name, a new identity. You're an adult, you're not a child. You have your own home. Like there's like a whole different orientation. And what you bring with you as an orientation to the collective as the priority. And we don't do any of that, right? And you think about, you know, some of the groups of men in society that if we're so wounded by the failure of that system, and I think about Vietnam vets because they did a thing purportedly in the service of the tribe, the greater unit. And went through the lonely, horrifying, isolating experiences there and came home and we spat in their faces and it utterly destroys the new person. And so there's this just fragmentation. There is no boy. And there is no, man. It's just a destruction and more vets have died by suicide since the war and then in the war itself.
And that pattern of initiation occurs at each of those initiatory thresholds. And so in the masculine journey, let me keep going here, unless you interrupt me...
Sarah Marshall ND: I have a question that's burbling, I'm waiting for the moment. No. I mean, cause I, I want, I always like to get the, all of it and what's right there at the back of my mouth is like, okay, and as a woman with a man in my life, what do I do? How can I, and you and I have briefly touched on the conversation that I hear a lot around the women, you know, I'm 40 this year is to have a good man, you gotta raise one. And that's not my most empowering conversation and yet I can also see some components where, and Justin, I love you, and I think you're going to be good with this, so we'll find out, but like Justin stepping into my life, we had conversations initially, where there were things about his life that were deal breakers for me. And usually that's the end of that conversation. And there is an, I know, I see into him who he is, he saw me and he said, I got it. I'm going to do it. Give me six months. And I went, yeah. No way, are you going to do that in six months. And now six months, I'm like, wow, all right, we're doing the thing. And now he's like, okay, and this is what, and there actually has been not raising, but like I say, ‘this is what I require’, I've never been willing to talk like that in a relationship. And, and where we started was it's your life. I want you to do what you want to do and whatever you want to do, you should fulfill on. And then I'm going to decide whether or not I want to play with that person or not. And he just kept looking at me with these like, confused eyes and he's like, yeah, But I want what you want, you have to tell me what that is. And I'd be like, no, I'm not going to tell you. I want you to do what you want to do and we were in a stand still, to the point of that was the end of the relationship. Until something clicked in me. I don't really know how, and we've shifted the conversation and it really has been.
And then I noticed my maternal instinct comes in where I went to help him with it. I want to like be there through all the steps. And I don't know who, but somewhere recently there was a voice that was like, and then you have to give them the task, give them the trial, give them the journey and they let them go figure it out on their own. And I've been actually having to consciously practice that where I say, okay, I need you to deliver X. I need this from how you handle this. And then I have to shut the F up and that’s not very easy for me. I mean, cause I've been a coach for 15 years and I have all these resources and I bought
Dallas Hartwig: and seeing these things and telling people how to get from here to there.
Sarah Marshall ND: And the two greatest things that I have done to support him is one, I found him a coach, that's not me. And two, he has an amazing relationship with my father and my father is one of those elders and he has, he has a lot of women in his life. So he hasn't a lot of men to express himself in the same way, his own friendships he's cultivated.
And there's something that's clicking. And like, I remember the first time I was like, who are you just talking to? You? He's like your dad. I'm like, you guys are like chatting on the phone and more and more lately I've been saying, when something comes up, I'm like, I got it. I'd talked to my dad about that and just get clear what the best approach is.
Dallas Hartwig: when that's the that's the masculine and you acknowledging the masculine wisdom of the elder. Right. Which is good and normal. Like again, like that's good and normal. That's what everyone who's in that masculine moment mode should do in that space. It's, it's not a sex issue. So there's a couple things. One I want to, I want to do a thing and then come back to your question, what a women do, cause I think it's a really important question. I get it a lot. I think I have a partial answer. So the, as I organize the masculine archetypes beyond that boyhood initiation, like once you're a man and I mean, man, as in oriented to the collective, no longer interested in the pursuit of glory and heroic individualist orientation and also taking the distillation and crystallization of those of that earlier initiatory experience of like the confidence and competence and discipline and focus and drive and, and that, that sort of archetypal experience or the descriptor there, I think it is the Hunter. Right? And in, in modern society, in civilized society, we often identify that as a warrior energy.
