Blog Full - Maurice Leavitt | Personal Essays, Travel Writing & Reflections

29 Dec 2025

Men’s Loneliness & Brotherhood: The Return to Ourselves

by Maurice | posted in: Compassion, Compassionate Conversation, Masculinity, Men's Work, Personal Growth, Relationship, Vulnerability | 0

I spent almost 20 years participating in men’s circles at the Men’s Resource Center of Maine. One group as a member and another as the co-facilitator. Once a week, in the same room, with the same men.

Week after week, I watched something extraordinary unfold. Men carrying decades of silence, trauma, shame, and loneliness slowly learned how to be courageously vulnerable. Speaking honestly and listening with empathy. I watched men practice the art of compassionate conversation.

After two decades of listening, witnessing, facilitating, and being changed by this work, I can say this with absolute clarity:
Men need other men in a way our culture has never allowed us to admit.
Most of us are starving for real connection.
Not networking.
Not locker-room banter.
Not competitive based camaraderie.
Real Honest Connection

But most men don’t get that because it was never modeled to us growing up.

The Cost of Our Current Masculinity

Men's Loneliness & Brotherhood: The Return to Ourselves

Men’s work, at its core, is any intentional practice where men grow, heal, unlearn patriarchal conditioning, and move toward a more grounded, gentle, emotionally responsible masculinity. We don’t need more “tough guys.” We need emotionally honest, compassionate men who can be role models for other men and boys. And the truth is we don’t have nearly enough of them.

The consequences are everywhere. The current script on masculinity is collapsing under its own weight. Men are hurting. Boys are drifting. Families are strained. Communities feel the absence of emotionally attuned men.

Many think feminism is a quest to persecute men, but feminism is a movement to liberate all people from being victimized by the system of patriarchy. Patriarchy teaches dominance instead of intimacy, suppression instead of expression, isolation instead of connection. And the absence of healthy male role models — in our homes, schools, and communities — boys grow up unprepared for the emotional and relational demands of adulthood.

Here’s the quiet crisis beneath the headlines:

Over 80% of single-parent homes are led by women, and boys raised in these homes are twice as likely to be incarcerated as girls.
Only 25% of therapists and teachers are men. Boys rarely see emotionally capable men in caregiving or educational roles. Women make up 75% of recent psychology doctorates.
70 – 80% of primary school teachers are women. This isn’t wrong — but it means boys rarely encounter adult men in developmental spaces.
Boys are twice as likely to be suspended as girls — five times as likely if they are Black.
Young men are struggling academically: men make up only 40% of current college enrollments.
About 3% of American men will experience a sexual assault or attempt — a number deeply underreported due to shame, stigma, and silence.
Men commit 75% of all violent crime in the US and 99% of sexual assaults. — against both women and men.
25% of American women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime, almost always at the hands of a man.
Men make up nearly 80% of all completed suicides in the US,. Globally, men die by suicide twice as often as women.
And in the prison system? 93% of incarcerated Americans are men, despite being less than half the population.

These numbers and documentations aren’t random. They’re a result of a masculinity model that needs some drastic changes. The old model trains men to compete and disconnect from their hearts and everyone around them. We’ve been taught to suppress our emotions, be self-sufficient, hardened, unexpressed, and unreachable.

And the cost is devastating.

Men aren’t “the problem.”
Our training is the problem.
The loneliness is the problem.
The lack of brotherhood, elders, mentors, accountability, emotional education — is the main problem.

And that is exactly why men’s work matters.

The Silent Epidemic: Men and Isolation

Young men are now one of the loneliest demographics on the planet. Not because they don’t want intimacy, but because we were never taught how to build it—or even allowed to want it.

Right from childhood, boys are trained away from closeness:
“Big boys don’t cry.” –
“Be a man.”
“Handle it.”
“Don’t be soft.”
“Stop acting like a girl.”
“Shake it off.”
“You can’t depend on anyone.”

We learn from an early age that emotional expression is weakness, and weakness is dangerous. Therefore, men are less likely to seek or receive emotional support and hide their pain behind silence, addiction or anger. The consequences mean higher suicide rates and substance abuse issues.

Layered beneath all this is an unspoken fear driving the distance between men: homophobia. Not sexuality or sexual orientation — but the continuous monitoring of male intimacy. The fear of getting too close, being judged, or shamed for tenderness.

So men keep emotional distance, not because they want to, but because they’re scared of being misinterpreted. And in that distance, loneliness and isolation grows.

As we age, men’s social circles shrink. Work and family responsibilities dominate. Friendships fade. Couples isolate. Responsibilities expand. Career and economic stresses increase. Pain gets pushed underground because there’s nowhere to put it, no one to talk to.

Far too often, many men live without a single friend or having other men to be unguarded with to share our truth. No shoulder to cry on. No one to reach out to us when we have isolated for too long. No one who understands the weight we carry.

And the tragedy is this:
Men often turn to their women for all emotional labor, expecting them to carry the weight of what we can’t share with other men. But men cannot be fully held by women alone. And women cannot be the only emotional home men have.

Men heal in the presence of men. Not in theory. In practice.

Why Men Drift Into Isolation

Men are not born emotionally cut off—we are shaped into it by families, culture and society. There are many missing pieces that men have not been given to be emotionally connected to themselves and to others.

