Until we have met the monsters in ourselves, we keep trying to slay them in the outer world. And we find that we cannot. For all darkness in the world stems from darkness in the heart. And it is there that we must do our work.

~ Marianne Williamson

I am writing this firstly for my much younger self, even though I know much of what I want to say here would not have been received by him. Secondly, I am writing this for all my brothers who are still looking for answers and solutions out in the world, and I’m hoping some of what I’m trying to say will stick. And lastly, even though I am mainly addressing a specific subsection of the male human population, most of the mechanisms and concepts I discuss speak to the deeper human experience, so I hope you will find some value in these ideas, whoever you are. This is going to be a long one, so cozy up and let’s go.

The Girl Shaped Whatnow?

Let’s start with a definition of what this term means to me. The hole I’m talking about is the seemingly uncomfortable and inescapable feeling of emptiness we feel at the center of our physical being. I say ‘we’ because this is such a core aspect of the human experience, that it often gets used to define what it means to be human. If I were to ask you where you feel this hole, you will most likely point at the center of your body, somewhere between your sternum and your pubic bone. We all inherit this feeling of emptiness through growing up among people who suffer from the same affliction. This hole is passed on from generation to generation, but how it expresses itself in any given person is a very individual affair. For some, the hole takes the shape of money, power, attention, love, food, drugs, all the way to the most extreme excess and deviance. For many men, however, this hole simply takes the shape of a girl. These men is who I am speaking to now.

The shape of the hole is simply a metaphor for the belief that some specific puzzle piece exists, out there in the world, which will magically fill up this hole in us, and relieve us from these dreaded, ever-present feelings of emptiness, numbness, sadness, fear and general confusion. If you consider the universal nature of this predicament and contemplate the large number of men who are convinced that only a certain woman can be the puzzle piece that will solve their life, some aspects of the state of the world we currently live in should start to come into focus a little more. In a painful way. So let me dump a few theories on you on why I believe this specific hole shape is so prevalent on our planet right now. As usual, I’ll have to start with childhood and the school system. In my understanding, there are three main elements that create the illusion of the girl shaped hole.

The first one is game playing. Human beings, like many mammals, love playing games. It’s one of their preferred ways of learning new skills. Unfortunately, this impulse latches on to the social games that are played by the adults in a child’s social sphere. These games are one of the main ways we inherit humanity’s ancestral dysfunctions. Especially in the preverbal stages of development, a human child learns habits that keep it emotionally safe. These habits follow the rules of the games that are played in its extended family. Do this and you’ll get a reward. Don’t do this or you’ll be punished. A child lives in a very small world and has no notion of personal power, so their sense of reality is governed by these rules. If this sounds a bit too dry and abstract, here’s two words for you that are very relevant in this context : Mommy pleasing. (Just so you get to read these words if they are more relevant to you : Daddy pleasing.)

Side note numero uno : Becoming aware that, on a deeply unconscious level, the game of Mommy pleasing is still very much alive in you is especially relevant and necessary if you are a man who has a girl shaped hole in his being. This game is the root cause of why your hole is shaped like a girl. The missing puzzle piece you feel you are so desperately looking for will seem to be held hostage by just about any woman you notice the slightest bit of attraction to. This is because you were born from woman, and nurtured by woman.

Your first connection to another human being was with woman, and this happened at your most receptive and non-mental state. This is not an invitation to cast blame, neither on mother nor on woman. This is an invitation to take personal responsibility for your emotional relationship with woman. To explore and become aware of how you relate to the feminine internally. This is how and where you start claiming your sovereignty as a man.

The second one brings us to the school system. By the time a child is locked up in this system, most of the preverbal game rules have been internalized and live on in a very unconsciously embodied way. Now it is time for reality to expand, for the game board to grow bigger, and for a shitload of new rules, many of which contradict the ones our body has absorbed so far. One of the more important ones, and one which rarely gets spoken of, is this : if you want to do well in school, do as the girls do. Girls are, by nature as well as culturally, encouraged to be meek. They play well together, they behave in class, do their homework, are much less violence-prone and don’t break shit all the time.

This is of course a grand generalization. Its intention is not to define “girls” but to illustrate the ideal that is so often imposed on boys in the school system, and often in the family as well. This ideal goes very much against the very natural rambunctious tendencies of young boys, and that is its whole reason for existence. Boys being boys is not compatible with the demands of forcing an education onto young children. A great deal of self-restriction is required from them. And obviously, none of this happens consciously – it’s just “the way things are.” But these ways are deeply traumatic, and this inner confusion and energetic conflict is also lodged into the young boy’s body. This now becomes his habitual way of trying to socially and emotionally survive in this new, expanded reality.

