Bringing Compassionate Healing for Men, with Sean Harvey
In this episode of the podcast, Andrew speaks with Sean Harvey, a man who is committed to providing healing to men—often in the most challenging environments. Sean and Andrew talk about what conditions need to be present for deep men’s healing to occur, the importance of profound storytelling, and the powerful impact of this work. Sean‘s background in the corporate world and in a monastery help provide him with a broad and practical approach to healing...and the conversation gives us a glimpse into the important work Sean is doing in the world.
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Listen to the podcast here
Bringing Compassionate Healing for Men, with Sean Harvey
I'm pleased to speak with my friend and colleague, a very interesting man with an interesting background. Interestingly, he doesn't do justice as powerful work in the world of healing, culture change, and growth. That is Sean Harvey. Sean has broad work experience from Wall Street to being the head of culture for an iconic fashion brand. He has been, perhaps still is, and would be more accurately an interfaith minister. His work is about healing men and helping to heal men who are suffering in silence in a variety of settings. Sean works with extremists, prison populations, and others. He calls hyper-masculine mindsets. He's a remarkable individual doing some important and challenging work.
He talks about it as finding truth in nature as well as in a number of traditions. He draws in a variety of different traditions, not just his faith tradition as a way of doing this work. He talks about how he does some of this work. He gets into that in the conversation, the ability to tune in to what he calls our sacred compass of truth. How do we discover our truth in a chaotic and complex world? We talk a bit about how you have these tough conversations with men who may not be particularly receptive to what Sean refers to as bringing an energy of unconditional love into these conversations.
This is some challenging stuff, and I have a lot of respect for the work that he's doing and admiration. I said, “How do you begin these conversations?” He talked about creating a safe container, helping men share their stories, and how key storytelling is that others can hear our stories, we can feel our response to those stories, and move forward from there together. He talks about moving from the wounding of our stories to the healing of our stories to a place of empowerment where the story is in the past, and where we can use our story to help others, not just to blame others or to separate others.
In terms of even the term spirituality, Sean talks about deeper humanity, as well as love and compassion. He used the term deeper humanity a number of times, and I thought that was very powerful as a way of connecting with these deeper levels of ourselves and he talked about bringing fierce loving into hyper-masculine environments. It's an interesting combination of energies that he brings to do this powerful work. He has a new book, which came out in the fall of 2023. He and I spoke before the book was released. The book is called Warrior Compassion: Unleashing The Healing Power Of Men and it's a roadmap of what he calls soul healing for men.
He shares his own journey as an offer to help other men. His book is fascinating. It touches on a variety of religious approaches. What he would say, and I would agree, but what he calls universal across traditions and at the root of compassion, which is core to his work, is love. He talks about the power and the challenging nature of compassion and how it's not at all weak. He talks about the opportunity for courageous surrender and surrendering when we get to a place of burnout and disillusionment, “Is this all there is?” and how people can be encouraged and welcomed into a space of courage, a space of the unknown for what's next in terms of their growth and healing.
As Sean says, it's about letting go of all the ego stuff that's getting in the way, getting in the way, and moving from rightness or perhaps even righteousness to curiosity, openness, and connection to what he calls that sacred compass of our own truths. This is an inspiring conversation. It's a bit challenging at times in terms of, “What is he doing in some of these very challenging environments?” He speaks about it with such clarity and breadth and depth of his own experience. It's a very engaging conversation and I hope you enjoy it.
*Please note that the podcast transcript is AI-generated, and thus there may be inaccuracies in the transcription from time to time.*
I'm pleased and happy to have my relatively new friend, but friend-friend, Sean Harvey with us. Sean is a fascinating human being with a unique path from corporate work to interfaith ministry, two Master's degrees, to work in prisons with police departments, largely bringing healing work to the community of men in a variety of settings. That may not be a fair way to provide a summary introduction, Sean, but welcome. Please add to whatever introduction you think is appropriate so the audience can know you a little bit.
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I always like to say, first and foremost, I'm a bunny dad. I raise foster and educate folks on how to have a house. That's a whole other dimension of my world. I like that you said, I've gone from Wall Street to fashion, which led to seminary, which led to working with police and military around how to deepen compassion and create cultures of compassion and hypermasculine cultures and systems. Working with men with hypermasculine mindsets and helping to heal men who are suffering in silence.
