Jan 11, 2021

3 Ways Men Energetically Castrate Themselves

For nearly any man, having their balls chopped off is one of the most terrifying scenarios imaginable.

If you have a scrotum, just reading that probably made it flinch.

But if it’s such a scary idea, then why do so many of us do it to ourselves every single day?

To understand energetic castration, we have to understand the original, physical act.

Cutting off testicles isn’t just a crazy act of torture. It has also served a clinical purpose for many years. In pets and livestock, castration is used to stop fertility and the production of male hormones, which makes them more docile and easier to manage.

Basically, it kills some important parts of their masculine essence—their edge, vitality, and (pro)creativity.

Even with your balls still in-tact, these exact same effects can happen energetically. Without literally clipping our balls off, we achieve the same symptoms through how we express ourselves, the choices we make, and the actions we take or don’t take.

The way you live your life can either vitalize or neuter your masculine potency.

The term masculinity includes a lot of qualities. Here, I’m referring more to things like creative potency, vigour, confidence, effectiveness, inner authority, and drive.

To castrate ourselves, then, means to undermine and diminish those qualities in some way. To make ourselves feel passive, useless, depressed, joyless, and dead inside.

Sadly, there are built-in aspects of modern culture that support this happening. They’re widely accepted and reinforced. Resulting in the creation of invisible traps, which nearly every man falls in. And nobody can tell. Often, not even himself.

From what I can tell in working with thousands of men over the last 10+ years, and escaping these traps myself, there are a few common ways men are energetically castrating themselves today… ways that we’re giving away our power, purpose, and meaning.

So if you’re feeling a lack of all three of those things in your life, and want to turn the tide, take a very close look at how these following three points are operating in your life.

1. Men squander their sexual energy

Sexual energy is a creative force. In a literal sense, it seeks to create life (even if you don’t want any biological children, you’re still a mammal, and part of your genetic code has millions of years of momentum behind the desire to reproduce).

In another sense, it’s the energy that seeks to create our own lives. It’s the vitality and passion pushing you to build up your world, and engage with it.

You could think of this energy as wanting to penetrate life itself. There’s a forward movement to it. A leaning into things.

Most men are constantly draining themselves of this vital creative energy. Usually, it’s through compulsive and excessive masturbation—jacking off multiple times a day and blowing their loads anytime, anywhere. After waking up, before going to sleep, in the bathroom at work, in their car, or any time they watch old reruns of Baywatch.

Many guys who use Instagram are following dozens (if not hundreds) of models, or aggregator accounts—who repost photos of swimsuit and fitness models, yoga teachers, pole dancers, and clips of college girls in tank tops pressing their elbows together, spliced with shots of them pretending to suck back cans of some poisonous energy drink named after a synonym for fucking.

And the more we tap on them, and look at them, the more Instagram gives it all back to us. Creating an amplifying vortex of photo-filtered flesh to gorge ourselves on. Which likely just leads you back to jerking off and completing the cycle, before kicking it off again.

Even away from the screens, or playing with ourselves, many men continue the trend and get lost in mental fantasies. They might envision the life they wished they were living, and the love or sex they could have.

They could see a woman in public and dream about talking to her, dating her, or having sex with her. In the time it takes to order a coffee from a barista, an entire relationship could play out in his mind.

And if he’s in a relationship, it’s not uncommon for such a man to imagine other people while having sex, or being in more extreme situations with the partner he’s actually physically with.

Dumping your sexual energy out in all these ways is as good as being castrated.

There’s the physiological side, such as how your testicles aren’t meant to be open faucets. They’re made to store up the juice and spend it in intentional bursts. When ejaculating too frequently, you’re left feeling chronically fatigued, lazy, flat, and checked out.

Then there’s the psychological side, where that core desire to create and penetrate your life is getting hijacked and redirected.

There may be a part of you that secretly wants to keep wasting creative energy.

Because, if you stored it, that would imply you’re going to use it. And if you used it, that would mean taking some action. Maybe even a risk. Not only is all that a lot of work, but it could end in… FAILURE (*gasp!*).

If we’re covertly avoiding making progress in certain areas of our lives, or moving toward goals, for whatever reason, addiction to masturbation or sex is a common symptom.

We get to sedate ourselves and empty the fuel tank at the same time. 

There are a lot of complex issues to potentially address in this point… but if a soldier was laying wounded on the battlefield, a medic wouldn’t start asking questions about their family history to determine what’s going wrong.

They would do emergency triage to stop the bleeding.

So, if you can see that you’re hemorrhaging massive amounts of sexual energy each week, your first step might be plugging up your leaks.

One drastic action step would be committing to NOP/NOM. That’s no porn, no masturbation, and no erotic media of any kind (yes, that includes the hip-thrusting Insta-baddies you follow for… ‘workout tips’).

See this article for a deeper dive and more support on how to approach this in a sustainable way, because you’re probably about to face into a serious addiction. And you’re not alone in it.

For many, NOP/NOM is more like a short-term dietary cleanse than a permanent change. You can set up whatever time window works for you. Just know the results aren’t always immediate. It can take a few months for your body to rebalance and reach homeostasis.

