the meaningful life — William Ayot Healing Mens Souls

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We are creatures of desire.

What we most desire is meaning.

What makes us suffer most is a lack of meaning.

The Meaningful Life with Andrew G. Marshall.

Marital therapist, author, and communications trainer Andrew G. Marshall invites guests from all walks of life to discuss what makes life meaningful.

Hello, I'm Andrew G. Marshall.

Welcome to The Meaningful Life.

We're available on Apple, Spotify, Podbeam, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your podcasts.

If you're a regular listener, you'll have heard that I'm running a men's retreat just outside Berlin this September 2025.

I'm really pleased that several listeners to this podcast have already signed up, but there's room for more.

Full details at my website, andrewgmarshall.com and click on Men's Retreat.

To give you a sense of what happens on a men's retreat, how they help lessen the burden men carry and help with male loneliness, I've pulled a classic episode from my archive –

William Eilt is a men's group facilitator, a ritual leader, a poet, and the author of the book Re-Enchanting the Forest.

He's dedicated himself to healing the shame in men's hearts and souls.

We started by talking about the overlapping crises that seem to have engulfed us all, and how we can draw on the wisdom of our ancestors who survived similar problems.

I think we've lived in a relatively cocooned age over the last 30, possibly 40 years, where we have come to expect comfort in many of our lives.

And at that point, we've begun to disconnect with the things that our parents and our grandparents were very familiar with.

Shortage, deprivation, which we might think of as famine, the experience of war,

which was very real in their lives.

I mean, it was no exaggeration to say that the Second World War was a total war.

And people were living through that.

They didn't talk about it much, but they had lived through it.

So suddenly the financial crash, which put doubt back in the system, and latterly the pandemic, which has brought disease back, sort of a global disease and a very destructive disease to both ourselves individually and to society, we have been cocooned from all that.

So we are relearning the lessons already.

of our parents, particularly of our grandparents' generations and before, who had to live in straitened circumstances.

They were not as wealthy as we have been, and at the same time, they were living with the ever-presence of death, which I think is something that we have not been used to.

Now, today we're going to be focusing in particular on men's response.

So I think hopefully the things we're going to be talking about are going to be equally interesting to women, either because they're facing the same problems or they love men who are facing these problems.

But what is different, do you think, from the way that men approach these huge issues that we need to focus on as two men here today?

Good question.

Well, there's an old truth that says that women are more in their bodies and they experience things more fully in that sense.

And that men can be strangers to their bodies.

I mean, they can respond in a very heady way.

And at that point, until such time as they are brought back into their bodies and they're grounded in their bodies and they begin to feel many of the things that many of us as men do not feel.

And certainly that was true of me right up until my 30s, that whole time when I was at some point just unable to put labels to things.

Not only could I not feel, but I didn't really understand the notion of the feeling.

And it wasn't just dark feelings.

It was things like joy I just didn't have access to.

So could you expand on that sort of not quite knowing what the problem was, but knowing that there was a problem so we can sort of really understand it?

Because I think people will recognise that.

Sure.

I think there's a dis-ease, Andrew, with many men.

We are brought up in a sort of a paradox of

On the one hand, we are expected to be emotionally literate, available, and fully what we used to call new man.

We are supposed to be present and available.

This whole notion of being emotionally literate was unheard of in most men's lives, not that long ago.

And on the other hand, we have this extraordinary situation in which we are still receiving, often unconsciously, from

People who would claim to be very conscious that we are expected to step up and deliver.

We are defenders and protectors.

We have all those sort of responsibilities.

Are we imagining that?

Or is there still a cultural message that is giving us from a very early age a sense that there are roles for men and roles for women?

And this goes back way, way back into our history, where in times gone by, there was a sort of a deal struck between men and women.

And I'm speaking in the mythical world here, but there was a deal struck between women who risked their lives in childbirth,

and men who risked their lives either in the hunt or in combat in defense of the tribe, the family, and their people.

So that was a deeply ingrained response to life.

And I'm not sure we've entirely shaken that off.

And that's just where we are.

I don't think in terms of a right or wrong around this.

I just think in terms of, well, that's where we are still.

And it's a paradox for many men, and they're torn between the one and the other.

They want to please their partners, and they want to step up as a man.

That's a difficult paradox to live sometimes.

And I think it's not just sometimes that men are alienated from their bodies.

I think they're alienated from their souls sometimes.

It's sort of almost like an old-fashioned idea.

What do you think the soul is that we're alienated from sometimes?

Well, that's, yeah, that is a big question.

The soul as I see it, and it must be said that many different cultures think of the soul in many different ways.

Many indigenous cultures think of external souls.

You can have one, two, three, four, five souls that manifest in different ways and do different things.

