Voice, Choice, & Truth

The OLSLAI trifecta of deep alignment.

I’m currently looking at the backs of twenty-odd men.

It’s Day 3 of a five-day workshop I lead every year called The UNcivilized Men’s Initiation and the attendees are all circled up in a large living room in Jefferson, Colorado.

Most of these men already look radically different than they did three days ago when they walked in the door.

Some are virtually unrecognizable. Their faces have changed. Their posture is straighter. And a number of them are speaking with markedly different voices. The octave has dropped, that’s obvious. But what’s most noticeable is both the words they’re using and more importantly the place from which those words come.

Their voices are different. Their choices are different. Because what’s true has been given a safe place to come to the surface.

They don’t know it yet, but tonight, after a day of deep emotional release work, we’re going to circle them up one last time and have them finish this sentence:

“What no one in my life knows but needs to be said is…”

Now that’s some real shit. That takes faith, trust, and a belly full of courage. Or shall I say it takes a commitment to living one life, soul led, all in.

In this piece, I’m sharing the fifth domain of OLSLAI — voice, choice, and truth.

Let’s dive into it.

The Need of Your Voice

Last week I made an Instagram post after watching someone I care deeply for use the word Grape to describe a sexual assault. We all know she did it for the sake of the algorithm and yet I was furious. This is post Gisele Pelicot, post Epstein List, and was fresh on the heels of learning of Telegram groups where tens of thousands of men share tips on how to drug and rape their wives.

In less than 90 seconds — I chose to write the short piece. I used my voice. And I spoke the truth of my soul. Then posted.

As of this writing, almost 4 million people have read my post. That’s a lot of opinions.

I remember being asked the next day, “How come you were willing to risk your business and your brand to speak out about the destructive behavior of men?”

It seemed like an odd question to me because my answer was, “I literally can’t not say something. How the hell can you hear about what’s happening right now and keep quiet?”

While the overwhelming response (mostly from women) to my post was positive, a lot of people were less than happy with what I’d written. I have an inbox full of colorful responses calling me all kinds of names. And I’d post it again tomorrow without thinking twice.

The “can’t not” is something I feel entering the collective right now given when something happens, how quickly it’s now all out in the open.

The world is being given permission to be honest. That permission trickles all the way down to you, sitting wherever you are reading this.

I grew up in the 80’s and in a house where we kept things to ourselves. This was especially true as a man. My heroes growing up were Rambo and Commando and silent ninjas. Not really the guys sitting down and saying, “There’s something heavy on my heart that I’d love to share with you.”

Now this wasn’t quite the “children are to be seen and not heard” era that my parents grew up in, but the idea was still there under the surface, albeit with the intensity volume dialed down a few notches.

We saw this notion societally echoed just a few years ago, with the cancel culture insanity that was so prevalent when COVID fears and distorted social justice collided. Many people watched friends lose businesses, opportunities, and livelihoods all for things we now are back to saying openly.

And now here we are — our voices, our depth voices, our truth voices, and our free voices — are all being beckoned back into the light and the darkness.

Too many of us have become fluent in silence, letting the very words we so desperately need to express live like caged animals trapped in our chests, chewing their own limbs to free themselves.

In OLSLAI, we speak first from our hearts but always from our souls. We speak with kindness and compassion as well as ferocity and power. We speak from our souls and know that the chips when we do, can fall where they may. Alignment is king. Censorship is death.

By now you must feel the enormity of freedom that lives on the other side of the sentence, “What no one in my life knows but needs to be said is…”

And then living from that place.

Speak your life into reality and your words into existence with a fury. Without apology.

Your voice is needed. Your voice is you. Free both.

The Power of Your Choice

What’s the difference between torture and enlightenment?

As someone who voluntarily locked himself in a pitch black room for seven straight weeks, I’ll share — it’s choice.

If someone had taken me by the scruff of my neck and shoved me in that room against my will, I would have had a phenomenally different experience, and mine was far from a walk in the park.

There’s a reason why consent is such a powerful notion and has such depth to it — at its core it is all about choice. I am a willing participant in this activity or I am not. That’s the difference between trauma and hardship, between violation and willing participation.

And yet there is much about our lives we cannot and do not get to consent to, isn’t there? I didn’t consent to my ex-wife leaving. I didn’t consent to my father dying. I didn’t consent to having acne, getting my neck broken, my ACL torn, nor my hairline for fuck’s sake. But again, here we are.

And yet, the choice is there, more often than not. And so often it is at the times when we’re digging our heels in and swearing that our lives are completely out of our hands.

I’m not a fan of bypassing anything, nor putting a Pollyanna spin on things just to make them sound prettier. And yet, it’s there.

One of the most powerful exercises I lead people through is — have to get, get to, blessed to.

So many times we tell ourselves — I have to go to work tomorrow. Or, I have to go to the gym this morning. I have to take the kids to school. I have to, have to, have to.

And yet:

When I’ve been unemployed, I desperately wanted to go to work.
When I was injured, I would have given anything to get back under a barbell.
Ask anyone who’s given up on IVF if they would view driving children to school as a have to.

