From Near-Death to Inner Life: Navigating the Human Condition with Markus Kasunich

0:00 Hello and welcome to Real Men Field. I'm your host, author, coach and healer, Andy Grant. Please visit theandygrant.com to learn more about me. Real Men Feel reminds men that they are human beings and have the right to experience and more importantly, express all of their emotions. My guest today is Marcus Kucinich. Marcus is a holistic life and relationship coach, keynote speaker, author, facilitator, and mentor. This week we go deep into the goal of Knowing Myself. Marcus talks about his near death experience at age 11 and the open fluidity of consciousness he experienced, as well as the 17 years it took to integrate that experience, which resulted in his IRAM model to understand and navigate human conditioning.

0:43 We discussed doing the inner work, expansion and contraction, and experience chasers. Marcus shares what brings him closest to that mystical near death experience he had as a child and the two things he wish all men knew. Let's do it. Hello Marcus, and welcome to Real Men Feel. Thank you, it's so awesome to be here. We've talked a lot for years, and I had to look back to see how long it's been. So we first spoke about you being on Real Men Feel back in August of 2022. Wow. OK, Yeah, I think we we both. Cancelled my trip, we both had different. Things show up and it kept moving, bopping and then I stopped for a year in between all there. So it's very interesting experience. But since real Men feel has recently won two awards, 2 Signal silver awards, one for its most inspirational podcast and best self help self improvement podcast, I would like to give you an award of you know, well, the the longest wait award doesn't sound very exciting. How you get the most persistent guest award? Fair not.

1:47 So, so Marcus, I know you, you first of all, you do a lot and and amongst that is author, coach, speaker, influencer, teacher, artist, father, husband, facilitator and seeker. I imagine that seeking came first. So what prompted young Marcus to begin seeking? It was all, it was a near death experience actually at 11 years old. I don't, I, I was born in Canada, Ontario, which is Southern Ontario, which is for those Americans that are listening, it's north of, of New York State, not far from Buffalo. And so winter, you know, in the winter time, it's cold, it's lots of snow. And especially in my youth, and we had one of those A-frame swing sets in the backyard and we would, you know, as kids, we would climb on it in the, in the winter time that the Bluffs would, the snow Bluffs, the snow dress would go over it and then you would try to climb over it.

2:38 Now I was doing that and accidentally slipped, caught my, my hood on the hook of one of those bolts that was sticking out and watched myself go into the entire death experience and watched myself die and came out on the other side, meaning like on the other side and watching my lifeless body hang on this this swing set. Eventually my father who was looking from the window is about 11 years old. My father came saw it for the window and ran out, grabbed me and in his intuitive kind of like emergency things drew a bath, had my mother draw a bath and they, they, they submerged me in the bath. And when they put me in the tepid water, I came back into my body.

3:22 Now, when I came back and a lot of people talk about these, like you've probably heard these experiences before where people talk about it as a mystical experience. It was a mystical experience. Don't be, don't get me wrong. On the other side, I experienced what it was like to have no conditioning, right, and total clarity. Now, this is, and this is a thing for a lot of people, they talk about, oh, on the other side, there's this immediate kind of evolvement in consciousness. That was not the case. My and I've talked to a lot of people who've had this experience. The consciousness you're in when you leave this plane is the consciousness you are on the other side. But I had no conditioning, no human psychology that was present anymore. So there was this kind of depth of clarity, lack of fear and a profound feeling of this infinite kind of love that I don't think I've ever experienced or could describe in human words in ever in any case that I've ever nothing comes close to it.

4:19 And so when I came back, having had that experience, the context of having no conditioning and then being shoved back into the human form, two things happened. 1 Immediately the first thought out of my head as an 11 year old was, Oh my God, this is life. Meaning I'm back here and I'm back here in this little conditioned, like all the different parts of my conditioning and layers and dynamics and habits and all that stuff is there. The human part of Marcus was there. And also the other thing was, is there was the chip that was kind of in that in our consciousness that divides all the world's that somehow got completely fried in me. And then I had this extreme experience of fluidity, energetics, emotions, spirits, energy of my, I saw, I could feel intensely my parents fear.

5:12 I could hear things that I think they were thinking, but I didn't have the, the experience at that at 11 years old to be able to like really kind of integrate what that was because an 11 year old consciousness doesn't understand. So it took me about 17 years to be able to even integrate the experience. But instantly what that did when I came back, and now I have this context of experiencing something completely different than life and then coming back into life, you could never really see it the same way. So instantly in that moment, I would say that immediately created me as a seeker because now I have this completely different experience. That seems not to be the case in my experience of reality is different than everyone around me. I had this understanding or at least this echo of a, a memory of having total clarity.

