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BORN TO LOVE

I often tell men they were born to belong and bred for break up.

Our natural state is to love others as decreed by nature herself.

It is to move towards people who resemble us and assume belonging, looking to the eyes for reassurance, ensuring the reciprocity underpinning our interdependence is intact.

I say the only person in life upon whom you may reliably count on for unconditional love with any confidence is you. If you were not loved adequately as a child and now find yourself as an adult still yearning for love, you’ve got a problem.

Don’t worry, it’s a common issue, you are not alone in feeling this way or being in this situation. The danger is that you allow yourself to be bred for breakup.

You could also say you were born to love and be loved.

Notice I didn’t say born to be loved and love. There’s a difference. If you say the words “born to be loved and love” that way out loud, you might notice how weird it sounds.

The order, to love and be loved, is a clear demarcation, a line between boyhood and masculine maturity

Yet, the way forward for your life is not backwards. It’s into the future as a powerful man. It’s to fulfill your masculine destiny, not to revel in what could have been.

In any case, men do not carry the same burden as women. You will often see me write men don’t need love at all. I think is true. The key word is need. We needed love as boys undoubtedly.

Every child needs to bask in the glory of his mother’s love for as long as possible. As men we cannot need love, or we revert to being boys. That’s how I see it.

Like it or not women are nature’s caregiving delegates. They have wombs and out of nature’s chaos they create life itself. Men, on the other hand, are nature’s expendable hunter warriors.

One man can impregnate a thousand women (think Genghis Khan and a few others); one woman maxes out at producing around a dozen kids… if it doesn’t kill her.

Despite having a self-interested brain like anyone else, women use their empathy, compassion, smarts and bodies to nurture and grow those around them. You think that doesn’t take a toll on them, especially as selfish human beings like the rest of us?

It does in ways you can’t comprehend.

Her secret fear is that she will be taken advantage of… or worse, taken for granted, especially by the adults around her… despite her sacrifice. Martyrdom to her equals slavery.

Nature realizes this is an impossible situation so it provides her with a powerful male hunter warrior who can stand by her as she creates life for the benefit of mankind. Part of his role is to defend, deliver, discern, discuss and/or delay, and decide while she is preoccupied.

Part of these Ds of masculine decorum of action include that he rescues her from her insanity to protect them both when she overthinks. Lest you think anything untoward of that last sentence let me clarify that this is just another form of reassurance.

He does this because caregiving takes her so far away from her own self-preservation that she may lose her way. Men take pride in producing more than they consume and so he delivers on behalf of them both, their children, and tribe.

He acts to preserve her essence lest she lose who she really is. He never forgets she can carry a sword and bow or run all night and howl at the moon alongside him.

…

Carl Jung wrote about the process of individuation. This is how we come to unify our past with our present, where the individual self develops from an undifferentiated unconscious.

For our purposes we could compare it to integration, the quest to reconcile various parts into a meaningful whole.

It’s where it all comes together and part of your journey is finding and accepting what Jung called your anima, the feminine side of your psyche. Jung did not see this aspect of your psyche as an aggregate of mother and father, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, or educators though they remain influences.

Jung considered the anima (and the masculine animus for women) part of the collective unconscious.

Typically, the male’s sensitivity is lower or repressed, he said, so he regarded the anima an important independent aspect of the self.

We often mention the masculine as characterized by order and feminine energy as chaos. Jung said the anima is a man’s source of creativity.

To that end a man realizes that he must reverse the flow. He doesn’t require love as he has the anima in him already. If only, he realizes and accepts it.

He no longer needs or expects love but rather, absent the caregiver’s burden, he realizes he possesses all the love he needs. While the women around him expend their love on people, he holds his in reserve for everyone’s benefit.

He dials out his love and power to those next to him, first making a difference there and allowing this energy to ripple out from his center and beyond as a path to meaning and freedom.

He earns respect by deeds or takes it with limits. He earns loyalty by winning hearts and minds, realizing that people are loyal only to those whom they respect.

Thereby, in doing this and fulfilling his mandate the expendable hunter warrior male makes himself indispensable.

He’s often truly loved for this… though he is unconcerned.

Questions? Comments?

Love & Power, True & Free,

©CHRIS WALLACE 2022 all rights reserved advisortomen.com

DESTINY
When I was a little boy, I visited a farm with my family a few times. I’m pretty sure my father was the owner’s AA sponsor though I would not have known it at the time. Our brood, nine kids, were invited to come out and spend the day on occasion. I learned from a client that farm has been sold in the last few years. I have no idea where it would situate today though it was near where I presently live.

I just remember being enchanted by the place. There was an old farmhouse, a shed out the back door big enough to hold farm tractors and equipment, and beyond the farmyard a good-sized barn. Chickens and turkeys and geese wandered about purposefully. I think there was a pond. There were cattle in the field and the barn upstairs was full of hay. They had guinea pigs living under their front stoop.

It was my kind of place and so, I decided I wanted to become a farmer and declared my intentions forthwith.

That didn’t’ pass muster with the adults. They said I’d go broke, that farming was a cruel life, and that nobody does it seriously anymore. I gave up on the idea and eventually we didn’t visit the farm anymore. I would have to find other paths to nature, and I did. There was Sawmill Creek near home but also cubs, scouts, and pioneers, all which allowed me to spend time in the woods and the great outdoors.