But I think the warrior energy again, taking the, the longer evolutionary view, warrior as a specific classes are a relatively new phenomenon in human history. It's we only needed a warrior, a specific warrior class once we started acquiring wealth and protecting it and owning land and stuff and people, and, you know, building cities and expanding everything.
Before that we didn't, we slept our stuff around and we didn't have much stuff. So there wasn't a lot of, a lot of stuff to fight over and we would have occasional clashes over resources, basically food and shelter to a lesser extent. But there, we didn't have a warrior class because we didn't need to, we had physically capable hunters who were good at protecting and providing and who could occasionally when needed take that courage and physical capacity and turn it to in the service of the tribe to protect from perhaps other humans, but that was not a mode that was not a specific class. So the warrior archetype is a, is a evolutionarily novel thing in the same way, like process food is. And I think we radically misunderstand that in the modern world.
Sarah Marshall ND: I love that you just compared processed food and warriors. Yeah,
Dallas Hartwig: nobody likes it. No one likes it when I say no one likes that, but it's new in the same way. Right. And so all of the positive capacities of the Hunter, all of those courageous focused disciplines, competent abilities in the physical realm, right?
Because that's protect providers totally limited the physical realm. The warrior is a distortion and compression of those capacities and the problem is that in order to take a Hunter and turn them into a warrior, you have to strip away empathy for self. And when you strip away empathy for self, the natural byproduct is lack of empathy for other. And that's how we create really horrific, abusive, even sadistic warrior cultures. And all of the things that warriors can do, hunters can also do, but hunters have the, the empathetic connection to self. Where they have some self-preservation instinct because the only thing, not the only thing, the primary thing that orients warriors into the sacrifice of self is the promise of glory, is the promise of adoration by the tribe, whether you live or die. But that requires that you dismiss your own needs, including your needs for survival. And that works in the service of a civilized warlike militarized society. But that's not actually good in terms of a tribal unit in good for humanity at large. So then when we reach a threshold where our tools in the physical realm stop solving the problems at hand, then we're called to another initiatory threshold. And that threshold is failure of protect and provide to meet the needs, to solve the problems, which is everywhere we look, but no one has any idea what to do next. So we keep doing more of the same. We try to accumulate more as a proxy to make us feel safer, et cetera. And then we do it until we're 65 and we collapse and have a heart attack six months after we quit working, because what else are we going to do? We just wrung out the sponge that was so dry all the way along. But what should happen in that sort of next maturational phase in an archetypal sense is we should move into the, and this is again, failure of the physical realm. We are, as men, as in the masculine journey, we are prompted to move into the realm of the mind.
The other part of self has been totally neglected or largely neglected and that is self exploration and introspection and getting to know yourself. Right. Self-awareness it's also the realm of intellect and spirit and, you know, so the archetype can be labeled as, you know, a magician, ShawMan, alchemists, philosopher… It's a very intellectual inward type space. And it, it ran with the sum of those two archetypes rounds out mastery of the self.
Sarah Marshall ND: Would that be kind of the equivalent in the woman's circle of crone?
Dallas Hartwig: No, not yet. No, we'll get there. There's another, there's another more mature version of that, that's closer to crone. Because the mastery of the physical domain and Hunter and mastery the inner world as as philosopher, you know, Alchemist adds up to mastery of the self. So then you have this in this, this fully intact self. This full container of all of the good things that any individual has their sort of birthright self, and they can then bring that into relationship to other. And so when you have, as the next archetypal space is the space of the lover and the lover is not just a sort of romantic partner. The lover is, relating that in tax self to everything else in the world. Yes. Partners, children, parents, coworkers, organizations, countries, the earth, all sorts of relating. So it becomes, instead of being the sort of vertical column, that's contained of self, it becomes a horizontal relationship to everything else that's around you.