5:58 And so instantly I had this intense fascination with the human condition because I recognized that when I came back into my field or into my body, that this thing was now online. This human psychology was now online. And I was like, I need to understand this. Now, I can't say I articulated it that way at 11, but as I started getting older, I started saying more and more and more, what is this thing that we all filter our experience through? That tends to be the way we engage. And how do I meet somebody who can help me see, or at least talk through this, that I see the world in a completely different way than everybody else around me? In fact, I actually thought that if anyone found out what I saw, how I saw in the perspective of what my reality was like, that they would put me in a mental institution.

6:45 So I was really kind of quiet about it as I was trying to figure this out. But that instantly made me a seeker. I wanted to seek and understand human psychology. So I went to school to study psychology. I went, then that wasn't enough. Psychology didn't answer the questions. So then I started seeking teachers, gurus, Mystics, shamans, anybody anywhere at any point who could give me some perspective on how it was that my version of reality was so vastly different, and to kind of work through and integrate how is going to work with that. Wow. So I, I get that being on the other side, there's No Fear. It's clarity, it's peaceful. But when you came back and said, oh, this is life, could you? Did you feel the conditioning?

7:32 Did it take away? Oh yeah, you could just recognize. Oh, it was like it was like being shoved into a tiny little box after having been in the vast expansiveness of the universe. And there was something about it that was really it was. It was there was that was the catalyst for me to understand. OK, wait a second. The I, what I recognize was in even in that moment, I'm like, I'm feeling so much. And now I have to make the distinction of what's my environment that I'm feeling, what's me that I'm feeling? What is this that's on on on board in my psychology because I just experienced total clarity. So what is this? So that drove me to deeply start to explore and become super fascinated with not only the mystical, but also the the human interface that interprets the mystical, right.

8:23 So one thing I always wonder, people that have the near death experience and they experience the other side and post consciousness, post life, what what whatever the proper term might be, do you get the sense that you shouldn't have had that experience like you saw behind the veil that humans aren't meant to? Or does it feel like like like a gift that it was meant for you? I always the the question, which is an alignment that most people ask around that is did you have a choice to come back? Could you have stayed there? And my, the way I would define it is was it it's a choiceless choice, meaning as an 11 year old, all of my identification was to this realm, to this human reality, to this 3D experience.

9:08 So I didn't have in in like in, I didn't have any way to really translate that into something more. And did I did it feel meant to happen? I didn't feel like it was a gift, but I didn't also feel like that it was not supposed to happen. So my experience was because it was so catastrophic and it, it unravelled my whole reality. There's a, there's a severity in coming back and having to deal with that, right? So that's the gift was not the word I would use, but that was meant to happen. I would, I would say, yeah, I would say that in some level this all played in whether whether it was orchestrated by consciousness or not, it played in for me to become the person I was going to become.

9:55 Because here I am 30 years later still talking about that experience, right. So obviously it had an impact and it motivated a kind of a kind of driven desire to understand what the human condition is in a way that I don't think anything else could have the way that way that that kind of kind of drove me into this kind of seeking path. So in that sense, yeah, I think it was meant to happen. And I mean, we can't really understand all the intricacies of the patterns and the the fabric of consciousness. So it's hard for me to go there. But I certainly feel like at this point, after having integrated that and now seeing that as I do see it as a gift, but at the time, no, it was a burden. I felt deeply, deeply terrified.

10:42 You have all your ordinary conditioning and then you have on top of that, I had this open fluidity of consciousness, which was not an easy thing to integrate, right? Which was what made, you know, contentment never created a seeker. So if you're content, you're not seeking in the 1st place. So I saw I was seeking something, some answer, some understanding because there was this agitation and this now this. Now I was but in in in relationship with something different. So with the near death experience, with your experience of I like love that term, the fluidity of consciousness, How how would you define the human condition? I would define the human, the human condition that is, is really the ego structure.

11:23 It's the personality structure that we have, right? And a lot of people talk about killing the ego and wanting to get rid of it. For me, this is a necessary interface that allows us to be, to, to experience a uniqueness in our human experience. We filter that divine consciousness through this human experience, which creates the unique personality of Andy, of Marcus, of Frank, of Jill, of whoever, right. And through that uniqueness, we get to learn through our human psychology structure, we get to learn and interface and, and be able to integrate more of our relationship to the little self, right, to the little self.