Here are a few of them:

Anger becomes the primary emotion because softer feelings were shamed.
Honesty comes out as aggression because softness feels unsafe.
Listening becomes an invitation to fix.
Asking for help feels like weakness.
Conflict becomes withdrawal or fighting.
Discomfort feels unbearable.
Being stuck feels like failure.
Affection toward other men gets labeled.
Accountability feels like humiliation.
We try to control another’s pain because we think we should know how.

No one taught boys these things. Our fathers didn’t know how. Coaches didn’t talk about it. Schools don’t teach it. Religious institutions often reinforced indifference and shame.

And so men enter adulthood emotionally stunted, relationally underprepared, and spiritually starved.

Men don’t ask for help because they’re conditioned to believe:

Help = vulnerability = weakness = loss of control = humiliation = death

So men implode privately through substance abuse and addiction. Carrying everything alone until something breaks.

What Happens Inside a Circle & What Doesn’t

When a man first steps into a circle, something shifts. I remember the first time I sat down with a group of men… awkward, guarded, unsure of what was expected of me. I remember trying to decide how much to say, how little to reveal. I had spent most of my life being self-sufficient, self-contained, and emotionally disciplined. Connection beyond that felt unfamiliar, dangerous.

The men around me began to speak honestly about what was happening in their inner world. Not their accomplishments, not their roles, but their actual inner world. I felt something I didn’t have words for at the time: relief. Not comfort, not safety. Relief. The relief of realizing I wasn’t the only man carrying things in silence.

Inside a circle, men tell the truth, and no one tries to fix it. Men listen without interrupting, without rushing in to rescue, expressing empathy because we are all human with struggles. Competition is replaced with honesty. Over time, the mask you walked in with doesn’t fall off—it just stops being necessary.

I had to learn new ways to connect. Most men do. I had to learn how to speak without hiding behind my intellect. How to feel my sadness and grief. Practice how to listen without preparing my response. I had to learn to let myself be witnessed so I can be accountable for what I wanted to do with my life. I had to understand that vulnerability and compassion… for myself and for other men… was a visible sign of strength.

Equally important was what we do not do in the circle. No unsolicited advice, no judgment, no one-upmanship. Nobody is required to speak. Vulnerability is not forced and something we grow into. No “man up” nonsense. The usual masculine armor slowly dissolving, because it has nowhere to attach itself.

The circle gave me something I didn’t know I was missing: a different way of being a man among men. Not harder, not softer—just real. And once you’ve experienced that, you can’t forget it. You can’t go back to pretending you don’t need it.

The Circle as a Counterculture for Men

A men’s circle is one of the few places where men are given the chance to stop performing. Out in the world, we’re trained to be competent and self-sufficient. We compete without realizing it. We pretend we are holding it all together and everything is fine when we are not. Most men have spent their entire lives being rewarded for silence and punished for softness.

But in the circle, I’ve watched decades of conditioning loosen and fall away. Presence matters more than performance. Connection replaces comparison. Men learn how to speak honestly about their struggles and how to listen without trying to fix or manage anyone. It feels strange at first—almost unsettling—because nothing in our culture has prepared us for this way of relating.

I’ve watched decades of conditioning fall off men like old armor. I’ve seen men who haven’t cried since childhood soften in a way that wasn’t dramatic, just real. I’ve seen conflict turn into respect because no one walked away. I’ve watched shame lose its power the moment a man says something he’s been hiding and carrying alone for years.

Circles matter because they return men to themselves. They rebuild the parts of us that we want to bring forward into the world. They remind us that tenderness and affection isn’t a sign of weakness or homosexuality. That strength without connection is just loneliness in disguise.

In that sense, the circle isn’t a meeting. It’s a small act of rebellion where men come alive… to live the life they want.

My 20-Year Journey: What I’ve Seen and What I Know

Most of what I know about men comes from the raw, uncomfortable, beautiful experience of sitting in circles with them.

I’ll never forget that night, a successful and respected man who hadn’t cried in thirty years let his tears fall. A few quiet tears, slow and hesitant at first, as if he didn’t quite trust he was allowed to feel them. Nobody leaned in, spoke or offered a tissue. We simply held the space. When he finished, he said quietly, “I didn’t know I was carrying that alone.” I’ve never forgotten that.

There have been nights when conflict showed up hard. One man having an affair with a married women while another preaching biblical passages about adultery at him. Both triggered, both defending something deeper than the argument on the surface. In most places, that kind of tension would be avoided or exploded. But they stayed. They spoke honestly. Eventually they heard each other. What started as hostility, ended with a kind of respect that only comes from going through the fire together.

Men don’t need to avoid conflict—they just need safe places to practice it.

And I’ve seen how men change each other in ways no workshop, book, or therapist ever could. I watched men call each other forward with clarity and kindness. I’ve seen apologies that cleared the weight of years of shame. I’ve watched men let go of roles—provider, leader, tough one, silent one—and show up simply as themselves. From that place, they become better partners, better fathers, better human beings—not because they were told how to be, but because someone finally saw them clearly as they are.

After twenty years, one truth has become unchangeable for me.

Men heal through other men. Not through advice or performance, but through honest connection.