The idea of a soul that runs before us that can be a totem animal or can be some form of creature, we only know of it through notions of witchcraft and the idea of a familiar, a witch's familiar.

But that's closer to something very old in which we were believed to have

what Philip Pullman would call a demon.

He would speak of this outside entity, and he elaborated on it beautifully.

But I think that those kind of souls can be seen in the context of different cultures.

For ourselves,

And I think we have to acknowledge that whether we are secular, whether we are religious, whether we are atheist, we are living with an inheritance of 2,000 years of convinced thinking.

And that's sort of in our bones.

So we have the Christian notion or the Judeo-Christian notion of a soul.

But we also have the pagan notion of the soul, which is something that is deeply connected, deeply connected to the world, deeply connected to feeling, deeply connected to experience.

Robert Bly, an old teacher, a wonderful old poet, he used to talk about the soul is here for its own joy.

It's a part of us, but it's not actually a part of us.

It has its own way of operating.

It doesn't do data, for instance.

It thinks in symbols and images.

It doesn't hold with many of our notions of how we live our lives.

We want to move onwards and upwards.

And the soul is going, ooh, that's a curious button.

I'll press that one and see what happens.

It just wants to experience.

And if we fall off a cliff, if the car explodes, if our relationship is destroyed, just by right of pressing that button, the soul doesn't really bother as long as it's had the experience.

It is an entity within us.

It's not necessarily us, if that makes sense.

We can find ourselves, our ego and our souls can get separated out.

And we've been living in a very egoic age.

So many of us have lost contact with our souls.

What do you think of the idea of the sort of soul being like a sort of an authentic version of ourselves, rather than the sort of the version that our parents, you know, the system, our headmaster, our partner, even ourselves would think we want, but that somewhere inside us, there is an authentic version of ourselves that has to be heard?

Yeah.

Yes, I think that's a very good point.

I think when we begin to look at ourselves, we begin to notice that the soul and the psyche seem to be one and the same thing, whichever way we care to name it.

The mind is a wonderful thing, but it is working in a different way slightly to the soul.

And when we begin to realize that, and let's be honest, there's soul music, soul food, soulful ways of behaving that seem to imply a depth of feeling, a connection, and an embodied quality.

So I think that that's an experience that we have.

And very often, it's a thing that happens in later life.

As we move into our lives, we suddenly realise, and it can be quite a sudden thing, that we have parted company with our soul.

And that can be a very painful experience.

And we try and get it back in all sorts of ways.

So tell me more about this experience that happened to you around about 30 when you had a sort of disease with yourself.

What happened and how did you meet yourself again?

I was working in casinos.

In London's West End.

Mildly dyslexic.

I went for a job as a youngster.

I went for a job as a courier and became a croupier.

And at that moment, I got paid.

And suddenly I stayed for a while.

And I lived in this strange world, which magically recreated the childhood home that I had, where people would get drunk and play cards at night.

I grew up in a pub.

And it seemed very familiar and very easy at first.

And I stayed there, and I stayed there, and I stayed there for decades, a couple of decades.

And at a certain point, I began to realize that there was something terribly wrong with me.

And I couldn't really blame the world.

I tried.

But what I began to realize that was, at a certain point...

I was in real trouble.

I was also writing during the day.

The casino work allowed me to do my writing.

I had a play that was transferred to London and did very well by its own lights.

And on the opening night, the lights went up and a trap door opened under me.

And as I thought, is this what I've been doing for all these years?

And I just fell through into a sort of a clinical depression.

At a certain point after that, I realized, actually, I think I was soul dead.

I had no connection with my soul.

Now, John Keats, the poet who died at 25, wrote in a letter to his brother, I believe it was, who said, have you no idea how important it is to take an intelligence and make it a soul?

So I think soul making is important.

We need to maintain ourselves.

We need to feed them.

We need to bring them alive on a regular basis.

And that's the thing that I was not doing.

I was getting up.

I was working to get my plays made.

I was then working in the casino to pay my rent and do the things that one needed to do in central London.

And at that point, I woke up one day and I thought, I am in real trouble.

And I felt I was cut off from my soul and I was soul dead.

So we can call it alienation.

We can call it what we will, but it's there and it's very real and it hurts.

So if people are soul dead, I think they're going to be in a pretty dark place and they'd like to hear how you made your soul, so to speak.

Good question.

And it takes time.

I mean, we have to give ourselves time in these situations, I think.

In my case, first of all, I began to clean house.

I began to look at my past.

I began to see what was it that drove me to the situation I was in at the time.

What got me into this dark and gloomy backwater of my own life?

And I began to look at that, and that pointed out rather painfully that I came from an alcoholic family who had acted out their pain after the Second World War, coming together and basically living, existing together, but not fully living.

And I signed up to that.

It's sort of what we said at the beginning.

They were numbing themselves, weren't they?

