July 2025 — Holding More

Notes on fatherhood, sex, masculine leadership, and becoming the one who stays.

I’m continuing my monthly updates to share what’s most alive in my world—across creativity, sex, fatherhood, and the path of sacred leadership. Here’s what’s unfolding.

I’m sitting with the question: What’s in the way of giving myself fully in service to life?

In my last men’s group, a brother shared how he’d been riding this steady wave of creative flow—lit up, alive, pouring his energy into the world. As I listened, I felt something stir in me—a yearning in my heart that whispered, I want that. Not just the output or momentum, but the feeling of deep alignment and purpose, the sense of being in service to something greater than myself, and the experience of being moved by life.

That desire hasn’t left. It’s been burning quietly in the background—in my morning tea ceremonies, in the in-between moments—asking me to pay attention. And lately, I’ve been sitting in the inquiry: What’s in the way of giving myself fully in service to life?

The question has echoed through tea ceremonies, summer barbecues, a baby blessing in our backyard. It moved through me as I watched my mom hold Ember during her visit last month with a kind of joy I rarely see elsewhere on her face—a grandmother’s delight that felt like love made visible.

With our nanny on vacation last week, I had more time with Ember and less space and energy for work—and I could feel different parts of me surface.

One part said, “I’m afraid I can’t do it.” There was a tremble in that young voice—a fear that I’d step into something sacred and then freeze. That I’d be asked to carry more than I can hold. Another part didn’t even want to enter the conversation. He was warm, content, curled into the sweetness of fatherhood and home. He loved the simplicity of family life and didn’t want to awaken, not really. He just wanted to stay in what was already beautiful.

And yet, beneath both of these parts, something else is waking up. It feels like reverence and devotion. Like a sacred kind of pressure that lives low in my belly and high in my chest—a pulsing reminder, every time I look at Kiki and Ember’s faces, that life has given me so much. And that some part of me longs to surrender to full-bodied service to something greater. Not out of obligation or ambition, but from the truth that this life is not mine to withhold, that the gifts I’ve received were never meant to stop with me.

I don’t yet know what shape it will take. I’m still sitting in the question. But I feel the soul fire in me that is kneeling before Life and saying: use me. And I’m listening.

I’m meeting parts of myself I’ve never had to meet—through fatherhood.

Over the weekend, Kiki booked a hotel room in Boulder—her first night away from Ember since she was born. Twenty-four hours to rest, to be alone, to sleep. It was something we both knew she needed.

I felt confident and steady taking care of Ember on my own. Everything went fine—she squealed with delight over her morning apple slice and oatmeal, stealing the show as usual with every bite like it was a private movie just for me. And still, something subtle played out beneath the surface—almost too quiet to catch at first. When I defrosted the breast milk, I had a passing thought: I just need to make it until Kiki gets back. When Ember skipped her nap, another whisper: It’s okay, it’s just for one day.

In the moment, I didn’t fully register it. But the next day, something landed.

Kiki has been holding the full field of awareness around Ember’s care—and I’ve been co-holding most of it, but not all. Maybe 90%. And this was the moment life asked me to feel the stretch, to catch the subtle places where I still brace against experience rather than being present with it.

And that stretch—that’s my favorite part of this spiritual journey of fatherhood.

Because what I’m really being asked to do is expand my capacity. To become more aware, more present, and more willing to feel all of it—not just the moments of sweetness, but the subtle sensations underneath. Fatherhood is revealing the edges of my own consciousness, and inviting me to stay.

And the beauty is: I love this chapter of fatherhood.

We’re spending quality time with Ember every day—starting each morning with a tea ceremony as a family, singing with the ukulele, planning meals with her in mind, watching her eyes widen at new textures and tastes. There’s more play, more presence, and more love than I knew my body could hold.

And somehow, alongside all the joy, there’s this deeper current—the slow expansion of my awareness into corners of myself I’ve never touched before. And that? That’s the true gift. That’s what fatherhood is offering me, in this season.

Not just the miracle of raising a child—but the sacredness of becoming the man who can hold everything that’s arising.

I’m reclaiming sex as a sacred practice of truth—and masculine leadership.

I’ve started scheduling tantra dates with Kiki—once a week, on the calendar, when we have childcare coverage. We’ve had two so far.

For a long time, I resisted scheduling sex. I thought it would make things feel mechanical or forced. But in this season of life—especially as parents—putting it on the calendar is one of the most loving things we can do. Not because it guarantees a particular outcome, but because it creates the spaciousness and the conditions for something sacred to emerge.

I used to wait for a window to open—a break in the day when the baby was asleep, a sliver of quiet—and try to slide intimacy into it. But intimacy doesn’t want to be squeezed. It wants to be chosen. It wants to breathe. And if we don’t intentionally make space for intimacy, it just falls by the wayside.