The blessed to adds a final dimension here:

— I acknowledge that someone took out a loan, took a deep breath, and started the company who employs me. Someone decided to study brick laying, and electric, and plumbing, and built the building my company rents. Someone decided to go into real estate and rent the building. You feel me on that one?

Going from have to, to get to, to blessed to is a relatively easy shift once it’s in your consciousness. But it’s not the big choice I’m alluding to.

I choose not to drink. I choose not to do drugs. I choose not to consume pornography. I choose to publish my work publicly for people to both consume and criticize.

I intentionally choose in as many areas of my life as possible and look deeply at all the places where if someone were to ask me, “Is that true?” about the stories I tell myself, I’d be in deep contemplation about whether I was making a choice in that moment.

Most important here is the place from which we’re making our choices, and in OLSLAI we speak of three main areas. For sure there can be overlap between them but the more clarity we have the better.

The areas are:

— Our egos
— Our wounds
— Our souls

Again, I’ll acknowledge the potential overlap and connection relationally between these areas as well as the gift of hindsight to show us where we may have thought we were deeply intentioned and yet acting out of wounding, egocentrism, or both.

My ego chose my last car purchase, plain and simple (Mercedes G-wagon…gorgeous car, way more than I could ever afford).

My wounds chose many of my relationships, including my marriage.

Being in alignment with my soul is why you’re reading this piece, why I have talks on the darkness lined up for the fall, and why OLSLAI is being promoted outside of my work at UNcivilized.

I imagine you can audit your own life, past and present, and find places where perhaps the choice wasn’t the highest, or you’re even denying there is choice.

And yet we can ask — and we can check in — and we can contemplate the big decisions we’re about to make, or the reasons why things may feel wildly off in an area of our lives and ask, “Am I acknowledging the choice I’m making here, despite saying I don’t have one?”

And perhaps more importantly, “Is my ego choosing here? Are my wounds? Or am I in conversation and alignment with my soul as I move forward?”

Now let’s move on to truth.

Truth Is An Anvil

Truth, when committed to, costs you everything that is not it.

That’s one hell of a proposition, isn’t it? It’s almost as if it takes a commitment to your soul’s deepest expression to survive it.

The question that’s been asked in each section, the one I’m asking the men to answer later in the evening is about voice, isn’t it? I’m not giving them the option of writing it down. And of course they’re welcome to stare blankly at the ceiling and say nothing, that’s their choice.

But if they do choose to share, it will be putting voice and choice to something that’s in a word — real. And truth.

This level of truth is often hard to find, at least on a busy Wednesday morning while ushering the kids out of the house, lunchboxes in tow. It may not be readily available in between meetings, while scrolling The Gram, or when intoxicated.

It’s the kind of thing that most often sits in the corner of your life waiting for an event you didn’t consent to to come along and reorganize your reality. It’s the death, the loss, the heartbreak, the crushing defeat that drops you out of your ego and into what you actually fucking want. Or don’t, despite proclaiming the opposite.

It waits until you’re in a container that can hold you, in the case of this piece, it’s the house full of men and a team of trained facilitators, ready to help each man remove the burden he’s been carrying. As my brother Michael says, “Some things are too heavy to put down alone.”

There’s a thing about truth, that we all know but don’t say out loud — it lands differently. When we hear it, we feel it. It hits us in the gut and we know there are no more questions needed.

Truth can land with an anvil, or wisp past your ear like a down feather. It’s not a size thing or a weight thing, it’s a stillness thing. Truth stops your brain from needing to know more, to intellectualize, or to fabricate — it simply is. And we all know it when we feel it.

In OLSLAI, truth is not to be feared, although inviting it in will come with change. Change is scary and disruptive and expensive, but not more than living for another moment out of alignment with our souls.

In OLSLAI, we know that putting voice to truth is liberation. That putting choice to truth is power. And combining all three is the path to the life we lie in bed dreaming about.

In OLSLAI, we know grace is our soul’s love language and ask for and give ourselves copious amounts of it as we reorient ourselves toward our deepest truths.

The Question

I won’t share the particulars of what the men spoke tonight in our closing circle. But they did.

We asked them to finish our sentence. They freed themselves of burdens some of them have carried for decades. Things their closest friends and even their spouses know nothing about.

There were tears. There were uncomfortable silences. There was an immense amount of courage.

The most beautiful part? Everything shared was wildly human. Almost mundane in the face of what we’re subject to daily in our social media feeds. And yet to each man, the risk of sharing was the risk of exposure. Of honesty, of letting go of all of the benefits he got from keeping the secret.

This work is brave, folks. It’s real. It’s scary and there isn’t a great road map for it.

But it’s honest, and the satisfaction you’ll get from aligning yourself to the truth of your heart and the voice of your soul is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. There’s a buzz that comes from it that’s virtually imperceptible. Until it’s not there. Then its absence is deafening.

Live your life in a way that leaves no doubt you’re on your soul’s path. To you or anyone else watching.

One life. Soul led. All in.

Now it’s your turn. What no one in your life knows but needs to be said is…

Love and darkness,
Traver

P.S. — If you’d like the audio version of my latest book 28 Days In Darkness, I’ll read it to you myself.