My family had moved us from Halifax to Ottawa so dad could work at the National Defence headquarters and so I missed kindergarten and started school in grade one. I’d worked hard with my mother to learn how to read at age five so I could be like my elder siblings. What a cruel trick it was to arrive at school and find that it was for naught as no one spoke English. In fact, it was forbidden.

Nevertheless, I learned French, mostly by osmosis because it was all gibberish to me at first. I spent time in the back vestibules with my head up against the wall for making everyone laugh with my nonsensical imitations.

The first year and a half were not so much fun. I was an Anglo in a French Catholic school during the rise of Quebec nationalism. All my teachers were either nuns or French natives with deep ties to the adjoining French province of Quebec. I felt their discrimination deeply.

Yet one day in grade two, I arrived in the morning not understanding French as usual and as the day progressed, at some point I did. I suddenly realized, “Hey, I get this!” and wondered at how that happened. Thereafter I could understand French and have ever since.

I fought my way up the grade school social hierarchy to where in grade six, I was voted class president. I loved the role, getting to hold meetings to solve classroom problems, standing at the front of the class and thanking other grades when they came by to give a performance or presentation. I also had a kindly teacher by the name of Mrs. Stewart who spoke the odd English. I felt appreciated in that grade.

I decided to become a teacher.

In middle school the following year, a well-intentioned teacher put the kibosh on that quickly. I can still picture her face and demeanour at the front of the class telling me that the job sucked: long hours, marking on weekends, a room full of unruly kids, parents, and school officials to deal with. Besides, I think she said you made 18K per year and so it was a dead end financially.

Convincingly, she talked me right out of it.

After being tossed out of the house at fifteen as my father burned out and broke down, his violence having left an indelible scar on my psyche, I dropped out and drifted into drugs and crime. I’ve been shot, stabbed, hit with baseball bats, and did time for shooting others. I guess you could say I gave as good as I got. I was officially pardoned by the govt about twenty years ago

I’ve been a street sweeper, a carny barker and a door to door salesman; I’ve dug trenches with a jackhammer putting in natgas pipelines and operated a forklift in a warehouse and welded sewer pipe inner cages on a twelve hour overnight shift; I have cleaned govt offices after hours and later worked as a retail men’s clothing store salesman; I hustled one of Canada’s first loyalty cards, and for a time worked as a real estate agent while also operating as a flower wholesaler and owning a florist shop; and I was an addictions residential counsellor, saw clients privately, and also taught the reality of alcohol use to men who had lost their licence to drunk driving; I later built the largest newspaper paid circulation salesforce in Canada with 150 reps and 18 managers in seven cities; and a few years ago, I sold energy to farms and businesses and then worked at a tech startup.

Very few of us go through childhood with a clear idea of what we want to spend our lives doing, or at least, with a definite sense or clear interest that draws us in. Sometimes I will run into someone who tells me, “I’ve always been attracted to this” and so that’s what he did. It happens, but usually they have taken a round-about way there.

We become adults and look around at the many paths we can take to try and make sense of life and our place in it and are often or usually stopped in our tracks with indecision.

Yet, I can tell you for me, looking back, there were signs of my destiny all along. I was born smack dab in the middle of a family of eleven and I think this made me a good manager. I had to negotiate adults and younger siblings. I’ve also worked since I was about ten. That was when I left the house one day and went business to business on nearby Bank Street looking for work. That’s me on my father’s right with the first four of my siblings.

I mowed lawns and shoveled snow and washed cars and planted gardens for my neighbours. I was helped along first by older friend Rod with whom I collected discarded bottles to claim their two-cent bounty, and later by my super-hustler buddy partner Graydon who taught me how to cross Ts when it comes to snow shoveling and grass cutting. I think about that OCD bastard with great fondness every time I shovel snow or cut grass, ensuring I have my banks even and tidy and my lines straight.

I see him and another childhood friend now and again these past few years since I moved back near my hometown. He’s still washing and waxing cars, meticulously.

Now I live on 200 acres of bush and grow a big organic garden in summer to feed myself and my family. There is nothing like walking outside and harvesting vegetables and salad stuffs, tomatoes and kale and spinaches and the like, from your own soil and labour. Nothing. This gives me a powerful buzz.

I also forage plants from the surrounding fields and use folk medicines. My evening tea is often a combination of dried plants I have stored in containers. Each year I expand my knowledge a little bit and my harvests and concoctions.

I walk in the area at least once but often up to four times per day with my wife’s Cocker Spaniel, Remington Cabela. She’s named after a gun and sporting goods store. I accept that.

And I teach everyday worldwide to appreciative men whose lives are positively affected by the hard-earned lessons and depths of learning I have accumulated. I write and teach… and sort of farm.

Perhaps that is the lesson I’m trying to share with you. That you cannot escape your destiny and if you do it will be a painful journey. That you were chosen for life by heavens of infinite wisdom and arrived here fully loaded and ready to go with your potentials and possibilities intact.

And that nothing about how things “should” be or how you “ought” to act or what you “must” do with your life applies in the final analysis. The only thing that counts is that you are true to yourself, to your gifts.

Here’s some advice:

It is every man’s purpose to listen carefully to his yearnings; to identify what comes easily to him, watching with vigilance for things that enthrall and capture his attention; to discover what he is good at and which he finds satisfying; and to then sharpen these talents as he might take a stone to the edge of a blade, taking rough steel and making it supremely useful.

He expands these heavens bestowed talents into strengths and manifests these into the world to make a positive difference, allowing his unique energy, his power and love, to ripple out for the benefit of all.

