Welcome to the 32nd episode of Warrior Week, Parables from the Pit. The show has a new format where every week the conversations will be driven by three lead trainers inside the Warrior Movement: Sam Falsafi, Jesse Ewell, and Kevin Voisin, who combined have led and trained thousands of men inside the experience known as the Warrior’s Way. Each week they will have a real and raw conversation about a specific aspect of the pain of the modern man. Today is a powerful conversation about the overall pain of all men, which is feeling alone and lonely.

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Parable #1: Pain that Men Resist

• Coach Jesse: The pain the men are resisting that comes up consistently is the pain from a father. It comes down to the pain we experienced as a child that we carried for many years, almost like a weight on our back that we never let go of, and never learned how to work past it.
• Coach Kevin: The one pain I see across the board is that men are unable to endure the pain of vulnerability. Even if that feeling is having love for their child, they have a hard time expressing it because they’ve been taught that those feelings belong in the realm of women and not real men.

QUESTION  What is the pain that you are resisting the most? Parable #2: Operating Alone

• Coach Sam: The current path of a man inside his pain is this idea of being alone – not socially alone, but operating alone. It ties back to no instructions from dad, and that emotions are not part of the playlist.
• Coach Jesse: Feeling alone is disconnection. When you’re alone, you disconnect from people and from the things in your life, and that is what gives you the feeling of being alone.

QUESTION    What pattern have you noticed about yourself when you begin feeling all alone? Parable #3: False Feeling of Significance

• Coach Kevin: By believing I’m alone, my ego fucks me up and says no one has ever felt this pain before; that no one can understand. We give ourselves this false feeling of significance that somehow in the history of the universe, no one has ever felt this before.
• We had a miscarriage in our marriage, which was a painful loss. When I started opening up and sharing it with people, I was so amazed. It seemed like everyone had a miscarriage story. I wasn’t alone at all.

QUESTION   What is something you have opened up about recently from a place of vulnerability? How did you feel afterward? Parable #4: Backpack Full of Pain

• Coach Sam: In certain areas when I feel that things are not going well, I have a tendency to get a backpack and put all of my pain inside of it and carry it alone. I have these old tendencies that have a major impact on me the minute I start feeling alone.
• Coach Jesse: A pattern we have as men is this feeling of alone that takes us back to the place where we first began feeling it, between the ages of seven and ten. We try to hide to make ourselves feel better about being alone.

QUESTION   What’s coming up for you in this part of the conversation?

 

Parable #5: Share Your Pain

• Coach Jesse: When I feel alone, I close off everyone around me. It’s me not letting anybody in. I feel I’m not vulnerable enough to expose myself, therefore I’m all alone in my own Pit that I created because I wouldn’t let anybody else in.
• Coach Kevin: There is no reality in the idea that you’re alone. My father used to tell me: If God wanted you to do everything by yourself, he would have put you on your own little planet, and you could just do it all. Instead, he put you here with 7 billion other people.

QUESTION   What is one thing you need to share with someone this week?

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Question:

“Where in your life are you feeling the most disconnected? As you feel that pain, what the fuck are you going to do about it? Are you going to give yourself permission to have a conversation?”

Parables from the Pit:

“The source of the pain of being alone is disconnection. We experience this trauma of disconnection many times and each time we do, we find ourselves attached to different things – any type of attachment that takes away the pain.”

— Coach Sam Falsafi

“The pain of feeling alone comes from the pain of not communicating that you’re experiencing feeling alone. Communication is the gateway to not feeling alone.”

–Coach Jesse Ewell

“Most men are sedating away from any emotion. They don’t want to feel anything. Even the positive emotions scare the fuck out of them because there’s been this conditioning that men don’t feel, and that to open up and be vulnerable is a weakness.”

–Coach Kevin Voisin