And it's again, another one of those fundamental reorientations that take place. It's, it's a, it's a 90 degree shift because it, instead of, you know, developing the capacities of the self, you were then taking that intact self and orienting it outward. So it's a, it's a relational phase. And that's what happens in that fundamental reorientation is why midlife shifts, midlife transformations are so chaotic and turbulent and confusing and disorienting because these, these back pressures, these archetypes are like clawing their way out of your experience. Like they're coming through you, whether you like it or not. And if you don't do the things that allow you to kind of complete and integrate each of those phases they will find their way out in almost always really horrific, destructive, painful ways. So putting attention on what they are and describing them, understanding is important.
So then you have the space of the lover, which is in relation to everything and at the sort of the sort of last expression, the sort of fourth archetype that occurs in that masculine journey. A lot of people would call that King energy. I don't think that King is the best descriptor there because King is also by and large a civilizational hierarchical organization. And King works because it is the end point that makes the glory seeking warriors, aspire to jump over it. Like every warrior wants to be the King. But, but that, what that means is that it washes over any races, all of that intersecting space in the middle or, or intermediate space. that's very relational. And so I reject King as a good descriptor of that energy. And even if you talk about the sort of servant King or benevolent King or whatever, in this sort of structured generative sense, it's still hierarchical. And You know, is it requires that there is a kingdom, a large thing underneath you. And I just reject that whole premise. But you can't have an elder or a Sage and I think about elder and if there was to be a King it's more like chairman of the board than royalty. Yeah. The buck has to stop somewhere. But that's alike council of elders with one person tallying the votes, as opposed to being like, this is my word is law.
So that's the whole arc of things. Back to your question, what do women do? Because the way I think about the last half century of, you know, feminism and women collectively, really moving forward from a very immature maiden type space, much more strongly into a mother type space. And so those are the kind of two preceding archetypes in advance of crone. So, what I see is, especially as women who have become literal mothers and also women who have become mothers of their career and life they've, they've taken ownership of and cared for and nurtured a thing, their life, this is you. They they're, they are actually more mature version of the maiden individually and collectively. And so we look out at the world and you see a whole bunch of women being like, I don't really want this angry teenage boy, who's interested in glory and I'm not super interested in the warrior that just wants to fuck shit up in the world to prove how awesome he is and to protect and provide until he's 65 years old. Like that's actually not a peer relationship. No, it has utility. It has utility when there is both vertical and horizontal relationships in the context of a tribal unit. Whether it's a family or a community, whatever. So it has utility, but only sometimes only with some men in some part of their development.
And if you're talking about a romantic relationship where you're having, you know, like, Oh, you want a partner in a woman who's really squarely in her mother energy is not especially drawn to a less mature man who sure can do the prevent protect and provide thing, but especially women who have their own career paths and have a very mature psyche.
They're like, well, I can actually do that for myself anyway. I don't really need you to protect and provide. I've already got that. I want someone who just right across from me.
Sarah Marshall ND: When I'm not in my most conscious speaking mind, I've had it come out of my mouth and definitely been right there, which is like, what do you bring the table?
I mean, yeah, you're great. You're a shiny object. You were a lot of fun, the dating phase. And that's what I did for a long time. It was like, I was good dating, entertainment, companionship, and enjoyment of spending time getting to know another human being like no problem. And as soon as it started to actually be about real life happening, I was like, cool, I'm good, you can go now. You know, and like, I even started to have my own little world of distinction of playmates, lovers and partners. And the majority of my experience was like they were playmates that it was just literally everything about this was fun. There were lovers where there was genuine intimacy and an emotional caring of each other. But one of the questions, one of my coaches pose to me is would you put your business in the hands of this person?
Dallas Hartwig: And you were like, absolutely not.
Sarah Marshall ND: And so there's been this threshold for me, and this is literally where Justin, because Justin is like, I want to be your partner and I said, you're not qualified. That's how the conversation started.
