Is your calm, capable and competent masculinity, actually causing you a slow death?

How male conditioning and the weight of holding everything together - your Shiva energy - can cut you off from the wilder feminine energy (the Shakti), that is needed to live in true balance.

I work with men’s bodies for a living. What I encounter, repeatedly, are Shiva-strong men. Conscious, capable, intelligent, often extraordinarily competent in our material world, but almost completely cut off from the energy that makes them feel truly alive.

They have achieved everything they were taught to value as a man, and yet they feel completely lost.

Many carry the quiet sense that they were once more exciting in their youth; more present and more fully themselves. They cannot say when that changed or where that vitality went. But, over time, many have simply stopped expecting it to return, thinking this is just part of growing old.

These men are not broken, nor are they beyond repair. They are simply disconnected from that old feeling they yearn for, often because they decided long ago - sometimes even as boys - that it was safer not to feel.

And, of course, it is.

Yet there is a particular kind of exhaustion that results from that decision, and it isn’t tiredness. It is the weight of being the one who holds everything together, always: the provider, the decision-maker, the one who doesn’t fall apart.

Let me share an eternal story from the beginning of time…

Before creation, Shiva, the Hindu god who creates, protects and transforms the universe. sat alone on Mount Kailash in perfect, unbroken meditation.

He is pure consciousness, aware of everything, moved by nothing. This is his nature. He is the unchanging ground beneath all existence. The still point. And yet, in this stable state nothing is being created, nothing changes. The universe exists as pure potential, as yet unlived.

That is, until Shakti comes along. In Hinduism she is the ‘Universal Power’ that underlies and sustains all existence. She is known as Parvati, daughter of the mountains, the force of nature itself. She looks at Shiva and recognises her counterpart: the consciousness to her energy, the grounded stillness to her unpredictable movement.

She is compelled to reach out to him, because she realises that together their union ignites creation itself.

Shiva sits, resplendent, deep in meditation. Knowing he is a man, above and beyond the world of mere earthly desires. So Parvati does something radical. Rather than perform for him or make herself more appealing, she simply sits beside him and begins her own fierce, disciplined practice.

She cultivates herself so completely, so powerfully, that eventually when Shiva opens his eyes and sees her, he truly sees her - not as merely a distraction from his higher purpose, but as his true equal.

And in that moment, he is undone.

He feels completed in a way he didn’t know was possible. Their union is not just a romance, it is the birth of the universe - the moment Shiva and Shakti meet, all of creation becomes possible.

The story of Shiva and Shakti is a myth that has lasted thousands of years, and like all worthy myths, it is not just a story about gods on a mountain, there is a much deeper message..

It is a metaphorical map of what lives inside you.

Why your Shiva might be lacking some Shakti…

Shiva translates as the part of you that observes, the awareness behind your thoughts - the stillness you access when you need to make a hard decision or stay calm in a crisis. Every man knows this part of himself, or perhaps wishes it showed up more often.

Society holds this up as distinctly, archetypal masculine quality, and so most men have spent their whole lives trying to cultivating it, consciously or not. They are driven, at least in part, by the simple human desire to be loved and admired for becoming what is expected of them.

Shakti then, is the part of you that feels. That heightened energy that runs through the body when you are genuinely moved by beauty, grief or desire. Perhaps by the particular quality of light on a given afternoon that suddenly stops you without knowing why. It is the force that makes you want things, makes you want to create things; that makes you want to reach out and upwards toward life rather than simply endure it.

How alive is that aspect of yourself right now?

Shiva and Shakti live inside all of us, regardless of gender. They are a polarity present in every aspect of the universe. But since it is men that I work with, it is the masculine soul that I want to reach out to in this writing.

Shakti is often assumed to be archetypally feminine. Do not be fooled - she is not the gentle, flowing, goddess-aesthetic creature the wellness industry markets as feminine.

Shakti’s energy moves through thunderstorms and orgasms; she moves through the grief that drops you to your knees, as comfortably as she moves through the creative force that keeps an artist working through the night.

She is the animating current of reality itself; beautiful and grotesque all at once. When this force moves through a man’s body, it does not make him feminine. Instead it makes him more fully, dangerously, and unmistakably, alive.

Most men reading this will recognise Shiva in themselves immediately. The stable, stoic masculinity they have been taught to value. But many have found it more convenient to shut Shakti down. ‘She’ can feel petulant, demanding, fierce, needy and embarrassingly ‘unmanly’.

She is often banished to the back room of consciousness, where her vitality slowly fades, along with the life force of the man who put her there. Our culture has never taught men to value this energy, or to listen to the needs it points to. Suppressing her can make life feel more stable for a while.

But it comes at a cost.

What I see in the men I work with

As I said at the start of this article, my vocation is to work with men and help them find their way back from the slow death of successful conformity. Men who are disconnected from this wild feminine force that completes them.

Beneath their stable and often admired masculinity, can dwell a quiet loneliness that exists even inside their relationships. Sometimes especially inside their relationships. They feel a sense of being deeply unseen in the place where they most want to be valued, and with no roadmap of how to show up differently.

How this manifests for many men is a hunger for touch that has nowhere ‘clean’ to go. It may or may not be primarily sexual, by degree. But at its core is the basic, animal need to be held without having to perform or provide in return.

When can a man receive without the ledger needing to balance, to switch off their thoughts and just… be?

Men often come to me thinking they know what they want: as many erotic, sexy, performative, shallow, sexual experiences as they can get. But they don’t know what they don’t know - they have lost touch with Shakti, their life-force, and the only way they know to feel it again is through using a woman’s body as a surrogate.

The paradox of such experiences, is that they can sometimes reinforce the feelings of being lost, and shame at the man they believe they have become.