That's one of the ways of actually dealing with this.

Absolutely.

They were medicating themselves, really.

And one case with work and the other case with alcohol.

And that was my parental guidance, if you like.

So I slipped very easily into that mold and I had to unpick a lot of that.

Eventually, I found places where I could work on this problem of coming from an alcoholic family.

And then I discovered men's work.

Now,

By sheer chance, I was in a recovery group, as they called it.

And the conversation back in the very early 90s, around about 1991, was that there was this American poet, Robert Bly, who was talking about men's lives directly to them.

And he had written a book called Iron John.

And I kind of went along.

And I was stunned because it felt like my life was being explored in ways that I had never dreamed that it could be.

And he was doing it through poetry.

He was doing it through story.

He was doing it through ritual.

He was doing it through other means that spoke directly to the soul, where reading a prose book does not actually do that automatically.

So I was very taken with that.

And I began to write poems, which I hadn't written since I was 15.

I'd had poetry published when I was 15, but I'd given that up entirely.

When my father had died, I'd kind of gone into a reliving his life, I suppose.

And I found myself, in a way, able to explore through art those things that I couldn't openly admit in a circle or directly to a therapist.

And that was very helpful for me.

So I used the art and then this notion of being in a group of men.

drumming, talking, doing the things that men don't normally do that you wouldn't do in a pub because you'd be drinking and you'd be having drinking friends.

In a men's group, things get serious and it's as if you go down in the lift.

You find yourselves talking about your losses, your failures, your pain.

And there's all the good stuff too.

But the importance was I had an access to working through those things which I needed to work through.

And I think this is what is sort of rather revolutionary about the whole idea, is men working with other men.

Because generally, we've been programmed as men, if you've got a problem, you go to a woman.

Women deal with our emotional stuff.

What is different...

with being a man talking to another man about all of this kind of stuff?

In a funny way, I think that as men, we used to give away our creativity or our feelings, that that was a woman's department, or somehow it was associated with the feminine, which of course is nonsense and is a way for men not to feel and not to experience.

And that's the thing that I discovered was that in the company of men,

I wasn't trying to impress.

I didn't need to impress.

And if there was one woman in the room, all the men would somehow get competitive in some bizarre way around being seen to be top dog or being seen to be this, that, and the other.

But in a group of men, I found myself beginning to heal in ways that I actually didn't believe possible.

I was blessed by the men's groups I was in.

And that really helped me.

If you can take your tears to a group of men, if you can be held in your rage or your fear by a group of men, that has a slightly different effect than giving it to mummy, taking it to the wife, taking it to the lover, taking it to the girlfriend, who just gets so fed up with having men dump their feelings on them.

It's a place where you can begin to really process and get through.

As Robert Frost, the poet, says, the only way out is through.

So you have to go into the feelings to heal.

You have to go into the darkness to heal.

And to do that in the company of men is both strengthening and in some way quite potent.

It gives you a sense that you're actually getting somewhere and doing something.

And there are men now, of course, who've been in men's groups for 30-odd years.

You know, they really have made the journey with each other.

Yeah, I've been in a sort of a similar kind of thing on and off for 15 years.

I mean, it's the doing it over time, I think, is what is so powerful because you sort of have ups and downs and you see the full range of people.

And, you know, it's good to see how other people deal with the same stuff, like, you know, parents getting old and dying and things like that.

You don't feel as if you're the only person going through it.

And that is wonderful.

Yeah.

Now, the two things that are likely to come up that men need to deal with are anger and shame.

So I think we'll break them down into two halves.

Because if you're going to heal a man's soul, if anybody's going to heal their soul, they're going to have to deal with these two things.

So let's look at anger first.

And you have a lovely idea of a sort of a triangle where you have anger, shame and violence.

So tell me about that triangle and why do you have it?

Originally, it came to me as the idea of gas work, which is grief, anger and shame, and the sense that they were inextricably linked.

I spotted in myself that very often when I was angry, what actually was going on was that deep down inside, I was really full of grief and unable to express it.

There was also the other thing going on that often when I was angry, an old childhood message would come up, whack, and I would find myself in deep shame, unable to speak, unable to look people in the eye, diminished and sort of frozen in that moment.

So I began to realize that rather than feel the shame, I could be angry.

I would sort of puff myself up, which made me feel better and stronger somehow than this diminished, shrunken creature that I could become in shame.

And ultimately, I lost contact with the grief almost entirely.

And it wasn't until I got into men's groups or into men's work where I discovered that the door to healing, in men's cases, is actually grief.

I think this is very different for women.

In the way that I think men need to go away and grieve together, and that's been a recurring riff in mine and many men's lives, I think that women need to go away and be angry together.

That in the way that big boys don't cry has been the message in many men's lives.

Little girls shouldn't be angry has been the message in many women's lives.