There are a lot of men suffering in silence in the corporate space, which is where I focus most of my work, but it's certainly not exclusive to them. I am grateful that you said yes and that you're here. I feel as though you've got some special perspectives to share about that intersection of spirituality and leadership in a variety of settings, not just in the corporate space from your experience. We've talked about this, but as I like to tee this up, and we'll take this wherever it goes, I talk about spirituality in terms of the spiritual dimensions of ourselves as people, not spirituality necessarily as a practice, although we could come to that.
What are the spiritual dimensions of us as humans? How do we bring those into our leadership? How do we encourage others to do the same? My hypothesis from my experience and my observation is that the workplace needs it now more than ever. It needs leaders who can demonstrate empathy, compassion, loving, forgiveness, presence and peace, etc. You've seen that in a variety of settings. Where do we even begin? When I shared with you some of the questions that I like to ask people, what jumped out at you? Where should we start? I want to follow your lead here.
Playing off of what you shared. What does it even mean to talk about spirituality at work? The language I use, and it's becoming clear as I'm in more of these conversations talking about spirituality in the workplace because I talk more about soulfulness and tapping into the soul. What does it mean when we go from our heads to our hearts, intuition, deeper inner knowing, and that intuitive knowing that reflects our essence? It doesn't have dogma. It is more of what I like to call our sacred compass to truth and how we discover the truth in a world right now that has much chaos, and complexity and has many different manifestations of being in, in a sense, a post-truth era where people are wondering, “What is truth?” That ability to go inward, listening to that inner compass that guides us to navigate from a place of knowing.
I love the way you described that as an ability. It's not some conceptual thing or a label to put on certain qualities, which I might refer to that way, but it's more than that. It's an ability.
I think it's a practice. By taking the actions in practice, you keep strengthening the muscle and elevating your ability to be able to go deeper, be more grounded, and be able to create more invitation that plays to the dance of the ego, especially for many men. I think for all of us, dance is the ego of the need for control and the permission to let go. So much of what I talk about in working with men, male leaders, and in any setting, and especially in corporate, is the ability to let go and surrender to get off the script, and to be able to see things from a very different perspective or set of perspectives
Different meaning what, because I'm hearing by inference deeper, more holistic.
Spiritual Understanding
When I think about spiritual understanding, the in and of itself, the ways we deepen spiritual understanding, the part of it is our journey to discover our own truth is the first step to move beyond the protective layers that we hold for ourselves, to look into our shadow, to look into where our fears, where our shame, anger, or hatred resides, and work through that and discover what's true for us at our authentic core then to seek, to understand and to see the truth in someone else, then to be able to accept that both of our truths are true versus my truth is better than your truth, or that, “I need to change your truth to match my truth.”
I think right now we are in such a place of division and disconnection from each other that the more we can start to see each other's truth and accept each other's truth as true, the more we're going to start to be able to start building bridges when I see from things from other perspectives to see. They see things from other people's perspectives that we may not share as our own and to be able to be in a place of reconciling it with ourselves to come to a place of acceptance for someone else.
The more we can start to see each other's truth and accept each other's truth as true, the more we're going to start to be able to start building bridges.
That is indeed an ability. I would suggest, a rare ability. Maybe you could share some examples, but I'm curious when you're working with groups, perhaps particularly groups of men, and that could be police officers, prisons and other communities with whom you've worked, where do you start with that? How do you begin that conversation? You could share a different story from a different population, but I'm curious to know how you begin and initiate that type of conversation.
It starts with storytelling. First, it's creating the container for safety. We are creating spaces that are psychologically safe for people to be able to come into the space? In particular, what does it take for men to feel safe, and vulnerable in the space, especially among other men? I think that's first and foremost, and then being able to create an invitation for storytelling where we can start to share our stories and unpack our stories. The first is to begin by, in the spaces I hold, sharing my story and asking men to react not to what they think, but to what they're feeling, experiencing, and what's happening within their bodies, and then give them the opportunity to share their stories and permission based on the level of depth that I go.