If you’re resistant to going cold turkey, consider identifying all your leaks on a list on paper, and start placing narrower constraints around them. So, if you’re jacking off five times a day, can you take it down to one? If it’s once a day, could it be once a week?

Could you cut out porn and activate site blockers? Or delete Instagram from your phone for a while and eliminate the constant distraction?

Start with some commitment to reducing the size of the gaping drains in your sexual energy. I’d encourage you to lean toward NOP/NOM, if you haven’t succeeded with it before, because anything less can be a very slippery slope. Whenever there’s wiggle room, or half-measures, the mind kicks into high gear to bargain and make compromises, which may put you on the fast track to relapse.

If you can summon the will power to make this happen, and stick with it, you’ll likely have more energy and boldness than you’ve ever had before.

2. Men allow their focus to be sucked into endless time wasters

Outside of sex, there are countless other black holes sucking up our energy.

In the 21st century, our minds are basically covered in leeches.

We’ve got non-stop international news broadcasts. Multiple social media accounts. Increasingly more realistic video games (with immersive VR headsets on their way to being as ubiquitous as cell phones). Inflating financial stresses. Bottomless porn sites. And good ol’ YouTube, which will autonomously bounce around from philosophy lectures to Zamboni fail videos until the power goes out, or you’re physically incapable of maintaining consciousness (at least Netflix has the decency to ask if you’re still alive).

As many are waking up to realize: Nearly everything in the digital world is designed to form addictions and keep you hooked.

Digital media companies aren’t interested in educating you, or entertaining you. If it seems like they are, that’s only because those are audience values that keep them using.

These companies’ aims are to boost engagement and revenue. And they’ll do anything to make it happen. Including scanning your entire email inbox. Watching every single click of your mouse, and tap of your finger. Keeping track of what you watch and how long you watch it, or who you talk to and how often.

If you let them have their way, you wouldn’t even sleep. You would just be an LED display-lit zombie, keeping up your monthly subscription fees.

So, unless you intentionally intervene, and put up boundaries to defend your mental energy, you’ll have none left.

And as I referred to covert strategies in the last point, maybe a fearful part of you actually wants that to be the case. 

Now, it’s easy enough to see a report of your screen time and snap to the realization of how much time you’re wasting on devices, videos, or podcasts.

But it’s much tougher to confront how your focus and energy are being devoured in real life, by things like work and relationships.

The same two core patterns apply to both realms:

Doing too much, or staying too long.

If you’re trying to advance five different careers or businesses at once, you’re bound to go nowhere with any of them. Your creative energy gets diffused, and there’s not enough being feed into any single avenue in order for it to grow.

Or you might be changing jobs, career paths, or missions every six months. Never letting yourself build momentum and actually create anything.

In relationships, this non-committal pattern might cause you to rapidly surf from one person to another, or keep a bunch of dating options active while running yourself ragged to keep all the plates spinning.

On the opposite end, you might stay way too long at a shitty job you hate. Allowing it to hoover up your life force, while you feel more and more impotent and lost.

You can also stay too long in a loveless or toxic situation. Stuffing your voice and feelings down for years, without fully knowing it. And not having the courage to leave neither the job or the partner.

In doing this, the underlying message you’re sending yourself is: I am powerless. And I do not matter.

You’re snipping off your balls, putting them in a jar to be displayed on someone else’s shelf. The result is being stuck in a version of you that’s indecisive, has no confidence or self-respect, and has no hope of true aliveness for the future.

Re-invigorating your masculinity, and making meaningful progress in love and work, often involves two main things…

One is cleaving away all the dead weight.

If anything you’re spending most of your week on is killing your soul and keeping you neutered—habits, jobs, or people—get them the fuck out of your life. The cost is simply too great. And the longer you stay attached to your stories of why you can’t, or you have to wait just one more year, the more intensely you’ll feel castrated.

Two is having a committed, singular focus.

Masculine energy wants to get shit done. To crush something. To see things to completion. When it’s not given the chance to do that, it just goes to sleep.

Once the superfluous shit is axed from your life, one simple way you can awaken the beast within is to direct all, or at least the majority, of your bandwidth to one endeavour. That doesn’t mean you can’t engage in others. It just means tackling them one at a time.

Once one business is up and running, you can pivot and focus on the next. So long as the right systems or people are in place to maintain the first one, and keep it going.

And if you’re caught in the pattern of skating from one relationship to another, dig in to understand why. What do you get to avoid by splashing in the shallows, instead of diving deep? What patterns are you being attracted to? Start unpacking the baggage that follows you to every relationship. Get complete with yourself.

Unless you have an outstanding option in front of you to commit to, the best choice might be to take a break and focus on you. Gain balance, potency, and clarity, and reengage with dating when the time is right.

As a first step, when you’re done reading this, grab a notepad, or open the memo app on your phone, and start a running list of ways you’re wasting your time (and therefore your life). It might be your job, or dating apps, or TV, or scrolling social media, or compulsively reading news articles.