The Invitation

There comes a moment in every man’s life when something inside whispers, I can’t keep going like this. Sometimes it shows up as exhaustion, a numbness towards life, or hearing ourselves say “I’m fine” when we’re anything but. Eventually we recognize our silence becomes to heavy to carry anymore. Our armoring too tight. The loneliness too familiar.

We realize we no longer want to be alone, can no longer stay silent, and begin shedding the layers of armor. Not because we became weak, but because we’ve been living inside an emotional drought.

This is where the circle comes in. Not as a cure-all, not a spiritual shortcut, but as a place that refuses to feed any bullshit to you. It’s not easy or predictable, and not always comfortable. But it is real. And these days, real seems rare.

In twenty years, I’ve seen men rebuild their lives after divorce or job loss. I’ve seen men crushed by isolation and substance use slowly come back. I’ve seen relationships repaired because men learned to become present, compassionate, emotionally generous… alive.

I’ve seen men who thought they had nothing to offer become the steady anchor for other men in crisis. Men who hadn’t cried as adults finally let go in a room of strangers who became brothers. Men who have rewritten their understanding of what it means for a man to be strong and powerful.

Men need brotherhood. Not because we are broken or fragile, but because we are human. And humanity demands connection.

If you made it this far and feel some kind of resonance. If there is a softening, a tightening, or even a sigh of relief… maybe this is your moment. Maybe you’re realizing the cost of doing everything on your own. And you’re tired of being the strong one, the capable one, the one who never needs or asks for anything.

Maybe you’re ready, finally, to be witnessed in the truth of your life.

If so, consider this simple invitation—one man to another.

You were never meant to do this alone, by silencing the heartbreaks, or living behind a mask.
You don’t have to.
If the timing feels right, you know when to step in.

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Links

The greatest human rights violation on the planet is the harm men do to women

Why women leave men they love – What every man needs to know

Why men are in trouble

The Sexodus, Part 1: The Men Giving Up On Women And Checking Out Of Society
The Sexodus, Part 2: Dishonest Feminist Panics Leave Male Sexuality In Crisis

12 Dec 2025

Identity Crisis: Who Am I Now? (Midlife Crisis Edition)

by Maurice | posted in: Embrace Change, life transition, Midlife, Personal Growth, spiritual practice, The Human Condition, transitions | 0

A personal reckoning with how the self is shaped, shed, and rediscovered.

The Question That Starts It All: What Is Identity? Who Am I, Really?

I ask myself the same question a lot… Who am I now after I can drop all the ideas of who I thought I was…. Teacher, chef, son, sexologist, strong, generous, listener, music lover, complainer, happy guy, angry man, etc. How do I explain the version of myself that learned to survive and thrive?

Then I begin to wonder what forms my identity and the kind of person I am today. At first, my family, culture, work, and responsibility began to put the words to define and tell the story of who I am. As I write this… How do I get to explain myself to myself? Makes me laugh to read this.

Some of these words might help explain the story of identity…

Temperament is what I was born with. How sensitive I am. How much of a risk taker I am. Do I approach or avoid? What is my natural pace in life? How much stimulation or quiet time do I need?
Emotionality is what I feel, how deeply they land, how long to they stay? How do I express emotions? How attuned to others am I? Am I naturally an empath? Solitarian or need to talk things out?
Personality is about behavior. How I relate with people, connect or pull back? Lead or observe? Am I a calming presence? Am I agreeable or confrontational? Adaptive or inflexible?
Character is about choices. Principles and values I refuse to abandon. My behavior when no one is watching. How I carry suffering. How I treat people who do not bring me anything. What I do with my power. How do I respond when life collapses?

This was the original version — quiet, unprotected, unfiltered. I didn’t choose any of this. I just was this way when I was born. Before any spoken language, before familial or societal expectation, before any performance. There was a natural rhythm.

The Person I Became in My Family

The first step in how my identity was shaped, was in my resistance, not in compliance. I sensed early that something in the family system wasn’t right and didn’t fit. I could feel the unspoken demand for loyalty — the kind of loyalty that asks you to shrink, to stay quiet, to fall in line as if the family were a monarchy and the only acceptable act was obedience. But I couldn’t do it.

I refused to give up the parts of myself that noticed the hypocrisy, or felt the injustice, or saw the emotional games for what they were. So, I became the black sheep, the one who refused the script, the one whose honesty exposed what everyone else preferred to hide.

I was not the peacekeeper, not easily agreeable, or the child who smoothed things over. I was the one who questioned what didn’t seem right. I refused to pretend something wasn’t happening. In a family that mostly valued silence, my honesty was confrontational.

There was a decision I made long ago, most likely not consciously, I wasn’t going to disappear to make others comfortable. I made a commitment long ago, to self-preservation, to be true to myself, my experience, my feelings, my desires. The part of me that still refuses to hand my life over to anyone’s narrative but my own.

The Person I Became Because the World Rewarded Me

(Work identity / usefulness / capitalism)

As I grew, I began shaping a life for myself, or at least I thought I was. I had ideas of what I wanted to do, but life also made its demands on me. I learned quickly that being good at something wasn’t just a skill, it was also a form of currency.

People relied on me to perform. I was respected and rewarded for being strong, consistent and capable. And the world, especially a capitalist one, rewarded that.

In a culture where productivity is considered as our purpose, it becomes easy to believe that your work is how you identify yourself. Most people never even question this. Our jobs become the answer to the question “Who are you?” long before we dare to realize that this question needed a different response.