So that we have that terrible situation in which a woman comes to us very angry and starts to cry.

Because that was the only acceptable message to her.

And she is frustrated by that.

We are kind of paralyzed by that because we're uncomfortable around grief.

And the whole thing just gets worse and worse and worse.

Wow.

So for men to be able to really approach the healing, they need to access the grief.

And sometimes that can be in a group, that can be about unpicking.

Actually, are you really angry?

What's going on?

What's really going on?

Ah, okay.

That's what's really going on.

There's a deep well of grief that is demanding attention.

So what was the grief that was demanding attention in your life then?

Well, it...

Firstly, my father had died when I was 15 and we had had a row the night before he died.

I'd been out and came back late.

My father and I had a row and he hit me and he wasn't a violent man, but he hit me and knocked me down.

I went up to bed.

He came up to my bedroom later and said, let's make it up, old son.

That was his language.

And I said, no, never.

He went away, had a heart attack and died in the night.

That is a lot of grief.

That's a lot of grief.

And I carried that for 23 years before I cracked that particular connection.

So from that, I realized that, you know, my grief, and I think what happens in life is that other griefs adhere to the primary grief, if that makes any sense.

Psychologically, that might not work, but for me, that's my experience.

I would say that they congregate together and they reinfest each other almost.

I think that's absolutely right.

And it's a sort of a vast amalgam that we accrete, we find wrapped around ourselves, that can be almost paralyzing because we fall into that trap, the mythological trap of thinking, if I ever cry, I'll never be able to stop.

If I ever weep, the dam will give behind me.

I remember writing a poem back in the 90s, early 90s, a poem that was about, you know, if I grieve, I will never be able to stop.

And that's a real factor in many men's lives.

So that holds them in all the more.

And it's not until you're in a safe place where you can grieve.

And that's often in a men's group or in a room of men where you can actually just let go.

Because there's that thing again in the back of your head.

You've got to be a protector and defender.

So you really can't grieve openly.

You can't grieve in public.

And in many men's lives, there were small opportunities.

Walking past the cenotaph or standing by the cenotaph on the 11th of November was an opportunity.

But even then it was held in because of this massive weight of grief.

And I think, if nothing else, Men's Work has broken that dam and allowed us to grieve and live our lives more fully, frankly.

And I think you can get inherited grief as well.

I mean, in my family, we're still coping with the First World War and the losses that

And the messages that were given about grief from my great-grandfather to my grandmother to my mother and to today and my family, they're still as potent.

So it's sometimes not just your own grief, but the grief you've been handed on from all the ancestors.

Yes, yes.

And I believe that's true of anger too.

Right.

So let's talk about anger.

So I believe that we can have other people's anger for them.

You know, there's the classic thing of the husband becomes more and more rational and more and more together and quieter.

And the wife becomes more and more angry and frustrated and so on and so forth.

Well, in actual fact,

What's happening is that the wife is actually having the anger that the man is afraid to express.

So there's these sorts of things, and they're all going on in different directions, different feelings and in different circumstances.

I remember exploring some of my anger and realizing it wasn't mine.

It was actually my mother's.

My mother was an angry woman.

She used to wake me up in the morning shouting at me, and that was not great.

So I became quite angry and can still be very angry.

And that's opening the door on this oven, this furnace of anger, which developed.

But actually, it wasn't mine.

It was my mother's.

It was my grandparents.

You know, it was all the held-in anger of the polite English middle class on the one side and the brave working class on the other.

So there was a great deal of non-expressed anger.

And I think that also adhered, as we would say, to the grief and then the shame came down.

because one is ashamed of one's behaviour, one is ashamed of crying in public, one is ashamed of being seen to be weak, all those things.

And that's where the shame reaches.

And it gets down to a core of toxic shame, which is something we might talk about.

But that comes through this extraordinary mix of confused and projected and almost unowned feelings that we possess.

So underneath the dis-ease is anger, grief and shame.

I mean, it's no wonder we don't really want to go down there really, is it?

I mean, it's not a pretty sight.

And what you're saying, and I agree with you 100%, but it ain't easy, is that you have to sit with the shame.

So what do you mean by sitting with the shame?

Sitting with the shame, first of all, you have to attune your attention.

You have to spot when you are in shame, when you are ashamed.

And that's not always easy.

Most of us, and I think this is true of both men and women, we live in a shame-bound society, many of us.

Shame is endemic in our culture.

It's like another pandemic that no one ever talks about.

But in that process, we can live it.

And I lived it for 30 some years.

I lived a long time in a medium of shame.

So like a fish in water, I couldn't say, oh, that's the water, because that's just what I swam in.

And what I swam in was a deep toxic shame that had been given to me by my parents, one of whom had all sorts of issues around self-image and weight and eating and work, and the other of whom had been deeply, deeply shamed himself in toddlerhood and onwards and was so ashamed of himself that he sat out to drink himself to death, basically.

