Mikaal Bates and I discuss men's work, intimacy, rites of passage, masculinity, initiation, brotherhood, sacred theater, acting, self-discovery, community, purpose, combat sports, nudism, political landscape, and tribal societies.Adam 0:02 I'm here with Michael Bates. He is a men's coach and a coach of of intimacy between men and women. I met him in New York right before the pandemic, literally two weeks before the the first news of it, and I had attended a men's circle he held in Brooklyn, and then it was only years later, three years later, that I did my own initiation into men's work. And now I've been paying a lot more attention to what he's been doing, and he's doing some really interesting things. So thank you for being here, Michael, Mikaal 0:38 it's a pleasure to be here. Adam, thank you for having me. It's good to see you again. Adam 0:43 Yeah, you too. So, like many of us, myself, I moved to New York coming from a jazz performance area. And you, I understand, are coming from an acting background. I'm I'm curious, like, what was your journey to come to New York and in general, how did your acting inform the work that you're doing? Mikaal 1:05 Now, it's a great question. I was actually a jazz saxophone player in college, but, uh Oh, wow. Adam 1:11 Which, which sacks, etc. Nice. I played Alto and Perry Right on man, B Mikaal 1:18 flat to B flat. You know? It's a nice the nice, big gap, yeah, yeah. Man acting, I mean the arts in general, I would say that you know, so much of the work that I do, especially in the in the rites of passage and initiation space, there is a component of sacred theater to it. There's a component of enacting these rituals, the ritual of masculinity, the ritual of manhood, the transformation of going from one state to another and studying acting in New York at the the Esper studio, which is Meisner technique, was a revelation. It's a spiritual, deep spiritual practice to live or do truthfully under imaginary circumstances. And so it was a huge time for me of self self discovery and learning to use my entire body as an instrument. I had been, as I mentioned, a musician, and I've been an athlete, but there was something about getting to know myself and the instrument of the body so deeply that I could be open to any experience and to take on any experience or role, any any of the vast potentiality of what it means to be human and to be a conduit of that. I honestly don't think there's anything I recommend people do more than go to acting school. It's just such an incredible skill and just an incredible way of getting to know yourself. And so I would say, I use, I use skills that I learned in acting school every day, and the work that I do, literally in the one on one coaching work, and also in the the group, the groups as well. Yeah, Adam 2:58 the being open to any experience really stood out at me, because in my own experience of men's work, I realized how much, how kind of myopic my my life was, just I'm only operating from my own perspective. So being in, and I imagine this would be group therapy in general, but being in experiences where I'm I'm seeing, in this case, men coming from all walks of life, experiencing all kinds of different issues, and in a way, holding space for that, being a vessel for that, it makes me less judgmental and less reactive to other people's experiences in general. Mikaal 3:37 Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I mean, once you once you meet the entire retinue of human potential, and I think New York is so great for that, you know, just go and go on the subway in New York and just sit and watch. And the whole human spectrum is just there, just laid out in, in, in every single individual and the uniqueness of the individuals there. So it's a beautiful thing. And one of my favorite things about New York to say the least, Adam 4:04 yeah, so what is men's work? And why does it matter? Mikaal 4:12 That's a great question. Men's work is a term that's become pretty popular in the last, you know, five to 10 years. I mean, it's, it's the process of men working on themselves. It's the process that once happened to us when we were young men, when we were living in intact tribal societies for hundreds of 1000s of years, regardless of where our genetics come from, if you go back far enough we were living as tribal peoples, and there have been extensive studies done on the peoples of Earth. And one of the beautiful, just unifying aspects of this work is that as teenagers, you and I with the rest of the men of our. Tribe, or the boys of our tribe, would have been taken by the men away from our mothers, away from the comforts of the hearth and the warmth of mother's skirt tails. And we would have been taken out, usually into the dark, into the cold, with the men. And we would get to learn the experience of what it means to be men, the ethos of our tribe, the the mythos, the myths, the stories and we would be literally put through a process of becoming men. And one of the big topics that I love to talk about, we have this idea of patriarchy in the modern world as this pejorative thing that you know, men and the shadows of men, what, has become of us, but when I look at it, I actually think it's something called puerarchy. Puerarchy means rule by boys. And what happens, unfortunately when men are not initiated, is our bodies mature and we become adults. We occupy an adult male body, but our psychologies and our emotional bodies don't just naturally make the transition from boyhood to manhood, and we actually need something to help us do that. And that's what these rituals, these rites of passages, are all about. The idea is that men become men, or boys become men, through a cultural process, through an external process of men putting boys through a process, something that they go through, something hard, something difficult, something challenging. There's this idea that the masculine grows through challenge, whereas our sisters, the menstrual cycle comes for them. It's something that happens, whether they like it or not. Their bodies change as as male bodies do too, but our sisters go through that process and become women, and that happens inside of their bodies. So just the way a female body has sex inside of its body, a male body has sex outside of its body, the rituals and rites of passages are similar. The rituals and rites of passage of womanhood tend to happen inside the body. The rituals and rites of passage of manhood tend to happen outside the body. So what the way I look at our culture right now, our culture is struggling because we live in a society where we have the majority of our adult men in adult male bodies that haven't actually gone through any meaningful transition, any initiation or rite of passage into manhood. And the result of that, I think, is, is the culture that we see, where we don't, we don't have a lot of mature masculine models, role models, or people that are, I would say, occupying a frequency of masculinity that is inspiring, that combines, and I know we're going to talk about this a little bit, but combines what I see as these sort of two, two aspects of masculinity, the sort of strong raw, The sort of stereotypical strong gym going, you know, athletic, Warrior, protector type, and then the soft, sensitive, vulnerable, communicative type as well. And how, how we can join those two elements of the male psyche together, in in in individual, mature men. Adam 8:23 Yeah, wow. I love that. Maybe the best description I've ever heard men's work and why it's important. I just anecdote. I maybe a year ago, I put what is men's work into chat GPT, and it, it slapped me on the hand, and said, men's work refers to construction jobs and and heavy, you know, hard labor. And it's, it's a term that is, it stands in opposition to women's work, which is like working in the house, working in the kitchen. And I love that we are. We are owning this phrase. Now, this such a meani… Get full access to Adam Lamb Adventure Club at adamlamb.substack.com/subscribe