It was that way for me. Chef, Restauranteur, Professor, Facilitator, Sacred Intimate.

I became the strong and reliable one, the one people could count on. And for a long time, that identity worked, both for them and for me. But somewhere along the way, I confused my competence with my identity. I misconstrued my functional usefulness inside the business or academic structures for my inherent value.

Because capitalism teaches us that if we stop being productive, we stop mattering. It was this message that was buried in me more deeply than I ever could understand.

This “seen” version of myself wasn’t completely false. It just wasn’t entirely true. I had built my identity around survival, contribution and reward. But the truth of the self isn’t constructed from usefulness, approval or what anyone can take from you.

The true self is what remains when all the performing stops. The core personal values are mine. The desires I buried to stay responsible and conflict free. The boundaries I didn’t believe I was allowed to have. My natural flow and rhythm that was overridden. How I want to live my current day-to-day life has nothing to prove.

This newly revealed identity, the one emerging, is what survived all the expectations.

The Person My Roles Required

(Relational identity / emotional labor / responsibility)

As I stepped further into my adulthood, I didn’t stop to ask “Who am I?”. Life asked me a different question… in terms of my relationships with people…. What can I hold?

So I stepped further into the roles put in front of me… teacher, leader, partner, friend, the emotionally grown-up one, the secure one. The man who could be a trusted confidant with other people’s delicate stories.

None of these roles were forced upon me. In many ways I chose them fully and willingly. But once I decided to step into these roles they began shaping me just as much as I was shaping them.

I didn’t have to think about being dependable. Showing up in my strength became expected. I am lucky it came natural for me. My developed emotional intelligence and emotional availability became a service to others. People gained deep trust in me, and I was highly honored to be the recipient and did not take it lightly.

These roles never asked me if I had the qualifications, bandwidth or capacity. They only asked if I wanted to continue doing what I was doing.

At some point I slipped into a life where other people’s needs began defining where I directed my time, my attention, my presence. It was other’s people’s expectations of me that shaped my sense of self long before I noticed it happening.

This was a meaningful, beautiful and at times, a deeply fulfilling time in my life. But even the roles I loved playing came with their own expectations. Something I had to maintain as long as my performance held to others’ expectations.

I didn’t realize how much of myself was woven into these roles, until the day life started asking me if I wanted to live a little differently.

Who I Thought I Was

(Mirror identity / perception)

For a long time in my 40’s I truly felt I was the person I was meant to be. I didn’t feel like I was playing a role for anyone. There was no adapting or performance. I thought I was simply just being myself. Why would I think any different? And everyone around me reflected that version with such consistency that it felt like the truth.

When people see you in a certain way for long enough, you stop noticing it’s a reflection of themselves and not you. You start believing it’s a definition of yourself.

What took me years to understand was how easily other people’s gratitude felt like identity confirmation. Their dependence on me felt like purpose. The more people put their trust in me, the more I mistook that trust as a mirror of who I was.

What took me a long time to understand was how easily other people’s gratitude felt like an identity confirmation. Their dependence on me felt like purpose. The more people put their trust in me, the more I mistook that trust as a mirror of who I was.

It was too easy to confuse being needed with being seen. A confusion of being valued with being known.
Looking back, this was another case of a misplaced identity. Perceiving the version of me that served people as the version that was actually me. A self, shaped more by responsibility and expectation, than my personal desire and choice.

How I was seeing myself and the identity I had been living was not the full story of who I was. It was the story that was working for me and the world at that time.

And as my world began to change, this story no longer fit. I could feel the shifting. But do I have an open mind enough and am I willing to see it?

Midlife Cracking Open

(Loosening, shifting, not fitting)

The roles I was playing in my life began shifting. The external world stopped asking for the same version of me. Life is loosening its grip.

My life was facing many big transitions. My father died, I quit my teaching job, sold my real-estate business, got rid of all my stuff, made another home halfway around the world.

My world was changing and the story I had lived for so long, no longer fit. The ground under my feet was not steady. The strange part was that there was no crisis, no meltdown, no dramatic unveiling. My life wasn’t falling apart. It was just…. different?!?!

I could feel myself questioning, “Who am I now?” All the past definitions I once used to describe my identity, from the earlier stages in my life, no longer fit in the same ways.

Was I entering into the part of midlife that nobody warned me about? The time when the old version of myself isn’t needed anymore, and I’m left waiting for the new version to fully arrive? The limbo-land. The in-between time and space. The uncomfortable and confusing middle ground where these questions become unavoidable…

If I’m not all those roles… then who am I now?
Who am I without the job title, the being of service, the structure of responsibility?
Who am I if no one is depending on me to be productive?
Who am I if I’m not the strong one, the steady one, the reliable one?
Who am I when there is no one to perform for, no one to impress, no one waiting for me to show up in a certain way?

This isn’t so much a midlife crisis as much as it’s a slow, steady realization that only most of my entire identity had expired. Not in a dramatic or painful way—more like a snake shedding its skin in order to grow.

Midlife is bringing me an unsettling kind of clarity. A sense that the version of myself I had been living wasn’t wrong, but it just wasn’t the whole story. Something in me is asking for a different way to inhabit my own life. A different way to see myself. A different kind of truth. A truth that isn’t tied to being the chef, the teacher, the strong one, or the dependable one, but to the man underneath all of that—the one I never gave myself time or permission to really know.