The third and most insidious cause of the girl shaped hole is the lack of guidance a boy receives, as he becomes sexual. Once a boy hits puberty and his hormones start to shape his body as well as his reactions to his world – inner and outer – he will intuitively seek out guidance. In a tribal context, there were always older men outside the family who would naturally step into this role. Even up until the industrial revolution, a boy would have access to this mentorship in his extended family, his village, his neighborhood.

This hasn’t been the case for a long time now, and for decades, pubescent boys generally only find guidance among their peers. Looking at the first two elements, having highly repressed and confused teenage boys look to each other for how to live life is a clear recipe for personal as well as societal dysfunction. Again, none of this happens consciously – it’s just “the way things are.” And what do these boys teach each other? More emotional repression and resistance, more living life posing, more unhealthy ways to express anger, grief and of course – love.

How The Hole Works

This boy is now twenty years or older. He is unknowingly carrying in his body two decades of habitual constriction and repression of his inner truths. Since this is the way things are, he is living in a world where this way of being is accepted as normal. In certain contexts it is even encouraged. The rules that applied in the game of school often also apply to the game of work and friendship. He might even become mildly successful, both professionally and socially. But underneath, there will always be this nagging feeling that’s following him around, this itch that is begging to be scratched, the hole that is dying to be filled. And that hole is shaped like a girl.

Another reason this hole is shaped like a girl is that everything and everyone in his life has taught him how to repress and hide the parts of him – even from himself – that other people can actually relate, connect or be attracted to. He has skillfully disconnected himself from his own boyish essence and unknowingly walks through life pretending to a well-behaved girl. This unconscious charade makes it very difficult for another person to connect to him as a human being. Especially when that other person amplifies the urges in him that he spent a lifetime learning to push down. When he feels the deep longing to connect with this other person, physically, mentally, emotionally, sexually. The raging fires of inner conflict between these strong urges and the enforced safety of self-repression can easily grow out of control, and this is what he brings into his attempts at connecting to the person he feels attracted to. If he even gets that far. None of the old rules apply, nothing seems to work, and “she” always seems to be out of reach. This is why the hole is shaped like a girl.

Side note numero deux : it’s an almost magical law of life that a person will always be attracted to its reciprocal. Because our boy is so disconnected from his essence, and cannot share himself with another human being, he will find himself attracted to human beings who are themselves afraid of truly connecting – either with themselves or with another. It doesn’t take much effort to see how this applies to many of the relationships you have experienced in your life : your own, your friends’, your parents’ and most of the popular portrayals of relationship in movies, tv, music, etc. But don’t despair – even though this way of relating is considered normal, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any better, healthier ways available to you.

So there he is – feeling empty, alone and confused. But also – horny, infatuated and enamored by beauty, fundamentally drawn to it. But most of all he feels frustrated, because he was made to believe that every problem has a solution. And he can’t seem to solve this problem, no matter what he tries. And the worst that can happen to him, which is also the biggest irony, is that he finds himself a girl he thinks he likes, who thinks she likes him back – most likely for her own wrong reasons. (See side note numero uno, in case you already forgot.) For a while he feels on top of the world – free at last! – but sooner or later the hole reappears in his consciousness. Because even though in his mind his problem is now solved – it should be solved! – it is only an illusory distraction from his inner reality. She really is nothing more than a distraction from his own habitual self-dismissal. And using this as the basis for relating to another human being is not a sustainable situation, and sooner or later the whole thing explodes.

Exploding relationships or not, he will always come back to this unnatural homeostasis. Back to living with a girl shaped hole, right in the center of his being. He will also persist in the belief that there is a solution to his problem. A solution to women, to relationship, to attraction. And so he will continue to use the same rules he learned as a child to solve this hole in his being. He will learn new tricks, buy new behaviors, put on new masks and slap on new layers of pretending. Which inevitably will make things worse, even though his experience might tell him otherwise. If he finds the right tricks and puts on the appropriate masks he will find a way to appease his hole as well as keep the girl happy – or so it seems – and become even more unconscious of why he’s even doing the whole thing in the first place. Many life-long marriages throughout human history have been just this – two people, allowing themselves to pretend to each other just enough to stay together, so they wouldn’t have to feel the hole in their soul. That’s probably the scariest thought I’ve ever had.

The main mover in this scenario is that he’s been taught that understanding will solve any problem. Actually, the opposite is true : putting trust in understanding itself is not only the cause of the problem, it’s also what keeps it in place. Generally speaking, the thinking mind impedes or even prevents connection. Believing it can create or sustain connection is deeply delusional. But again – this is considered normal. The thinking mind only deals with the outside world in abstractions, and trying to connect to another human being through abstracting them will inevitably push them away, which will deepen the hole further, which will illicit a stronger pushing away of feeling, and round and round our boy goes, deeper and deeper into his own frustration, loneliness, numbness and confusion. Most men live most of their lives in this state of being, and many take it with them to their grave.

