speaker-0: It is not possible without death. Literally. Death is the thing that makes life possible. Without death, life ends. Period. I don't care what the technology. Without death, life ends. And so if we're gonna hold life in this sort of way, we should at least be holding the thing that feeds life in that way. If not even higher.
speaker-1: Hey there, has there ever been a moment in your life when you stopped everything, looked in the mirror and actually wondered, who am I, really? How did I become this version of me? And as men, have you ever sat with the question, what does masculinity mean to you? Not what the world told you it should mean, but what it feels like in your bones. And those bigger questions, the ones about life, about loss, about the fact that one day all this ends, how do they land in your chest? Do they scare you? Do they wake you up? Or do you just keep moving? If any of that just tightens something in your throat, you're not alone. Because today we're sitting down with a man who doesn't just talk about his thresholds. He walks people across them. His name is Paul Simard. Paul is a death doula, a men's guide, a cultural architect. He's the companion people call when life is asking them to become someone new in the middle of transition, loss, awakening, or renewal. He calls himself a keeper of the thresholds and he holds this space with a rare, steady, fiercely compassionate presence that somehow makes the scariest parts of being human feel sacred. Through his words, through his work, Paul has this beautiful way of putting death back where it belongs, not in the shadows, not as something we fear or avoid, but as the very thing that can bring us fully back to life. He's delivered two TED Talks that are already changing the conversation. The first, The mythical man challenges every old story we've been told about masculinity or emotional expression. His second, bringing death back to life, drops this spring in 2026 and it's an invitation to completely reimagine our relationship with grief, dying and what it means to be alive while we still are. Whether he's on stage in front of hundreds or sitting in a circle with just a few men who are finally ready to feel everything, Paul's authentic presence simply says, you don't have to do this alone. If you know a man in your life asking these questions or needing someone to walk beside him in a time like this, send them this episode. Now, help me welcome to the show the incredible Paul Simard. Welcome to Let's Get Selfish. Paul, I can't tell you how excited I am to have the opportunity to have this conversation with Paul, I was excited when we had the opportunity to connect and I got a little bit of a chance to learn about you from the package you sent over to me. But I would love for you to take the floor and explain to us what it is you do.
speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. I mean, every time I get that invitation, it's a learning process for me too. I'm going to figure out who I am today. So for the most part, if you want to look at the primary ways that I spend my time, I am a men's health and wellness guide. So I help men navigate their physical, spiritual, and mental health. A lot of it being on the latter part of things. And I do that through what I call counter societal approaches. to the different areas and it's an invitation for men to really sit with themselves and to question, right, who they are and what are they experiencing in the world as a primary tool in order for them to reclaim really parts of themselves that they may not have even known were within their sort of DNA, if you will. The second part that I do, which is the one that always requires a little bit more explanation is I'm a death doula and, you know, many people today have heard of birth doulas. We have, you know, More often than not, have women who accompany women and families as they're going through pregnancy and their birth duelists. I'm at the other end, if you will, and I accompany families and individuals as they either navigate someone with a terminal illness, maybe it's even themselves, or after the death of a loved one and supporting them as they, well, I don't want to say process their grief because I don't believe that that's actually the goal. Create a deeper relationship and find the nourishment within the grief and find a new way to be. with their grief. So that's part of what I do as a death duel. And the other thing I do is I really want us to change the public narrative around grief, dying and death. And so I do a lot of community work, hosting events, speaking on stages, as you alluded to earlier, inviting people to question the way that we have been asked to view and really had our views imposed upon us as to what grief, dying and death represent in our lives. So those are the big pieces that I do. I do writing. I'm a, as I said, I'm a speaker. And I love being in moments like this.
speaker-1: I want us to start from the beginning here and let's really focus on what it is you do in the world with men and how are you helping men particularly step into a life of more acceptance and better masculinity and understanding themselves. And this, we live in a really messy world where a lot of us men struggle with identity, our masculinity, what the society tells us and who we're supposed to be. How can we do better? How can we step into that better and understand it a little more?
speaker-0: That's such a beautiful question that that could probably take us the whole of our time together today. ⁓ and you know, I think part of it is actually in the question. You said something right at the end, which is how can we do better? And this is one of the key things that I think we are being called into question. This notion of always having to be better, better compared to what? Better compared to whom? Who's setting the metrics? Who's determining what makes for a good man or a bad man? Who's decided what it actually means to be successful in the world? We don't question those things. We don't. For the large part, we are socialized into a system and literally put on a treadmill, if you will, and just asked to keep moving. Literally keep moving. None of us, first of we're not really given the time even to call that into question. Because everything is so planned out, so articulate. And if you take a moment of pause, imagine, you know, going between elementary school and high school and saying, you know what, I'm going to take a moment here and think about all of this, decide whether or not I want to keep going. Right. Or between high school and university, right. Or between university and a job, you know, you're wasting your time. If you do anything like that.
speaker-1: dive into that a little bit where there are so many people out there, we can use that reference of going from high school to college and university who do the, I'm going to take a gap year and find out what I want to do and who I am. Or there's the people who dive straight from high school, right to university and college, and they don't even stop. is it, or could you say it's comparable? that there's the people who take the gap year and whether they find out what they want to do or they never end up going back to school because they now can't make that decision or the people that have dove right back into it and quit one to two years in because they really had no idea what they were doing. They didn't take time to understand or break it down.
speaker-0: Well, again, your question is structured in such a way where the answer, you know, can be explored right within it, which is to say you've offered up a binary, right? Excuse me. And the idea that a 18 or 19 year old is going to have any idea what it is that they want to do with their whole list. I came to be doing what I'm doing right now at the very young age, a very young age of 46. And it's so different from where I was as a 20 year old. Right? Where I was in sales and I was, you know, selling widgets and doing the things that I was convinced and socialized to believe were the things I needed to do. And so the idea that a 21 year old can make the decisions that will be absolutely what they're going to do for the rest of their lives is, is in and of itself a false start. Universities, I believe, you know, should be doing I've seen one program like this actually here in Montreal at McGill where you start in a major, but your first year is actually, you're not allowed to take any of your courses within the major. You actually have to go out into other departments and other fields. They force you to go out and learn more. And I believe that that's one step closer to what it is we should be doing, right? And supporting our young people.
speaker-1: can jump in here and I have to wonder does age play a role in identity, masculinity, and what we believe we are?
speaker-0: think it's experience more than anything else. You know, it's the same idea that in order to be an elder, right, you need to be old. And that's not true. I'm blessed to have an indigenous elder who teaches me a lot of the different things that are supportive in my way of being. And she's 15 years my younger, you know, so age has nothing to do with it. And she's a she on top of that. And so it's really important to note that it's experience that is really the key determinant. to this idea of masculinity and you're pointing at something here without recognizing, think that you're pointing at it, which is to say for the most part, up until the age of about 21 or so, most young people, most young men don't go through anything that looks like a rite of passage. Nothing that challenges them, nothing that brings them into contact with their actual humanity, with their place within the systems, right? And what we do have in place right now is year 21. or depending on where you live, 18, or maybe at 16, if it's your driver's license, but it's these sort of fleeting, really non-consequential moments that are considered to be these rites of passage where now you can drink as a 21 year old. And so now you're a man, right? Being a man was something that was not earned in the sense of making you sort of worthy of, but that more allowed you to come into contact with your own sense of self through these rites of passage.
speaker-1: Here's one that's rambling through my brain and making me really curious. Cause I loved how you were saying kind of that right of passage, but do you think that in our society we've built things like, you kind of said, getting your driver's license and being able to drink and some of those real surface level pieces as rites of passage over someone who grew up having to be the lead. or be the man of their house at a very young age, someone who had to learn how to take on responsibilities at a really young age. Do you see a difference in how people, I guess, present themselves or develop themselves from those surface level rites of passage to a very experiential, ingrained rite of passage?
speaker-0: So first of all, would say that neither one of them is a rites of passage, right? So they're actually different things, but neither one of them are rite of passage, right?
speaker-1: Okay. What is a right of passage?
speaker-0: A rite of passage is something that is actually held by the community, held by the village, right? That, you know, we'll outline a simple one that would have been a part of many of our cultures, right? No matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter what part of the world you're from, you would have had some kind of a rite of passage that looked something like this, whereby the young boy is taken away from the family, including the father. by the way, but primarily it's a removal from the nurturing, holding, caring embrace of the mother and brought into an experience with the elders, the uncles and the grandfathers of the village. And they're taken through something very intentional and that is very, not only confrontational, but that helps the young boy to understand that they have a responsibility, that they have a, yeah, a responsibility. in regards to the village that they must be able to hold in their body, that they must be able to contribute. And so they're then taken through whatever that process is and whether it's a hunt or whatever it is, you three days in the wild on your own, and then they're welcomed back on the other side, right? So it's a very intentional, it's a very, very well-held space. And again, it then makes the man, you know, who has emerged from the rite of passage, someone who is ready to be in service of the community. So in nothing that you described in those two examples, in nothing of that, does that exist, right? And I just want to speak to that young person who's been called into being that leader of the household, let's say. There are obviously advantages to that, but there's also a lot of things that can come up for that person because they might actually lose their adolescence altogether. Right. And that's not healthy either. Right. So if you're a 10 or 12 year old and you're called into leadership in the family, there's a development, there's a growth, there's an understanding of who you are as a young person and what's happening to your body and how the world is operating that is stolen from you.
