Hello Reader,

This past week, I've been trying to balance family time with a bit more work, now that my parents have come to visit and help with the kids. It's a 5-hour drive, so they only come a few times a year.

Two Updates (One Success, One Delay)

In my last newsletter, I mentioned I'd been working on two things. My plan to release a free training I've been working on two weeks ago didn't go as planned. It was an experiment to see how video would work for me, and also finding the balance between valuable information and conciseness.

My intent was to give value—explain what most men I work with struggle with and what to do about it in the shortest amount of time. Creating that balance was much trickier than I expected. But I'm satisfied with the latest version. If you're interested to see my first long-form video going deeper into the topics I write about, you can check it out here.

It's much easier to explain complex topics in video than in writing—and you can get a feel for my vibe if you've never seen me. On the other hand, I have to admit, video doesn't come naturally to me like writing does, so it'll take some time until I get accustomed and feel more comfortable. But I see this as an opportunity for growth.

The other surprise I was working on is a short, free course on nervous system regulation, but I decided to improve it and include a few videos as well, so I'm postponing its release.

The Year My Life Accelerated

Back to sharing my journey. Hands down, 2022 was the most intense year of my life up until that point. It felt like my life was accelerating exponentially.

For the first time since I started going to the gym in 2012, I stopped going rigidly. Even in 2020, when gyms closed due to the pandemic, I was training 6 times a week—3 times jogging and 3 times lifting weights with the dumbbells and equipment I bought for home. But 10 years later, I was ready to let go of that identity of a rigid gym-goer. I only trained when I wasn't doing some inner work.

I still continued my Total Immersion swimming training twice a week, learning to release tension in the body. I'd done extensive research and knew what I needed to work on to make even bigger shifts in my life. I wanted to combine the inner work I was doing with outer work—returning to where I started, but this time with self-awareness, intention, and just as supplementation, not as foundation.

Learning to Approach (Again)

I doubled down on dating. Back then, I was still part of a community of men working on dating and confidence. That year, I finally did something I'd been wanting to do for years but never followed through on—I joined two group trips where we practiced stepping out of our comfort zones and approaching together.

For the first time, I wasn't sabotaging myself. I was out on the streets, approaching strangers, and actually seeing some results. And for the first time in a decade, I felt that familiar feeling like I had some superpowers and could create my destiny—the same feeling I'd briefly experienced in 2020. Little did I know it would take more than a decade to finally break free completely.

I had already worked with a dating coach in 2020 and in 2021 with another who had shifted into inner work. But even with their guidance, I still couldn't break through. Looking back, I believe they did their best—but most dating coaches can only take you so far if your nervous system is stuck in survival mode (especially flight/freeze). For men carrying deeper trauma, the standard "just push through" advice doesn't work.

I believe the coaches I worked with did the best they could. But knowing what I know now, most dating coaches can only help men who don't carry much unresolved trauma. For men stuck in deep flight/freeze patterns, the standard advice just doesn't reach. And they blame you for not taking action. If you know of any trauma-informed dating coaches, let me know. I haven't found one yet.

That first boot camp got me warmed up. I overcame my approach anxiety—this time not by desensitizing myself by forcing through, but by acknowledging the tension and working with it. I got back into the habit of approaching women. During the four-hour boot camp, I got two numbers and almost had an instant date, but unfortunately, the girl had to catch a flight back to Norway.

In the first half of the year, we flew to Bulgaria for 5 days with my friends from the online dating community. It's a cheap country with beautiful women. Talking to strangers in a direct man-to-woman communication style still didn't come easy to me, but I finally wasn't the one just observing others while freezing myself. And I realized one thing.

I always needed more than just looks to feel attracted to a woman and have deeper connection before intimacy. I finally accepted that about myself. I wasn't trying to prove anything to other men anymore. I wasn't looking to become some kind of player; I was building a skill to approach women I wanted to meet in day-to-day situations.

I got back to the learning phase—messy, uncomfortable, but necessary to build strong foundations.

Breaking Through My Voice and Movement Blocks

I wanted to work on my voice, but the voice coach I chose had taken a break from coaching to focus on releasing her album (she was a singer as well). I was always self-conscious when it came to my voice. I'd been told I was "the quiet one" in school often, reminded frequently that I should talk louder.