These tantra dates are becoming the natural extension of our sex containers—but with an even deeper sense of ceremony. The essence of tantra for me has always been to return home to ourselves, and these dates are precisely that — a ritual space to return to what is most real between us, a practice to meet each other in truth. Whether what arises is tension, grief, beauty, fatigue, turn-on, or something else entirely, we meet it with presence, breath, and reverence.

It’s also become the place where I practice masculine leadership—and expanding my awareness through sensation. When I set the space with intention, when I root into my own experience, when I choose to stay, I become the one who can hold all of me—and in turn, all of her.

In the past, I struggled to hold this kind of space on my own. Some part of me kept looking to Kiki for a signal that it was safe. I didn’t yet know how to hold the container of my own vulnerability, fear, or desire—so I tried to outsource that safety to her. I kept waiting for her buy-in. But what I’m seeing now is that this very dynamic kept me from being able to lead—not just in our relationship but in life.

It kept me from being the one who could truly hold the space for life to unfold.

I’m re-orienting toward the gap between desire and reality—as the place where something in me is waiting to be met.

There’s a pattern I’ve been tracking lately in my creative process. It begins with desire—an impulse to write, to express, to bring something into form. But instead of clarity, I find a kind of quiet stall. The energy just isn’t there. My thoughts don’t cohere. The idea doesn’t fully take shape.

In the past, I’d default to one of two strategies. Sometimes I’d push—trying to make something happen, trying to will the creative current forward. Other times I’d pivot, deciding the moment wasn’t right and turning toward something else: a walk, a river dip, a jaunt through town. Both strategies have served me. But lately, I’ve started to see them not just as responses, but as ways I’ve been skimming over a deeper layer of experience. I’m starting to wonder if what I’ve been calling “low energy” or “lack of flow” is actually an invitation to meet something in myself I’ve been avoiding.

Most conventional approaches frame this kind of stall as a problem to solve—some version of procrastination, resistance, or misalignment. But what feels more true is that there’s a part of me—often a very young part—that doesn’t yet feel safe to come forward. And when I orient toward the goal, toward the thing I’m supposed to be producing, I bypass that part entirely. Even turning toward something else can become a subtle bypass, if I don’t take the time to pause and feel what’s actually here.

A moment from last month made this unmistakably clear. I had committed to leading a Dharma talk for couples on Sex, Partnership, and Projections in our home—an experience that was part storytelling, part workshop, part ritual to teach some of my recent transmissions. And yet, in the days leading up to it, I could feel the young part of me that would freeze.

I didn’t push through it. I stayed with it. I breathed with it. I let it exist. I invited friends to the talk who could hold that part with loving presence. And in that meeting, the energy I’ve been wanting kept showing up. Not as a result of effort, but as a natural unfolding once the part of me holding the freeze felt seen. The talk came through with ease—not because I got unblocked, but because I felt whole.

That moment changed how I relate to the space between desire and action. I see it as a part of me surfacing to be felt. I’m hypothesizing that with this new frame, I’ll find that the creative energy I was seeking was never gone—it was simply waiting for me to slow down enough to meet myself.

I’m exploring a deeper integration of masculine and feminine in my creative life.

There was a time when I forced myself to show up every day at the desk. No matter how I felt, I would sit down to write—same place, same time, same pressure to produce. It was masculine discipline in its rawest form. And while something did get created, it often felt dry. The writing came from will, not from truth. I was holding the container, but I wasn’t meeting anything real inside it.

Then, as part of going through The Artist’s Way this spring, I let go of the structure entirely. I stopped trying to force the current. I let my feminine lead. I waited for inspiration, wrote when I felt called, trusted the flow. That felt like freedom—for a while. But recently, something in me has gone quiet. I hadn’t published anything in a month. I was waiting for the muse—but I wasn’t showing up for her. And with our beloved nanny transitioning to a professorship, it was easy to let the extra uninspired hours fold into fatherhood.

What I’m exploring now is something new—a third way.

A glimpse of it showed up during a recent tantra date with Kiki. A part of me didn’t want to show up. I felt tired, disconnected from turn-on. But something in me knew—if I entered the space, if I breathed into the discomfort, if I met her and myself with honesty—I would touch something real. And I did. We did.

That’s the shift I’m curious to bring into my creative practice now.

Not showing up with an attachment to produce something. Not waiting until I feel ready. But coming to my creative altar as I would to a lover—with breath, with reverence, with deep listening.

What happens if I treat my creative practice like a tantra date with my inner Creator? Where I let myself settle into deep ritual space to meet some part of myself. Where I allow and don’t force. Where, in the same way I might let go of attachment to sex, I let go of attachment to producing. Where I choose contact over avoidance—but without self-bullying or willful override.

What happens if I expand the field of what I’m creating, and let creation take new forms? Not just writing, but arranging a room, designing a moment, planning a surprise, building an altar of beauty in everyday life.

What happens if creation isn’t something I do—but something I meet? A field I enter when I stop grasping and start feeling.

I’m still in the exploration. But something is slowly revealing itself. A rhythm that doesn’t collapse into discipline or dissolve into flow. A rhythm that lets me show up as my Creator in every moment.