I’m not collapsing. Maybe a little lost at times. Trying to have some patience for myself.

I’m simply becoming more aware of the person I had been for decades is transcending into a person I am still becoming.

The Person I’m Learning to Live With Now

As I move through this stage of my life, I’m realizing that identity isn’t fixed. It shifts, dissolves, and reforms depending on what life asks of us. The versions of myself I’ve lived — the responsible one, the steady one, the useful one, the strong one — all served a purpose in their time. They weren’t mistakes. They weren’t lies. They were honest responses to the life I was living.

But now the conditions of my life are different, and the way I see myself has to evolve.

I’m learning that I don’t need to hold myself together in the same way I once did. I don’t need to be productive, or in emotional service, or succumb to the expectations of others. Those identities helped me survive and succeed, but they aren’t the only ways to describe “who I am”.

What’s emerging now is hopefully a more grounded version of myself — not relying on usefulness to feel my value, or on external reflection to feel real. A version of myself who isn’t trying to prove anything or carry the weight of the world. A version who is more interested in being present than being extraordinary.

I like to see this time of my life as a reinvention. A slow remembering of the parts of myself that were buried under responsibility, obligation, and performance.

I don’t have all the answers, even though sometimes I like to think I do. I don’t think midlife is about knowing the answers. It’s about being honest enough to make the space in my psyche when I realize old story no longer fits, and making room for the new one form, especially during the mysterious time while it’s all still taking shape.
My question still remains… who am I now?

I’m someone in the middle of a transition, like many of us are. Questioning, noticing, and paying attention. Learning to live alongside the identities that I once thought defined me, even as I let them go. Willing to let the next version of myself emerge without forcing it.

And that has to be enough for right now…
to be the person who is no longer who he thought he was,
and not yet realized who he is becoming,
but trying to be awake and honest as possible
during this time and space in-between.

21 Nov 2025

The Anatomy of Desire & Shame

by Maurice | posted in: Ask For What You Want, Compassionate Conversation, Conflict Resolution, desire, Dominant Submissive, Eros, Loving Well, Masculine and Feminine, Psychology, Relationship, sexuality, shame, Speaking Your Truth | 0

Author’s Note:
We rarely talk about the anatomy of desire and shame… specifically, the space where masculine identity, trauma, and desire overlap. This essay tries to map that territory without sensationalism, to show how receptivity and surrender—often seen as weakness—can actually be acts of trust and integrity. My hope is that it invites inquiry and conversation rather than judgment.

There are some shameful desires we inherit from society’s conditioning, family history, personal trauma or repression that get labelled as forbidden, dangerous, taboo or unworthy. Yet they are wired into us as humans long before we ever understand them.

Every human desire is neutral and then becomes shameful because shame is taught and learned. It’s the cultural mechanisms that turns them toxic.

There are many desires that have been given a shame script. Here are just a few examples…

Men expressing emotion (anger) isn’t welcome. It disrupts social harmony. So we swallow anger until it builds up and turns into an explosive rage.
Why are you so lazy? Productivity is seen as virtuous. Burnout means personal failure, when it is most likely systemic failure.
Sexual pleasure and curiosity. Religion and patriarchy equate purity with self-worth. We feel dirty for any kind of fantasizing or masturbating.

For some of us, desires grow into unmet needs that live in the body, shaping our longing in ways difficult to explain.

This is the anatomy of desire and shame for myself: the truth of wanting to surrender, to be received, to stop performing, to let go of leadership and control, and to experience the kind of connection that dissolves the walls society and trauma taught me to build.

It is sexual, yes. But it is also fully human.

Shame’s Origin

Shame didn’t begin in my body; it began in the world that taught me how a man was supposed to be.

The messages arrived at an early age and were uninvited: big boys don’t cry, and men don’t need nurturing and comforting. Men are the pursuers… goal-oriented, absorbing rejection without flinching. Masculinity, I was told, meant penetration, dominance, rejection, stoicism. Anything softer belonged to women — anything receptive, anything tender or nurturing was marked as wrong for a man.

The shame deepened inside religion, where desire came with rules about who I was allowed to love and how I was supposed to behave. It settled into family, where the black sheep is most often blamed and where emotional difference become the target.

Trauma sealed it: molestation, emotional neglect, the unspoken but unmistakable message that my feelings weren’t important. That I didn’t matter, unworthy. That the desire for wanting to be understood and accepted made me the problem.

Shame isn’t something I chose. It is something that was assigned by culture, family, religion, trauma — until it was internalized and made as truth.

But the desires never disappear. They wait patiently to be awakened.

The Shape of Desire

My desires did not form as acts of rebellion. They were born out of silence. Emerging, not as something I had lost and needed to recover. But as something that I never thought could be allowed to exist in the first place.

For years, I lived inside a version of masculinity that left no room for receptivity, softness, nurture, or surrender. But my body knew, reminded me regularly and I ignored it for a long time. I wanted something my family history and cultural conditioning refused to acknowledge and accept.

Desire first showed up as confusion. Wanting to be received and accepted for my different thinking, being touched and entered with care, physically and emotionally received with tenderness. In ways that contradicted everything I had been taught a “normal” man should want. Not because any of my desires are bizarre, but because the permission for them were never granted.

