We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jonathan Jay Dubois. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jonathan Jay Dubois below.
Jonathan Jay Dubois, so great to have you sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our readers and so let’s jump right into one of our favorite topics – empathy. We think a lack of empathy is at the heart of so many issues the world is struggling with and so our hope is to contribute to an environment that fosters the development of empathy. Along those lines, we’d love to hear your thoughts around where your empathy comes from?
I was always ‘sensitive’. I could sense and even sometimes feel the emotions of those around me. I had trauma, and so I attracted other people with similar trauma. We discussed and were present for each other’s experiences, including their pain. While I think many people have sensitivities, far fewer can hold space for the pain of others. When others cry during their process, we say, “don’t cry.” Being present means allowing the crying, the screaming, and the swearing for everything and not making any of it personal. This is a skill that needs to be developed for real empathy to take place. By genuine empathy, I mean embodied. Anyone can say sympathetic words, but the difference between sympathy and empathy is in the body. Empathy means ‘feeling with’. Most of us want to push the feeling away. For most of my life, I expended enormous amounts of energy and money, pushing feelings away.
I have discovered, though, that the key is in allowing the feelings to be felt in your body and psyche. This enables them to be processed, and they no longer need to determine your reactions to what is going on in your life. This is a game-changer for men! Women have been allowed to feel their feelings except for anger. Anger is the one emotion men have been encouraged to feel. By bringing awareness to our emotional lives, we can hold a presence for the emotional lives of others and bring health and vitality to our relationships.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
Like most of us, I was raised in an environment rich in possibilities for trauma. Divorce, a history of alcoholism on one side of the family, and mental illness on the other. I came into adulthood with complex trauma and multiple unhealthy coping techniques. Addiction. Codependence. They mostly involved putting some mental and emotional distance between me and my trauma. My only education about emotions was “Boys don’t cry,” my father’s distance from emotions like grief, shame, guilt, etc., and my mother’s bouts of severe depression. The latter made me develop an aversion to sadness, grief, shame, and other emotions. My family environment taught me how to use anger for motivation and as a weapon.
So, before trauma healing and shadow work, every ‘difficult’ (read socially unacceptable) emotion I had was channeled directly into anger. Shame into anger, fear into anger, sadness into anger, etc. While I managed to survive and get married, my life was an unhappy struggle. One thing I connected with at a young age was spirituality. At 27, I discovered shamanism and became certified in shamanic healing. Shamanism is a spiritual path where the practitioner can access information, wisdom, and healing through non-ordinary means. We receive guidance from the realm of non-ordinary consciousness by entering into an altered state of consciousness (I access via a drumbeat). Through this path, I knew I was called to be a healer, but my triggers made it difficult for me to actually work with anyone. Though I was precociously social as a young child, I developed an aversion to people by the time I was a teenager. This was worsened by the fact that healing brought people to vulnerable places I had not yet been willing or able to go.
At some point in my 40s, I knew that I couldn’t manage the life I wanted for myself without breaking free from addiction. This was the first step toward healing. Getting sober taught me that my ego, left to its own devices, will destroy me. Sobriety was not enough. I was in the midst of a Ph.D. program and a new father. I needed to unwire some of my triggers. I got therapy. That helped my mind, but the triggers were still in my body. I needed to heal that.
One day, a message from a shamanic vision brought me to a kundalini yoga class. Kundalini Yoga has been a tremendous help in letting the trauma out of my body. It has helped me become aware of and gain mastery over my nervous system and energy body. It is also in my relationship with my kundalini studio, the Awareness Center, where I met Winnie Chan Wang, who, aside from being a fabulous partner to grow with, has also been instrumental to my healing journey. During this phase of my life, I healed significant parts of my trauma through my shamanic work and with the help of others. I also began to answer my call by helping others heal. This has helped me make profound shifts in my own life because many of the lessons that we help others learn are deepening in ourselves. Embodying them.
At this time, I also began to awaken the Divine masculine within me. At a retreat in Spain led by Sofia Sundari, they created a container where all of the men met daily to support each other through honest, vulnerable sharing. This was a revelation to me! I didn’t even know it was possible for men to support each other in this way. Because men were always an unsafe place for me to take my emotions, I had always relied on women to help me process what emotions I couldn’t stuff or distract myself from. There was something that I had craved my entire life without knowing it. Stable emotional support from other men.
I had to have more! So, I created a men’s circle called the Sacred Brotherhood and am now devoted to men’s work and relationship work. Men’s work is relationship work, of course. I work with both women and men on their relationship with themselves, their pasts, their souls, and their partners. One of the things that draws me to work with men is the great need. We live in a society with more mass shootings than any other, where men are 4 times more likely to take their own lives. Due to our lack of skill in releasing the pressure of emotional disturbance, we are more likely to cause damage through a sudden, unconscious explosion. We are also more likely to isolate ourselves and not seek help.