speaker-1: In our society now and as a generations of change, what would you say is the most relatable kind of space that that could be walked into? What is something that in our now generation and the society that we're living in today that we could really atone to this space?
speaker-0: think the most successful one, it's going to sound silly to some people and anybody who actually is aware of what rites of passage are and things like that are going to say, no, no, no, that's not, but I don't want us to set the bar so high that it feels like something foreign to us or that you like, know, everybody's out selling programs and things like that. That's great. It's, it's important. It's wonderful that if that's accessible, but it's also not necessarily accessible to everyone. So I want to offer something right now that is accessible to everyone. And, know, I talked about. you know, the young man being taken from the family, including the father, right? Well, fathers in and of themselves, assuming that they are a part of the household could do something very simple, like create a camping trip opportunity. But within that camping trip opportunity, don't do everything. Create some intentional moments throughout it. Have the boy be the one who starts the fire. Have the boy, you know, catch and cut the fish. Bring some intention to it, right? Take a moment and even just honor, you know, if you do catch a fish as an example, right? Take a moment and honor and recognize what it is that you're doing. You're consuming life in service to life, right? And honor that fish, right? So just create more intentional spaces like that. You know, a 13 year old boy going off for three days with his father and he's going to learn some basic skills that the father can pass down. Now that assumes of course that the father has those skills himself, but if you don't have them currently, it's not rocket science. You can easily go and figure out how to start a campfire. You can easily go and figure out how to catch a fish. You can easily go and figure out how to build a very simple, non-retail store purchase tent. You can figure all these things out very easily. And so going out and doing that, and even if you're learning it with your son, it's an initiation of sorts. It's a rites of passage. So keep it simple. It doesn't have to be complicated.
speaker-1: world nowadays and the culture that we're living in, especially with so many people growing up in this technology-filled and sucked into their phone kind of world. Or on the flip side of it, many people growing up in dysregulated, non-conventional families. Are you seeing that there is less of this rite of passage or seeing that there's more men affected because they're growing up without any of these experiences?
speaker-0: I mean, there's really very little evidence in terms of data that says that that's so. Okay. So there aren't a lot of people who are really measuring and doing research to actually be able to say this with like numbers and look outside, look at the state of the world. All you have to do is walk into the actual communities in which you live to see that, that things are not heading in the right direction. They haven't been for a really, really long time. And you talked a little bit about, you know, some of the masculinity and challenges and things like that, you know, male suicide is five times higher than, you know, suicide by women rates of addiction rates of violence. You know, these things are all skewed, unfortunately, in the direction where men are the largest portion of these people incarceration, you know, and so there's, there's no question just by looking out at the world that something is missing. from the experience. And one of the biggest things we find is that most men, and you alluded to this earlier as well, don't really have a sense of belonging. And especially now where, and I'll say this, especially for like the later ages. So let's say from the age of about 35 onwards, right? Where you could be, you know, in quotes, the height of your professional career and you're already being made redundant by the 21 year old, right? Or the AI, right? And so. And without a sense of belonging, right? It's, it is literally, it's leaving you floating out in the wind, right? And we don't quite yet have it figured out in terms of how do we support these men in these times, right? We, we don't quite yet have enough men understanding the value of men's work and the value of community and what it means to get together over more than just a beer and a hockey game, you know, which is fine. But there's a deeper layer that when you. ask men about it when you really invite them into it, that is undeniable, right? And we have places like the UK where you now have like a minister of loneliness. Imagine there's a government office called the minister of loneliness. Most men can't identify one person that they could turn to under any circumstance.
speaker-1: I have bit of a two-part question on this. Part one is, what does it really mean to belong? And part two is, does the meaning of belonging change as we get older?
speaker-0: ⁓ that's such a beautiful question. So to be, to belong really, for me, it's two parts. And the first part is to be able to look out into the world, right? And to be able to see yourself in it, to be able to see yourself as someone who contributes, who can stand strong within that place, wherever it is that you are. Right? And you talked about earlier with the phones, you know, A great indicator of the fact that we don't feel like we belong is the fact that we walk down streets side by side with people, with our faces in our phones, as opposed to being in and of the place that we're in. Right. It's a great indicator of how we feel about our environment and whether or not we feel safe and comfortable in it. Right. The second piece that I think is, about belonging is actually, we have the capacity? And this is the more challenging one. Do we have the capacity? to actually feel as if we're in right relationship with the places in which we live. Right. And that's actually really, really hard because we are so, there is no, we have very little sense of, of, ⁓ the word I'm looking for. We have very little sense of like influence on the worlds in which we should, we don't understand our world. We don't know how our homes work. We don't know how food gets into the grocery store. Really. We don't take the time. to understand. so there is no relationship between us and our outside world and right relationship means reciprocity. Right? So we are excellent consumer. We have been socialized to be very, very good at that. But when we don't reciprocate, and there's a part of this that ties into the work with the death doula, when we don't reciprocate, then we're not in right relationship. And so in our bones, we don't feel like we belong because to belong means that we are reciprocal. Right. That's huge.
speaker-1: Before we go into part two, have to interject with this then. Do you see or is there a correlation between people fakily feeling like they belong because they're part of a social media group or they're something on the internet, but yet they're still completely lonely and dealing with all these other issues on the outside. They've got this device and they're part of all these groups and They feel like they belong to somewhere on this internet platform. Yet in their everyday life, once they turn that phone off, they're completely miserable and lonely and lose their sense of belonging because there's nothing besides that online platform.
speaker-0: A sense of belonging fundamentally must be rooted in reality, period. And so I'm not going to say who is and isn't feeling a sense of belonging because it's impossible to tell really from their social media and from the way they are online. But if that's where they're getting their sense of belonging, then my sense would be that no, they do not have that sense of belonging. It needs to be grounded and rooted in reality, right? One of the men's initiatives that I do is is called rooted and rising like a tree. A tree starts by putting its roots down, right? And then it rises. So my invitation for men is to let's get your roots down. Let's get you grounded. Let's have you have a sense of belonging, right? And then let's quote unquote, elevate or, or rise up or whatever the thing is. But if you're not rooted, if you're not grounded, then all you're going to do is rise and fall and rise and fall. So we got to get those roots in the ground.
speaker-1: I've learned that personally the hard way I would say that for everybody out there Paul is talking a Crucial and something that us men don't always think about especially at a young age It's something we're not thinking about and maybe it's something we think about as we get older I know that I have is I've started to mature I'll say that where you put your roots the strength of your roots is Crucially important Paul you said it beautifully if you have no roots You will try to rise and keep falling.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. And this points to one of the, know, I talked about how I do counter societal coaching with men and I don't like the word coaching, but it's easy for everybody to understand. You know, some of the principles of, of what I do is the first one is always the one that catches people off guard, which is I, I really work with men on helping them to become stoppable. And when they first hear that they do a kind of, huh, like they know they heard the words right, but they think that maybe I made a mistake because society wants us to become unstoppable, but for a moment, let's stick with the whole tree analogy and putting those roots down. If that acorn never settles, how possible is it for it to crack open and lay down roots? Impossible, right? And so it must stop in order to put down roots. And becoming stoppable doesn't mean that other people can stop you. Not at all. It means that you have the capacity to slow down. And I love metaphors. So here's a metaphor for people. The faster you go through life, imagine you're a car on a highway. What happens? Let's use, I don't know, most of your listeners are probably maybe Canadian, I'm going to guess, but so we're going to go with that anyways. This, if you're starting at 30 kilometers an hour and you think about everything that you can see in your peripheral vision, it's fairly vast. When you accelerate that to 80, it gets a little narrower. On 20, a little narrower. 60, 200, forget about it. Right? You're focused solely on this very narrow tunnel. And so the idea of becoming stoppable is the invitation for you to slow down to a near stop so that the aperture of your peripheral vision can be opened and more of what is happening can be let in. And that is actually then when you become more capable of doing whatever it is you want to do in the world, because you see more of it. You can experience more of it. The faster you go, you know, and fail fast, right? It's an entrepreneurial thing. Fail fast and fail often, right? Except at what point do you actually learn and develop something sustainable? It's when you slow down and let the roots hold, right?