The longing wasn’t a need for me to act out my dominant side, nor was it a need to give up all control to another. It was wanting someone to stay with me, in the moment, in my full expression and deepest sensitivity. I didn’t want my feelings to be managed or someone to look away in disgust. To stay in pure connection, listening, understanding. Offering each other the freedom to put down the need to perform in any socially acceptable way … finally be able to breathe.

We live in a world that tells men to take what they want.

My truth was that I only wanted to be met right where I am, with honor and respect. (Isn’t that what we all want?) Not conquered or fixed or criticized or judged or shamed. Met. Seen. Felt. Received.

It wasn’t the act itself that mattered. it was the surrender into a (sacred) space where I could exist without a filter or the need to protect myself, without armoring my heart. A space where my humanity, not my gender role, social status, or anyone’s expectations defined me.

It’s in the meeting of bodies, where the truth I’d hidden became undeniable: the body speaks a language of trust and desire long before the mind gives permission.

Connection, Relief and Power

I have experienced many times when my desire was finally and fully met with openness. It felt like a coming home, into myself and my own body.

There was no big shock or revelation, no explosion of discovery. Only the silent recognition of something I knew that had always been there for me. For the first time, I could relax. I could finally stop leading, reading the room, pretending I was in control, evaluating consent, trying to anticipate what might be expected of me. I could exhale a sigh of relief.

What surprised me was that I did not feel a sense of weakness at all… only strength. I carried an appreciation for the relief, because it gave me a pulse of power, as if all the stories, beliefs and energy I had spent holding myself together could finally move through me instead of work against me. I could finally breathe in peacefulness.

To be received, to be taken, to be opened, was to be witnessed without judgment. To be held in my surrender was to feel trust, and love… in committed and honest action.

Inside that vulnerable and receptive space, connection and presence replaced any critical thinking about performance or time-traveling into the future. The simple desi to be connected to the other was the exchange. Through matching breath and eye contact.

For those moments, I wasn’t the man society wanted me to be.
I was simply human… body, mind, heart and breath… aligned with life itself.

The Universal Body/Mind

The older I grow, the more I see that this isn’t only my story. The shame that wraps itself around my desires are the same one’s wrapped around nearly everyone I meet.

We are taught early to be divided… men from their softness and receptivity, women from their power and femininity, and all of us from the truth of our body’s desire for connection and pleasure. We learn to fear what we most need… the ability to give and to build trust, receive love, to have needs, and permission to surrender.

Each of us carries a private strategy around armoring our hearts. Trying to keep the fear at bay by attempting to manage our feelings and trying to control how we are seen through someone else’s eyes. These are things we cannot truly control anyway. And yet beneath all the conditioning and the illusion of control, the body still remembers its own language… a voice that asks to know you better, a touch that says you are safe, and a breath that says you are worthy to belong.

When desire is allowed to live, without us trying to hide behind a disguise, to be communicated and expressed fully… it stops being dangerous. It is not buried. We evolve into the people we are meant to be.

Owning our erotic and sexual truth is an important aspect of our lives, it isn’t an optional indulgence. It’s an act of honesty that anchors our emotional lives in the body that carries it all.

The communication of our desires, and some of our fantasy world, becomes a form of honesty and vulnerability that reminds us we are still alive, still capable of connection.

The anatomy of desire and shame is, in the end, the anatomy of being human.
To understand our desires means we will heal the shame associated with it.

We need to stop apologizing for wanting to be seen for who we are. And we need to practice the skills needed to receive each other in our fullness and truth of our expression. Only then can we begin to repair the distance that keeps affection and appreciation flowing between each other… without hesitation and judgment.

What remains is not an act of control or compliance, but mutual care and understanding. The unlimited possibilities emerge from the willingness to stay, to listen, to touch… with honor, reverence and respect.

With that kind of vulnerability and honesty, the body relaxes, and the mind can finally rest.

10 Nov 2025

The Currency of the Heart

by Maurice | posted in: Compassion, Compassionate Conversation, Heart Opening, Love, Loving Well, Relationship, Truth | 0

There is a certain economy that doesn’t deal in cash, but in something far more intimate… mentally, emotionally and physically… the invisible exchanges that make up the human condition. The currency of the heart is love, empathy, and genuine human connection through acts of affection. It is the medium through which relationships are built, maintained and sustained.

Ongoing acts of kindness, generosity, honesty, and vulnerability are what we “spend” as the building blocks for relationships. Forgiveness, gratitude, and compassion are what we invest to sustain them. Unlike money, this currency can’t be hoarded. It multiplies only when reciprocated. When giving and receiving happen in good faith.

I’ve learned that even the heart weakens when the currency is withheld or when investments in mutual agreements is not returned. In the workplace, in families, and in love… I’ve seen what happens when people default on their agreements while unresolved issues accumulate without acknowledgment.

Over time, I began to notice how this same imbalance shows up in other parts of life. Between siblings who avoid hard conversations in the name of peace; between lovers who claim honesty but hide behind politeness or distraction; between colleagues who protect their image instead of the relationship; and between colleagues who depend on each other for success.