12:05 And so for me, the human experience is not only we're a, in my word world, we're a spiritual being having a human experience, but that human interface is that personality structure. And it is, it is also my opinion that having been around spiritual communities for the last 30 plus years, that that is one of the areas that people do not go in terms of understanding and learning about themselves. Because whether whatever spiritual experience you have in your life, it's going to be filtered and interpreted through the maturity of your relationship with that psychological structure. So if you don't have a relationship to it, then you're minimizing the depth of the richness of the experience you can have when you have these exalted experiences or openings of consciousness.

12:53 So the human part of me is that filter, that human psychology filter for me, that's that's what I would define as the human condition. A challenge I see often in people that have a spiritual awakening of some sort. They really accept their spirituality, their divinity, the the consciousness flow connected to everything. And then they try to stop being physical and stop being human. And like, no, like I said, we're, we're both. And as you open up to more of of one, and as you discover, as you seek, it doesn't mean you stop being. Both 100% and this is the thing, a lot of people, they bounce between that like spiritual relative, spiritual relative.

13:36 But even if you look at the definitions of consciousness from ancient Sanskrit teachings, the the consciousness is made-up of two, two different qualities. Emptiness, which is beyond all human experience. We can't understand it, our mind can't wrap itself around it. It's in shamanic circles. They call it the void in in non dualistic experiences, we'll they'll call it this, this empty or this quieter, this space of this space energy. And then there's relative, which is all action. So that's like the Shiva Shakti, Shiva's this emptiness and the certainty beyond the human experience. And then Shakti is the activity of the relative world. Now consciousness is made-up of both. Both of those things have to be present. If you're bouncing between both of them, then you're not getting a rich integration of a full experience of what reality could be, because both of those are who we are in terms of. And that's what makes it such unique, interesting beings in terms of our relationship to this other that's so beyond human.

14:37 And then the human interpretation and experience all wrapped together. I mean, we're fascinating creatures, right? At times. Well, I guess yeah. Again, if I think of Mr. Spock, it's it's always fascinating. But. Sometimes terrifying to be in it, I guess. Indeed. Not necessarily comfortable, but certainly not boring. I mean, the relative world is just, it's just imbued with activity. And so I feel like a deep, the deepest kind of integration we can have is a connection to that other. That's something beyond the human experience, beyond manifestation, the unmanifested, something that is unintangible and cannot really be understood by the mind.

15:21 And then this relative human experience which allows us the ability to interface with this divine other quality and translate it into our our experience as a human being. OK, so from our most recent conversation about you being a guest, we had decided we had focus on on what is inner work because that that's a term that's out there, inner work, inner child, healing your core wounds, all these sort of buzz words and phrases that are out there in the seeking community, in the spiritual growth, personal growth worlds. Can you tell me what most people see as inner work, and perhaps what you see as true inner work? Sure, sure.

16:02 I would say that most people in an uninformed place see inner work as experience. They'll have these experiences and they will then have this experience will open up or clear or facilitate a deeper understanding or a deeper connection to what is within you. And in some ways, they think that that experience is a form of inner work. And it is to a degree, but it's incomplete without some cognitive understanding, in my opinion. Right. So for me, inner work is being able to look at that human personality structure and get really, really intimate with it, understand the conditioning of what's in there.

16:49 Because we are all conditioned by the time we're seven years old. It's been proven by the time you're about seven and nine years old, you already have all your habitual conditioning that you would have received from your family of origin, your culture and where you your kind of your influences. So that is going to inform how you how you engage with everything else, including all of those openings into consciousness. So for me, the depth of inner work that I see is missing in the spiritual world and in the world of self development too, is going deep into the personality structure and understanding how you pick as a conditioned human being because that's going to inform everything on some level, unconsciously or consciously. So that's, I think that's the piece that's often missing in the spiritual seeking.

17:37 And so I always define it as relative sadhna because it's about learning and understanding how that works. And for me, I didn't understand it. I just knew that it was there because I had that experience. So then I went on this journey to to go deep inside of that conditioning and find a way to map it so that I could work with it and understand. Because ultimately when I was in that moment, I could feel everything. There was this unity feeling when I came back into this relative form, but I could also feel what's me and what am I? What am I are are tuning into around me, the people around me. And the more deeply you understand your own conditioning, the more informed you are. The more the more clear you are, the better your engagements are with people. And to understand what's influencing your unconscious behavior.