speaker-1: had a mentor of mine tell me a great metaphor that I'd probably heard it a thousand times, but it didn't click in until that moment that slow is fast. And she had to say it to me twice because I looked at it the first time, like, what the heck are you talking about? And she said, slow is fast. And I went, okay. And she looks at me and goes, if you slow down and you take that extra minute, you can do things with more accuracy. You can do things with better quality. You can do things in more of the moment, instead of trying to rush through them, skipping over details, making a mistake or having to go back and fix something because you didn't slow down that little bit. And to me, that was huge. think there's more people out there that if we could find that ability to slow down for a minute and not always be going so fast. There is, I think it's in Alabama. We're going to go back. Song that says, know, what is it? I'm in a rush and I don't know why and I love it So I think exactly where you're going is Phenomenal that back to the acorn if it continues to blow in the wind. It's never gonna set its route
speaker-0: Exactly right. Exactly right. And you also then, you you talked about sort of the, you'll be more effective, you'll be more impactful and da da da. You're also going to be able to see where it is that you need help, right? Which comes to another one of the sort of principles of what I teach, which is embrace your limits. We're told to blow through our limits that they're actually defects that we're meant to like learn the skills in order to overcome. Maybe, maybe, and maybe you're actually meant to lean on someone. which is actually how societies and cultures are meant to be built, is by us leaning in on each other to create these structures that become much, much stronger. So I could go out and learn how to be, well these days you can do most of your accounting online, but I could go in and learn all of the principles of accounting so that I could be an effective accountant within my own business, or I hire the best accountant that I know who happens to live five minutes from me and have a much, much, much stronger infrastructure to be building around. I embrace my limit. It's not my thing. It's not my thing. And so I benefit by embracing that limitation. I'm not minimized by it. I'm able to do more. I'm able to bring my gift more into the world because I've embraced that limit. So embrace your limits. They're beautiful things. And this too leads, and you we didn't really touch when I mentioned the death do a little before, but this too is part of it as well, right? Because The ultimate limit is death. And until we come into a healthier relationship with grief, dying and death, we are always going to be sort of struggling. We are always going to be somewhat limited in our capacity to really, really, really live in the way we say we want to. And so that's the ultimate limit that needs to be reintroduced back into our lives.
speaker-1: This really actually does round into part two of the question I had thrown in there is, as we age, does all of this seem to change? Do we get a better understanding as we age? Are we able to step into this better as we age? Or as we mature and age in our life, is it just something that is a natural development? Like, how does age play into all of
speaker-0: Again, don't, I really don't feel it does. It's an opportunity potentially, and I guess we could say that that's what retirement might offer. But also we know that most people in, or many people anyways in retirement really struggle with engaging and remaining engaged in that time of their lives because that sense of worth has been so tied to the performance, right? To the metrics, to the contribution, to the production. to being a provider and a protector. And now all of a sudden you're not doing any of those things anymore. So I think that, again, it's more important to think about experience. It's much more important. I know some young men who are 26, 27 years old and who have embraced the idea of men's work. And excuse me, I would say that their expression of masculinity is far more mature than some of the more immature versions that I've seen in 46, 47, 55, 60 year olds, right? And so it's much, much less about how old you are and much more about what are the experiences you've had along the way and how present have you been in them? Because you could actually, you know, I spoke about my past being in sales and sort of being in the corporate world, if you will. I could have easily have kept going down that path, but it was me paying attention to the experiences I was having within those places that allowed for the shift that allowed for me to see that. What I wanted for myself was something far different, far, far different. And so my capacity to do whatever it is I'm doing today, if I'm ever in a position to be able to help people is less a result of my age and more a result of how I've been within the experiences and what I've done with them as I've gone along and how I've invited others to challenge me. You talked about your mentor. I'm blessed with like, either I know them or I, whether I know them or I don't, but if you don't have to know someone. personally for them to be your mentor. can deeply shape your life. Francis Weller is a great example for me, you know, where I've spent a lot of time with his work. Michael Mead is another one. I've never met either of these two people, right? And so I don't need to know them for them to be my mentors. So what, what do you go and do with your experiences? How are they shaped?
speaker-1: Yeah, I love that and that is a great opening for me because now I'm really wanting to dive down the rabbit trail and find out how it is that you took your experiences and now all these pieces that have shaped you from as you said you used to work at the corporate world and doing sales you moved into working with men how did you end up now stepping into a world of death doula and as a man This is one of those fields where we hear about women working in as a death doula very often. That is when I think of a death doula, I picture a woman as a man. How do you bring the masculinity and how do you bring a male perspective to being a death doula?
speaker-0: That is a beautiful question and it's the first time I've been asked that one. So thank you for this question. And we're going to, we're going to stumble through something that might look like a response, I hope. So the first part is easier. ⁓ My transition was from corporate actually. And then there was a 10 to 15 year period of nonprofit work, which started to bring me closer into like community and those kinds of things. And then in 2017, I came across this thing called men's work when I actually lost my job and started to call into question everything that I was as a father, as a provider, as a protector, right? And I was literally Googling things like, what does it mean to be a good father? What does it mean to be a good, you know, and I landed on what does it mean to be a good man? And that's where I came to men's work. And it was men's work that was actually the first introduction towards this thing that I now do with death, dying and grief. the death duel will work. And a friend of mine, Ian McKenzie, has a beautiful podcast called the Mythic Masculine and he had Stephen Jenkinson on, excuse me. And you know, this was a number of years ago and right away I could tell that this was someone who was different. I had never heard anyone speak about death, dying and grief in this way. And when I was thinking about the work that I was doing with men and already starting to get a sense of how that sort of rat race was such a huge part of everything that men were struggling with. And the idea that you needed to create a life of meeting by, by having a life of production, right? Of output, right? That that was somehow the measure of a man. And then here comes Steven with this work around death and dying and asking me to rethink and reshape my whole relationship to it. I alluded to it earlier, but that's when I realized that men's primary, so a lot of men, let me, let me. Roll back the generalization. lot of men, many men, myself included, struggled with the idea that we were somehow limited, right? And that our limits were, were viewed as these things that were defects in ourselves. That if you weren't able to do everything, then you were not a good man. And with Steven's conversations around death, it really pulled me in and I started to really go down his route. You said the rabbit hole is a perfect, this is where we should put a warning for any listeners that if you don't know Steven, you need to start to go down. and look at his work, you're heading down the rabbit hole. Like, absolutely. And get ready, you will see wondrous things, but you may not come out for a really long time. But it became very clear to me that that relationship with death was one of the primary things. And so I started to introduce this idea of reshaping our way of viewing and seeing the world into my men's work around death, right? Specifically, I added that element in, which I had never introduced before. And then that just literally honestly expanded and I started to find myself coming into places where I was having these conversations with people from all different backgrounds and all different cultures and all different genders. And I remember at one point I was actually at a, Steven is someone that I've had the chance to get to know very well. And I was at his farm in Ontario for this two year journey with a cohort of people as part of his orphan wisdom. And I remember him asking at the very beginning, you know, like. There aren't a lot of people who, you know, when I ask who wants to do what I do, put their hands up. And I was kind of like sitting in the back going like, well, no, that's not true. There's one right here, you know? And I came out of that weekend and I joined a certification program to become a Death Dula. It eventually became the thing that I could feel my own vocational pull into. I think it's a deep privilege to sit with someone who is dying. I think it's a... It's a gift, you know, and I really do feel as though we have been socialized to view these things in very, very different ways. You graciously mentioned my two Ted talks and the one that I gave while as we're recording, it was less than 10 days ago. It was called bringing death back to life. And it's all about inviting us into viewing death, viewing grief in their fullness, not in these narrow social constricted stories that we have been raised into. It's not. It's not that. We're missing so much that's available to us.
speaker-1: Do you find that there are a lot of, I'm going to put it in a general layover, people in general, whether it's men, whether it's women, who really have a fear around death. This whole conception of they are afraid to get old and die. What do you think that really comes from? What's the underlying reason for that fear of death and getting old?