The richest people, I think, aren’t the ones who love the most, but the ones whose love is steady and consistent over time — who admit when they are at fault, and their actions match their words. Because every heart keeps a tally. Some debts are repaid through apology, some through forgiveness, and some through the quiet individual work of growing up emotionally. The currency of the heart, like any true wealth, depends not on abundance, but on authenticity… on whether what we offer others is real.

Work Life: The Cost of Withholding

In professional life, the currency of the heart reveals itself through communication — the willingness to openly share information, to collaborate, and to act with a mutual respect. In kitchens and classrooms, I’ve always believed that service is not simply about quality or performance; it’s an act of respect. Respect for each other, for the food, the equipment, and for the space.

When we provide something of value, such as a particular service, a meal or food product, a workshop, or an experience… we acknowledge the contract between seller and buyer: both sides have dignity, and both depend on the other to communicate with kindness and act in good faith. To me, it means, I care enough to give my best, no matter what side you are on. It’s not transactional in the shallow sense, but relational. A way of honoring the underlying trust another person has placed in you.

I once worked with a man whose job directly affected my own success. I relied on him to communicate when ingredients or products couldn’t be procured — to let me know early enough so I could adjust menus, find alternatives, and adjust curriculum. But he didn’t. Repeatedly, he stayed silent until the last minute. Always leaning on the “everything is a learning experience” in the academic environment. And when I asked him to communicate sooner, he smiled, nodded, and returned to his silence.

What I came to understand was that this wasn’t forgetfulness. It was a form of passive aggression and a way to control. He derived his power from my dependence — from knowing that withholding information would unsettle me. His silence was a kind of emotional currency, used to remind me of who held the leverage. Until I started ordering myself, the divide between us deepened. Trust was completely broken.

This unsettling event taught me something about the workplace: that sabotage doesn’t always appear as obvious aggression. Sometimes it looks like calmness or silence. It sounds like “no problem.” Politeness can hide deep avoidance, quietly eroding trust. And once trust begins to dissolve, so does the spirit of service that is being provided to the purchaser.

You can’t serve the customer — or the larger purpose of an organization— when those within the system are busy glorifying and protecting their own territory. I’ve come to believe that true and honorable service isn’t just about the raw honesty about the product or service we provide or pretending to be meeting the customer’s needs. Being of service is about how we traverse the relationships of all people involved throughout the entire process. Beginning with honesty in what is promised, and continuing through complete transparency, humility, and openness.

Good communication becomes the basis of the ethical infrastructure of doing business and workplace dynamics. Without it, people stop communicating openly. They start managing impressions instead of relationships, and what looks like teamwork is really just quiet self-preservation.

In this kind of environment, even the idea of success and excellence loses its implication. Because the real value of what is being offered — to clients, students, or diners — isn’t only in the product itself, but in the integrity of how we collaborate to deliver it. That’s the currency that customers feel, even if they can’t name it — the unspoken, trustworthiness of people working together in good faith. Some of the best products and services, I’ve found, come from people who work this way.

Family Life: The Quiet Betrayals

In families, the currency of the heart is often spoken through actions rather than words. The rhythm of ongoing displays of care, and seeing who shows up during times of stress and who disappears when it matters the most. Unlike colleagues or friends, family members carry a longer history of shared moments, experiences and expectations. Built over many years of shared meals, shared grief, and shared silence. That silence, I’ve learned, can wound as deeply as any act of cruelty.

In my own family, betrayal rarely began as an open conflict attempting to be resolved. The betrayal arrived being masked through avoidance, indifference, or the careful withholding of feelings and truth telling. There were times when a family member chose not to say what probably should be said, preferring silence over discomfort. When I reached out, wanting to repair something strained between us, the response was an empty politeness. As if I was the one creating the problem just by asking. The effort to repair became the offence. Most conversations would end with a “it’s fine,” which of course meant nothing was fine at all.

At first, I misunderstood that restraint for maturity. The kind that tries to keep the peace and avoids the drama. But over time, I saw it for what it was: the fear of vulnerability disguised as harmony. We all learned in our own ways that keeping things “pleasant” was safer than being honest. Yet what we saved in short-term peace, we lost in long-term connection. The emotional trust account kept being drained and hardly replenished.

The silence in the unresolved issues in families can feel civil, even loving, but it corrodes trust the same way deceit does, just more slowly. When people withhold speaking their truth, they also withhold the truth of themselves. You start to sense the absence in the room long before you can name it. It’s not that love disappears; it just stops its reciprocity. You still want to care, but something invisible blocks its movement. An unspoken hurt, pride, exhaustion, and it keeps affection from getting through.

I sometimes wonder if all families carry a kind of unspoken debt for the sake of keeping the family together. What happens to all the things we never felt comfortable to say, the apologies we never offered, the forgiveness we withheld, and our truths we decided the other couldn’t handle? We don’t escape those costs, we pay for them in different ways — through our distancing when we feel over obligated, tension, or the exhaustion by pretending nothing is wrong. If we are unlucky, we pay later through regret, realizing too late that silence never protected us from the heartbreak of love.

I used to think love alone could keep people close, but I’ve come to see that love without openness, honesty and the risk of vulnerability slowly loses its value. You can still share a life, but the feeling of being known dissolves. What’s left looks like love from the outside, but inside it’s the illusion of love displayed by habit and dependency.