And that was my inheritance of shame.

That's another heavy weight to carry.

But once you spot it, once you see it in yourself, and once you stop passing it on, because the easy thing with shame is just to shame other people.

Yeah.

Call that a body.

It's that horrible shaming quality we can have in conversation.

And that's just passing our shame on.

Yeah, if you think my shoes are ugly, look at yours, sort of kind of idea, really, isn't it?

It's pernicious, and we have to somehow arrest that in ourselves, if we possibly can.

And at first, it's about observing it in ourselves.

We don't have to beat ourselves up about it, and we certainly don't want to shame ourselves for it.

You know, you can't shame shame.

The only way that you can come out of shame is to bless it, to bless the person.

Shame is about who you are.

Guilt is guilt.

It's about what you do.

Shame is about your person.

It's about who you are.

And in dealing with that, you then have to go to that dark place and you have to feel it.

You have to acknowledge this is my shame.

This is what I feel.

And it's horrible.

You know, you feel it in your gut.

You feel it in your throat.

You feel it in your body.

And you just have to sit with it.

And in time, you begin to let it pass through you.

Because once again, you're traveling through it.

And then there comes the moment when you can begin to see yourself and even bless yourself.

When you can begin to look into the mirror and not hurt yourself.

And many people cannot look in a mirror without hurting themselves.

We see this in anorexics.

We see this in fighters, all sorts of different people.

But it's about developing that relationship with yourself.

And you say it's about blessing.

Tell me about how you bless somebody or you bless yourself.

Yeah, it's a fascinating thing, isn't it?

Blessing comes from blessing, an ancient German word, which relates to blood.

It's to make sacred with blood.

which goes back to the blood house and the sacrificial quality.

So it's a sacred activity.

So that connects it immediately with the soul.

And if you come from that place and you are able to look people in the eye and say the good about them, see the good in them, name it and bless it.

And we don't have to go through a whole big rigmarole of I bless you.

You don't have to do that.

In an argument, for instance, I say, that hurts, but I can see that you're doing some good.

I can see that you have this quality and you name the quality and you bless it.

And that's the ability to see the good and call it and name it.

Robert Bly, the poet that I talked about, had an extraordinary ability to both bless and curse.

He could really bless people.

He could look you in the eye and say, I think you're doing really well.

Or I really liked what you said earlier about so-and-so.

And he'd be speaking from an almost magisterial position of authority because you'd invested him with that authority just by being in his company.

And he would be able to use that and say, in my case, he said, I see you as an old man.

which to other people was insignificant.

To me, it was the one thing in the world I needed to hear because I always assumed I was going to die young because all my family did, the drink and heart attacks and all those sort of things.

So I'm now 10 years older than any male in my bloodline, my immediate bloodline, and I'm living to be old.

And that was thanks to, I would say, thanks to Robert seeing that and blessing that in me.

That's a bit complicated, but that's how I felt it and how I saw it.

I mean, I felt incredibly moved when I heard that.

It's sort of the whole concept of blessing and that story about it sort of, as you say, travelled down somewhere deep into the soul.

And it doesn't have to be verbalised.

I used to run a poetry series on the border between England and Wales in Chepster.

And we would invite different poets from America or from Australia and Wales.

So they'd be on the border and they would meet.

One of the poets that I eventually managed to get was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

And he came along and he gave a fantastic reading with a wonderful Pakistani Indian poet called Imtiaz Dhaka.

And they could not be more apart, but they created a wonderful evening.

At the break, midway through the evening, Rowan Williams was walking towards the bar to get himself a drink of some kind.

We were trying very hard to do that for him.

But he could not take a step because people were standing in front of him wanting to speak to him.

And I spotted what he was doing.

And it was he was throwing his attention around these people so that for that moment that they were together, that was the only person in the world.

And it was almost like Darshan.

You've heard of the concept of blessing by touch.

by presence, by being with someone.

Just by being with someone, he would look at them, drink them in, and just by being there would bless them.

His quality would reach out to them and hold them and bless them.

And it was a fascinating thing to watch.

I don't even know if he knew he was doing it, but he was blessing people by his presence, by his attention.

And I think that's the key factor.

If you want to bless someone, you can't just say, oh, I bless you, you're fantastic.

You have to really look them in the eye, see them, and bless them.

It's a really connective thing.

And that's the thing that reconnects us.

It's like a little silver wire that reconnects us to humanity.

And when we are shamed, those wires are snipped.

So we progressively lose more and more of those little collections until we're utterly isolated.

So the blessing is what reconnects us, soul to soul, eye to eye, heart to heart, however you care to look at it.

But that's the gift of blessing.

And I think it's a thing that we all need to practice.