18:25 Behavior transforms all of your relationships on every level of your being. If you want a conscious relationship, you got to have a conscious relationship with yourself. Cool. Yeah, it reminds me of So I'm I'm an issue with the modern mystery school. And the core of that is the the mission of being an initiate is to know thyself all levels. And it goes next to the Temple of Delphi. Exactly the beautiful place, by the way I visited there. Amazing energy, amazing. So the big self and the little self, right? So there's the big self is that other and the little self is that, I guess what we people call it, the ego structure, right? And it is the ego structure, but it's a necessary component because it's our human interface.

19:07 It's how you and I as people engage in our uniqueness and create relationship. So if you don't understand how that thing works or how you've been conditioned or how to work with it, then I mean, aren't you in some ways being influenced by all the conditioning unconsciously that you've not explored and some level that's becomes what's kind of feeding into your relationships? Yeah, yeah. So many programs and teachers and books out there will act like it's almost like the ego's a mistake, like, oh, you shouldn't have it. You got to get rid of it. It's just this broken thing. It doesn't serve a purpose, but it it does, Yeah, it's valuable. And and the key when you understand it and what conditioned it, perhaps what's distorted is best things, but the the ego is really its job is to keep us safe. Yeah, it's to keep us.

19:51 Being a seeker isn't safe to to grow and expand isn't always doesn't feel safe at least. Absolutely. I mean, because you have to push to your far into your comfort zone, right? So you know that when you're pushing to that unknown space that you're going to hit your paradigm and then it's going to challenge all of these perceived understandings, conscious or unconscious, about who you are. So for me that structure. Is a powerful and necessary thing to understand. And so I went in I I mean, how this happened was I spent a year in the forest in the the mountains of British Columbia on a vision quest. I come from a native background. So for me, going into the forest wasn't too big of a deal. But a year was even in my culture was extreme and I spent a year with with living on the land and all I had with me was my journal and I was alone for I think the longest time I was alone.

20:41 I was about a year that I was on this track, but I was alone like the longest stint without seeing people for about 3 months. And when you start getting a loan and now you have nothing to project all of those issues and conditioning, no people. And you're in this experience where you're, you're really in your own conditioning and you can see it. I started journaling like crazy. Everything that was coming up in the, I didn't have the tools or the understanding in my early 20s what was going on, but I understood that I needed to really map or at least observe how this thing was running. And so that was how I started that to build a kind of, or at least translate how I saw the world in a way that I could kind of use it as a tool to help people to go in and to understand that conditioning. And, and again, here's the thing, Andy, most people talk about in their work, I think people want to do it. Like, I think as as beings, there's something in us that drives us to want to do this, to know thyself, right? But I don't think we have adequate tools in our our modern day society, which is why you end up in programs like Initiate, programs like the the Mystery School and doing other things because we're looking for a way, we're looking for a system, we're looking for a map on any journey. We're looking for a map to kind of navigate. How are we going to have a relationship with this inner world?

22:01 Yeah. So most people are are having experiences. It raises their awareness and that's where they stop. Still not getting the full bad. They don't realize how right a whole group of, you know, a group of 20 people have the same experience, but it's all different based on their ego, based on their conditioning of how what they take from it, how they view it, how they interpret it, what they do going forward and used. I wasn't familiar with this term, but you were using a term called experience chasers going after one more journey, one more ayahuasca trip. One more thing is what I'm missing. And and again that that and I I was in that for years too, that the chasing the tail, just going in circles as a as opposed to spiraling upward in growth, just chasing all there's all, there's one more wound, all there's one more inner childish. All I could, I got to keep looking in the past. I got to keep, you know, digging up the whatever the stuff I've thought I've already gone over.

22:51 I must be missing something. So your vision quest, your mapping of your inner world does does your map translate to all humans? Having, I mean, I studied psychology in university because of that, that was that driving interest in the human condition and discovered to me there was some, there was some, there was a ceiling as to how far I could go in terms of the understanding of the psychological model. And for me, the map I created was not only the way I view the world, but was a way for me to kind of work in a comprehensive way with that inner world. And I can kind of break it down how I, how I broke it down. First of all, my, the model I created is based on expansion and contraction.

