In today’s culture, men are under extreme stress and too many have become anxious, angry, lonely, and depressed. We all know that men and women are different, but not always in the simplistic ways our society would have us believe. This dialogue explores a deeper understanding of the awakening masculine soul and what it means to be a good man in the 21st Century. It explores how men can shed the crippling effects of what many have come to call the “man box” and also delves into the effects of what our guest calls the Father Wound. Many men are evolving and embracing the complexity, strength, and beauty of being a man and what that means for the women who love them. Jed has worked with thousands and thousands of men who are angry, irritable, and to some degree violent. “There isn’t one man that I’ve ever worked with that when you get to the root, when you look at his early life experience, violence is part of his experience. He’s been wounded in some way. He offers the importance of looking at the underlying health problem. “Adverse Childhood Experiences affect our physical health: higher rates of asthma, lung problems, cancer, and heart disease. We’re seeing that these things have core issues that go all the way back to childhood. We’re creating a whole new way of healing and a whole new understanding of healing. Instead of looking at what’s your diagnosis, we’re asking what happened to you? What were the wounds that may be the ultimate core causes of these later problems that we have as adults?” Diamond describes the power of men’s groups and their coming together for initiation and rites of passage. He tells of being transported and picked up by a man who previously experienced the ritual. “Being in that rite of passage circle where we learned some depth of connection, being reconnected to ourselves and other men, and then having that special man come back for us and calling out ‘Jed Diamond, it’s Howard La Garde. I’ve come back for you.’ It’s still very, very moving as I described it to you. I get emotional when I talk about this. The experience so many men have had and women as well, is the men who did not come back for us, men who may have harmed us, or men who may have abandoned us, or men who left us, or men who we’ve been longing for our whole lives for that man to come back for us, whether it was our father, or our good buddy, or our friend, or the man that died before we could hold him or be held by him.”