We don't do enough of it.

And I think often it comes when you have made the journey yourself.

You have to somehow experience not being blessed.

to then bless yourself because you have to do that thing of looking in the mirror.

And that can be a tough one.

Now, I think you said most men have a problem with grief.

I think my problem would be more with shame than grief.

And one of the things that you can do to try and avoid or not deal with shame is you can go for pride, you know, rather than I'm terrible, I'm wonderful.

How big a trap is that?

Is it a trap?

Is it a trap or is it a defense mechanism?

I don't know.

It's a complication.

I do know that.

I think that with very, very bright people, one can find a certain arrogance that can actually be associated with having been shamed for being a SWAT or a brain or this or that or the other when you're younger.

The sporty crowd might shame you or the lads out there having fun might shame you for being a SWOT and being intelligent.

Something which, oddly enough, in our culture seems to be a derogative.

It's something very odd about our culture that doesn't honor intelligence and brightness.

So there's that.

And there's also a kind of a grandiosity that we can have if we come from these dysfunctional backgrounds or vaguely dysfunctional backgrounds.

We can become quite grandiose, which is both a means of protecting and defending ourselves, but it's also a sort of like a natural response to not being seen.

We're seeking to be seen the whole time.

We're seeking to be blessed, loved, seen.

And at that point, we can become a little bit grandiose.

Certainly I did in my case.

And that's where we get into this notion of narcissism and narcissistic behavior, which is, you know, the idea of attention seeking, attention grabbing and all that kind of thing.

And that's where that can come into and feel like and look like pride.

There's something very benign about pride in an almost tribal sense.

To be honoured, this is a word we have not got in our culture currently.

We don't do much of that anymore.

But to be honoured by somebody else and given pride, maybe it's the wrong word, but given self-respect, given honour.

I think I love the word honour.

Let's have the word honour.

Yeah.

I spent a bit of time in the subcontinent of India, Pakistan.

And what I realized was that in Urdu, there's a word called izzat, which is honor.

And in many instances, you take away a man's izzat, you take away a man's honor, and he is a badly diminished man and can get very angry, very ashamed, very hurt, and potentially very dangerous.

And I think that that's part of the mix that we have.

We don't have the word honour in the sense that we don't seek to maintain our honour as people would have done a thousand years ago.

We don't do that anymore.

And I think that's a bit of a loss somehow.

So in a moment, we're going to sort of look at all of these issues through the lens of one man's letter.

My gosh, this letter is going to do a lot of work.

We'll have a look at that in just a moment.

The Meaningful Life with Andrew G. Marshall.

Please follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and visit our website andrewgmarshall.com forward slash podcast where you can join our supporters club and unlock bonus material and other benefits.

In June, I will run my third men's retreat near Berlin.

In a chaotic and challenging world where the rules of masculinity are getting blurrier and the criticism of us more strident, this growing community of like-minded men is an important resource.

This retreat is called Balancing Priorities, being both the barefooted warrior and the embodied lover, and runs from Thursday 11th June to Saturday 13th June 2026.

The weather will be wonderful, and we can take full advantage of the lake and the unspoiled nature around us.

The main themes of the event will be how to have the strength to stand up for yourself and your family, yet at the same time be the empathetic and engaged lover your partner longs for.

How to both protect and nurture.

Come and join us and learn how to be both the barefoot warrior and the embodied lover.

More details and registration at www.andrewgmarshall.com.

Look forward to meeting you.

If you enjoy The Meaningful Life, there's all sorts of ways of getting involved with it.

I have a newsletter that's done on Substack.

It comes out every two weeks and I look at issues that I think will be helpful to you.

I point up particular episodes of The Meaningful Life.

If you'd like to have that, it's completely free.

Go to my website, www.andrewgmarshall.com and you will find out how to subscribe to my newsletter.

While you're there, you could look at becoming a supporter of The Meaningful Life and help us continue the work.

You'll find details of that at www.andrewgmarshall.com forward slash podcasts.

And there you can also find out how to send a letter in.

And this letter is brief, but full of pain.

So, I believe my wife to be depressed has been for many years.

Nothing works.

Blames me for everything.

Gets angry at the drop of a hat.

Tried to work it out.

Tried everything with logic.

But nothing works.

I need help.

So, this is soul work really, isn't it, ultimately?

I think you're right, yes.

I think you're right.

And there's a quality of almost like a miasma of pain in the description of the relationship.

There's a miasma of pain between this depressed wife and I think an increasingly desperate husband.

I think it's fair to say that.

That's what I'm hearing when I read it.

And also in that desperation, the sense of holding on, trying to fix it, wanting to force a solution, which of course is a very male response to a female problem in that sense.

But trying so hard, I've tried everything with logic, but nothing works.