23:34 Because I mean, we, we spend a lot of time talking about good, bad, right, wrong, black, white. We live in a dualistic reality. So that's going to be the nature of how we understand things through comparison. But when we go into the right wrong thing, we immediately start with moral with there's a moral overlay on that, right? So when you talk, when you talk in terms of expansion and contraction, you're not talking energetically, you're talking about an energetic relationship, a vibrational relationship. And so then it becomes what I'm what I resonate to and what I don't resonate to, rather than that's good and that's bad, where that's right and that's wrong, which for me breaks takes out the moral, the moral fabric of that, which makes it just about observing, giving your relationship to the vibrational reality that we are.

24:20 So for me, I broke it down, expands the expansion is radiant and mature. So the radiant inner child is, is an aspect of the of the expansive side of your inner child. And the mature inner adult is, is those, those two pieces put together, radiance and maturity create the expansive energy. And below the line is contraction, which is the wounded inner child and the shadow inner adult. Now, none of it is wrong. Like every human being has a fragmented psychology. There's not one human being, you know, And I've been around, I've, I lived in an ashram for 11 years and was a personal assistant to many enlightened beings. So I travelled the world with these enlightened beings.

25:00 And I'm telling you, they all have egos, all of them. There's no such thing as transcending the ego. You integrate it. And the way you integrate it is not to denying it, making it wrong, or just ignoring that it's there. It's through understanding. And that's the model I created. How contraction, the wounded inner child in the shadow, how you're conditioned, what you're conditioned with and what it looks like. And then on the on above the line, how you are conditioned with radiance and maturity. So for me, I broke it down into 26 archetypal stories that we could then start mapping how to deal with your inner world. Which the whole point of this book or what I was writing was to create a model to make it easier to go inside. Because what I observed is in this world, very few people had an adequate map, right?

25:49 So I was, so I would, I believe that it's, I mean, I've now been using the map for 20 years with my clients, coaching, written books, done courses. So I know that it's it. And I've seen what it does in terms of giving people the awareness of how not only to engage with the conditioning, what's there, but know what to cultivate in order to use medicine, what I call medicine for when you're in a contractive state or a wound comes up, how to meet that in a way, right? A lot of people think healing means getting rid of your conditioning, and it isn't. It means having a more conscious relationship to the conditioning that you have. Your conditioning is not going away. Everyone wants to make it go away as one of those those faux pas in the spiritual self development world.

26:32 It's like, I want to make the pain go away. I want to make the conditioning go away. You're better off to deeply understand how the conditioning works, so when it rises in you and there's a trigger in the outer world, you know how to meet it with awareness, with maturity, with connection, with expansiveness, and with medicine. When you first journaled your map and discovered how to travel your world, has it changed or has it remained true and accurate? I would say that it hasn't changed that much in, in when I the, the original kind of mapping of it, which really was mapping my, my inner dialogue to see all these different voices that are inside of us and to understand how the different qualities and worked and kind of give them names.

27:21 I mean, there's a nuances to how it's changed working with clients for the last 15 or 20 years, but fundamentally the map still holds true. And I look for, I'm constantly looking for flaw in it so that I can create and refine it. So there's refinements in terms of the nuances, but I would say that the map itself still serves and has served in as a very powerful tool for people to at least get into the process of self-awareness through introspection and understanding your condition, right? So So what is this map called? Oh, it's called, I call it IRAM, which is inner relationship archetypal model and or and it's a map for creating conscious relationships. So the more conscious and more connected you are to your own conditioning will be the level of conscious and awareness that you can have in every relationship around you. You can't have a relationship that's more conscious than you have in the relationship with yourself. And the most intimate relationship you'll ever have on this planet is the relationship with yourself, right? That in that know thyself experience, which is the foundation of so many spiritual teachings. How did you first share Iram?

28:33 Was it? Was it your your book? A workshop one-on-one? How did it? How did it translate to others? I would say my first case studies were my family because I was starting to do this process and I'm really, I didn't create a model. All I did was narrate how I see the world. So when I look at a human being, I look at a human being fundamentally is, is fragmented. And they're and I'm when you talk to somebody, they're speaking through a filter, they're speaking through an archetype, they're speaking through a story, they're speaking through an aspect, a quadrant of their conditioning. So you could talk to somebody who's deeply in their wounds and they're speaking through the wounded inner child. And there's different qualities and different kind of storylines of the inner child meeting this overdramatic, frozen, lost, overindulged, misunderstood, all these different qualities. So you could, when you, as you become more and more adept in understanding your own conditioning, you can see that individuals are speaking through a specific quadrant of their consciousness.