Dallas Hartwig: And, and and also I'll say Justin as proxy for every other man that sucks to hear that's very confronting and it's not, it's true, broadly speaking, but it's really confronting because it, it triggers the like defensive, like what are you talking about? Of course I am. I know everything because when you're 18, you actually think, you know, everything and like, that's the part that comes forward in that space. And, men who are sort of close enough to that initiatory threshold either from some external life experience or the slower, harder internal work of doing it to and for yourself, we'll get nudged over some really small inflection point there and they'll say, Oh fuck, you're right. It’s literally had this like, got punched in, punched in the gut sensation. And that's what that's the way adult men respond to a confronting challenge or pointing out failure or just not, not showing up. And I don't know what exactly makes a difference between this and that. Because so often, and this is like zooming out again, when feminism really sharply rebuked men collectively, 70 years ago or whatever for being shitty adolescent boys who were abusing everyone, including the world. Most men at that time, either became sort of like soft regressive childlike and somewhat androgynous, like smaller version. That's like soft spiritual spineless man, which predictably women are like, that's not actually that hot cause you're kind of like a child. So there's the like adolescent patriarchal mode becoming, moving away from being adult men it's regressive or there's the more truly kind of adolescent angry, defensive, resentful. I'm going to. You know, like again, I re I'm very visual. So I picture like mother rebuking a 14 year old boy who has been a shit too is whoever
Sarah Marshall ND: I think we, at one point talked about that. Like even in childhood it's like, then the young boy has an option to either regress back into that soft you're right. I'm so sorry. Sweet little boy. But then the connection gets put back in
Dallas Hartwig: because there's more distance between mother and child, then
Sarah Marshall ND: there's this big rejection of, and the fight and the teenager takes off yeah.
Dallas Hartwig: deflection muttering under his breath and calling her a bitch and kicking a hole in the wall upstairs.
Sarah Marshall ND: And I am not like an advocate that the way that Justin and I have worked through this as an answer, it's just what I can reflect on what I've watched.
Dallas Hartwig: But this is the process that so many couples and potential couples need to do because women are right to say, Hey, you're not actually here with me in the way that I want you to be, that the way that I need you to be, to be a partner, a true partner and so then, so if men collectively and individually don't respond to the like small regressive child soft way, and they don't respond in the like defensive deflective adolescent resentful way. They actually have to like take a deep breath and step in step forward in a maturational sense and also in a sense of like, well, that's true and I'm sorry, and I want to be better. And I don't know how, and where do we go from here? Like that's an adult conversation and because generally speaking women are way closer on average to that space than men. The conversation, invariably, is men saying like, what do we need to catch up to you? What do we need to do? Like, how do I get to be a true eye to eye peer with you? And so to come back around your question, what a women do for right now, they have to be patient. And it sucks that you've got a lot of men who are just not up to the job. But that's true. It's real. And so for right now, it is on the micro scale. Sure. Find the man, find the one in a hundred men, who's actually up to the job, but on the broader sense women collectively I think need to recognize that more and more men are waking up to the reality like, Oh man, this is not okay. And we have no idea what to do and there's no elders there to lead us through this. So we are in part, I think it's actually okay, in small fractions and small sort of pieces of a relationship that you can bring that mother energy to Justin and say like, Hey. And in a very use the word maternal a minute ago. It's like, I think that's totally okay. And I think it's actually a misunderstanding to think that we should never be parents to our partners, but that can't be the primary or only way of relating.
Sarah Marshall ND: I literally told him he gets to tell me how to eat because when I deviate it messes stuff up and like, I'm like, no, no, no, no, this is where you can just be father. And it’s gone really….
Dallas Hartwig:. Right. Because we need trust someone that trusts that someone else has your best interest in mind, you can say, actually you're better at this particular thing lead me through this space. Right. So I'm curious with your experience there, do you feel like, and I'll use the word surrendering, it's kind of a dirty word, but do you feel like surrendering to Justin in that space of food choices allows more of your feminine to come forward?
Sarah Marshall ND: Oh yeah, and that's one of the biggest things like, you know, he has had an extraordinary set of life circumstances, and he's been warrioring and hunting and doing a lot of those kinds of things. That, that's what he’s been up to. Well,
Dallas Hartwig: Well, that's what we're all taught to do because that's what we're valued for.