Well, I think it's a truth or a partial truth to say there's no such thing as an intellectual answer to an emotional problem.

You know, there's that sense that maybe he's looking at the wrong thing, poor man.

I mean, I think the first problem is that we as men have been raised to solve problems.

And some people don't actually want their problems fixing.

They actually, they want you to really see them first.

That's what they want.

They want to be seen, not fixed.

So how could he see his wife rather than trying to fix her?

As I finished reading it, I had a sense of him backing off.

There's something sort of almost relentless about tried to work it out, tried everything with logic, but nothing works.

I need help.

There's that desperation in it.

But I have a sense of him pushing it, pushing it, pushing it, pushing it.

When perhaps his wife just needed to be allowed her depression.

And that's a difficult choice to make.

But to then back off.

and honour her in her depression.

That's a difficult choice for a man to make because the expectation, and it may also have been his wife's expectation, that he was going to fix it, that he was going to cure it, he was going to solve the problem.

But clearly, it's insoluble.

It can't be fixed.

And that's where he's calling for help.

And when you try and fix somebody and you try and fix their anger, what do you think normally happens?

They just get angrier.

Absolutely.

And you either have a damn fine row, which may be good, you know, it may clear the air, or you get into a habitual call and response.

Anger, resentment, anger, resentment, anger, resentment, and the whole thing just kind of rolls forward in a sort of like an emotionally limp kind of a way, where it's never ever resolved.

It's just experienced and lived.

Now, I actually do have a podcast specifically on the topic of how men respond to women's anger.

But let's look at this.

How do you respond to a woman's anger?

How does he respond to his wife's anger?

Because trying to fix it is making her angrier.

So we need an alternative strategy.

Well, I think the first thing is to keep breathing.

It's shocking how often I was once in a room full of men and women where the women suddenly started to express their anger for righteous reasons.

And the rage of a half room full of women had 16 stone rugby players running out the door.

They couldn't handle it.

They couldn't handle their loved ones or just a woman's anger.

And of course, at that point, we're talking about mummy's anger and the fear of losing mummy and the fear of all that, that sort of mythological thinking that we get into around our partners.

And I think the important thing in that circumstance is to take a big deep breath, is to remain present and absolutely remain present and allow that anger to just break like a wave.

You know, you don't have to fix it.

You don't have to stop it.

You don't have to.

Sometimes you just need to stand and listen to it.

Or as we might say, take it.

And I would encourage you, and this is going to sound like the most weird idea, is I would ask you to say to your wife, tell me more.

Just those three words, tell me more about that.

Because what it says is, I accept your anger.

Now, I know that that's a terrible thing to say, but deep down, if you can accept somebody's anger, you can accept all of them.

Whereas if we won't accept somebody's anger, what we say is, I'll have these nice bits of you, but actually I don't want the rest.

And that actually feels, if you're the person that's actually on the receiving end of that, it actually feels deep down very rejecting.

So it's terribly understandable why you don't want to hear any more anger.

But if you actually can say,

Yeah, I hear you're angry.

Tell me more about that.

You will get a whole lot more anger.

And, you know, if you're really strong, you could say, yeah, I hear that is the more.

And there will come a point where there isn't any more.

Yes, absolutely.

And you might then have a conversation that would be different from the ones that you normally have.

Yes.

Or at least what anger there may be, and there will be anger in the future, what anger there may be in the future will be present anger rather than past accrued anger, that stuff that can be so toxic and difficult.

The one thing I thought was interesting in the letter was – I say the one thing, it's actually a very interesting letter –

was this idea of trying everything with logic.

And that kind of prompted me to think, maybe, maybe there's an opportunity here for the guy who wrote the letter to have a really good look at himself.

Could he possibly be projecting his anger onto his wife?

Could he be maintaining his own righteousness in his logic?

Could he be possibly keeping to a path where he's the one who is sane and together and so on, and she's balmy and mad and angry?

There's a little bit of that that could be in the mix.

And I'm not saying that's the picture entirely.

What I am saying is there's a little bit of us that can feel – you used the word earlier – we can feel quite proud for holding on and not getting angry ourselves.

That, of course, pushes more anger onto the wife who can get more and more angry.

So I think it might be worth –

friend, either doing some anger work or joining a men's group in which his anger would be welcome.

His anger would be a part of the mix of the group as all the others.

And perhaps there might even be a rage that needs to be addressed.

Sort of like as we have toxic shame, we have toxic anger, which is rage.

And at that point, that might be something that he can lessen at the very least.

He can lessen in the company of other men.

Just a thought.

Yeah, I mean, you took the words right out of my mouth.

I was going to ask him, what is his own relationship with anger?

You know, finish this sentence, you know, anger is, and then you put three or four things down.

I'm sure the answer won't be anger is wonderful, but that's the sort of thing that I'm looking at.