It may be useful for you to return to your earliest memories and look for the seeds of your destiny there before the after-build installation of a conforming ego by your caregivers obscured your desires.

What did you yearn for?
What came easily?
What captured your attention?
What were you good at?
What satisfied you?

Who would you need to be to live up to your potential?

What would it mean to look to the sky each day with satisfaction knowing you are fulfilling your promise?

How could you be that person?

Accept this challenge, follow your sacred destiny…

Questions? Comments?

Love & Power,

True and Free
cw

©CKWALLACE, 2022 all rights reserved

BE-FORE SETTING GOALS

Setting goals each year can be a bitch. It sets off a desire process and we know wanting equals suffering.

Why? Because as soon as we want, we must contend with not getting. Facing that little fact is painful for it involves loss. You go from not having (blissful ignorance) to wanting (perceived lack) to not having (reward prediction error) and pain (dopamine drop). What a circle-jerk that process is.

Around the end of each year, I get the quiets from people when I ask about their goals. Some are “good” students and go “all-in” on goal setting. One of our guys has his done in October. Pretty sure he’s on the spectrum, I love those guys whose systemizing brains make us all look bad.

I swear a lot of people get sheepish about goals the last couple of months of the year. Ask them about them and they will often give you the equivalent of the guy who shuffles his feet while looking at his shoes. It’s like mommy just caught them heading off to school with their bed unmade and homework left undone.

Others will just lie. The ego is part of your integrated central nervous system and denies, distorts, and represses inner and/or outer reality to reduce anxiety and depression. The ego has its own wisdom.

Of course, all this is unnecessary. The reason for this is because the first step in setting a goal is to set an intention around being. If goals remain unmet, it’s because you are setting them as you are in the present, expecting to remain exactly as you are now at some future point but with a goal reached. See the problem with this?

Think of yourself ten years ago? How different are you from that person now? Exactly.

Achieving goals starts with being, not with doing.

At the repeated risk of sounding repetitive (see what I did there?), you either form an aspiration and clear intention about your identity, and then support that ideal with daily actions which become part of your lifestyle which then informs personality, or you risk that your identity will cobbled together bit by bit by mostly well-intentioned people around you meeting their needs, not yours.

To set goals is to aspire to be someone different. If I want to learn to public speak, the act of going to Toastmasters for a year changes who I am. It’s an identity shift. I must see myself as a public speaker and then go and be that which I have imagined by doing.

Reaching goals is first about setting intentions for who you want to be. It is by imagining who you could be and adopting that completely, internalizing that being, and then doing the things each day which supports this image you have of yourself until it becomes normalized, and shit gets done.

It’s the oft-called for Be-Do-Have. First be the person that is the kind of person who does the things that you desire achieving and lo and fucking behold, you soon get what you want.

So, who are you going to be in 2022? Not the same guy as in 2021, that’s for sure. You will change. In which case, you might as well be the one deciding how that’s going to turn out.

Brings new meaning the phrase, “to your well-being.” Well, who are you being?

Questions? Comments?

True and Free, Love & Power,
cw

©CHRIS WALLACE, advisortomen.com, 2022, all rights reserved

https://go.oncehub.com/ChristopherWallace

Self-Compassion Hack: countering judgment

Almost from the time of birth we make judgments.

In his book, Just Babies, Paul Bloom writes of an experiment with one-year-olds. Three puppets are put in front of the child. The puppet in the middle rolls a ball to the puppet on the right, and this puppet rolls the ball back. Then the puppet in the middle rolls the ball to the puppet on the left, and this puppet fucks off with the ball.

Afterwards, the same three puppets are placed in front of the child with a cookie in front of each of them. Who knows, maybe one of those delicious Arrowroot biscuits I used to like as a kid. The child is invited to go and take a treat from one of the puppets. Which one do you think it turns to? If you instinctively said the puppet who fucked off with the ball, you’d be correct. Bloom reports this is what happens most of the time.

Bloom sums things up saying, “It starts with what we are born with, and this is surprisingly rich: babies are moral animals equipped by evolution with empathy and compassion, the capacity to judge the actions of others and even some rudimentary understanding of justice and fairness.”

Now take those humble beginnings and amplify them during the aging process from babies to adults. Amplify is the correct word because the basic judgments of childhood intensify and become a way of life as we reach maturity.

We judge ourselves harshly, others mercilessly, and circumstances unfortunately.

Our self-judgment keeps us more than just in check, it imbues us with fear and subdues the spirit. Judging others ensures the belonging we so desperately need is always inadequate. By constantly judging circumstances as less than ideal, we force ourselves to live in the future and don’t see the gifts found in everyday life… for happiness is a decision only found in the present.

Compassionate self-forgiveness is one of your best counters to judgment because most judgment occurs within our hearts and minds without the involvement of others. Judgment is an inside job and so, that’s where we aim compassion.

If you feel put off by your significant other or a parent or co-worker, recognize the shift in feelings inside you that goes along with it, knowing at that very moment the other person has no idea of the judgments going on inside you. These are your thoughts and feelings and yours alone.

So, we take a deep breath and take full ownership of how we think and feel and forgive ourselves for judging the other person. Suddenly an emotional shift is made because internally we are no longer withdrawing from someone but reconnecting. Frustration leaves and power and love prevail.

We do the same thing when we find that we judge ourselves harshly. I forgive myself for being so judgmental of me and the negativity fades… and power and love prevail.