They know that they can go while having a level of protection, though that they don't have to disclose what they don't feel comfortable disclosing. Storytelling is key. So much of my work is taking a multimodal approach. I use a number of different practices and techniques to be able to engage in spaces I facilitate in the conversations that I hold. When I train any new facilitator, what I often say is we get caught up in our PowerPoints, Words, and why we're getting it right. I always say, “Your words mean nothing at that point. Your audience is with you within the first 30 seconds of you starting any conversation that all depends on your presence and your level of grounding and the invitation that your inner alignment creates for someone else to come into the space and feel safe.”
Is this a welcoming space? Is this a safe space? And that's not about the words that I use or what's on the slide.
It's not what's on the slide. It's what energy are you creating as you become the centerpiece to hold this container that's co-created by everybody in the space. That starts to get the permission for the vulnerability, and that gives the permission for being able to tell our stories. From there, we start to unpack our stories and try to understand the pieces of our stories where we have strength and the places where we need healing then to be able to start addressing the places that we need to heal that are holding us back from love. They're holding us back from compassion and holding us back from connection.
As you described that, what I'm brought back to is these core dimensions of humanity when we are purists, some people would call spiritual dimensions are exactly those things that are occluded by judgments and shame and trauma, etc. We don't need to create this stuff. We need to help clear the clouds.
As an interfaith minister, I subscribe to the teachings of Christ. I subscribe to Shamanic practice and Shuki wisdom. So much of it is about finding truth in nature, finding truth, being on this path of seeking truth. More so to your point, what do we need to do to unblock the wounds that are holding us back from love? So much of my work is focused on helping men expand their capacity to love and to move from this concept of love with conditions to unconditional love and how do you hold every person that's in front of you from a place of unconditional love?
In the audiences that I reach and the men that I speak to, especially when I work with extremists or far-right extremists or White nationalists or men with hyper-masculine mindsets, it's being able to bring that energy of unconditional love into the space and then being able to have that energy there for men to start to be able to feel in ways that they can start to embrace that unconditional love.
In my belief system anyway, which is present. It is there. It's a question of, “Can we access it?” It's a little bit like sometimes when people talk about purpose, you don't create your purpose, you find it. It's there if we can be quiet enough and tuned in enough to hear it or to track back. When you were talking about sharing stories, the image that I saw was stories make us who we are. They don't define us for the rest of our lives, they make us who we are. Would you agree with that?
Accepting Our Wholeness
It's being able to see your stories. I often use the metaphor of the river to where the calm waters, tributaries, high points, and then where are the rocky waters? Where are the rapids that reflect the challenge? You can't accept part I think what we don't want to always look at is in those rough waters. I think that's part of us becoming coming into our wholeness.
It's the same water moving through those different experiences. However, we may want to define it literally, spiritually or otherwise. Water is one of those things that shows up in all kinds of spiritual teachings for a good reason. The image that was coming up for me when you were talking about stories and unpacking stories is our stories are essentially like, “Tell me what you think about this. I haven't thought about it like this before.” Stories are like our tea bags and we can take our tea bags out and talk about them and what was that experience, etc. What's left essentially as a result of these stories is what's the tea that we're holding in our cups that has been colored literally by our stories? How do we look at that for what it is? How do we help define what helped flavor that water the way it is? What choices do we make from there?
Many of the technologies are approaches that are out there how do we move from our perceived reality to objective reality? How do our perceptions from our stories cloud our judgment, how we see and interpret? The question then is, as we are with our stories, are we still in the wounding of our stories? Are we in the healing of our stories? I think it can be very easy to stay in the wounding of our stories, or we can still stay in a place of victimization or victimhood versus moving to that place of empowerment where we have moved past, moved to a point in our stories where it's in the past and we can see things objectively. We're able to use it for helping and supporting others and bringing ourselves up in those times when we fall down so that we keep getting up and helping others to get up.
How can I create some distance between myself and that story? How can I then use that story to help engage me, motivate me, guide me, and focus me towards more purposefully what I would want to be doing and the contribution I'd like to be making? Does that fit?
The only thing I would add to that is that before you get to the distance of the story, do you address the story and look at it for what it is, and take the elements of the story that are clouded and take the clouds out you can see things realistically without attachment? It's often the attachment to our stories where we get stuck versus when we move to a place of non-attachment with our stories.