And I think that you need to do the thing that every man hates to do more than anything else in the world, and that is ask for help.

Yes, yes.

Which you have done to us, and that's brilliant.

And I think you need to find sustained help because this is a lonely path to tread.

And I mean, I think it would give a very strong message to your wife when you say that, you know, actually, I'm finding this really difficult and I'm going to get some help for it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And also, I think that in the final analysis...

The only life you can save is your own.

There's a tendency in us all to want to help others, particularly those we love, and to fix them and to cure them and to whatever that might be.

And we feel utterly helpless around their discomfort or their disease or their whatever that might be.

And at that point, we need to really say to ourselves, okay, I can't change her.

I can't fix her.

But I can change the way I think about her and feel about her.

And I can work on myself.

And who knows, perhaps...

that might ease something within the relationship.

Just not being prodded can be a huge relief for somebody.

And I'm just having a very weird thought at the moment, but I generally tend to go with weird thoughts.

I wonder if he needs a poem.

in the sense that, you know, a poem actually helps us look at things differently.

And I wonder if you've got a poem that would deal with depression, anger and stuckness.

And I would imagine that somewhere in your oeuvre, there must be a poem that talks about anger and depression.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

Here's a poem that speaks to the situation we find ourselves in.

It's a poem called Around and Below and Behind.

Across his shoulders, anger, and down his knotted spine, coiled and writhing, captive, bound, the anger of a thousand yeses in place of a solitary no.

Moulded round the anger, corroded, cracked, and dangerous, the armour of his given shame, a second hand-me-down inheritance from those who could not, would not love.

Far below the shame, a grief, unacknowledged, unexpressed, the oily sea beneath a cliff, quiescent now but never leaving, eroding all with a lap and a kiss.

Behind all this a staring child, alone, abandoned, terrified, the quintessential orphan, frozen by the fear of death and life and love and all he knows.

That's beautiful.

I think I'd like it a second time, if that's okay.

Okay.

Around and below and behind.

Across his shoulders anger and down his knotted spine, coiled and writhing, captive, bound, the anger of a thousand yeses in place of a solitary no.

Moulded round the anger, corroded, cracked and dangerous, the armour of his given shame, a second hand-me-down inheritance from those who could not, would not love.

Far below the shame, a grief, unacknowledged, unexpressed, the oily sea beneath a cliff, quiescent now but never leaving, eroding all with a lap and a kiss.

Behind all this, a staring child, alone, abandoned, terrified.

The quintessential orphan, frozen by the fear of death and life and love and all he knows.

And poetry sort of hits us in a deeper place, which is sort of where we sometimes need to go out of that daily battle.

I think this is the realm of poetry because it, once again, it deals in images, it deals in pictures.

The oily sea beneath a cliff.

is a picture the soul can take on, whereas a whole series of rather interesting but long abstract words are not going to touch the moment.

And that's where poetry works, particularly in men's work, in men's groups, because it arrests the attention, but it sort of bypasses the intellect and goes into the feeling state.

through the images.

And I think that that's what I found with the work.

And I was writing poems in men's events, during men's events, and later in corporate events.

But I would write about what was in the room, what I was feeling, what I was seeing.

And at that point, when a poem begins to really mean something, it's creating an image.

And of course, your image is going to be different to my image.

Your oily sea is going to be different to my oily sea.

Your cliff is going to be different to my cliff.

And so on and so on and so forth.

So the more a poem mentions things and doings, so nouns and verbs and less sort of these descriptive words that can really not necessarily help us, the more precise it is in that imagery, the more we remember, the more we take on.

And I think sometimes that's the best way to open a subject up so that we can get there ultimately together in a group.

So as my witness on The Meaningful Life, I have to ask you, what makes your life meaningful?

Soulful experience.

The experience that I get when I get close to those peak experiences I had as a kid, as a youth, out in nature, feeling the connection to everything.

And whether that is grief, joy, madness, all these different experiences, to embrace them and soulfully add them to my life, not to shun them.

as I did for so long.

So there's a notion for me of having a connection through the feeling to poetry, to art, sometimes just to stand in front of a beautiful thing and let it soak in.

That's what I mean by experience.

I think that's how I get to meaning.

I think meaning for me is a sort of like a secondary thing after the experience.

I don't want to disparage meaning or meaningfulness, but there's a part of me that has to get to it via experience.

My men's retreat is from Sunday the 28th of September until Wednesday the 1st of October, just outside Berlin.

Full details on my website, www.andrewgmarshall.com.

Click on Men's Retreat.

If you'd like to hear more from William, we've got some daily rituals to feed our soul.

That's what we'll be talking about in the bonus material.

And if you want to hear that, you can subscribe directly via Apple or Spotify.

And if you want to become a supporter of The Meaningful Life,

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