On the surface, we like to deny that we’re wasting time at all. It keeps us comfortable. But when pressed even a little bit, everyone will admit to already knowing what useless habits and toxic commitments need to change.

Consider this my tap on your shoulder to quit fucking around, rip off the leeches, and look after yourself.

3. Men chase money instead of meaning

energetically castrated, men castrate themselves

In our society, young boys quickly learn that one of the main points of life is to keep increasing the numbers in their bank accounts.

The deeply conditioned message goes: Earning more + Spending more + Having more = Being more.

Money becomes the meaning of life. Millions of men have come out of school, put their heads down, and grinded their way into a mid-life crisis—when they finally wake up to realize they just spent several decades playing someone else’s game, and their one, precious life on this planet feels like a sham. With no deeper foundation in true meaning, or purpose.

It’s fine to want to be a millionaire. Money is an incredible resource to support greater initiatives.

But becoming a millionaire in a soulless way will castrate you deeply. You become as hollow and superficial as the goal you’re chasing. Because your actions and vision are inherently disconnected from others and the world. It’s about you, and dollars, and perhaps material luxury.

Masculine essence is like a fire burning in your belly. It fills you and your life up with warmth and energy. Living in a soulless way extinguishes that fire.

(And I’m speaking from experience here. A couple of years ago I had a million dollar a year revenue stream rocking in my business that felt increasingly misaligned. The better it did and the more people it reached, the worse I felt about it. I shut it down without a second thought and I immediately reclaimed a fuck ton of energy in my life.)

To build up a healthy masculine essence and keep it thriving, you must do things that are in deep harmony with your, as well as all other areas in your life.

It’s just like how a forest operates. It’s all connected. And it’s all symbiotic. It thrives and dies, together as one.

At first, certain jobs and paycheques might seem like they’re in alignment. It might feel like that’s what you want, based on your values at the time.

But many of our initial desires are shallowly rooted in ego, and supported by the capitalist definition of success.

To the deep masculine…

Money follows meaning.

If you have that order reversed in your life, like most people do, you’re in serious trouble.

However, it can take some time to see that. And it’s okay for younger men to focus on money for a few years. Having a stable foundation, and being able to meet their basic needs, allows them more bandwidth to ask bigger questions, explore themselves, and reengineer their lives to find ways to put meaning first and keep making a living.

But many men don’t hold that intention, or ever make that switch. Their life force is dedicated to adding another digit to their net worth. Which is tragically uninspiring and brutally empty.

By leading with money first, instead of meaning, you’re bound to be making hordes of decisions that are out of integrity with your deeper self. The further along you go, the more alienated and distant you become from yourself and your masculinity.

Because your deeper self isn’t isolated and materialistic. Your deeper self is vitally connected to everyone, and everything. It has intrinsic values that transcend physical things. And it’s hungry for meaning.

99 times out of 100, a millionaire who leads with money will be less fulfilled than someone who earns $50k/year, and is deeply connected to meaning. 

Meaning feeds and fuels you profoundly, in ways that money never could.

Take a hard look at how your life is being lived. What is motivating you? What are you working toward? What are your goals? What is your purpose?

If the answers are based in salary figures, or stuff like cars and homes, you can be sure that money is coming first.

If your answers have to do with things like creativity, truth, love, service, freedom, connection, self-expression, education, or enlightenment, you can be sure that meaning is at the helm.

If you find yourself in the first camp, keep generating answers. When you go past and exhaust all your worldly desires, you start getting in touch with your deeper motivations. The things you would do for inherent pleasure, or making some difference for others in the world.

You get a better sense of who you are beyond the societal game of life—your career labels, debts, wardrobe, and profile pictures.

You contact your unique essence as a human being. And when you begin living your life in alignment with that

Defending, honouring, and expressing that

It feels like your balls are made out of granite and attached with titanium rods. And instead of a campfire, there’s a self-sustaining star perpetually burning inside of you, that can never be extinguished.

You walk through the world as a vital, proud, deeply alive man, whose balls are firmly attached, and used well without fear.

It’s my deepest wish that every man can recognize this as a possibility for themselves, and begin living in a way to makes it their reality. By reclaiming their squandered masculine power, and focusing it into a laser beam, directed at their greatest lives.

Dedicated to your success,

Jordan

Ps. If you enjoyed this article, you’ll likely also love checking out:

11 Ways To Be A More Attractive Man (or How To Fight Entropy 101)

Being A Healthy, Balanced Adult Is Sexy As Fuck

How To Develop Your Masculine Edge: 9 Steps To Becoming A Beast

9 Practical Ways To Be More Present In Your Life

Supercharge Your Sex Life (video series for men)

Jordan Gray
About Jordan Gray

Jordan Gray has been a sex and relationship coach for over 15+ years, with his work reaching over 200 million people worldwide. His writing has been featured in Vogue, GQ, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Health, and countless other publications around the world. When he’s not working with 1-on-1 coaching clients or writing a new article, he’s most likely to be found reading, chopping wood, or spending time with his wife on a little island off the west coast of Canada.

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