speaker-0: Fundamentally, we're going to get a little woo woo here. So apologies to anyone who doesn't appreciate it, but we're talking about death here. But fundamentally, I think it comes down in large part due to the overemphasis we have placed on our physical and material world and us as the center of it. By doing those two things, we have kind of set aside mystery. We have set aside that which is unknown. Because we are at the center of all of this, the death of us is the, is in a certain way, the death of the center, right? We, we, we are killing, if you will, you know, the whole reason for being, which is us as people, which is hubris at the highest level, right? And when we don't allow mystery, when we don't allow the unknown to be a part of our day-to-day experience, when we are, you know, I, I often say we have a, we are a knowledge addicted. society. We need to know everything, right? And we need to know it so deeply that we hyper specialize and there's literally people who can only talk about one thing in the world, you know, and we celebrate them and we give them prizes for their knowledge and for their contributions, which is wonderful. But when there's no mystery, right? And death is a mystery, you know, and there are people who are trying to figure out and trying to know what it is and trying to defeat it even, right? Hundreds of millions of dollars are going into defeating death. There's a global movement called don't die that literally is inviting people to take steps to support a, eternal life of sorts. And so instead of embracing that unknown, we villainize it. Right. So it becomes this thing that we are fearful of. It's interesting because there is, ⁓ there's a lot of research and one of my dear friends, ⁓ L'Ova Francois is one of them who does some work on this, but you know, in our bodies, in our experiences in the way our brains process things. Fear has a very clear footprint, right? It stops us in our tracks. Our brains kind of like go, whoa, like what's going on? and right. ⁓ there's another response to an external experience that is quite similar in the way that it imprints our bodies. And that is awe. When we look at the biological footprints, if you will, on our bodies of how we respond in moments of awe and fear, they're actually quite similar. It's the translation. that moves it from one place to the other. Right? You see that? Yeah. You know, I'm afraid of snakes. I'm happy, not happy to admit it, but I'm open and admitting it. Right. And there are other people who look at a snake and they're just like held in awe. Right. It's, it's, and people will say, well, you were taught. And I was like, yes, I was. But the point is, is that my body is responding in the same way as theirs are. It's just that it's being translated differently in the brain, right. In my nervous system. And so if we can. I'm one of the ways that I've been able to, I don't want to say embrace snakes in the world, but be more comfortable with them being there is by actually spending some time and looking at them and seeing what it looks like from a place of, right. And when you, when I do that, I become, mean, the way they move, the way they're able to like, you know, open up and consume. And then all of the symbology that they have throughout history and time and all the ways that different cultures have like embraced snakes, like. I kinda have to hold them also in a certain level of reverence, right? And so can we hold death in that reverence? Because here's the thing, we love to celebrate life, we love to protect it and cherish it and nurture it. Rightfully so. And it is not possible without death. Literally. Death is the thing that makes life possible. Without death, life ends. Period. I don't care what the technology is. Without death, life ends. It's just fundamental. And so if we're going to hold life in this sort of way, we should at least be holding the thing that feeds life in that way, if not even higher, if not even higher. It's like, wow, death, my gosh, it is making room for more life. So here's a controversial one for you. Dying is a privilege. Wow. Dying is a privilege.
speaker-1: Sitting here and listening to what you're saying and how you're describing death and it is now giving me a feeling of what I can just call beauty. You have transformed death from this ugly, fearful, dark object to something beautiful and a transition and I'm just sitting here in awe. I'm having my moment of awe. listening to you talk about death going, he puts it in such a way that it now just sounds like nothing more than beauty to me. ⁓ The way you're bringing it across, and I hope everybody out there listening, as you hear Paul talk about death, can close your eyes and see or feel that beauty that he's instilling into something that can be so dark and hard for people to deal with.
speaker-0: Can I give people an analogy for them to hold on to so that they can see it? I've this more and more. The analogy that I want people to invite and we're spring here now in Canada, right? So you're going to have lots of opportunity for this, friends. A flower in full bloom. A flower in full bloom is something that captures our attention. We stop, we pause, we take it in, we might smell it, right? We really will take it in. And we think that that bloom is full of life, right? But what that bloom is actually doing is signaling the death that is coming. Right? So that flower in full bloom is actually full of death. It's the last thing that that part of the flower will do before it transforms, transitions into something else. Whether it falls to the ground and lays seeds for more flowers to come or becomes a fruit. Right? Either way is, it is that liminal space. It is entering the dying. So that bloom is actually the dying of the flower that is happening. we, we, again, we hold it in such beauty, you know, we pay a lot of money to buy them by the dozen, right?
speaker-1: to caveat this into making sure everybody hears me that everybody has their own beliefs behind this and we respect all beliefs. But I'm very curious to know what is your belief, Paul, on the afterlife? What is their after death?
speaker-0: Yeah, thank you for that question. And as I'm want to do, you're going to forgive me if I don't directly answer your question, but I'm going to say first and foremost that it's the belief that is important and the holding of it and what it does for me that matters. Right? My belief, because a belief at the end of the day is something that supports you in living the life you seek to have to its fullest. So whatever your belief is, as long as it does that, than it is doing the work it was meant to do. So celebrate your belief, but also sit with them and make sure they're doing that work and not keeping you narrow and constricted and focused. My belief around what happens after we die is a mystery to me. It is mystery. And that is my belief is that I will die into a mystery. And what a gift. a, how can I, I don't want to say that I'm looking forward to it because I'm not. You know, I have three girls, have friends and family and community and work that I want to continue to do. And, and actually first, and I may rail against my own death when it actually approaches, but I also know that that belief of going into mystery as I die and again, death being a privilege. If I'm dying, if my death arrives, then in a way, the song of my life, my part within the song of life anyways, is complete. And that's where the privilege comes in. Because after my life has ended, it's the thing that makes space in the music for the next note. Right. And without that, it would just be beep and that's really fucking annoying.
speaker-1: Man, you have put this in a way that is transformative, beautiful, and so easy to understand and look at in a new perspective. I want to know, Paul, in all the experiences that you've been able to take on now, in all the ways that your life has transformed from when you were a young man to now, what's one of the greatest pieces of advice that has transformed your life?
speaker-0: This is an emotional one for me because it's still transforming and shaping my life. So I have some challenging relationships in my life as we all do. And at one point I was sitting with Steven, my mentor, and I asked him about one that was particularly challenging and particularly close to me as well, very close to my heart. You know, I asked him, well, how does one demonstrate their desire to be that role model in the world for that person when that person won't let you be a part of theirs in any way, or form. And he said something so profoundly beautiful that it will stay with me forever. And he said, your job isn't to wonder about whether or not they're paying attention. Your job is to go out and demonstrate what it means to be in the world, trusting that one day something will happen to them and they will say that is what they meant. And this is the part that got me. And he said, you need to be ready for that moment to potentially come. only after you've died. Something you may never see. And I wept at the result.
speaker-1: is intense. That I highly relate and the way you put it just is it makes my brain dive into how my metaphor, I use ripples in an ocean where when you throw your rock into the ocean, it creates ripples that you might never see. And the way you put it though, that I felt that I'm going like, you're going to talk to somebody and you're going to say something that You have no idea whether they understood it, they heard it, they saw it, and yet you need to be okay with never knowing that because the day that they do, you might not be here. Paul, this seems like a great place to bring our conversation full circle. And I would love to have you round us out with a bit of a summary to all this. If you could put all of this into one big, neat little bubble.
speaker-0: That's right.
speaker-1: How would you tell people to live their life? How would you explain to somebody what is living your best life means?
speaker-0: There's a lot of qualifiers in your question and I want to invite people to drop the qualifiers. I want to invite people to live life, not their best life. Their best life always could always, may, let me say that, their best life may always lead them to think that there is something better still, but I want to call them into their life. So please, please answer the call of your life. And that just means be present, slow down, listen and love. Right? All the things we know. We know these things. I'm not going to say anything. There's nothing we've actually said today that people don't know somewhere in their bones. Right? They already know this already. So if anything, we're reminding them or we're rattling their bone cage a little bit to shake things up at best. No more. But I want to invite people to answer the call of their life, to live in it. And that is what makes a life of meaning. It's not anything you can measure. It's not anything you can point to. It's not anything that you can... touch or sell on Amazon. For sure, it's not that, right? But it's answering the call. It's answering the call.
speaker-1: Paul, finally, I would love for you to leave everybody listening here with how they can find a few more of your TED Talks and learn a bit more about you. If they want to dive down the rabbit holes on everything that we've shared here today and dive deeper into what it means to look at death, what it means to live more of a masculinity life from the man's perspective and have their identity. brought out and they want to learn more about your work because I want to learn more and I've taken a huge amount away from this. It's been a beautiful conversation. Where can we find more?
speaker-0: So there's two websites to start with, pulsamar.co.co.com. That's the first one, all in one word. And that's where all of the different pieces of my work are. And then the work around death, dying and grief, that is on the canoe.co again. And that's where we can learn more about and go deeper into that work as well. Pulsamar.co does have a canoe. tab to it. It also has my speaking and my writing, which you can come into contact with through that. And I'm very, very, very open. So, you know, when people come on my website, the phone number they see isn't some general 1-800 number. That's my, you know, that's going to bring the right to my cell phone. So if people want to reach out, send me a text and, and let's find some time to embrace each other in some of the harder edges, some of the harder conversations of life.
speaker-1: Paul, this has been nothing but beautiful. I'm sitting here in awe and I'm so grateful for the time that I've got to share with you. Thank you so much for joining us today. I know that there's somebody out there that has got to listen to your words and they're going to feel the beauty that I...
speaker-0: Thank so much for having me. It's a true pleasure.
speaker-1: As we wrap up this powerful conversation, here's a quick 30 second favour I'd love to ask you. If something in today's talk with Paul hit you, if it stirred something, challenged you, or gave you a little more breath around life, death, or who you're becoming, would you share it with just one person? One person who might need to hear this today. Because when conversations become ripples, they create change we may never get to know. Every single week we draw brand new conversations just like this one. Real, honest, designed to help you get a little more selfish with your growth, healing, and your own life. I'm your host Brian White and you've been listening to Let's Get Selfish. Until next time, take care of yourself and keep asking the bigger questions.