The Four Illusions

These are the four illusions most human beings live, and have lived, their lives by. This is especially true for the men I am speaking to here. But these three are so prevalent and universal that I’m sure anyone will relate. Everyone believes in them and lives their life by them to some degree, and it’s an unwritten rule of life not to question them.

The first illusion I will call Seduction, because it is fitting in this context. More accurate would be to call it manipulation, but I want to narrow it down to this specific flavor of manipulating others. As men, as a lesson handed down from a dark and distant past, we are taught that it is normal to expect a woman to be receptive to our every whim. It’s not a great intellectual feat to see the link between this ancestral sense of entitlement and being raised a momma’s boy. But it’s much easier to see the mechanism behind the momma’s boy in someone else, than it is to find in ourselves this vague background belief that women owe us love just because we are a man. It’s a tricky thing to become aware of, but once you do you will see it everywhere, most of all in yourself. In a broader sense, we all have our own version of this background belief – somehow, somewhere we are convinced the world owes us something that will make us feel whole and loved, and we rarely question the feeling of disappointment and frustration we feel when it – inevitably and without fail – doesn’t deliver.

Short but important side note for men who are lost in the illusion of Seduction – your role is not to initiate the Seduction, as the popularized belief goes, but to respond to her invitation. This is how nature intended human partner connection to form. She invites, he steps up. Believing the opposite is true and the “masculine thing to do” is doing a disservice to yourself and to her. Acting on this false belief creates a lot of unnecessary tension and conflict in your and her body, which will govern the initial interaction. This is the real cause and nature of the so-called “approach anxiety.”

The second illusion I will call Love. Love is a difficult word, because it can mean several things to one person, so when two people come together to talk about Love, confusion and frustration is inevitable. The reason it means so many things is why I call it an illusion – when Love is based on the assumption that it is something that other people have to give to you, it becomes transactional, and just like money it can come to serve many different purposes. Just like in Seduction, there is a vague entitlement wrapped around this word. I deserve Love, I need Love, give me Love, and the worst one of all – but I Love you! The keyword here is vague. The word Love is used when the words that are actually applicable in most situations are approval seeking, proof of worthiness, delusion, infatuation, all of which come down to the same need : solve my hole! This illusion, just like the first, is a lesson that comes to us, handed down from parent to child, throughout human history, from a dark yet simpler time. Wanting to be loved as a human child is a powerful survival strategy. Not just emotionally but physically as well, considering the sometimes ruthlessness of the natural world we once called our home.

The third illusion I will call Loneliness. Yes, I’m going to shit on Loneliness too. The explanation for this one is in line with the previous two illusions : Loneliness is just another form of emotional entitlement. We collectively believe that it’s normal and natural to want and expect another person to solve our inner emptiness. We comfort people when they express loneliness, either directly or indirectly. There, there. You’re not alone. But loneliness has nothing to do with being alone, and everything to do with the refusal to be alone with ourselves, to look into the deep, dark hole in our soul and sit through the long, painful ride. Which is no surprise – a human being rarely comes across this sound advice in their lifetime. The opposite is however so prevalent it’s sickening – once you see it. This ancestral lesson that has been handed down is a coin with two sides : your inner emptiness needs an external solution, and don’t you even dare question this belief or you’ll tamper with the fabric of reality itself!

The fourth illusion I will call Sex. What people understand when they hear or speak about Sex is a big tangled mess of confusion. When you mix the natural, mammalian instinct for procreation, the natural, human desire for connection and pleasure, the divine healing force that is unleashed during the sexual exchange of energies, and the very unnatural compulsion to solve your emotional disconnect through external means, you get a very nasty beast. Here again there is a strong element of entitlement, usually of the more mutual variety : the people involved expect some level of emotional soothing or distraction from each other as the real but unspoken payoff from the physical act of Sex.

The common thread here should be fairly obvious : completely unconscious and unquestioned expectations, which are nothing more than ancient habits that were deeply ingrained in us, usually before our capacity for language became online. To stress this point : the unconscious nature of these illusions makes that they run your life, you think their repercussions are normal and inevitable, you see proof for their normalcy everywhere, and are always discouraged to question their real meaning, or your own true internal motivations.

And to counter that with some good news : manipulation is unnecessary and very counter-productive, love is always, always accessible to you, learning to enjoy solitude grants you superpowers and sex can be the most beautiful gift you can give another person – if you know how.