That same pattern — withholding, preferring appearance over truth telling, and the slow removal of affection — becomes even more dangerous in romantic relationships, where the stakes for intimacy are higher.

Love Relationships: When the Currency Shifts

In romantic life, the currency of the heart is depleted the fastest and is the hardest to accumulate. In the beginning of a love relationship, love feels limitless — giving and receiving freely, speaking openly, and offer our best selves without hesitation. But love has its own economics. What begins as emotional abundance can slowly turn into imbalance when communication stops and expectations of outcomes are held tightly.

In the West and what we label a “love” relationship, begins with attraction and chemistry. That first spark carries everything for a while. But eventually, the early energy wears off. What once felt like love spontaneously sparking between two people, now begins to require attention and effort. We have to learn about each other, beyond the illusions of love we created during the infatuation phase. Understanding, patience, and emotional literacy now becomes the currency. We must learn how to love, not just run with the current impulse of feelings. Many couples struggle here, mistaking the decline of excitement for the loss of love itself. In truth, it’s where emotion and chemistry aren’t enough. It’s the stage when love asks us to mature. To discern between our impulses and to replace them with patience, empathy and attention to feed the relationship.

When I was travelling through India, I got educated about arranged relationships. They begin in the opposing direction. The commitment to loving well comes first, and affection must be earned through shared responsibility for trust building over time. The emotional account starts at zero, and the couple must deposit daily acts of care, communication, and respect until trust begins to grow intimacy. In arranged relationships, the erotic charge matures through familiarity and the intimacy of daily life, and through the safety that allows desire to be expressed. In both kinds of relationships, love thrives only when the currency of the heart continues to circulate — when both partners contribute effort towards vulnerability in expression, displays of compassion, and emotional generosity.

But when the willingness to be vulnerable and shared honesty is withheld, when needs go unspoken and unmet, resentment accumulates, and the system begins to fail. One partner may start making withdrawals the other can’t sustain. Trust and safety erode and connection becomes harder to repair.

This emotional bankruptcy doesn’t arrive suddenly; it builds slowly… through small acts of abandonment, avoidance, refusing to see from the other’s perspective, and the distancing that accumulates over time. Some respond by denying anything is wrong, throwing themselves into other interests, or numbing themselves. Others look outside the relationship for new erotic opportunities to feel alive again and to fulfill needs and desires. The betrayal, when it happens, is often less about the depleted passion between two people. It is the lack of attention to the relationship and each other that has accrued over time —a desperate attempt to feel alive again.

What I’ve come to understand is that love is not a renewable resource on its own. It depends on deliberate reciprocity — the continual shared exchange of truth, attention, affection and spoken vulnerability. Whether a relationship is chosen through chemistry or arranged through family, its value isn’t measured by how it begins but by how faithfully intentions maintain the flow and exchange. When love stops being cultivated, the currency of the heart loses its value.

That loss of value extends beyond romance. Whether in family, work, or culture, when honesty stops circulating, relationships lose their vitality and what remains is form without substance.

Reevaluating the Heart

I’ve come to see that the currency of the heart runs on trust across all relationships… in work, in family and in love. Trust is built by honesty, commitment, action, open communication, and consistency over time. When relationships are missing these things, the structure may remain intact, but they are hollowed out from substance and begin to feel empty. Trust eventually collapses, no matter how talented, polite, or affectionate people appear to be. In the end, what we give and what we hold back always reveal themselves.

In professional life, the withholding of communication stops people from working towards a common purpose. In families, the choice to be silent becomes the convenient way to hide. In love, emotional avoidance depletes intimacy until the relationship runs on habit rather than connection. Each environment looks different, but the same principle runs through them all: relationships fail when trust is built and then broken between people.

We live in a time that values productivity over the gift of time we offer to each other, self-image over sincerity, and convenience over depth. It’s easy to forget how quickly emotion loses weight when words and gestures aren’t matched by action. We often use grand language instead of the small consistent actions that actually sustain connection. But the heart keeps its own accounting. We all know when the exchange we are making with each other is authentic and real.

There is an ongoing appraisal in every relationship. An invitation to bring sincerity and honesty back into our interactions when we may have drifted off course. It means speaking our truth even when it risks disrupting the peace. The repairing before resentment accrues. Practicing our listening and communication skills as a generous act of care. The return isn’t about creating comfort, so much as trust — the quiet wealth that allows people to stay open even when life gets difficult.

I have felt the conflicting dualities contributing to social harmony, both the beauty and uneasiness. Thailand has taught me the grace of kreng jai and save-face, and also the cost. The unspoken feelings and the polite distance that sometimes stands in for truth. Yet beneath the formality, we all desire for the same thing: exchanges that are genuine and feel real.

The currency of the heart is not a win or lose proposition, nor is it about seeking to profit. It wants reciprocity. We grow our relationships when we are generous with our attention and presence, we are not graded by performance. Whether in a workplace, a family, or a marriage, the same principle holds. What we give from our heart sustains connection. What’s genuine lasts; what’s performed falls apart.

I no longer see growing our emotional intelligence or the expression of emotional honesty as a luxury. It’s the foundation that sets in motion every trustworthy exchange — the backbone of all true service to humanity, all exchanges of love, and all true belonging. Because in the end, we each know whether we acted out of selfishness or out of true care, truth, and compassion.

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