speaker-1: Hey there, has there ever been a moment in your life when you stopped everything, looked in the mirror and actually wondered, who am I, really? How did I become this version of me? And as men, have you ever sat with the question, what does masculinity mean to you? Not what the world told you it should mean, but what it feels like in your bones. And those bigger questions, the ones about life, about loss, about the fact that one day all this ends, how do they land in your chest? Do they scare you? Do they wake you up? Or do you just keep moving? If any of that just tightens something in your throat, you're not alone. Because today we're sitting down with a man who doesn't just talk about his thresholds. He walks people across them. His name is Paul Simard. Paul is a death doula, a men's guide, a cultural architect. He's the companion people call when life is asking them to become someone new in the middle of transition, loss, awakening, or renewal. He calls himself a keeper of the thresholds and he holds this space with a rare, steady, fiercely compassionate presence that somehow makes the scariest parts of being human feel sacred. Through his words, through his work, Paul has this beautiful way of putting death back where it belongs, not in the shadows, not as something we fear or avoid, but as the very thing that can bring us fully back to life. He's delivered two TED Talks that are already changing the conversation. The first, The mythical man challenges every old story we've been told about masculinity or emotional expression. His second, bringing death back to life, drops this spring in 2026 and it's an invitation to completely reimagine our relationship with grief, dying and what it means to be alive while we still are. Whether he's on stage in front of hundreds or sitting in a circle with just a few men who are finally ready to feel everything, Paul's authentic presence simply says, you don't have to do this alone. If you know a man in your life asking these questions or needing someone to walk beside him in a time like this, send them this episode. Now, help me welcome to the show the incredible Paul Simard. Welcome to Let's Get Selfish. Paul, I can't tell you how excited I am to have the opportunity to have this conversation with Paul, I was excited when we had the opportunity to connect and I got a little bit of a chance to learn about you from the package you sent over to me. But I would love for you to take the floor and explain to us what it is you do.
speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. I mean, every time I get that invitation, it's a learning process for me too. I'm going to figure out who I am today. So for the most part, if you want to look at the primary ways that I spend my time, I am a men's health and wellness guide. So I help men navigate their physical, spiritual, and mental health. A lot of it being on the latter part of things. And I do that through what I call counter societal approaches. to the different areas and it's an invitation for men to really sit with themselves and to question, right, who they are and what are they experiencing in the world as a primary tool in order for them to reclaim really parts of themselves that they may not have even known were within their sort of DNA, if you will. The second part that I do, which is the one that always requires a little bit more explanation is I'm a death doula and, you know, many people today have heard of birth doulas. We have, you know, More often than not, have women who accompany women and families as they're going through pregnancy and their birth duelists. I'm at the other end, if you will, and I accompany families and individuals as they either navigate someone with a terminal illness, maybe it's even themselves, or after the death of a loved one and supporting them as they, well, I don't want to say process their grief because I don't believe that that's actually the goal. Create a deeper relationship and find the nourishment within the grief and find a new way to be. with their grief. So that's part of what I do as a death duel. And the other thing I do is I really want us to change the public narrative around grief, dying and death. And so I do a lot of community work, hosting events, speaking on stages, as you alluded to earlier, inviting people to question the way that we have been asked to view and really had our views imposed upon us as to what grief, dying and death represent in our lives. So those are the big pieces that I do. I do writing. I'm a, as I said, I'm a speaker. And I love being in moments like this.
speaker-1: I want us to start from the beginning here and let's really focus on what it is you do in the world with men and how are you helping men particularly step into a life of more acceptance and better masculinity and understanding themselves. And this, we live in a really messy world where a lot of us men struggle with identity, our masculinity, what the society tells us and who we're supposed to be. How can we do better? How can we step into that better and understand it a little more?
speaker-0: That's such a beautiful question that that could probably take us the whole of our time together today. ⁓ and you know, I think part of it is actually in the question. You said something right at the end, which is how can we do better? And this is one of the key things that I think we are being called into question. This notion of always having to be better, better compared to what? Better compared to whom? Who's setting the metrics? Who's determining what makes for a good man or a bad man? Who's decided what it actually means to be successful in the world? We don't question those things. We don't. For the large part, we are socialized into a system and literally put on a treadmill, if you will, and just asked to keep moving. Literally keep moving. None of us, first of we're not really given the time even to call that into question. Because everything is so planned out, so articulate. And if you take a moment of pause, imagine, you know, going between elementary school and high school and saying, you know what, I'm going to take a moment here and think about all of this, decide whether or not I want to keep going. Right. Or between high school and university, right. Or between university and a job, you know, you're wasting your time. If you do anything like that.
speaker-1: dive into that a little bit where there are so many people out there, we can use that reference of going from high school to college and university who do the, I'm going to take a gap year and find out what I want to do and who I am. Or there's the people who dive straight from high school, right to university and college, and they don't even stop. is it, or could you say it's comparable? that there's the people who take the gap year and whether they find out what they want to do or they never end up going back to school because they now can't make that decision or the people that have dove right back into it and quit one to two years in because they really had no idea what they were doing. They didn't take time to understand or break it down.
speaker-0: Well, again, your question is structured in such a way where the answer, you know, can be explored right within it, which is to say you've offered up a binary, right? Excuse me. And the idea that a 18 or 19 year old is going to have any idea what it is that they want to do with their whole list. I came to be doing what I'm doing right now at the very young age, a very young age of 46. And it's so different from where I was as a 20 year old. Right? Where I was in sales and I was, you know, selling widgets and doing the things that I was convinced and socialized to believe were the things I needed to do. And so the idea that a 21 year old can make the decisions that will be absolutely what they're going to do for the rest of their lives is, is in and of itself a false start. Universities, I believe, you know, should be doing I've seen one program like this actually here in Montreal at McGill where you start in a major, but your first year is actually, you're not allowed to take any of your courses within the major. You actually have to go out into other departments and other fields. They force you to go out and learn more. And I believe that that's one step closer to what it is we should be doing, right? And supporting our young people.
speaker-1: can jump in here and I have to wonder does age play a role in identity, masculinity, and what we believe we are?
speaker-0: think it's experience more than anything else. You know, it's the same idea that in order to be an elder, right, you need to be old. And that's not true. I'm blessed to have an indigenous elder who teaches me a lot of the different things that are supportive in my way of being. And she's 15 years my younger, you know, so age has nothing to do with it. And she's a she on top of that. And so it's really important to note that it's experience that is really the key determinant. to this idea of masculinity and you're pointing at something here without recognizing, think that you're pointing at it, which is to say for the most part, up until the age of about 21 or so, most young people, most young men don't go through anything that looks like a rite of passage. Nothing that challenges them, nothing that brings them into contact with their actual humanity, with their place within the systems, right? And what we do have in place right now is year 21. or depending on where you live, 18, or maybe at 16, if it's your driver's license, but it's these sort of fleeting, really non-consequential moments that are considered to be these rites of passage where now you can drink as a 21 year old. And so now you're a man, right? Being a man was something that was not earned in the sense of making you sort of worthy of, but that more allowed you to come into contact with your own sense of self through these rites of passage.
speaker-1: Here's one that's rambling through my brain and making me really curious. Cause I loved how you were saying kind of that right of passage, but do you think that in our society we've built things like, you kind of said, getting your driver's license and being able to drink and some of those real surface level pieces as rites of passage over someone who grew up having to be the lead. or be the man of their house at a very young age, someone who had to learn how to take on responsibilities at a really young age. Do you see a difference in how people, I guess, present themselves or develop themselves from those surface level rites of passage to a very experiential, ingrained rite of passage?
speaker-0: So first of all, would say that neither one of them is a rites of passage, right? So they're actually different things, but neither one of them are rite of passage, right?
speaker-1: Okay. What is a right of passage?
speaker-0: A rite of passage is something that is actually held by the community, held by the village, right? That, you know, we'll outline a simple one that would have been a part of many of our cultures, right? No matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter what part of the world you're from, you would have had some kind of a rite of passage that looked something like this, whereby the young boy is taken away from the family, including the father. by the way, but primarily it's a removal from the nurturing, holding, caring embrace of the mother and brought into an experience with the elders, the uncles and the grandfathers of the village. And they're taken through something very intentional and that is very, not only confrontational, but that helps the young boy to understand that they have a responsibility, that they have a, yeah, a responsibility. in regards to the village that they must be able to hold in their body, that they must be able to contribute. And so they're then taken through whatever that process is and whether it's a hunt or whatever it is, you three days in the wild on your own, and then they're welcomed back on the other side, right? So it's a very intentional, it's a very, very well-held space. And again, it then makes the man, you know, who has emerged from the rite of passage, someone who is ready to be in service of the community. So in nothing that you described in those two examples, in nothing of that, does that exist, right? And I just want to speak to that young person who's been called into being that leader of the household, let's say. There are obviously advantages to that, but there's also a lot of things that can come up for that person because they might actually lose their adolescence altogether. Right. And that's not healthy either. Right. So if you're a 10 or 12 year old and you're called into leadership in the family, there's a development, there's a growth, there's an understanding of who you are as a young person and what's happening to your body and how the world is operating that is stolen from you.