The same applies to circumstances, especially the usual, “I will be happy when this happens… or that happens.” I forgive myself for being so judgmental and my frustration fades, power and love prevail. Suddenly, I see things heretofore I could not, finding wonder in circumstances that I had no idea was there.

Practiced regularly, a whole new world opens. More importantly, a certain peace comes over you as you move into everyday life operating from the master self, where power and love prevail.

Power & Love

True & Free
cw

©2021 CHRIS WALLACE, advisortomen.com, all rights reserved

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If you are up to it, click on the picture below for my scheduler

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SHADOW CALLING
Listen to me: A woman secretly craves
being possessed by her man
Not just possessed but taken.

That’s not a rape fantasy
(though for some kinky broads it might be)
but it’s not holding back.

I contend women need a powerful man
with whom she can surrender herself completely,
feeling safe enough to temporarily visit her shadows.

That does not mean rough sex
(though it could for some) but it does mean
you better be the goddamn maestro

in the behind-closed-doors personal porn film
being recorded in each other’s minds.
Where all your secrets are laid bare.

I am fifteen years in with missus
and have never banged her the same way twice
(though I’m not opposed to that).

Her complete surrender to you sexually
is PART of what helps her replenish her power
after making sacrifices under the caregiver archetype.

The nastiness she engages in with you privately
is what allows her to function as the goodly wife in public.
She needs the contrast, as do we all.

It’s the calling of the shadow

Power & Love
©CHRIS WALLACE, 2022, all rights reserved

Could you make her smile?
Could you get her to trust you?
Could you make her feel safe?
Could you do that just because you can?

RAPPORT MADE EASY

Here’s the secret to building rapport. Never mind Tony Robbins’s long-winded and over-complicated videos teaching NLP modalities like matching and mirroring. Go ahead and watch them but you won’t learn rapport that way.

Listen to me and you’ll do just enough of what some of those cover, but instinctively. Why? Because I’m not going to ask you to be mechanical or to be anything other than yourself. I will do is teach you how to adopt the kind of mindset you need which will make the rest of it come naturally.

Do you believe you can reinvent yourself if needed? Can you rise to a challenge if circumstances merit? And this: act as if and soon you are. Because it’s no more complicated than that.

Neither did I pull this out of my ass this morning. I have a long history of engaging with people and this has left me with an intuitive approach around others. I have also taught my technique to hundreds of people over the years, male and female and watched their success with people improve immediately. It is easy to learn once you know how.

And that is the thing: It is also unlikely I would have ever noticed these rapport factors if I weren’t forced by context to tease out its component parts so I could teach it. I ran door to door crews for most of my adult life. Well, at least the parts where I had a job… where I had an actual job. You get what I mean.

In a family of eleven, I was smack in the middle (with four brothers and four sisters, and a mom and a dad). I went door to door as a kid single digits in age looking for a job to earn a few dollars shovelling snow or mowing lawns and canvassed all the businesses up on Bank Street near my parents’ home looking for work. At eleven, I worked the carnival, first sweeping floors in a midway restaurant for 12 hours per day, but eventually working a dime-pitch right on the midway.

I started working door to door selling Maclean’s, Chatelaine and TV Guide for Maclean-Hunter in 1972. I’ve run sales crews and trained hundreds of reps on the finer points of sales and crew managing. I’ve worked retail in men’s clothes at several shops. I sold one of the first customer loyalty discount cards in the early 1980s using teams to the public and to businesses. I ran flower teams in Southern Ontario and BC until the late 1990s.

I sold energy to farms and businesses and manufacturers for three years until a few years ago.

Before that, I organized teams to sell subscriptions until newspapers were hurt badly by the move to digital, ending after 13 years as senior VP of Canada. I had up to 150 reps under me with 15 managers in 7 cities working for a dozen newspaper clients. And I have coached, counselled, and mentored people professionally for the better part of three decades.

I realized what I teach you here was the key to it all by watching myself and then recording what worked and sharing that with my reps over the years. Through repetition, I was able to boil it down to two parts of the same factor. To apply it as I teach it requires you shed all neediness and insecurity and expectations. You will soon see why.

The secret to building INSTANT RAPPORT with people is to treat them AS IF you have ALWAYS known them while assuming YOU ALWAYS WILL.

That’s it. But you must believe it to pull it off because it’s no small thing.

Come from THAT place inside you. Do not give yourself a moment to think anything or anyway else. When you look into their eyes, you see someone familiar. You see their history, and you see them yesterday and today and tomorrow and long into the future by just glancing at their face. They must see this in your eyes in return. They must.

That is a critical factor: authenticity.

Sweep your side of the street. Be pure of heart. Your words and affect and body language must be congruent. Failure to be real instils distrust.

You have people in your life you have always known. Perhaps it’s siblings, parents, children, long-time friends. What does it feel like to interact with them? Easy? Good. Make it exactly like that with everyone. No exceptions.

Would you hide yourself from your brothers or sisters, or from your mother or your father, or from someone you had worked with for many years? No. You would be natural and easy-going and even vulnerable and open. Your life before them would be an open book, and because of this, more often than not they respond in kind.

Why is this? Because the congruency of your approach makes them feel safe.

It’s the key to human interaction, to something called the social engagement system. When we meet someone or feel under stress, the ventral vagus connecting the brainstem to the heart and lungs and the trigeminal (tri-facial) nerve is activated. We look to people’s faces for signs of acceptance and especially, for reassurance.

The prosody of one person’s voice calms the other.