29:33 They're either speaking to the shadow, right control, you know, possessiveness, unavailability, enabling all these different aspects of the shadow where they're speaking through their woundedness when they're below the line in contraction, or they're speaking from expansiveness through the radiant in their child. Creativity, you know, magic, playfulness, giftedness, feeling, where they're speaking through the mature part of them, consciousness, which is, you know, availability, nurturing, compassion, you know, the protector, the responsible adult. There's these different qualities that every human being speaking through. So I think as I was a child, I was witnessing how people were speaking through this fragmented part, and an unevolved, fragmented individual is like popcorn. They bounce around to all these different things. Somebody who has an awareness is has a stability and can kind of track how and where are things are coming and what place they're speaking from.

30:31 When you know where someone's speaking from, then you know how to address them and meet them in a way that's very expensive, right? So for me, it was a practice. I was, I was already doing this with all the people in my family. My first case studies were my family. And then in my late when I started developing the, the, the material, I started using it with my coaching clients. And then we did retreats and then I I practiced it and tested it for 10 years before I wrote the. Book if it's about states of expansion and contraction, right? Are we constantly moving back and forth? No human stays in expansion or stays in contraction or do. They, I mean, I, well, I would say that, I mean it's a natural ebb and flow, right? We expansion and contraction is the essence of energy. Energy is expansive or contractive. Those are the two states.

31:20 So we're kind of modeling the vibrational reality of constantly we're either in expansiveness or contractiveness. And I think we move depending on what our outside catalysts are and our inside conditioning. We get triggered into expansive experiences and contractive experiences. The question most people ask me is can I stay in expansion all the time? And I think you can cultivate deeper relationships with your, with your, with everything above the line, right, with your maturity and your radiance. And the more you cultivate that relationship, the more you'll stay in that. The gravity of that awareness will keep you above the line. It doesn't mean that you're not going to have stuff that comes up, but when it comes up, you, you have the ability and tools to meet that experience, to meet those those wounds, to meet those issues, to meet that stuff that comes up in you with, with medicine and understanding on how to relate to it in an expansive way. So even if you have a contractive experience, you can still need it in an expansive way. So the answer is yes, we're always going back and forth between expansion and contraction. And the more consciousness you have, the more awareness you have, the more integrated you are in your personality, the easier it is to stay in an expansive state. And it is a choice.

32:36 It is a. Choice. The time spent, the time spent in contraction can become momentary as opposed to decades, depending on on, on your response, on your reaction to. It and you and you and I both know having done a ton of healing work, I mean, that you could get really deeply stuck in the wound, right? And sometimes that's appropriate. It's part of the process of having to work through it. But there is a point where even if you're deeply getting deep in your process of understanding your the dark parts of the shadow, parts of the wounded, parts of your conditioning, that at some point you're going to have to meet it differently. And that's where the tools in the medicine help you to make a choice to stay above the line, cultivate those parts of you above the line. See the way I built it is or the way I kind of understand this is the conditioning that we get, the scent conditioning, that shadow and woundedness, it's there. It's not changing, it's not going away. But everything above the line, radiance, all the radiant child aspect parts of yourself and all the mature aspects of yourself, that can all be cultivated.

33:39 So the more you cultivate that stuff above the line, the easier is to stay above the line because the gravity of that energy is just keeps you there. Right, like attracts like you're, you're reading energy users correcting more reading energy and experiences and yeah. Exactly. Because one mistake I'm well, one among many mistakes I made in my early seeking and and growth opportunities. I thought my teachers, I thought any mentor I had was perfect. I thought I was flawed and broken and they were perfect. So that I I was making the mistake and assumption that they were staying in reading expansion all the time and any time I had that experience like, Oh my God, this is what life is. Really supposed to be? And then I'd have a period of contraction. I like, oh, I, I did it wrong and I'm back where I started. And I just want to just like that. Is that ever the case?

34:28 Are you really back where you started, or is it just something else is coming up for you? I don't think you can ever go backwards. I mean, that's like kind of like it's like, you know, you can't unring the bell, right? So I don't feel like there's any there's a point in any process where you go back to revert back to where you were, because even if you revert back to you where you think you were before, you've also you've already touched something else. So then your experience of where you went back to will never be the same. So I believe, I don't think it's possible to UN evolve and de evolve or how whatever word we want to use to put us back to where we were. I think we create the perception of that and we may revisit the same patterning, right? But if, but if you're revisiting the pattern this, the, the second time you see the pattern is the third time you see the pattern or the first time you see the pattern will never be the same because there's experience, there's understanding, there's, there's integration that happens every single time.