The story becomes our identity. That's what I walk around with. I appreciate what you're sharing there about getting into the story, not so quickly, not rushed to separation. What wisdom needs to be distilled from that experience as I'm totally labeling? Psychological safety and safety. No pressure to force people to share something that they're not comfortable sharing. How do you introduce things that are “spiritual” where you might call them spiritual, perhaps without alienating people or people thinking you're proselytizing, you're coming with the attack dogma.
I very rarely ever use the word spiritual. I think you can talk about spirituality without ever using spiritual language.
If my memory serves me, you've had to do that. You've had to come in and give a talk without using the word spiritual.
In a lot of corporate spaces, yes. In a lot of the environments I'm working with, I don't feel the need to talk directly. One of the things I discovered in some of the work I've done, especially when I take men out on outdoor adventures, is you never have to hit the topic head-on. You never have to have a head-on collision with the language. Men most often respond to the drive-by not the head-on collision, but a drive-by. You can talk about any number of things or give language to things that get to the essence of what you're trying to say and it becomes an invitation.
When I'm talking about spirituality, I'm basically talking in terms of love, compassion, and deeper humanity. What I have found in my work where I cross political lines, especially in America, and I'm talking to progressives, conservatives, extremists, and those in the middle of the road, the language that I have found that has the most resonance across all lines of the spectrum is tapping into our deeper humanity and that we are mirrors of each other's humanity and that we are able to deepen because I think what we're yearning for is the more humane and being in connection with each other from a place of deeper humanity and treating each other with humanity
In many initiatives that are out there, while they are well-intentioned, even when we talk about inclusion and justice work, there's not always humanity in the equation. It can also make others feel alienated in the process to not want to engage. As I think about it, usually the work of the language, I mean compassion is an example. It is fierce loving compassion that we bring into organizational systems to hyper-masculine environments. We are able to talk about love in more and more circles these days because I think many people are yearning for it.
In my book, I talk about the faith traditions and how different faith traditions define compassion from Christianity, Judaism, Islamism Buddhism, Hinduism, Shamanic practice, and integral spirituality. Each one giving its definition then looking at the universal truths, what is universal across all of these different traditions, around the ways we think about compassion. The reality is, it's the root of compassion is love. From that place of love, as I talk to men, I'm talking from a place of compassionate masculinity, which then I show has spiritual grounding to it.
At the root of compassion is love.
Whenever anyone tells me, being compassionate is a sign of weakness, which I think the trope that we hear all the time, and I think most people think it's BS. I think we're more sophisticated than to say compassion is a sign of weakness. For those who do hold that notion on some level, I always say there is spiritual grounding and a foundation for this from Gods, lawyers, and those who are deeply embedded without the dogma of what's good and what is in the best interest of people.
Warrior Compassion
There's a lot to be said about that type of colonized thinking, misogyny, and power over, etc., that breeds the association of compassion as weakness. I remember years ago at a Wisdom 2.0 conference, I was listening to Reid Hoffman, the CEO of LinkedIn, talking about how people think that compassion is soft and easy. He said, “Have you ever tried to tell somebody that they're fired and why they're fired, especially if they're someone who's been a friend, and to move them along into their next role because that's what you have to do and you have to be compassionate. You have to hold those multiple energies at the same time. It's a very difficult thing to do.” Certainly not a weakness. These are tough decisions to make. I feel like I'm going to ask you, you did mention your book, your book is a new book. Could you talk a little bit about that? My sense is that that's squarely related to what we're talking about.
My book is called Warrior Compassion: Unleashing The Healing Power Of Men. It offers a roadmap for men's soul healing as a catalyst for systems change. In the book, I talk about the wounding and healing of men, what's the state of men nowadays, and warrior compassion of the healing power. I share my journey and then unpack what I see as steps from my journey that have been helpful, that may be helpful for other men as they think about their journey, how to prepare for the journey, how to embrace the journey, how to be an inquiry as they walk their path then the types of healing that they can do. Healing spiritual wounds, parental wounds, inner child wounds, and generational wounds, how they come into a place of balancing a masculine-feminine, healing their wounds around gender, and having men invite men to examine their own relationship with gender.