In fact, all arguments between people have this at their crux. One or both feel unsafe and want reassurance and is not or are not getting it. All those fights you had with your girlfriend were because you or she needed reassurance. Are you there? Are you with me? This is how human beings attach to each other. Same for women or men or old or young.

Wherever I go, missus is always surprised how people respond to me. If I’m left alone with someone, she expects I will know something personal about the individual, sometimes in minutes. It’s just because I treat people like I have always known them and always will. And I assume the same about them. Because of that, I’m an open book and they feel safe.

Can you use this for evil? You can but it’s hard. People’s sixth sense for safety is strong. Most can spot a fake (incongruency) a mile away. Others scare easily and take a bit more to warm to you.

Hold fast to the good in you.

To genuinely and openly treat people this way takes power. It takes love. It takes your masculine power and love—of which you have an abundance in reserve. Do not deny it from yourself or others, share it with the world. A man who uses his power and love in service of himself and others finds meaning and freedom.

Part of that freedom is being able to talk to anyone at any time in any circumstances. It results in a little less pain in a world built for suffering.

Warren Bennis (1925-2014), a great American leadership scholar said “Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it’s also that difficult.”

The simplicity is in self-acceptance. It is compassion for yourself which leads to compassion for others. It works the other way around too. When we love others, in no small way we love our self.

We are all perfectly imperfect souls.

Just do that, everywhere, always. Lead with power and love. No burned bridges, no unsaid or unfinished business. We are all brothers and sisters here folks: kin in the great human family. Can you use this for good?

Stay powerful, true and free…

Power & Love
cw

© CHRIS WALLACE 2020, all rights reserved, advisortomen.co

TAKE A WALK WITH ME
If I could encourage you to do one thing in the coming year (or tomorrow), it would be to commit to daily walks. I have been doing them for years, and they are integral to my mental health. Turns out I did not just discover this, having felt the pull of the woods since I was a little boy.

On my parents’ street growing up in the 1960s, ma once told me there were some sixty kids on just our end of the two-block length of Falcon Avenue in Ottawa’s south end. The city put a tree in front of every house property road allowance. These were small saplings which grew a little each year.

But a few TALL trees grew on property lines in people’s backyards, towering over the houses, like giants to a young boy’s perceptions.

Refuge for most of us meant the fields at the end of the block where three primary grade schools, one French Roman Catholic, and one of each Roman Catholic and Public schools in English. All these were once part of Grandma Mason’s farm who kept her home still on Brookfield Avenue between the schools. Behind her place was a fallow ten acres but could have been a hundred to my little boy’s mind. I found great spiders and bugs there all summer.

Beyond all this were train tracks, and beyond these, Sawmill Creek. That is where I spend my best times as a child, rafting, exploring, hunting with bow and arrow, tobogganing in winter, and swinging from a great rope at the swinging tree in summer.

There was a well worn single-file trail along the north side which contoured the winding creek but also rose and fell with the grade. Marvelous, the kind of path you felt you could just walk on forever. It was a place to imagine, to simplify, to recover and soothe.

I was not doing anything others had not done before me. Maybe you remember something like this from your younger years. Most of us spent some time in the woods as kids. Indeed, it is how we evolved, to be outside and explore and revel in nature every day. It turns out our minds calibrate to the outdoors.

A little science
Researchers have discovered a 20-minute walk in nature acts as well as medications like Ritalin to improve impulse control and focus for ADHD kids.

Walking through an arboretum sees working memory improved by as much as 20%. Come back in from a walk and your ability to proofread and catch errors in your writing goes up. You can answer questions quickly and more accurately if given a speedy cognitive test.

And what about that incessant worrying we sometimes do? There is nothing like walking outside among the trees and plants to alleviate symptoms of depression. No wonder people love to nourish their soul with a little (or a lot) of gardening. It is better than valium. Your best stress reliever is not a few drinks at the end of the day, but time spent in nature.

Very little of our time is in the fresh air. Most city kids do not even play outside daily. With more than half the world’s population living in cities, a number which could reach 70% by mid-century, we are outside starved. This is unnatural, counter to how we evolved over millennium.

A reference
In The Extended Mind, Annie Paul notes that many of the man-made landscapes around the world carry influences from our past. The way Japanese gardeners prune their trees to look like the branches of trees found in East Africa to the great estate gardens of Europe to New York’s Central Park to how southern US landowners irrigate their rain-starved properties all stem from the same archetype.

“We like wide grassy expanses, dotted by loose clumps of trees with spreading branches, and including a nearby source of water. We like the capacity to see long distances in many directions from a protected perch…  And we like a bit of mystery—a beckoning promise of more to be revealed around the bend,” she writes.

Turns out it’s embedded deep within our psyche.

With nature around us we are smarter, more emotionally stable, less stressed, and more productive. Hospitalized patients who have a window view of nature recover faster and require less pain medication. Big companies are on to the production connection and are adding plants to their workspaces.

How I use it
Since I moved on to acreage almost six years ago, I have benefited from daily walks. I intend to do four per day but often get less. And, I rarely skip a day. To that end, I keep an uneven trail of about a quarter mile mowed of grasses in summer and cleared with a snowblower in winter. I sometimes exercise by tossing a 20lb ball around it at least once in the several times I go around in a day.