35:27 So you're never, ever going back to where you were before. So you've mentioned medicine a number of times. So let's, I want to get clear like, So what are you referring to when you talk about medicine and helping this, this journey? So let's talk about it from this perspective. Let's just assume you are talking, you're talking to an individual who's deeply needy, right? They're coming from the fragment of that wounded child. They're speaking through the, through the archetype of the needy child. And then as an individual, how do you meet that with an expansive energy? Well, neediness is all about not having your needs met. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a touchy word because nobody wants to be considered needy, right?

36:08 Because you see like the sucky person who's trying to draw attention, we get the, the classic needy individual. But if you look at the word needy, it means you didn't get your needs met. And so then when you look at what's the medicine in my own consciousness, if I find my neediness or in another individual, how do I meet that in an expansive way? It's well, So what is what is the medicine for neediness? Nurturing because you're because you weren't nourished. So if you're nourishing an individual, you show up in a nurturing, nourishing energy, which is the mature part, mature inner adult kind of archetype. You, you show up as compassion, which is a deep sympathetic understanding of somebody's pain, right?

36:48 You have compassion for what's going on. So you'd show up as compassion. You show up as nurturing. That's a medicine that starts to dissolve that feeling of neediness and invite somebody to come back above the line. So you can invite somebody who shows up to you in neediness. If you show up in the expansive energy of nourishment and nurturing and honoring and all the different things, that creates an invitation for somebody to take them to step from below the line to above the line. It doesn't mean they're going to accept the invitation, but you're showing up as the medicine, which that's what I call the medicine, the the antidote for that kind of conditioning. And that applies to all the different aspects of the shadow and the woundedness.

37:30 And I spent, like I said, years like really exploring what is the medicine for all these things and how do you meet these expensive these, these contractive elements that come up in you? Because somebody could show up as needy and you could show up in a very judgmental way, right? That's not medicine for the experience. That's feeding more contraction. So if the objective is to be an expansive energy, then when somebody shows up in a needy space or someone shows up in a controlling space or someone shows up in an overdramatic space of eventually when you learn to integrate and understand these these tools, you also understand how to meet an individual in the most expansive place, which will create the deepest kind of intimacy instead of meeting in that contracted place.

38:13 So if this is really resonating with someone, they really, you know, interested in the inner world, looking for guidance, looking for the model, it it what's the best starting point? Is it, is it the is it your book? Is it something else with you or? The book is fantastic. I mean, in the sense it's 333 pages. Originally it was 999 and my editor was like, no, no, you're going to kill people. You need to, you need to cut it down. So he cut it down to like 150 pages and I'd put it back up to you, 333 because I just felt like there had to be some stuff in there with the tools. So the book is a good way, at the very least to create a map for you to start inner work. Because if you can't listen, someone says to me, I've heard this all the time, Andy, I'm doing shadow work and I'm like, that's fit. I go, fantastic, what are you doing? And they can't articulate it.

39:04 Then I asked them, well, if you can't articulate the actual shadow work you're doing, then Are you sure you're doing anything? Or is it as effective as it can be? Because if you're working on a specific part of your consciousness, you should be able to articulate what it is you're working on, right? So I find this, I often people say I'm doing inner child work and I'm like, fantastic, you're doing inner child work. Are you doing radiant inner child work or are you doing wounded inner child work? Because they're completely different medicine and different things for both sides of that, the expansive side of the inner child or the contractive side of the inner child. So what I did was make it more comprehensive and create languaging and tools around it.

39:45 So the book is a good starting point. It's that it's based as a workbook. It's created to give you tools to journal. It gives you affirmations, it gives you an understanding. And then what a lot of people end up doing is they start the book, they start mapping their consciousness, and then they end up in a session. They're like, I want to go deeper into this process and understand it. I do this with a lot of couples. Because, you know, a lot of couples end up in their relationship with each other. The reason they have issues is because they don't understand their own conditioning. And then they're just projecting conditioning on each other. So when you can understand your own conditioning and the conditioning of your partner, my God, does it ever change the way you engage with each other. You could show up as the medicine for each other.

40:25 You understand what your tendencies are, what your partner's tendencies are. You don't have judgement for the fact that every human being has this, has this, this fragmented consciousness, which I think is a gift, quite frankly, because that fragmented consciousness gives us the opportunity to explore all these facets of who we are and then integrate them into this integrated being where this where you're aware and you're having a conscious relationship with your inner world. Of all the things that you do and have done, what's your favorite? I would say to you, I am profoundly. I have a deep love, I have a deep and devotion and fascination with the human condition.