Sarah Marshall ND: And so in some senses, if you just like line up person to person, I've spent the last 15 years building a career and he has some of that, but it's not to the same level. So because of work I've done with Alison Armstrong's programs and sacred feminine, and in the , which I've talked about before in other podcasts is a shamonic sexuality and spirituality, Rite of passage process. I've had elder women who shared with me about how do you, because quite frankly, even if I can find the person who is willing, the magnetism is not there. And so I'm like, you're a great person, but I don't really want to take you to bed and jump your bones either. You know? And that's something we're for whatever reason where Justin and I have lined up, there was more than a spark. And I have been fortunate enough to have education, how to breathe life into that spark and how to allow for where he provides and protects, even when my career, by, I'm going to use societal standards stronger. And I have certain, I have more resources in certain typical societal ways than he does right now, but I mean, give him a year he's moving really quickly. Cause there was a call to action, which he's meeting. And so I do have places where I'm intentionally looking to cultivate and empower him as the provider protector, him as the decision maker, him as the masculine, quite totally selfishly because it's hot and I feel because it works and get to go into those soft places. And it's interesting that we, you know, however we decide coincidentally met or the universe planted him in my life, literally at the very end of the bottom of my health crash, it was right before diagnosis. We met at the beginning of July. I'm technically we met last year, but we actually connect to the beginning of July. I was officially diagnosed at the end of August and I couldn't have gotten through the last six months without him.
And there was something actually about me being in a health crisis and I was not going to let it impact my practice, but I had five, four to five hours of functional brain power a day. And that had to go a hundred percent to work. So he provided food. He provided like... he didn't even really cook much before he met me. And he now like puts breakfast on the table everyday, puts dinner on the table every night, handles the dog, handles vet things, handles any errands. Like literally he took all of that off my plate and it was interesting set of circumstances that actually allowed our relationship to cultivate inside that space, where at one level, you could even turn that into him, mothering me, but we didn't do it that way. We really had it in a different dynamic and a bunch of that was intentional on my part. I didn't just let it happen. I was intentional about how we created it.
Dallas Hartwig: Yeah. Well, and what I hear there in the space of like health crisis is failure of you, your your failure to be able to master the physical realm and the breakdown of that system and having to change the way that energy flows and way things work, because you just couldn't do it anymore. Something had to change. And so you were then, and if we take this masculine journey, part of it, the failure of the physical realm, the failure of that Hunter space, where you're providing for yourself and protecting and all that and you had to say I can't and I imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, I imagine in the last six months that you've had more space to get more into that inward shamonic magician philosopher, Al chemical space, which is the next phase in that sort of mask and the journey which we all have in us. And he allowed that to happen by providing again, this is that sort of external force and external input. He allowed that to happen by saying, I've got this physical stuff. I can, I can do this and you can go do that. Right. And so there is this really beautiful handing the Baton back and forth at different moments in your, in your maturational process individually, because you're going to go through transitions and thresholds at different times. It's not age matched ever...
Sarah Marshall ND: ever, even no matter what. And he's four years younger than me and it’s actually irrelevant. Like it really just doesn't matter.
Dallas Hartwig: Well, I was, I was, I was doodling yesterday. I was laughing cause I always liked drawing graphs and stuff, but I was doodling an X, Y axis of maturational age versus chronological age. And what it was occurring to me was, we all have this slow plot of time that you know, that this will say that the same race for simplicity's sake. And what occurred to me, especially in the space of moving from Hunter into the sort of ShawMan magician space it's so inward and it requires so much, sort of psychic energy and actually just time introspective time, that is meditative. That is self observing, developing self-awareness that might be structured meditation. It might be walking around in the woods. It might be going on a solo motorcycle trip. It might be study of a different craft, whatever. But that requires time and it also requires the like open space for the default mode network to do some of it's kind of crunching in the background. If you don't have any open space, if you're working 50 hours a week and then you're running your kids to their extracurricular activities. And then on the few short hours you have, you're trying to maintain a relationship with your partner and then you're watching Netflix and whatever else, like you're filling up all the space. That's not happening in tandem at the same proportionate rate as actual chronological time. And so I think one of the other things, again, one of the ways that patriarchy as an economic system incentivizes us to stay in that highly productive warrior economic unit sense, is it squeezes out any of the open time that would allow us to move forward because the open time is required for us to move forward.
Sarah Marshall ND: And isn't it interesting that in many respects, we just got an entire year of a lot of open time and…
Dallas Hartwig: and there’s a lot of big shifts happening...