One of the things that we do, often we talk about gender equity or gender justice, is that we rush to the justice part and we forget the humanity part when, by that I mean we don't give men the space to even look at their own, to even question their own relationship to gender, to question the ways that definitions, rules, and rules around gender, manhood, masculinity, power, gender dynamics and the rules of women.
All of these are changing quickly. What I find is especially White, straight men, are often scratching their heads, not sure what to make of it. You haven't been given the space, even asked the questions in general, and then also ask themselves in reflection, “How do I feel about this?” That is a critical piece that is missing for a lot of men to be able to have that examination and to start to understand that part of the healing for men and part of healing, the strengthening masculine in healthy ways needs to also include healing the feminine and healing the masculine through the feminine.
Within us, as men.
That is where we have our empathy, compassion, grace, space, and spaciousness to be able to start to untether, unwrap, and untangle many of the ways we have been conditioned to grow up and show up as men. I never say right, wrong, and good. I never say toxic masculinity. What I will ask the question is, by leaning so far into the masculine, without access to the feminine, what has been the cost? What does it cost you in your life? What's been missing in your life and what are you yearning for? Often when I'm talking to men, my approach is because I believe many men are suffering in silence in some way or another. The fact that we're human, we're men, and we have wounds, and many of us haven't healed the wounds. We walk around in suffering from those wounds I meet men and their suffering. I listen for their yearning, and I offer hope in the midst of both. I think that ways of being of service spiritually are the ways we can offer hope to each other and empower each other versus tearing each other down.
One way of being of service spiritually is to offer hope to each other and empower each other instead of tear each other down.
Thank you. That's beautiful. There's so much trauma, and woundedness, and how can we invite men into those conversations in a way that's not threatening physically, in another way related to safety, or threatening of their identity that they're terrified to jump in? It seems to me that what we're talking about here is challenging identities, “Who am I if I'm not the win-at-all-costs competitive guy? This is what I've been taught.” The mental health numbers support that in terms of the mental health statistics around men and women. I'm doing a panel discussion shortly about that. Numbers don't lie about that either.
I call it de-identification challenges. 1) To your point, when you take away the masculinity identity, men have to ask themselves, “Who am I now? Who am I in my offensive?” The other part is, how we help men navigate a world that is feminizing, where we are emphasizing empathy, compassion, and community, and these things that go counter to the masculine ideals that many of us are grown up with. How do we help men navigate that without emasculating men in the process?
Without making wrong those more masculine dimensions of us that may be more aggressive or whatever. We are not talking about male and female, we're talking about masculine and feminine as I understand it, right? How to move to discuss these things that are more feminine without judging the more masculine piece.
What I see is there are often two approaches to the ways folks want to work with men. It's either, we'll take a hyper-masculine approach and be your emotion, value you, and get you to feel something, damn it, or the opposite extreme that I see in a lot of conscious communities is we elevate the feminine so much and we forget, or we demonize the masculine. We are at a crossroads for men's healing, I think that there is another movement forming which is how we come into the integration and the balance of the healthy masculine and feminine, then takes us into our sacred masculine or our sacred feminine I think that brings us back to the spirituality piece, that once we're able to heal in the feminine, heal in the masculine, blend them together, there's an energetic shift that happens within us that brings us into that place of calm, invitation and openness that we can navigate the world in a much more liberated way.
Once we're able to really heal in the feminine, heal in the masculine, and blend them together, there's an energetic shift that happens within us that brings us into that place of openness that allows us to navigate the world in a much more liberated way.
I feel a need to ask you, what do you mean by sacred masculine and sacred feminine as opposed to masculine and feminine energy?
As you're on the journey, it's the levels of consciousness. As you deepen those levels of consciousness, and as you continue to the work you generally could feel, and I'm going to suspect will feel an invitation to come into more of the sacred view. I have found many people through their different practices, embodiment practices, mindfulness practices, psychedelics, whatever the vehicle is that brings them into a deeper state of consciousness and awareness that often takes them into a deeper connection with their spiritual selves and soul. When you start tapping into that soulful energy, then you start reflecting, I think more of the sacred you. If we are reflections of a sacred, the more authentic we are, the more connected we are to our sacred selves and our highest selves.