41:08 But for me personally, the the, the most powerful, intense, beautiful experiences have always been in terms of meditation and deepening in experiences of consciousness, because that connects me to something outside of that I touched in my youth in that experience, something other than the human condition. And then when that's on board and I have a conscious relationship with that, that affects the way I view and filter through my human and experience. So for me personally, going into deep spiritual experiences of touching that place beyond the human conditioning is gives me a kind of awakened experience that connects me to what was it was like on the other.

41:52 Side so is that is deep meditation the closest you can get in your actual human existence to that experience at 11 years old? That's a good question. So meditation's a tool, but I have had spontaneous experiences of that of through the course of my life because I mean, once that's activated and open, now it's, it's in you and it's alive. So now it, I mean, it gets activated in different experiences. I've had it activated, I've had it activated through ecstasy and through energetic experiences. I've had this profound connection activated through deep and profound meditation and I've had it activated through cognitive understanding of my conditioning. So I don't think there's one place where it shows up more than the other.

42:38 I think it's just about being available as a human being and being deeply intimate with all these different things that are happening with us, and then having a communion where that can inform you in a different way. And so the deeper you go into that space, the more you're going to be informed by something other, more and beyond this human experience. So since this is real men feel, is there anything that stands out and all that you've studied, experienced, is there anything that stands out as one thing you wish more men knew? Yes, I wish. Two things. One, it starts, one of the reasons I even approached your podcast and we kind of connected in the 1st place where we connected was because I was so excited by the title of your podcast.

43:26 Real men feel because feeling is emotional. The the experience of your emotional body is the entry point to consciousness because consciousness is a direct experience. And if you don't understand how to tap in and actually feel in a visceral, somatic way, then it's very difficult to go deeper into your intuition and even deeper into another experience. So feeling the emotional experience of connecting and not just being able to talk about your feelings, but being able to talk from within the feeling as you're having it. A lot of people talk about their feelings. They can analyze their feelings. But when you're talking, when it's a live experience and you're able to communicate from that space, that is incredibly profound, powerful, and it opens the door for you to have a deeper experience of consciousness because that's direct experience in action. So I wish more men had access to tools to teach them how to not only feel and how to understand that as an experience in the body, but then to be able to articulate that with with kind of sophistication because that will allow you to be deeper and more intimate in all your relationships. Completely agree.

44:43 Awesome. So you said two things. The second thing I feel is the understanding of your conditioning, because I feel like a lot of men do not understand why they do what they do. And I feel, I mean, this goes for men, but it goes for any human being. The more deeply you're connected to who you are, the the more integrated you are, the more rich your experience are, the more rich your relationships are, and the more the depth of what you can experience as this reality is, is unfathomable that all, and that's all that's all dependent on you having a deeper relationship yourself. It's an inside job. It's always been an inside job.

45:24 It always will be an inside job. Yes, we get catalysts in the outer world, but the work, the inner work, is an inside desire to know thyself. Awesome, Marcus, I've enjoyed every conversation I I've had with you. So I had a high bar for this conversation and it's you're hitting it. What is the best way for people to stay in touch with you to keep up with all that you're up to? Well, I'm on social media, so you can find me on social media, which all the links I think will be in the, in the thing. Also, they can connect on the website. They can, they can definitely connect and have sessions. I do private sessions as well as different events all over the, the country and the different, actually different countries as well. So there's always events going on in person and online.

46:06 So if they connect through my website, they connect and they connect through the book. You will find ways to kind of meet me and and see if I'm a fit to be able to help kind of help facilitate your journey into your inner world. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Marcus, that you, you won the coveted Most Persistent Guest award and I look forward to having more conversations with you. And you know, I want to thank everyone for listening and joining us as well and being willing and wanting to explore your inner world and to know yourself because I think that's a key point of this entire experience to begin with. So thanks again, Marcus, for joining us. Thanks for listening. Wherever you're discovering Real Men Feel, please subscribe, follow, like, share this episode with someone who would get value from it.

46:50 Post a review or comment. Please visit realmenfeel.org. See the blog post for this episode. We'll have links to all the resources mentioned. You can get Marcus's Book Connectors website and dig deeper into all of that fun stuff that you are. And if you're not yet in the Real Men Feel private Facebook group or maybe you even know that existed, you can visit. You can join by visiting realmenfeel.org/group and you can always reach out to me directly at realmenfeel@gmail.com. And until next time, be good to yourself.