Diving In

The only reason the hole in your being exists is because, as a human being, you are taught that the life that happens outside of you is more important than the life that happens inside of you. The inside needs to be subservient to the outside. This also makes the solution very clear and singular : you need to turn this dynamic around. This is the current arena of conscious human evolution – to become aware of, and then correct, this one mistake in direction, which has been handed down, all throughout human existence, and now lives in you. As I wrote earlier, the solution is to look and dive into the hole in your soul. It makes for a very elegant and almost simplistic sentence, and nothing else is actually required to save yourself from the pain of your never-ending emptiness, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

In my previous three-part post on embodiment, I already gave you my view on how and why embodiment does what it does, so I will just speak to the healing it can bring to the man with a girl-shaped hole in his being. When you take the fire of the urge to figure out women and love, the urge to solve the problem of the girl-shaped hole, and use it instead to master the art of feeling, you will slowly find yourself en route to becoming deeply human. As with all things embodiment, this may sound strange – until you experience it for yourself. It is very possible to use the power of frustration and pent up anger, and direct that energy in the other direction, and use it to propel you on an inner quest that will bring you all the riches you have been seeking outside of yourself, and possibly even more than you can fathom right now. Diving into the hole means learning to feel. You will need the right tools and knowledge to navigate this journey, but also this crucial understanding : the mastery of the art of feeling will not solve the hole in your being, whatever shape is has taken for you. At least not how you always imagined it would be solved.

Having spent so much time living your life trying to fix this seeming problem, you now have a large collection of parasitic visions and dreams of what will bring you salvation, of what your life will look like “once this thing is dealt with”. If your hole is girl-shaped, you have a whole filing cabinet full of images and movie scenes of what she will look/feel/smell/sound/taste like. (#LittleMaffia) But becoming a master at feeling will extend to all areas of your life, and your entire world will expand. Life will become richer in every way. You will slowly cleanse and uncover your true desires, which do not depend on a repository of preferred solutions to an illusory problem. And as stated in part three of my previous post, you will learn what effortless living is. Which brings me to this powerful – and very relevant – truth of life :

Effort is the enemy of connection.

The hole in your being has always seemed to demand effort of you, to arrange and manipulate your outer circumstances, so you didn’t have to feel what you feel. It’s this addiction to effort that destroys any real chance for true connection with another human being. Being effortlessly human, on the other hand, spontaneously provides the space, the opening, for another human being to step into. This urge for effort is just another side of the hole, and diving into the hole will slowly kill this urge. In the hole you will encounter the real source of all the things humans have been trying to attain and emulate all throughout history. And as you make that place your new home, slowly you will experience your own inner fullness. This fullness is lying dormant behind your emptiness. Somewhere inside there’s a part of you that knows this to be true.

Giving vs Expecting

From this place of fullness, your primary desire in connection will be to share your innate gifts. This is a very different way of living and relating than what we, as humans, have been taught to be the reality of the human experience. Diving into the hole not only means to face yourself, it also means to face the ancestral human illusions – see above – and their expectations that are still alive and ruling the earth today. It is not a small task, and will require great commitment and consistency of you. It will also demand that you let yourself be deeply touched by life.The hole in your being might be a painful companion, but it also provides you with a very safe and difficult to penetrate shield.

Before we wrap things up, let’s go back to our proverbial boy, to see how he is doing. When his life was ruled by his girl-shaped hole, even though he was convinced a girl would fix his problem, he was also so closed off from himself, that no other person would ever be able to truly touch him. Now he has learned that opening up is not like flipping a switch. It requires consistent practice to learn how to feel, to explore the real nature of his being, and to go against everything that prevented him from doing so. His focus is now on himself, because he knows his ignorance of his internal conflict is what’s keeping him from actually living a life. He now has the knowledge, tools and motivation to explore – and deeply embrace – his dysfunctions as well as his gifts. Give him time – he will be all right. Yes, I’m obviously talking about myself.

Truly and honestly exploring and understanding your inner world is the highest form of responsibility you can take as a human being. In an absolute sense, it’s even the only form of responsibility, since self knowledge is the only thing you have actual access to in life. Taking this responsibility for yourself will unleash a force of nature that will extend outward, eventually far beyond the limits of your physical body. Once you take responsibility and ownership of your own emotional safety (instead of unconsciously relying on the old, shapeless, internalized ghosts of mommy/daddy/whatever) this safety will become the most beautiful gift you can share with the world. Almost every human being you will meet in your life will have some kind of hole in their being. Meeting you will give them at least a reason to entertain the possibility of a different way of life.

Regardless of which shape your particular hole has taken, and regardless of your gender – emotional responsibility is the true masculine gift. It is from this place that you become the spiritual Pater Familias, the center of community, the loving sun around which others can orbit – safely.

But all this starts with you, with diving within your hole, with exploring and embracing what you find there, and eventually – to truly like yourself as you are.