It includes both masculine and feminine dimensions, but at a deeper level, hence sacred masculine or sacred feminine. Looking down at the clock here, there are many places we can go. First of all, thank you for all this. This wisdom adds a beautiful deeper root flavor to the palettes of this show. I appreciate that, and I definitely would love to speak with you again. I would like to highlight your book and go a bit deeper with it. I'm going to resist the urge to say, double click because I despise that phrase, but go a little bit deeper and talk about what you're seeing where you're heading and what's the invitation for all of us, particularly men, but also women.
If it's okay with you, could we wrap this up here and then pick it up to talk about after I have a chance to read the book right now we're recording this before the book comes out, but I will read the book before we speak again. Anything else that you might want to add to this topic that I may have left hanging? Something a thought you might want to complete?
The word that keeps coming up is courageous surrender, that this journey of healing for anyone, for any leader, is courageous, surrender. We often have played the game. If you've moved up to a level of leadership in any organization, you have had to play the game. What I find is many people, it's not that we're talking about burnout, that is one real issue. We're also talking about the disillusionment that many people become disillusioned that, “I played the game and this is what I got. I got the prizes, but this is what I got.” There's still that level is all there is or there's that level of unfulfillment.
This journey of healing is courageous surrender.
You talked about purpose earlier. I make that distinction of when you're doing this work, you are discovering your soul's mission, not your life mission, not your career mission, your job mission, but your soul's mission. That I think is the place where you find the ultimate fulfillment when you are in the dance with your soul around the ways you are truly meant, which have been uniquely designed to contribute to the world. I think the only way to do that and to get to that place is courageously, surrender into the unknown and onto a path that is going to be a soul adventure.
I've been in men's circles for many years and leading circles like that in the conversation around spiritual psychology for longer than that. Once I think we open this up and we start this inquiry, I don't how do you feel about this, but there's no turning back because once you, we start to say, “This is what I'm going to look at,” it may take years. It may take lifetimes. I can't label what that means. Once we head down that path, we can't say it's not important anymore. We can't pretend we don't know.
The thing I want to add to that is people ask me that famous question, “What are the metrics? What are the objectives?” I'm like, “I throw that out the window because that doesn't apply here.” That's part of the old narrative the old model. The way I have understood personal transformation and spiritual growth work is that each of us in our energetic interactions with each other plant seeds for each other. When it's your time to start walking your path, something will bring you onto the path those seeds will start to germinate in their time to let go of an attachment of what this is supposed to look like for others.
As long as I am doing my work, grounding myself, and coming from a place of love, I know that my interaction with you will plant some seed somewhere. To your point, the goal is not that we see all these men or all these amazing humans self-actualize. It's more of are we offering, being a model and offering an invitation for folks to step on the path and trusting that then their soul, their connection to spirit or the universe will start guiding them on this lifelong journey of healing, self-discovery, and awakening.
In building on what you're saying, that type of invitation has to be done with a sense of humility because it's done with a sense of, “I trust that your path is laid out. I'm grateful to be handing you a cup of water in the marathon of life. I trust that your path is laid out. I'm grateful to support you. I'm not here to be your guru.”
“I’m not here to be your guru. I'm not here to be your savior. I'm not here to fix you. What I'm here to do is witness you and for you to witness me and to walk the path to the time that we're meant to walk the path side by side.” Beyond that, it's letting go of all the ego stuff to your point, walking from a place of humility in this journey with others, and challenging ourselves to get beyond our own judgments, rightness, and righteousness, to be in a place of curiosity and to honor the beauty this person in front of me brings and the light they have to be with them as they start to grapple with their own shadow and their own darkness.
What a privilege it is to do that work. Thank you.
Thank you.
I appreciate this conversation. I look forward to continuing it, and the conversation goes on. I look forward to getting your book. Again, the title?
Warrior Compassion: Unleashing The Healing Power Of Men.
If people want to learn more about the work that you do, other than googling that book, where do they find you?
You can go to my website, WarriorCompassion.com. It's simple.
Simple is good. Thank you, Sean.
Thank you. I appreciate it.