Do this tomorrow
Normally it is a walk of about 15 to 20 minutes. Most people over-breathe through the mouth in their daily life at 12-18 breaths or more per minute, according to Daniel Nestor in his book Breath. He says optimum health require 5.5 breaths. So, I take these occasions to practice slowing my nose breathing to 5-6 breaths per minute by counting to six on the inhale and to six on the exhale. Once I have the pattern down, I just relax and look around while I walk. Sure enough, I come back to my office feeling like I am ten feet tall.

Mix it up
Often I will take one of the side-paths off the main trail and head in through the trees just for a change. I have Cedar woods to the north and Pine to the south. This random wandering helps me regulate my body’s stress but also acts as a salve for my mind, kickstarting problem-solving and making my writing easier. It also helps me better serve clients each day.

One of the most peaceful things I do for my self-care is to meander through the two-hundred acres without a real plan. This is often my “big reward” on a Sunday for a week well done. I am well-equipped with woodsman tools and can be gone an hour… or be gone for three or more.

I will bush whack a bit here and there, look for animal sign, find plants I’ve never seen before and a lot of green. The predictable repetition of being in the forest is a bit like being in the relaxed state of a hypnotic trance. If you step into the woods, in less than a minute, its effects take hold and heart rate and blood pressure settle down.

The BIG picture
The forest is always bigger than I am. “Nature… inspires a feeling of abundance, a reassuring sense of permanence” says Annie Paul. In that sense and beyond, it can trigger awe, that wow feeling we can often find in nature. When I found a Red Trillium plant growing by a creek in the back woods last June, I sat there just admiring it for about fifteen minutes. I had never seen one before and didn’t know they existed. I felt the same way the time I found Doll’s Eyes flowers in full bloom not far away. So cool.

Professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, Dacher Keltner, calls awe an emotion “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear.” It is from there that we open our minds to discover and assimilate new perspectives around us, especially the possibilities and potentials in ourselves and in others. We are all of us under the same heavens of infinite wisdom.

I hope you go for more walks. What would it take for you to make this part of your life? That, no matter what, you give yourself the gift of time in nature? Put away your phone, and allow the left-right-left-right cadence of a walk in the woods activate the harmony of your hemispheres.

I am going for one now.

May you all be awed…

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours.

Power and Love,

Chris Wallace
advisor to men

ADVISOR TO MEN: SEMI-PALEO COOKIES

TURN ON OVEN pre-warm oven to 350 degrees
2 cups almond flour (I like the whole nut grind—sometimes I substitute a bit of coconut flour)
½ teaspoon of baking powder
1/3 cup organic dark chocolate chips (omit if desired)
1/3 cup coconut flakes (or substitute with any dried fruit)
1/3 cup crushed fresh walnuts
¼ cup butter
3 tablespoons Maple Syrup
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract.
1-2 eggs
____________
Mix the almond flour and baking powder with a whisk. I add the dry chips, flakes and nuts and mix it all while it’s dry, while others might fold it in as they add the wet ingredients
Mix the butter, vanilla extract, maple syrup and egg(s) together and then add to dry mix
Fold and stir muscularly by hand with stout baking spatula until well mixed.
Place golf ball sized balls of mixture on parchment paper on your baking pan or size as desired.
Flatten with spatula and round edges to hold shape given chips and nuts
Bake for 20 minutes. Cookies don’t expand like regular flour.
Keep a watch after 15 min checking the bottom of one for just the right colour.
You may need to exercise cook’s prerogative and test by nibbling on it.
Place remainder on cooling rack and call the kids to see who gets dibs on which ones…
Watch a family movie with your children or read them a story before bed.
Tell them you love them even more than cookies. Swear it’s true.
No kids? Practice this recipe in case one day…
Or do the same with your missus or partner.
Tell them you love them more than cookies. Swear it’s true.
Enjoy this minor reward guilt-free.
Tell yourself you love you. Swear it’s true.
True and Free
©2021 CHRIS WALLACE advisortomen.com

SOCIAL DISTANCING: lessons from prison

As unprecedented as this pandemic situation is, whether you conceive it as highly intrusive or a mere inconvenience, a re-alignment to daily living which permits you to maintain your sanity is needed.

The goal is to isolate people so that the virus can run its course while we chase it down and remove its ability to replicate itself. At some point, we hope to see the last patient or person affected and see it off forevermore.

We don’t have a choice.

If we do nothing it would mean an overwhelming of our current medical resources with no guarantee the virus wouldn’t just keep mutating. Then, the whole round starts over again. The idea of catching the affliction and becoming immune could be a fleeting strategy.

The ideal solution is to let it die by not hosting it anywhere.

Of course, governments are falling over themselves to enact powers allowing them to get this done. Freedoms will be curtailed, if not voluntarily, soon legislatively.

It is your freedom I’m going to refer to here.

Specifically, you have no doubt by now been told social isolation is required. The Spanish Flu of 1918 (50,000,000 deaths ) and SARS (10% death rate) in the early part of the 2000s are our comparisons.

This time, no one is messing around. You are staying home.

_________________

HOW TO DO TIME

A guy appears before a judge for a minor offense. Judge finds him guilty and sentences him to 30 days in prison. The convict pipes up, “30 days judge? Ha! I can do that standing on my head!” So, the judge calmly replies, “Is that right Mr Defendant? Well here’s 30 days more you can do standing on your feet…”

Case closed. Next!

Every kid going to prison for the first time hears about the dummy who doubled his sentence. It never gets old.

So how do you handle staying indoors or at home for up to the next 8 months or longer?

I’m reminded of the times I was in prison. I know, I know, already I’m referring to having to stay home as prison instead of the modern conditions most of us live in. For sure, the penitentiary or reformatory or county jail is not the same thing.