I am dedicated to changing this atmosphere to one where men support other men through intentional gatherings and outlets to vulnerably share with one another.
To support each other. This has the potential to transform American society and lead the world into healing our global wounds, which are the legacy of colonialism, wars, and the destruction of our communities and our environment.
Thank God that at the same time I was working on my nervous system and healing deeper layers of trauma, my partner was writing the definitive book on shadow work: Honoring Darkness: Embrace Shadow Work To Nourish And Grow Your Power
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Honoring-Darkness-Embrace-Shadow-Nourish-ebook/dp/B09VJFLBGR
This was in the early days of our relationship, and being her research and development partner, I was there on the ground floor with her, exploring each of the 10 shadows she discusses in the book as they come up. I then had the privilege to co-teach all three class iterations with her. It allowed me to grow my knowledge of shadow work and gave me plenty of time to walk and have shadow work be a part of my embodiment.
Our shadows are those parts of us that we have difficulty accepting and that we definitely never share with others. We keep them hidden, often even from ourselves, and this makes them build up pressure until they become triggered and come out in unpredictable ways. Introduced first by Carl Jung, shadow work brings these shadows to the surface so that they can be seen and accepted. Once this has been done, these shadows often become our superpowers, the abilities we develop that we can help bring out in others.
What I have discovered is that the men’s work and the shadow work are ideally suited to each other. In a supportive environment with other men, men can share their shadows and, in bringing light to them, can grow beyond the boundaries to which they had previously been confined. In my current practice, men come to me to disclose their limits, allow the emotions and the events by which the emotions were planted, and hold space for these to grow beyond where they had previously limited them.
You can find out more about the Sacred Brotherhood at https://www.agnestreehouse.com.
And more about my work at https://www.spiritualdigger.com and soon-to-be www.shadowworkformen.com
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Three qualities essential to embodying the Divine Masculine:
1. Presence. Deeply listen. Gaze beyond the outer beauty and penetrate “her” soul. Her being whatever is coming up for you: a love, a calling, a work, etc. Hold a space so full of integrity and in holy service. Don’t seek what’s in it for you. Just hold space and bear witness. You will be amazed at the ways life opens up to you.
2. Integrity. Be impeccable with your word. If you say every day, then show up every day. If you say 7 PM, then it’s 6:55. Never fear the truth. It can only set you free. When you hear a truth that makes you feel hurt or triggered, congratulations! You’ve struck gold. Here lies the territory that can free you from your ego’s limitations.
3. When faced with fear, lean in. This is where the good stuff is. This is where you get to truly, deeply understand that you are not your thoughts, your emotions, your body. Be curious about what lies behind the fear; you might be surprised by what is there.
How can you improve these qualities? Show up. Over and over. When it’s hard, show up. When it’s easy, show up. When someone else’s emotions make you uncomfortable, recognize the invitation to face your fear and/or transform your shadow. Our greatness is on the other end of that discomfort.
One of my clients, Jeffrey, was apprehensive before he started. Shadow work is an intimidating prospect. However, he now says that he is able to “reconnect with inner values that [he] had forgotten” and that he feels more confident in his ability to catch himself when he stumbles. By showing up for ourselves and allowing our shadows to be heard, we gain the confidence of knowing that our darkest fears about ourselves can’t hurt us, and we can hold space for our children’s and our partner’s emotions. We become the safe space we’ve always wanted.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
Hmmm…at first, I thought this was a trick question. It’s both. Our strengths show us where we can serve others. If we find it easy to make money, donate. If you can build stuff, then make some things and give them away. We deepen our strengths without even trying much, so our effort is better spent strengthening where we’re weak, especially in our character. I have spent much time pursuing pleasure to avoid pain. This means I may need more time to feel the pain. Someone with constant pain may need to learn how to rest in the midst of it. We are on this earth to learn something and cleanse the muddy waters of our collective social shadows (the things we don’t like to discuss as a society).
I used to be a very angry person. As I mentioned, I converted most of my emotions straight into anger and became a master of that emotion. While I have become more and more peaceful as the layers of trauma have been released, no one in my life describes me as calm. I have come a long way, but I clearly still have work to do. Or rather undo. Before doing shadow work, I saw my shadows everywhere in all of the people around me. Now, I can trust people and get triggered less and less often.
This is why shadow work is worth doing. It may seem intimidating initially, but disarming my triggers and clearing ourselves of anything others can hold power over is beyond value!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://lovect.net/about/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathan.j.dubois/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/welovectc
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@welovectc
- Other: https://www.spiritualdigger.com/
