Transmuting Energy
The ultimate (hu)man hack.
Most of the men I know carry energy they do not know what to do with.
Some of it lives in the rearview mirror. It is the energy of the past self you would rather not see. The man who lied. The man who bailed. The man who went numb instead of showing up. The man who hurt people and then built a story to survive it.
The rest of it shows up when loss hits. It is the energy of grief. The ache in your chest when someone you love is gone. The rage at cancer or addiction or accidents that should never have happened. The exhaustion that settles in when you realize life will not go back to how it was.
Most of us were never taught what to do with any of that. So the energy turns against us. Shame becomes a verdict about who you are. Grief becomes a room you avoid. Both become fuel for the same old patterns: distraction, overwork, anger, withdrawal, pretending you are fine.
What if that energy is not the enemy? What if it is raw material?
Not something to erase, but something to transmute. Not into spiritual clichés or hustle, but into a different way of being a man in your actual life.
Let me give you two scenes.
Scene 1: When the date comes back
The first scene lives in my body every year on December 8.
Fifteen years ago, my life imploded. I was a pastor living a double life. My moral failure became public. The fallout wrecked my family and my sense of self.
December 8 is not just a date on the calendar. It is a doorway back into the worst version of me. The man who betrayed trust. The man who preached one thing and did another.
When that date rolls around, my body remembers before my brain does. My chest tightens. My stomach drops. Old scripts start whispering. This is who you really are. Nothing has changed. You can build whatever new life you want. Underneath it all, you are still that guy.
That is one way to use the energy of shame: let it prove the worst story about you and then organize your life around avoiding that feeling. A lot of men do that. We either bury the past and refuse to look at it, or we stare at it so hard that it becomes the only thing that is true.
Transmuting that energy looks different. It does not mean pretending you did not do what you did. It does not mean rebranding your harm as a growth opportunity. It means telling the truth and then asking a different question.
Instead of “What does this prove about me,” you start asking “What is this energy for now.” Fifteen years ago, I used the charge of shame to run, defend, and self-destruct. Today, when December 8 comes back, I try to use that same charge for something else.
To pay attention to the people my past harmed instead of making it all about my guilt.
To notice where those same patterns want to creep back in and cut them off before they do.
To stay tender toward other men caught in their own wreckage, not as a hero, but as someone who remembers that panic from the inside.
The shame energy does not vanish. It changes jobs. It stops being the prosecutor and starts becoming a teacher. The same nervous system charge that once fueled denial begins to fuel honesty, accountability, repair, and a different kind of fathering and friendship. That is transmutation in the realm of failure.
You stop asking “How do I get rid of this part of me” and start asking “How do I put it to work in service of the man I am becoming.”
If you want more on how December 8 impacted me this year, check out the most recent post at We Can Stay Human:
Scene 2: Standing in the thick of grief
The second scene is more recent.
I am standing in front of a room at the funeral of a 45-year old woman who’s 8 year cancer journey has come to an undesired end. I’m looking at her husband, her 11 and 13 year old boys, her mom, her friends, her colleagues.
She was brilliant and fierce. A devoted mom. An advocate for people most of the world had written off. She should have had decades left. Instead, cancer stole her far too soon.
We called it a celebration of life. Honest truth: it felt like standing inside a wound.
In rooms like that, we are tempted to reach for answers. To make the pain make sense. To find some explanation that lets us relax. There are no answers big enough for that kind of loss.
What we do have is energy. The energy of heartbreak. Of rage at a disease that did not play fair. Of fear about how to live now. Of a love so deep it cracks your ribcage.
In that service I talked about kintsugi, the Japanese practice of mending broken pottery with gold. How the goal is not to hide the cracks, but to fill them with something precious so they become part of the story.
Grief works like that. You cannot put the pieces back how they were. You cannot make the loss make sense. You cannot muscle your way back to “before.” But you can decide what fills the cracks.
Most men fill them with numbness or distraction. We keep ourselves busy or stoic enough that we do not have to feel the ache. The problem is that energy does not disappear. It just goes underground. It leaks out later as a short fuse with your kids, distance in your marriage, or that dull emptiness no success can touch.
Transmuting grief energy asks more of us.
It asks us to feel it.
To weep.
To let our voice crack.
To tell the truth about what we have lost.
And then, slowly, to ask: How do I carry this forward in a way that looks like love?
At her funeral, that question sounded like this:
Maybe for you it is the way she carved out weekends for family no matter how demanding the job was.
Maybe it is the way she fought for people others had given up on.
Maybe it is her insistence on celebrating wins, large and small.
Maybe it is as simple as movie night. Brunch. Resting under an umbrella at the beach while your people play in the waves.
Grieve and live. Not grieve or live. Grieve and live.
Let the ache become a commitment to be more present. Let the rage become a refusal to waste your life on what does not matter. Let the tenderness become a way you speak, touch, listen, apologize.
You cannot trade your grief in for a clean slate. You can let it turn you into a truer version of yourself.
What this has to do with masculinity
This is masculinity in the key of presence, not performance.
Most of us were handed a script that says be in control, do not feel too much, do not look back, do not fall apart. In that script, the only acceptable energies are power, productivity, and performance. Everything else gets buried.
Buried energy still moves. It just moves sideways. Control turns into domination. Stoicism turns into disconnection. Avoided grief turns into harm. Unhealed shame turns into self-sabotage or moralizing other people.
In this framework, masculinity is not about proving anything. It is about learning what to do with your energy. To feel without drowning. To grieve without disappearing. To remember without being defined by the worst chapter of your story.
You do not have to get rid of your shame or your grief. You have to give them a job.
To sit at the table with your ghosts and your losses and ask a new question:
What if none of this disqualifies me from being beloved.
What if all of this can be turned toward love.
The dates will come back. The funerals will not stop. The old scripts will still try to take the mic.
Transmuting energy does not mean you stop hurting. It means the hurt stops running the show. You become the kind of man who can stand in a room full of heartbreak, your own included, and stay soft. Stay honest. Stay present.
Grieve and live.
Let that be the way your energy moves.
This one hit home.
I've done and continue to do a lot of work to put the shame and grief to work and sometimes I've held onto it so strongly as a reminder...Yet I don't know if that's always the best way to handle it.