Regardless, there are many similarities depending on your frame of mind.

I tell you this because several times in my earlier years I was tossed inside. Most often, my life began to unravel immediately. Why wouldn’t it? Fact is my life was hardly “together” in the first place. Usually, I was apprehended and kept in prison on remand until I pled guilty.

The problem with doing time is all the stuff you had going on out there on the street either falls to shit or must be done through intermediaries. That is risky because the more people between you and your “stuff,” the higher likelihood of things going wrong.

Look, plenty of guys have done more time than me. I was lucky. Hell, I am lucky to be alive. But I bet each of them will agree with the things I’m about to tell you.

You might be like the newbie con whose life has imploded and he (or maybe she in your case) is still attached to the life they once lived (as good or as bad as it might have been).

In prison parlance, we call that, “shaking it rough.”

So, in case you are shaking it rough, here are my rules for doing time.

1. Forget about the outside
Nothing torments a new guy in prison more than to find his body is behind bars while his mind is still on the street. The first few months after going in he’s arranging visits and mail and phone calls trying to control the uncontrollable. It’s enough to drive him nuts.

The day I decided to NOT think about any of that was when I lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. I remember that decision like it was yesterday. I was walking through C3 range, it dawned on me and said fuck it… and I let it go.

It wasn’t like now I could enjoy myself. No. Not at all. But the difference was palpable. I probably stood two inches taller. And I laughed a little more.

The infamous ball-busting you see in movies like Goodfellas really happens. I never laughed so hard as I did in prison. At times, I felt a little guilty having so much fun. It’s all in how you look at it. You can laugh like that.

Plus, we have the internet. From home use any number of platforms like Zoom and Skype and WhatsApp and do calls all over the world. All videos and all, mostly free services so  you can ball-bust online as good as the old days. Fughetaboutit.

2. Make your cage a home
In prison, we didn’t have much so I learned to appreciate the smallest thing. Taking the environment where you will spend most of your time and making it work well for you is a critical step. Sure. happiness is a decision, but your environment is a BIG factor.

There’s not much you can do in a regional detention center but once you are sentenced to a prison, you can put some of your stuff in your cell. And you can barter with other guys to enhance your limited ambience. If you must be somewhere, (like a prison cell) and you have access to materials and have a say, why not make things as homey as you can?

Nothing gets wasted. A paperclip or a pin has a value. Take an old cassette player motor, a Bic pen tube, a hemming pin (or sharpened paper clip?), a splinter of wood like an eighth of a Popsicle stick thick and some ink from an art supply kit and a little scotch tape or thread and presto, you’re in the tattoo business. OK, maybe don’t try that one at home.

What could you do to set things up for a long-term stance at home? I bet there are many things. With the right mindset, you can make anything work. The trick is to focus on what you have and not on what’s missing

3. Embrace the suck
Sure, maybe you run a company or a department or some other “important” job which requires your expertise. How will the world ever operate without your wonderfulness? Truth is, it doesn’t matter. If it runs or does not run is no longer the question, at least temporarily.

This is the situation we are in and come hell or high water the powers that be are going to insist everything is shut down. And, there are NO bombs dropping outside. How nice is that?

Just as I couldn’t walk out of the county jail while awaiting sentencing or later, the penitentiary, you will be encouraged to NOT leave home.

By the time I got to the farm camp where I could walk away if I wanted, albeit for an illusory short term freedom while on the run and more time added to my existing sentence once apprehended, I got good at doing my time. See the parallel?

Embrace the suck. Do your time. Otherwise, you will shake it rough. You don’t want that.

4. Routines equal predictability
When you first get to the Big House, you do ten days or so in a newbie range. The only way you can communicate with the guys “in population” (who are there doing time already) is through a window overlooking the yard.

I was a common room man. Guys I knew reserved the job for me right while I was waiting to be transferred in out of the holding range. Once I adjusted (read: said fuck the outside), I took pride and care to set up my rudimentary environment with as much certainty as possible. This despite living with a bunch of killers and other assorted deviants.

This is a saviour… the habits that is.

I followed a daily routine with only slight variations on weekends for a Sunday visit and the odd Saturday movie night in the gym. Otherwise I did almost the same thing every darned day. I was up first and went to get food for the range. I used contraband and influence with the kitchen guys to make sure our range had lots of eggs and milk and other stuff.

While everyone else was at work (making license plates, etc.), I had the freedom (said loosely) to read, write, nap or hit the weights. After lunch every day I ate four pieces of toast with honey with a glass of milk, took a 20-minute nap and headed to lift. Like clockwork. I didn’t even have to think, just do.

Soon, one day blended into the next and I lost track of time. I didn’t check the calendar and just lived moment to moment, putting one foot in front of the other and appreciating only what had to be done next.

Eventually I felt like I was suspended in time, not aging, just… recharging. You are recharging your life.

5. Growing means not dying
You want to learn new stuff whenever you get some down time. Sure, you could take up welding or become a good chef inside. You can do that at home too. Speaking of kitchen crockery, I learned advanced crookery.

This including having an Ace lock gaffe made for me by the guys in shop. It was beneath me to ever use it when I got out… but I had one. Opened any pop machine or laundry room locks at the time.

I made a variety of contacts I could exploit later, dealers, importers, thugs. I learned the dissection of famous crimes from the actual participants and added to my knowledge about everything gangster.

It was decades ago. I’m not that man anymore, not by a long shot.