When I place my hands on a man's body with genuine, unhurried presence to fully and unconditionally witness ‘what is’ for them, many have no idea what to do. Their nervous system - which has spent decades in output mode - simply doesn’t have the circuitry available for pure receptivity.

They are used to ‘managing’ the experience. They have become condition to their Shiva being in control, and their mind tries hard to stay in charge and delegate to the body as its slave.

But in truth, the power is the other way around.

Given space, Shakti must flow, and her power is great. One of my favourite moments in this work is to see a man realise that he possesses that power still, if only he would allow it to flow.

I Was Once Shakti-strong, too

For men reading this who are thinking: how would a woman know? Let me reassure you, I am not describing this from mere observation. For much of my life, I was also Shiva-strong: directed, capable and effective in the world. I experienced the architecture of a conventional life, with the benchmarks of marriage, children, houses and businesses.

I was Superwoman, able to do anything a man can do, and often better. But somewhere beneath all these roles and the ultra-competence, I was depleting my life-force. By many measures, my life was an excellent life, but I felt like I was sinking, unable to put my finger on exactly why I was unsatisfied.

It was Shakti quietly lurking in the dark, unvisited rooms of my psyche waiting to be acknowledged.

I had known my whole life that it was coming. There were glimpses, moments where I could feel something enormous just beneath the surface, waiting, just out of reach. Like trying to grab fog. And then one day, in a meditation, my heart was activated. The door opened. And Shakti came out - all guns blazing.

What followed was six months of joy so intense it had to be carefully controlled to keep me grounded. It took every bit of the solid Shiva container I had built over decades to hold it safely. This force is called Ananda - pure bliss. It felt like a universe of energy and light expanding relentlessly from every cell of my body, both profoundly ecstatic and excruciating all at once.

This was the first of my initiations. The next initiation was not so pleasant.

Shakti moved through every system causing profound physical disruptions - my body purged decades of stagnation from childhood. Perhaps even from before birth. Sickness, pain and inadequacy challenging everything I thought I was. Navigating that chaos without a conventional map taught me humility and to feel my way through. Shiva came undone, Shakti took the lead, and she remade me in ways more profound and beautiful than I could ever have imagined.

Forged in the fire of countless initiations, I now find myself most often completely in love inside my own body - independent of relationship or experience. This is a feeling available in every moment, to anyone willing to allow it. I cultivate it daily, and it pours from me into everything I touch.

This is why I do tantric work: I know that energy wants to flow; it wants to ignite the same aliveness in anyone able to hold it. I am just a vessel for that.

That is the marriage of Shiva and Shakti meeting inside one body. It’s not just a spiritual concept, it’s a lived, physical, daily reality the body can verify.

How it can work for you

Most people are looking outside themselves for what can only be found inside.

Many men cycle through relationships looking for a woman that makes them feel alive. They have an endless hunger that cannot be filled, because it is not an external deficiency - you can't sustainably take it from someone else.

Shakti wants to rise inside every living thing, but it must be cultivated by one's own attention and practice. It cannot be taken from someone else.

The union people are craving is not primarily with another person, it is within themselves. When that inner marriage happens, when Shiva and Shakti unite inside one body, everything changes. You bring fullness rather than hunger to every encounter; presence rather than need.

The quality of your intimacy, work and relationships shift because you are finally inhabiting yourself. Life is both incredible and difficult at the same time - but it is to be lived in technicolour. This can understandably be unsettling to begin with.

I have observed something that may give some hope, though.

A strong Shiva foundation, the masculine ‘container’, seems to make the Shakti awakening easier, because you have some way of holding the energy as it flows. Without grounding, people can be easily overwhelmed by their own aliveness. So the masculine container, so long your sole prised attribute, isn't the enemy of the feminine current, it's actually what lets her move feely and safely through the world.

How I can help you regain your life force

You cannot transmit what you don't recognise, however. What moves through my body when I work is pure Shakti, grounded in my daily life. Understanding the flow allows me to meet someone who needs that particular frequency. It is as if I am a tuning fork: I sound a note, and the same frequency begins to hum inside the other in response - a harmonious frequency can reorganise a disharmonious one.

When I work with a man through tantric massage, using the tools of touch, sound and breath, I simply introduce him to the current running through every cell of his body that he was previously numb to. Shakti was never absent, she simply had no invitation to exist. She was dormant, suppressed, either consciously or not. I aim to create the conditions for Shakti to flow again

The session is only the beginning

When Shakti moves through a man and his nervous system finally stops managing and starts receiving, his body learns what's possible. There is genuine and palpable excitement found in that. But without a practice to keep that channel open, over time the flow quietly dries up again. Old patterns take over - not because the experience wasn't real, but because nothing was built to sustain it.

That is where the man's own work begins. I can show him what's possible - what he does with it afterward is his journey. It is about breath, awareness and a commitment to tending that small fire in his heart until it grows strong enough to burn on its own. Fifteen or twenty minutes a day of breathwork or embodied practices over a few months, is enough to teach the nervous system a new default.

None of this is mystical. Discipline is required, and that in itself is a reward. This is how the nervous system works: repetition builds circuitry, and new circuitry changes how you move through the world.

An invitation…

If any of this resonates with you, ask yourself one question: when did you last feel genuinely, electrically alive in your own body?

If you had to think about that for longer than was comfortable, that pause is the beginning of a fantastic journey.

Shakti is already in you - ‘she’ has always been there. To fall in love with your full self, Shiva just needs to open his eyes. It's too late to awaken once you’re a corpse. And in the men I work with, it’s shockingly common to behave as if dead while still alive. Don’t be that person - that’s not what life is for. Open your eyes now, take a deep breath and feel the full joy of living.

Reach out if you want help along the way, it is my pleasure to be of service.