speaker-1: In our society now and as a generations of change, what would you say is the most relatable kind of space that that could be walked into? What is something that in our now generation and the society that we're living in today that we could really atone to this space?
speaker-0: think the most successful one, it's going to sound silly to some people and anybody who actually is aware of what rites of passage are and things like that are going to say, no, no, no, that's not, but I don't want us to set the bar so high that it feels like something foreign to us or that you like, know, everybody's out selling programs and things like that. That's great. It's, it's important. It's wonderful that if that's accessible, but it's also not necessarily accessible to everyone. So I want to offer something right now that is accessible to everyone. And, know, I talked about. you know, the young man being taken from the family, including the father, right? Well, fathers in and of themselves, assuming that they are a part of the household could do something very simple, like create a camping trip opportunity. But within that camping trip opportunity, don't do everything. Create some intentional moments throughout it. Have the boy be the one who starts the fire. Have the boy, you know, catch and cut the fish. Bring some intention to it, right? Take a moment and even just honor, you know, if you do catch a fish as an example, right? Take a moment and honor and recognize what it is that you're doing. You're consuming life in service to life, right? And honor that fish, right? So just create more intentional spaces like that. You know, a 13 year old boy going off for three days with his father and he's going to learn some basic skills that the father can pass down. Now that assumes of course that the father has those skills himself, but if you don't have them currently, it's not rocket science. You can easily go and figure out how to start a campfire. You can easily go and figure out how to catch a fish. You can easily go and figure out how to build a very simple, non-retail store purchase tent. You can figure all these things out very easily. And so going out and doing that, and even if you're learning it with your son, it's an initiation of sorts. It's a rites of passage. So keep it simple. It doesn't have to be complicated.
speaker-1: world nowadays and the culture that we're living in, especially with so many people growing up in this technology-filled and sucked into their phone kind of world. Or on the flip side of it, many people growing up in dysregulated, non-conventional families. Are you seeing that there is less of this rite of passage or seeing that there's more men affected because they're growing up without any of these experiences?
speaker-0: I mean, there's really very little evidence in terms of data that says that that's so. Okay. So there aren't a lot of people who are really measuring and doing research to actually be able to say this with like numbers and look outside, look at the state of the world. All you have to do is walk into the actual communities in which you live to see that, that things are not heading in the right direction. They haven't been for a really, really long time. And you talked a little bit about, you know, some of the masculinity and challenges and things like that, you know, male suicide is five times higher than, you know, suicide by women rates of addiction rates of violence. You know, these things are all skewed, unfortunately, in the direction where men are the largest portion of these people incarceration, you know, and so there's, there's no question just by looking out at the world that something is missing. from the experience. And one of the biggest things we find is that most men, and you alluded to this earlier as well, don't really have a sense of belonging. And especially now where, and I'll say this, especially for like the later ages. So let's say from the age of about 35 onwards, right? Where you could be, you know, in quotes, the height of your professional career and you're already being made redundant by the 21 year old, right? Or the AI, right? And so. And without a sense of belonging, right? It's, it is literally, it's leaving you floating out in the wind, right? And we don't quite yet have it figured out in terms of how do we support these men in these times, right? We, we don't quite yet have enough men understanding the value of men's work and the value of community and what it means to get together over more than just a beer and a hockey game, you know, which is fine. But there's a deeper layer that when you. ask men about it when you really invite them into it, that is undeniable, right? And we have places like the UK where you now have like a minister of loneliness. Imagine there's a government office called the minister of loneliness. Most men can't identify one person that they could turn to under any circumstance.
speaker-1: I have bit of a two-part question on this. Part one is, what does it really mean to belong? And part two is, does the meaning of belonging change as we get older?
speaker-0: ⁓ that's such a beautiful question. So to be, to belong really, for me, it's two parts. And the first part is to be able to look out into the world, right? And to be able to see yourself in it, to be able to see yourself as someone who contributes, who can stand strong within that place, wherever it is that you are. Right? And you talked about earlier with the phones, you know, A great indicator of the fact that we don't feel like we belong is the fact that we walk down streets side by side with people, with our faces in our phones, as opposed to being in and of the place that we're in. Right. It's a great indicator of how we feel about our environment and whether or not we feel safe and comfortable in it. Right. The second piece that I think is, about belonging is actually, we have the capacity? And this is the more challenging one. Do we have the capacity? to actually feel as if we're in right relationship with the places in which we live. Right. And that's actually really, really hard because we are so, there is no, we have very little sense of, of, ⁓ the word I'm looking for. We have very little sense of like influence on the worlds in which we should, we don't understand our world. We don't know how our homes work. We don't know how food gets into the grocery store. Really. We don't take the time. to understand. so there is no relationship between us and our outside world and right relationship means reciprocity. Right? So we are excellent consumer. We have been socialized to be very, very good at that. But when we don't reciprocate, and there's a part of this that ties into the work with the death doula, when we don't reciprocate, then we're not in right relationship. And so in our bones, we don't feel like we belong because to belong means that we are reciprocal. Right. That's huge.
speaker-1: Before we go into part two, have to interject with this then. Do you see or is there a correlation between people fakily feeling like they belong because they're part of a social media group or they're something on the internet, but yet they're still completely lonely and dealing with all these other issues on the outside. They've got this device and they're part of all these groups and They feel like they belong to somewhere on this internet platform. Yet in their everyday life, once they turn that phone off, they're completely miserable and lonely and lose their sense of belonging because there's nothing besides that online platform.
speaker-0: A sense of belonging fundamentally must be rooted in reality, period. And so I'm not going to say who is and isn't feeling a sense of belonging because it's impossible to tell really from their social media and from the way they are online. But if that's where they're getting their sense of belonging, then my sense would be that no, they do not have that sense of belonging. It needs to be grounded and rooted in reality, right? One of the men's initiatives that I do is is called rooted and rising like a tree. A tree starts by putting its roots down, right? And then it rises. So my invitation for men is to let's get your roots down. Let's get you grounded. Let's have you have a sense of belonging, right? And then let's quote unquote, elevate or, or rise up or whatever the thing is. But if you're not rooted, if you're not grounded, then all you're going to do is rise and fall and rise and fall. So we got to get those roots in the ground.
speaker-1: I've learned that personally the hard way I would say that for everybody out there Paul is talking a Crucial and something that us men don't always think about especially at a young age It's something we're not thinking about and maybe it's something we think about as we get older I know that I have is I've started to mature I'll say that where you put your roots the strength of your roots is Crucially important Paul you said it beautifully if you have no roots You will try to rise and keep falling.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. And this points to one of the, know, I talked about how I do counter societal coaching with men and I don't like the word coaching, but it's easy for everybody to understand. You know, some of the principles of, of what I do is the first one is always the one that catches people off guard, which is I, I really work with men on helping them to become stoppable. And when they first hear that they do a kind of, huh, like they know they heard the words right, but they think that maybe I made a mistake because society wants us to become unstoppable, but for a moment, let's stick with the whole tree analogy and putting those roots down. If that acorn never settles, how possible is it for it to crack open and lay down roots? Impossible, right? And so it must stop in order to put down roots. And becoming stoppable doesn't mean that other people can stop you. Not at all. It means that you have the capacity to slow down. And I love metaphors. So here's a metaphor for people. The faster you go through life, imagine you're a car on a highway. What happens? Let's use, I don't know, most of your listeners are probably maybe Canadian, I'm going to guess, but so we're going to go with that anyways. This, if you're starting at 30 kilometers an hour and you think about everything that you can see in your peripheral vision, it's fairly vast. When you accelerate that to 80, it gets a little narrower. On 20, a little narrower. 60, 200, forget about it. Right? You're focused solely on this very narrow tunnel. And so the idea of becoming stoppable is the invitation for you to slow down to a near stop so that the aperture of your peripheral vision can be opened and more of what is happening can be let in. And that is actually then when you become more capable of doing whatever it is you want to do in the world, because you see more of it. You can experience more of it. The faster you go, you know, and fail fast, right? It's an entrepreneurial thing. Fail fast and fail often, right? Except at what point do you actually learn and develop something sustainable? It's when you slow down and let the roots hold, right?