You will use your time more productively. I have faith in you. What’s something you can do? Learn a language? Write a book? Do your ancestry? That last one will pay dividends for generations. Bada boom!

6. Imagination is your best friend
The thing with not being able to go anywhere is it’s all in your mind. I read. You can read, right? I read James Michener among others, Hawaii, Chesapeake Bay, South Africa and was transported around the world. It was pure escapism. And I read other stuff too. I even read the bible. Where there are books, you can learn.

And I wrote, a lot. I couldn’t write worth a shit, but I had a letter per day going out and a letter per day coming in from my gangster’s moll on the outside — all in pink envelopes doused in perfume. Nothing gets the conversation going like the scent of a woman.

Remember the heroic lessons of psychiatrist Victor Frankl surviving the death camps. It’s almost embarrassing to compare that to this but the point is to honour what he taught us: you decide what meaning to give things. No one gets to take that from you. You are a meaning-maker.

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” You can’t write anything these days without a Friedrich Nietzsche quote so there you are, one of his best.

7. Accepting others as they are
In many ways the “law of the jungle” prevails inside but there is ample opportunity to grow as a person too. Well, maybe “ample” is the wrong word.

What it does is force you to accept others as they are. You know why? Because at that point we are all in this together and no one is going anywhere. Familiar?

The hitman and the bank robber, the crime of passion murderer, the mob guys and the entrepreneurial cocaine cowboys, the dealers and the pimps, the bikers and thieves and the drug addicted, all of them are in the same place, with all their faults… and possibilities.

In such a predicament, it’s a good idea to suspend judgment and look for ways to survive and even support each other regardless of what brought you to where you are. You’ll avoid shaking it rough and do easier time.

8. Authorities are just doing their job
We called them screws. The prison guards unlocking and locking our cell doors or the access doors to various parts of the prison are just human beings like everyone else.

They work for different masters perhaps, the warden, society, a higher morality, their wives and children. But at their core, they are to a man (or woman in some places) just doing a life bit on the installment plan.

That means if you are doing less time (sentence), you have an advantage right? You go home one day.

See what I did there?

Often, we see freedom where there is none, and see a prison where none exists.

9. You can’t sleep away your time
The idea was you were “robbing the man” of his sentence over you the more you slept. This appealed to the immature nihilist in me. “Fuck them.” I thought, “I’ll sleep more than anyone.”

This meant I developed a BIG Valium habit for a few weeks trying to game my sentence. It was bullshit.

I was like a dog chasing its tail. It left me open to attack and caused me more trouble than it was worth. At the crux of all addiction is a quest to narrow focus. Truth is, I can choose my focus without any help.

Lucky. I figured it out fast. Time is time, just do yours.

Also, what if every addiction craving is just the universe demanding you be more powerful? What if not answering that call is a denial of your spirit? What if it’s just a way to stifle the voice for good in you?

Ever hear of a guy who is sentenced to a long term and has an epiphany at some point? Mutha starts to study and gets an education and eventually gets out and TURNS IT ALL AROUND. (I sort of fall under that category).

You know why we like underdogs so much? Because that is human spirit in action. It’s an irresistible force within each of us demanding we overcome. It’s the will to live and live more; it’s the best of us, the best of you.

How else might we answer such a call? Horace Mann said, “Be afraid to die until you have won a victory for mankind.” Do your part… however small.

Look after your sleep and your body.

It’s the Bodymind, not the Mindbody.

Locked in a cell, we’d use whatever is at hand to create our own gym. Heavy books strapped with a towel becomes a dumbbell. A stool and a bunk become a perfect place to do endless dips.

There are countless ways you can innovate to take your environment and turn it into something which will ensure you are tired enough to sleep like a baby soon after lights out. All health is predicated on sleep.

Which reminds me, lights out is always ten o’clock.

Inside or out. Good habits. No excuses.

10. Everybody gets out
In my country, almost every inmate eventually dies or gets out.

Sure, there are hoops to jump through. You might have to appear in front of a parole board to show you have taken an interest in your improvement as a human being. Courses, training, new attitudes. they all count. Outreach to the community is another way.

You could first get escorted passes, then unescorted passes, then maybe live at a halfway house while you find a job. Finally, full parole and a form of freedom.

It’s likely this current set of circumstance evolves in the same way. Expect there will be a staging back into normal life at some point.

That’s not now. Not yet. We’ll let you know. Did I mention there are no bombs dropping outside? Remember that. But you will be ready when the time comes. Stronger, calmer, more confident and assured. And, rested.

In fact, I was talking about this in one of my men’s groups last weekend. One of the fellas is a refuge from the Syrian war and talked about what it was like to be in your home where you normally think you are safe but only, some people are bombed and die there anyway.

We don’t have to worry about that kind of bomb. We must live in our houses and apartments for a few months. When you get out of prison, depending on the length of time you spend inside, things are different, a lot different, or almost incomprehensibly different.

A buddy of mine did 18 years for a crime he didn’t commit. He finally got the conviction overturned and gets out to no business and no wife and his only son had been murdered. He survived, found a strong woman to love and goes to work everyday. He’s the only guy I know in his 60s who is in better shape than me. He went in with no internet and came out to websites and email, and no family.

Trust me, you can do 8 months. You can do it standing on your head.

Things will be different. Nothing stays the same.

But you will be out.

Stay powerful, never give up
cw

Christopher K Wallace (Wally)
Advisor to men, mentor at large
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