Sarah Marshall ND: I mean, between COVID and what happened with my health, that's absolutely been the case. I've had so much more spaciousness and I'm crystal clear I'm not interested in going back to the way it was before, 90 hour work weeks and that's part of where my Chrysalis process of like what I'm transforming into next and how I want alter things in my day to day and the relationship context. And, you know, my cousin was just sharing about this year, he lives in New York city and I said, how have you guys been doing? And he's like, honestly, we just took advantage of that we don't know the next time we're ever going to be able to spend this much time together. And he's like, I'm so in love with my husband and I'm so just enjoying us, we got to know each other at a whole nother level. And it's like juicy. Cause….
Dallas Hartwig: lots of people had that experience this year.
Sarah Marshall ND: And I know it went other ways too, for some people were relationships that were only functioning inside of that patriarchy and the full schedule and the fact that they talked to each other, you know, a couple of hours a week. This cracked it.
Dallas Hartwig: Cause that's not, cause that's not a real relationship.
Right. That's a cohabitation with rights for sex and sharing finances. You know, that's not like a real mature and growing relationship, which is why, when things do shift in some way that gets dicey that's disregulates and threatens people. The whole thing very rapidly falls apart. It's so fragile. Yeah, because it's not that really deeply grounded individually and collectively relationship, which brings us full circle back to polyvagal theory and dysregulation.
So I'm one of the spaces I'm going next is, is trying to understand that like maiden mother crone journey that happens roughly in tandem with that masculine journey. Cause it's not something I know anything about. But what's fascinating to me because I like understanding progressively more complex systems. And that's obviously a very complex system because any variable can be mastered at any time, you know, and it's not the like this and this and this all in, in perfect unison. So I think about, you know, The sort of diagonals there of many women, primarily in that mother space relating downward, diagonally to a less mature masculine that's very often squarely in that immature adolescent uninitiated space or to a sort of Hunter warrior protection provide architect, which is really prevalent. That's really common, not necessarily because they're fully initiated and I speak to men a lot and a lot of them flatly reject the idea that they're uninitiated that like, I, I, I played football, I went to the military, I've started my own business. I was like, all that's cool, but like, that's just you playing within the same hierarchical adolescent space, which has no indication whatsoever of initiation. And they also, you know, I'm Canadian to have a fairly sort of left leaning political slant to talk to more generally speaking, more conservative American men.
This idea of reorientation to the collective as a central principle of, of mature masculine was really confronting. Because that's, because like personal responsibility, AKA code for, I don't care about you and success, acquisition of wealth and power and fame and sexual prowess. Like those are all very, very individualistic values and like that's absolutely central to America and absolutely problematic for our collective advancement and maturation as a species. But be careful here, like, is there a sniper outside when I say these things? The central ethos of America is antithetical to human maturation. And that's not me being like politically anti-American that's me observing what core values America was founded on and continued to actually be even amplified as we go forward in American history. And there's a reason why the stuff that happened last week is happening here and not in Sweden or Costa Rica.
Sarah Marshall ND: And where we started this conversation, which was, we have looked at the Paleolithic diet as best we can and these other ways of doing things on the physical, when we go back and we stretch back in time and we see how 60, 70, 80,000 years, and then more of genetic biologic history that we're at least entertaining ourselves with truing ourselves up to, you know, what would it be like to live more in alignment with that? We've only barely tapped the thought of what does that equal in the psychological and spirit and emotional realms.