speaker-1: had a mentor of mine tell me a great metaphor that I'd probably heard it a thousand times, but it didn't click in until that moment that slow is fast. And she had to say it to me twice because I looked at it the first time, like, what the heck are you talking about? And she said, slow is fast. And I went, okay. And she looks at me and goes, if you slow down and you take that extra minute, you can do things with more accuracy. You can do things with better quality. You can do things in more of the moment, instead of trying to rush through them, skipping over details, making a mistake or having to go back and fix something because you didn't slow down that little bit. And to me, that was huge. think there's more people out there that if we could find that ability to slow down for a minute and not always be going so fast. There is, I think it's in Alabama. We're going to go back. Song that says, know, what is it? I'm in a rush and I don't know why and I love it So I think exactly where you're going is Phenomenal that back to the acorn if it continues to blow in the wind. It's never gonna set its route
speaker-0: Exactly right. Exactly right. And you also then, you you talked about sort of the, you'll be more effective, you'll be more impactful and da da da. You're also going to be able to see where it is that you need help, right? Which comes to another one of the sort of principles of what I teach, which is embrace your limits. We're told to blow through our limits that they're actually defects that we're meant to like learn the skills in order to overcome. Maybe, maybe, and maybe you're actually meant to lean on someone. which is actually how societies and cultures are meant to be built, is by us leaning in on each other to create these structures that become much, much stronger. So I could go out and learn how to be, well these days you can do most of your accounting online, but I could go in and learn all of the principles of accounting so that I could be an effective accountant within my own business, or I hire the best accountant that I know who happens to live five minutes from me and have a much, much, much stronger infrastructure to be building around. I embrace my limit. It's not my thing. It's not my thing. And so I benefit by embracing that limitation. I'm not minimized by it. I'm able to do more. I'm able to bring my gift more into the world because I've embraced that limit. So embrace your limits. They're beautiful things. And this too leads, and you we didn't really touch when I mentioned the death do a little before, but this too is part of it as well, right? Because The ultimate limit is death. And until we come into a healthier relationship with grief, dying and death, we are always going to be sort of struggling. We are always going to be somewhat limited in our capacity to really, really, really live in the way we say we want to. And so that's the ultimate limit that needs to be reintroduced back into our lives.
speaker-1: This really actually does round into part two of the question I had thrown in there is, as we age, does all of this seem to change? Do we get a better understanding as we age? Are we able to step into this better as we age? Or as we mature and age in our life, is it just something that is a natural development? Like, how does age play into all of
speaker-0: Again, don't, I really don't feel it does. It's an opportunity potentially, and I guess we could say that that's what retirement might offer. But also we know that most people in, or many people anyways in retirement really struggle with engaging and remaining engaged in that time of their lives because that sense of worth has been so tied to the performance, right? To the metrics, to the contribution, to the production. to being a provider and a protector. And now all of a sudden you're not doing any of those things anymore. So I think that, again, it's more important to think about experience. It's much more important. I know some young men who are 26, 27 years old and who have embraced the idea of men's work. And excuse me, I would say that their expression of masculinity is far more mature than some of the more immature versions that I've seen in 46, 47, 55, 60 year olds, right? And so it's much, much less about how old you are and much more about what are the experiences you've had along the way and how present have you been in them? Because you could actually, you know, I spoke about my past being in sales and sort of being in the corporate world, if you will. I could have easily have kept going down that path, but it was me paying attention to the experiences I was having within those places that allowed for the shift that allowed for me to see that. What I wanted for myself was something far different, far, far different. And so my capacity to do whatever it is I'm doing today, if I'm ever in a position to be able to help people is less a result of my age and more a result of how I've been within the experiences and what I've done with them as I've gone along and how I've invited others to challenge me. You talked about your mentor. I'm blessed with like, either I know them or I, whether I know them or I don't, but if you don't have to know someone. personally for them to be your mentor. can deeply shape your life. Francis Weller is a great example for me, you know, where I've spent a lot of time with his work. Michael Mead is another one. I've never met either of these two people, right? And so I don't need to know them for them to be my mentors. So what, what do you go and do with your experiences? How are they shaped?
speaker-1: Yeah, I love that and that is a great opening for me because now I'm really wanting to dive down the rabbit trail and find out how it is that you took your experiences and now all these pieces that have shaped you from as you said you used to work at the corporate world and doing sales you moved into working with men how did you end up now stepping into a world of death doula and as a man This is one of those fields where we hear about women working in as a death doula very often. That is when I think of a death doula, I picture a woman as a man. How do you bring the masculinity and how do you bring a male perspective to being a death doula?
speaker-0: That is a beautiful question and it's the first time I've been asked that one. So thank you for this question. And we're going to, we're going to stumble through something that might look like a response, I hope. So the first part is easier. ⁓ My transition was from corporate actually. And then there was a 10 to 15 year period of nonprofit work, which started to bring me closer into like community and those kinds of things. And then in 2017, I came across this thing called men's work when I actually lost my job and started to call into question everything that I was as a father, as a provider, as a protector, right? And I was literally Googling things like, what does it mean to be a good father? What does it mean to be a good, you know, and I landed on what does it mean to be a good man? And that's where I came to men's work. And it was men's work that was actually the first introduction towards this thing that I now do with death, dying and grief. the death duel will work. And a friend of mine, Ian McKenzie, has a beautiful podcast called the Mythic Masculine and he had Stephen Jenkinson on, excuse me. And you know, this was a number of years ago and right away I could tell that this was someone who was different. I had never heard anyone speak about death, dying and grief in this way. And when I was thinking about the work that I was doing with men and already starting to get a sense of how that sort of rat race was such a huge part of everything that men were struggling with. And the idea that you needed to create a life of meeting by, by having a life of production, right? Of output, right? That that was somehow the measure of a man. And then here comes Steven with this work around death and dying and asking me to rethink and reshape my whole relationship to it. I alluded to it earlier, but that's when I realized that men's primary, so a lot of men, let me, let me. Roll back the generalization. lot of men, many men, myself included, struggled with the idea that we were somehow limited, right? And that our limits were, were viewed as these things that were defects in ourselves. That if you weren't able to do everything, then you were not a good man. And with Steven's conversations around death, it really pulled me in and I started to really go down his route. You said the rabbit hole is a perfect, this is where we should put a warning for any listeners that if you don't know Steven, you need to start to go down. and look at his work, you're heading down the rabbit hole. Like, absolutely. And get ready, you will see wondrous things, but you may not come out for a really long time. But it became very clear to me that that relationship with death was one of the primary things. And so I started to introduce this idea of reshaping our way of viewing and seeing the world into my men's work around death, right? Specifically, I added that element in, which I had never introduced before. And then that just literally honestly expanded and I started to find myself coming into places where I was having these conversations with people from all different backgrounds and all different cultures and all different genders. And I remember at one point I was actually at a, Steven is someone that I've had the chance to get to know very well. And I was at his farm in Ontario for this two year journey with a cohort of people as part of his orphan wisdom. And I remember him asking at the very beginning, you know, like. There aren't a lot of people who, you know, when I ask who wants to do what I do, put their hands up. And I was kind of like sitting in the back going like, well, no, that's not true. There's one right here, you know? And I came out of that weekend and I joined a certification program to become a Death Dula. It eventually became the thing that I could feel my own vocational pull into. I think it's a deep privilege to sit with someone who is dying. I think it's a... It's a gift, you know, and I really do feel as though we have been socialized to view these things in very, very different ways. You graciously mentioned my two Ted talks and the one that I gave while as we're recording, it was less than 10 days ago. It was called bringing death back to life. And it's all about inviting us into viewing death, viewing grief in their fullness, not in these narrow social constricted stories that we have been raised into. It's not. It's not that. We're missing so much that's available to us.
speaker-1: Do you find that there are a lot of, I'm going to put it in a general layover, people in general, whether it's men, whether it's women, who really have a fear around death. This whole conception of they are afraid to get old and die. What do you think that really comes from? What's the underlying reason for that fear of death and getting old?
