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Men face unprecendented challenges in today’s world – but there is hope.
OM catches up with US yoga teacher and speaker Max Strom about his work
on helping men flow through life with greater ease
B
orn with severe clubbed feet, Max Strom spent much
of the first six years of his life with his feet confined in
plaster casts and braces. Today, he is known for inspiring
and impacting the lives of people from all walks of life,
teaching breathing patterns and personal transformation
worldwide. His TEDx talk, Breathe to Heal, is approaching one million
views on Youtube.
Strom is also a well known yoga teacher and works with the
breath to help others – both men and women – to live better, more
rewarding lives.
His method, Inner Axis, is a system of field-tested techniques that
are known to produce results, impacting the internal and emotional
aspects of our life, as well as physical healing.
A global speaker and author, he acts as a bridge to connect
people with their ‘inner axis’ and thereby build better relationships
with others.
Strom was in London recently to conduct a series of workshops
under the banner, ‘The Calibrated Man’. The goal was to share
some of this deep yoga and healing wisdom with the city’s men
facing up to the stresses of modern life. OM caught up with him to
find out more.OM: The Calibrated Man Workshop: what is it and why now?
MS: Since I have been teaching yoga, our society has gone through
changes – specifically the exponential growth in digital technology
that is affecting every facet of our lives. One of the facets that
seems to be the most harmful is social media. The term ‘social
comparison’ sites is a more apt description!
Through teaching breathing for so many years and watching
how it affects people in my workshops, I noticed that the more we
practice it on a regular basis, the more the unseen armour that we
wear fell away. This is the armour that we wear to cover up our past
heartbreaks or shame. By practicing my breathing techniques, the
armour starts to come off and these old emotions and memories
are released and come to the surface. They are not just re-lived and
go back down again, they are reconciled and are then gone. People
radically change from being a depressed person to being much more
light-hearted and accessible. Northern European societies, like the
UK, train people to suppress all of our emotions and shut down.
When I lecture about this, I notice people respond quite
emotionally, relating to what I am saying. And the people who
respond the most are men. So whether they are business executives,
CEOs or family men, I started to talk about the way we learn to
express our emotions whether it was through mobbing in the school
yard or through the fists of others teaching us not to cry. Men get
very emotional when they hear this spoken. I can see that I am
striking a nerve so I wanted to run a workshop that would allow us to
go into this deeper.
It hurts anyone of any gender to suppress your emotions, but
there is a double-dose that happens to men – not only is it going to
damage you emotionally, but you are also going to be seen by your
peers as less of a valid man if you show that you care about things,
that you are sensitive. You don’t want to feel shamed by your friends
if you admit to liking the smell of flowers, the sight of a sunset
or look after a cat or dog in your spare time. Men are allowed to
express themselves almost exclusively through sport. In fact, if you
watch men at a football match you’ll see them become animated,expressing anger, rage, joy, euphoria if their team is winning, or
losing. They are constantly hugging each other. The rest of the day
they don’t do that. They don’t feel allowed.
I’m not saying that it’s never a good idea to suppress our emotions.
In a war, or an emergency, it is very useful to do this to get ourselves
out of dangerous or threatening situations. That’s when we need to do
it. But in normal life, in peacetime, it’s extremely damaging to not allow
ourselves to express and feel the human experience.OM: Why do men need yoga?
MS: It is my experience that women have more of a proclivity toward
healing, spirituality, and yoga due to their more nurturing and
emotionally aware nature and social training. Women are permitted
by society to express their vulnerable feelings, to cry, to be both
volatile and sensitive. Men, on the other hand, generally learn early
on to use their bodies as a competitive vehicle, something to control
and dominate. Strong, hard, fast. Feelings of vulnerability, fear,
and pain are to be denied and suppressed. Men’s health is often
measured by their physical fitness, but men’s mental and emotional
wellbeing is just as important. Let’s not ignore that 75% of suicides
are men.OM: Any wisdom to pass on to men who are struggling right
now with the modern world?
MS: Is there more to our life besides sports, sex, and alcohol? I find
that men are less likely than women to examine their emotional lives
or to try yoga, and yet we are in the greatest need of it. Most men
first come to yoga through a girlfriend or significant other, especially
early on in the relationship.
Yoga terrifies men because the degree that we need to journey
through a land of unfelt and even undiscovered emotions is very
daunting, to say the least. Most men are deeply invested in not
showing their vulnerability, their grief, fear, loneliness, love, and
shame. We have an immense commitment in living an illusion of
being Iron Men. Why? Because men have been trained thoroughly by
our society to not show emotions, which we have been taught are
signs of weakness. We were taught that to show you care, to show
you are in pain, and to show grief are all taboo. The social training,
put simply, is “Win or die, and never let anyone see you cry.” In
other words, through training by society, as a gender, men become
mistrusting, cut off from our feelings, and even embarrassed by our
more sensitive emotions. Even if your parents were supportive. Think
back to grammar school: If a boy was being ridiculed and shamed
by others and if his eyes brimmed with tears, he would be taunted
by other boys for being a “girl.” We starve emotionally because we
do not know how to share our feelings with others in order to feel
understood and bond in friendship as women do with one another.
When misfortune strikes, women console one another, grieve
together, cry together. Men on the other hand, will sit alone and
try not to cry — and he will hate himself for even wanting to. Or he
will silently go drown his sorrows at a pub. Men are taught to suck
it up. Well, when you suck it up, where does your pain go? It stays
in your body. To empower our relationships, especially our intimate
relationships, we need to disarm ourselves. Weapons and armour
empower us only for war; they do not empower us to be good
fathers, husbands, or friends. We need to stop posturing around in
our armour during peacetime. >>