Dallas Hartwig: I don't, I almost know. I know almost no one who's even thinking about that and asking that question, you know, and then that's, I mean, that's what I'm very interested in because I think about my own, like, this is all the same story, right? Like my own sort of symbolic and kind of archetypal maturation, like leaving, doing all of my work in allied health and rehabilitation medicine, and then moving into the space of nutrition and physical training and advocating for sleep and a more, and then kind of. Even more kind of balanced, generalized wellness. You know, my last book was about that sort of bigger picture, but all very confined to the physical realm, with some nod to this cyber sort of relational space then I'm like, okay, cool. Physical realm, that's my Hunter archetype, that's the physical mastery of that physical realm. And now I'm looking forward into the space and interested in talking about the knowledge and mastery and completion of self, the expansion of, of myself and of men in general into this larger container of like, sort of birthright self. So that, again, we collectively over decades and generations can rise and stand up and meet women who are already in that very like integrated, this is generally speaking, but more mature and more integrated like mother type space. And when, when I can, if I'm a fully integrated like Hunter philosopher and my full self, when I show up in relationship with a, with a woman who's integrated her maiden integrated her mother. It's fucking amazing. Theoretically, I haven't done that, but that's the, but that's the place that, that I would like to see all of us going. It sounds like much of the space that you and Justin are headed, which is rad. But that's like that doesn't change soon. So there's like all of these kind of incremental things that have to happen along the way. And the hard part is, and I heard you say this loud and clear about your, your conversation in relationship with Justin, you can say, this is the standard, this is what I need you to do, here's the task, here's the direction, I hope you do that but he has to go do it. And every single man has to go do that, their own thing. And that is both recognizing the failure of the protection, provide Hunter warrior archetype to solve all of our problems, which, it's not that hard to come to that conclusion. But the problematic and excrutiatingly terrifying next step is I have to go inward and do this thing alone. It's an the magician alchemists space is alone in the lab studying self.
Sarah Marshall ND: And I think that's my next frontier for the relationship, I have my own work, is allowing that and being the space, spaciousness for that inner journey and to not have it be him leaving me or a lack in the relationship or all those kinds of things.
Dallas Hartwig: well, and if you're in that, I love that you brought that up because if you're in that integrated, steady, secure mother type space, you can recognize it's okay for him to go inward to do his thing, because it doesn't mean that he's leaving you. Like that's the difference between insecure, attachment and secure attachment. And in the same way as adult men can't operate from an insecure toddler's nervous system in that kind of space. You can't operate from a, like, Oh my God, he's reading books instead of talking to me, he must not love me anymore, the whole relationship is falling apart, insecure place. Cause that will fragment the relationship. So I guess that's the other thing that women can do, which is recognize that a man who's really doing his work and stepping into the space that you've challenged and invite him into is going to have to turn away to go inward and you have to give him permission to do that. Like that's what he has to do. And that's the only road whereby he can circle back and meet you as a fully intact, fully integrated self. So the thing that you want requires a bit of a roundabout path, and you have to give them permission to do that. And I get that, that might not be what you want in the moment in the immediate thing, but in my opinion, that’s the only way to get to the place you actually want to go in the future.
So there's a book in an hour ….
Sarah Marshall ND: and I can't wait for the actual book.
Dallas Hartwig: oh shoot. Yeah, I haven't, I haven't even started writing a proposal, but like, this is the core content of my best work and I don't know what it looks like, and I don't know, but yeah. But this is how I, this frenetic excited mode that I get into right now, this is what I do when I give a shit about something.
And I feel like I have something to actually like significant to contribute. And so it's easy to compress that energy and excitement and, and insight into something, which will probably be a book at some point.
Sarah Marshall ND: Well, we are eternally grateful for the download. Any opportunity to surf the waves of the universe with you.
Dallas Hartwig: You may have listened to this on like three quarter speeds.
Sarah Marshall ND: Right? I know some of them, we speed up and, you know, to each their own of how they want to take this in and absolutely as always, it's an honor and a privilege to be in your space and get to have these awesome conversations.
Dallas Hartwig: Thank you. It's lots of fun. I'd love to do it again. Cause there's lots more of the world to explore. Cool.
Sarah Marshall ND: Totally, until next time!
(music)
Sarah Marshall ND: Thank you to today's guest Dallas Hartwig for sharing his bold hypothesis for healing men. Are you ready to take on your own health? I'm now accepting clients for 2021. Contact me at sarahmarshallnd.com or Instagram @SarahMarshallND. For a full transcript and all the resources for today's show, visit SarahMarshallND.com /podcast.
Thank you for listening. Support and spread the word by leaving us a review on your favorite platform, so we can heal our world. And as always a special thanks to music composer, Roddy Nikpour and our editor, Kendra Vicken. We'll see you next time.