speaker-0: Fundamentally, we're going to get a little woo woo here. So apologies to anyone who doesn't appreciate it, but we're talking about death here. But fundamentally, I think it comes down in large part due to the overemphasis we have placed on our physical and material world and us as the center of it. By doing those two things, we have kind of set aside mystery. We have set aside that which is unknown. Because we are at the center of all of this, the death of us is the, is in a certain way, the death of the center, right? We, we, we are killing, if you will, you know, the whole reason for being, which is us as people, which is hubris at the highest level, right? And when we don't allow mystery, when we don't allow the unknown to be a part of our day-to-day experience, when we are, you know, I, I often say we have a, we are a knowledge addicted. society. We need to know everything, right? And we need to know it so deeply that we hyper specialize and there's literally people who can only talk about one thing in the world, you know, and we celebrate them and we give them prizes for their knowledge and for their contributions, which is wonderful. But when there's no mystery, right? And death is a mystery, you know, and there are people who are trying to figure out and trying to know what it is and trying to defeat it even, right? Hundreds of millions of dollars are going into defeating death. There's a global movement called don't die that literally is inviting people to take steps to support a, eternal life of sorts. And so instead of embracing that unknown, we villainize it. Right. So it becomes this thing that we are fearful of. It's interesting because there is, ⁓ there's a lot of research and one of my dear friends, ⁓ L'Ova Francois is one of them who does some work on this, but you know, in our bodies, in our experiences in the way our brains process things. Fear has a very clear footprint, right? It stops us in our tracks. Our brains kind of like go, whoa, like what's going on? and right. ⁓ there's another response to an external experience that is quite similar in the way that it imprints our bodies. And that is awe. When we look at the biological footprints, if you will, on our bodies of how we respond in moments of awe and fear, they're actually quite similar. It's the translation. that moves it from one place to the other. Right? You see that? Yeah. You know, I'm afraid of snakes. I'm happy, not happy to admit it, but I'm open and admitting it. Right. And there are other people who look at a snake and they're just like held in awe. Right. It's, it's, and people will say, well, you were taught. And I was like, yes, I was. But the point is, is that my body is responding in the same way as theirs are. It's just that it's being translated differently in the brain, right. In my nervous system. And so if we can. I'm one of the ways that I've been able to, I don't want to say embrace snakes in the world, but be more comfortable with them being there is by actually spending some time and looking at them and seeing what it looks like from a place of, right. And when you, when I do that, I become, mean, the way they move, the way they're able to like, you know, open up and consume. And then all of the symbology that they have throughout history and time and all the ways that different cultures have like embraced snakes, like. I kinda have to hold them also in a certain level of reverence, right? And so can we hold death in that reverence? Because here's the thing, we love to celebrate life, we love to protect it and cherish it and nurture it. Rightfully so. And it is not possible without death. Literally. Death is the thing that makes life possible. Without death, life ends. Period. I don't care what the technology is. Without death, life ends. It's just fundamental. And so if we're going to hold life in this sort of way, we should at least be holding the thing that feeds life in that way, if not even higher, if not even higher. It's like, wow, death, my gosh, it is making room for more life. So here's a controversial one for you. Dying is a privilege. Wow. Dying is a privilege.
speaker-1: Sitting here and listening to what you're saying and how you're describing death and it is now giving me a feeling of what I can just call beauty. You have transformed death from this ugly, fearful, dark object to something beautiful and a transition and I'm just sitting here in awe. I'm having my moment of awe. listening to you talk about death going, he puts it in such a way that it now just sounds like nothing more than beauty to me. ⁓ The way you're bringing it across, and I hope everybody out there listening, as you hear Paul talk about death, can close your eyes and see or feel that beauty that he's instilling into something that can be so dark and hard for people to deal with.
speaker-0: Can I give people an analogy for them to hold on to so that they can see it? I've this more and more. The analogy that I want people to invite and we're spring here now in Canada, right? So you're going to have lots of opportunity for this, friends. A flower in full bloom. A flower in full bloom is something that captures our attention. We stop, we pause, we take it in, we might smell it, right? We really will take it in. And we think that that bloom is full of life, right? But what that bloom is actually doing is signaling the death that is coming. Right? So that flower in full bloom is actually full of death. It's the last thing that that part of the flower will do before it transforms, transitions into something else. Whether it falls to the ground and lays seeds for more flowers to come or becomes a fruit. Right? Either way is, it is that liminal space. It is entering the dying. So that bloom is actually the dying of the flower that is happening. we, we, again, we hold it in such beauty, you know, we pay a lot of money to buy them by the dozen, right?
speaker-1: to caveat this into making sure everybody hears me that everybody has their own beliefs behind this and we respect all beliefs. But I'm very curious to know what is your belief, Paul, on the afterlife? What is their after death?
speaker-0: Yeah, thank you for that question. And as I'm want to do, you're going to forgive me if I don't directly answer your question, but I'm going to say first and foremost that it's the belief that is important and the holding of it and what it does for me that matters. Right? My belief, because a belief at the end of the day is something that supports you in living the life you seek to have to its fullest. So whatever your belief is, as long as it does that, than it is doing the work it was meant to do. So celebrate your belief, but also sit with them and make sure they're doing that work and not keeping you narrow and constricted and focused. My belief around what happens after we die is a mystery to me. It is mystery. And that is my belief is that I will die into a mystery. And what a gift. a, how can I, I don't want to say that I'm looking forward to it because I'm not. You know, I have three girls, have friends and family and community and work that I want to continue to do. And, and actually first, and I may rail against my own death when it actually approaches, but I also know that that belief of going into mystery as I die and again, death being a privilege. If I'm dying, if my death arrives, then in a way, the song of my life, my part within the song of life anyways, is complete. And that's where the privilege comes in. Because after my life has ended, it's the thing that makes space in the music for the next note. Right. And without that, it would just be beep and that's really fucking annoying.
speaker-1: Man, you have put this in a way that is transformative, beautiful, and so easy to understand and look at in a new perspective. I want to know, Paul, in all the experiences that you've been able to take on now, in all the ways that your life has transformed from when you were a young man to now, what's one of the greatest pieces of advice that has transformed your life?
speaker-0: This is an emotional one for me because it's still transforming and shaping my life. So I have some challenging relationships in my life as we all do. And at one point I was sitting with Steven, my mentor, and I asked him about one that was particularly challenging and particularly close to me as well, very close to my heart. You know, I asked him, well, how does one demonstrate their desire to be that role model in the world for that person when that person won't let you be a part of theirs in any way, or form. And he said something so profoundly beautiful that it will stay with me forever. And he said, your job isn't to wonder about whether or not they're paying attention. Your job is to go out and demonstrate what it means to be in the world, trusting that one day something will happen to them and they will say that is what they meant. And this is the part that got me. And he said, you need to be ready for that moment to potentially come. only after you've died. Something you may never see. And I wept at the result.
speaker-1: is intense. That I highly relate and the way you put it just is it makes my brain dive into how my metaphor, I use ripples in an ocean where when you throw your rock into the ocean, it creates ripples that you might never see. And the way you put it though, that I felt that I'm going like, you're going to talk to somebody and you're going to say something that You have no idea whether they understood it, they heard it, they saw it, and yet you need to be okay with never knowing that because the day that they do, you might not be here. Paul, this seems like a great place to bring our conversation full circle. And I would love to have you round us out with a bit of a summary to all this. If you could put all of this into one big, neat little bubble.
speaker-0: That's right.
speaker-1: How would you tell people to live their life? How would you explain to somebody what is living your best life means?
speaker-0: There's a lot of qualifiers in your question and I want to invite people to drop the qualifiers. I want to invite people to live life, not their best life. Their best life always could always, may, let me say that, their best life may always lead them to think that there is something better still, but I want to call them into their life. So please, please answer the call of your life. And that just means be present, slow down, listen and love. Right? All the things we know. We know these things. I'm not going to say anything. There's nothing we've actually said today that people don't know somewhere in their bones. Right? They already know this already. So if anything, we're reminding them or we're rattling their bone cage a little bit to shake things up at best. No more. But I want to invite people to answer the call of their life, to live in it. And that is what makes a life of meaning. It's not anything you can measure. It's not anything you can point to. It's not anything that you can... touch or sell on Amazon. For sure, it's not that, right? But it's answering the call. It's answering the call.
speaker-1: Paul, finally, I would love for you to leave everybody listening here with how they can find a few more of your TED Talks and learn a bit more about you. If they want to dive down the rabbit holes on everything that we've shared here today and dive deeper into what it means to look at death, what it means to live more of a masculinity life from the man's perspective and have their identity. brought out and they want to learn more about your work because I want to learn more and I've taken a huge amount away from this. It's been a beautiful conversation. Where can we find more?
speaker-0: So there's two websites to start with, pulsamar.co.co.com. That's the first one, all in one word. And that's where all of the different pieces of my work are. And then the work around death, dying and grief, that is on the canoe.co again. And that's where we can learn more about and go deeper into that work as well. Pulsamar.co does have a canoe. tab to it. It also has my speaking and my writing, which you can come into contact with through that. And I'm very, very, very open. So, you know, when people come on my website, the phone number they see isn't some general 1-800 number. That's my, you know, that's going to bring the right to my cell phone. So if people want to reach out, send me a text and, and let's find some time to embrace each other in some of the harder edges, some of the harder conversations of life.
speaker-1: Paul, this has been nothing but beautiful. I'm sitting here in awe and I'm so grateful for the time that I've got to share with you. Thank you so much for joining us today. I know that there's somebody out there that has got to listen to your words and they're going to feel the beauty that I...
speaker-0: Thank so much for having me. It's a true pleasure.
speaker-1: As we wrap up this powerful conversation, here's a quick 30 second favour I'd love to ask you. If something in today's talk with Paul hit you, if it stirred something, challenged you, or gave you a little more breath around life, death, or who you're becoming, would you share it with just one person? One person who might need to hear this today. Because when conversations become ripples, they create change we may never get to know. Every single week we draw brand new conversations just like this one. Real, honest, designed to help you get a little more selfish with your growth, healing, and your own life. I'm your host Brian White and you've been listening to Let's Get Selfish. Until next time, take care of yourself and keep asking the bigger questions.