But my inner critic was even stronger when it came to dancing. While I could sing when I joined others and my voice would blend in, I couldn't dance at all. Just the year before—summer 2021—I attended my friend's wedding. I wanted to join others, but despite making huge progress since high school (where we'd known each other from) and becoming more social and confident, despite talking to people at the wedding I didn't know with ease, I couldn't step onto the dance floor. The self-consciousness and the tension coming with it was too much.

So the next choice was logically dancing, and there was a "Dance Therapy" workshop happening in February. Unfortunately, it got cancelled twice, but I found another workshop in March called "Dancing in Your Power"—for men only. And it was perfect: a small group of men where I learned the basics—how to move to music naturally, something like ecstatic dance (which I only learned about later that year).

But at that workshop, I learned what I needed to feel okay in my body and that it was safe to be seen dancing even though I'm not a pro dancer. I also made friends with the guys attending—and the workshop facilitator. Little did I know he would sign up for my workshop two years later.

When Dating Brought Opportunities

I met a woman in summer, and although we didn't hit it off romantically, we decided to stay friends and signed up for a two-month salsa basics course. I went from not being able to go on the dance floor to enjoying dancing in just 4 months.

And I was making new friends easier than ever before. Each workshop, each new event brought friends that I resonated with more than my old mates from high school or from the gym. Up until that point, those and the men from the dating community were the only friends I had. That woman didn't want to continue in salsa classes as she had other responsibilities starting, so I discontinued as well.

But in January 2023, the dancing studio moved to just across from my apartment, and I signed up all alone. I danced salsa for another 6 months in 2023 and really started enjoying it, even though it's a tricky dance style to learn. More importantly, I learned to be absolutely okay being seen dancing. And I learned to lead as a man, which translated from dance to my ability to take leadership—with women, in relationships, and in life generally. But let's not skip ahead.

The Power of Embodied Work

I read two more books from Alexander Lowen—Joy and The Way to Vibrant Health—after reading Bioenergetics in 2020 and starting to practice some bioenergetic exercises. Similar to breathwork, I found somatics powerful, and Lowen's work profoundly influential.

So many concepts clicked for me, and I was struck by how his insights—especially between body and psyche—unfortunately remained overlooked in mainstream psychology until recently, and he still doesn't get enough credit for the concepts people now talk about.

But somatic therapy itself wasn't something that I resonated with so much that I would devote more time to go deeper. I was looking for something more subtle (meaning being able to do it in public), less time-consuming, while being equally effective.

I'd journaled on and off for years, but I started journaling meticulously in May. I read Branden's work on self-esteem and incorporated his sentence stem completion into my journaling routine. I started what became a 365-day streak that brought a lot of clarity thanks to uncovering my hidden beliefs and patterns.

The Workshop That Changed Everything

My "mentor," with whom I started the inner work on my very first workshop more than two years earlier, opened up a new in-person course focused on the art of banter. And it became one of the highlights of the year.

We met each Wednesday, started the session with wins and gains, continued with bantering (starting first physical and in later sessions energetic) while incorporating releasing. It was a great combination of outer work with inner work.

Three important things happened there. We formed a great group, and after the course ended after 8 weeks, we all became friends. We started meeting each week, with someone else hosting others each week. We created a men's group—which we weren't even aware was a thing at the time. It was only after 2-3 meetings that I looked up how to host such a meeting properly and discovered there is such a thing as men's groups or men's circles (which later I delved more deeply into).

It became a safe space where we would share our wins but also our struggles, and it was a highlight each week for me. I started to lose connection with my old friends, and talking about sports or politics became so unimportant, so boring, that I consciously stopped meeting with those friends.

At the last Bantering Edge session, our mentor recommended a workshop he took himself. Four of us signed up for "Transformation of Shadow into Personal Freedom and Dark Eros" in Prague. Little did I know my life would change forever just 3 months later.

But before I tell you what it was, there was the third thing that happened. Thanks to the Bantering Edge, I started noticing my emotions more again—just being more aware of what I felt in my body, the sensations and tension. And two years after I'd stopped practicing releasing (I only practiced for 3-4 months), I started practicing Releasing again. And it helped me in many ways in the second half of 2022.

But there were so many things that happened in my life in the second half of 2022 that it's for another newsletter.

Stay on the path,

Bohus

P.S. The biggest shifts often come when you let go of who you think you should be and start exploring who you actually are. What identity are you holding onto that might be keeping you stuck?