Imagine you’re in the backwoods camping on a cold winter night under a splatter of stars. A shiver runs up your spine and you decide to build a campfire.

You dig a shallow circular hole, frame it with a collection of rocks, and light some tinder in the center.

As the fire grows, you toss in some light branches and, eventually, some small logs—and bam—you got yourself a campfire.

So is fire good? Or bad?

That’s a pretty silly question right? I mean it depends.

If it’s an uncontrollable wildfire that’s burning down your log cabin then it’s probably a bad thing from your perspective, but if it’s a small, contained fire providing warmth on a frostbitten night then it’s probably a good thing.

The key difference here is containment. If you can contain the fire, without extinguishing it, then you can harness its power.

Well, it’s the same exact thing with your emotions. If you can contain them, without suppressing them, then you can leverage their power and use the wisdom buried within them to attain clarity over what course of action you should take in any given moment. 

It’s important to note that both in the case of the fire and your emotions, you are not controlling them but containing them. There’s a big difference. The former is rooted in arrogance and recklessness, while the latter is grounded in humility and respect.

Containment is one of those special qualities that a feminine woman yearns for from a man.

She wants to know that she can fully let go of her analytical mind, relax into her emotions, and surrender control to a man with the emotional fortitude to contain her—like a glass holds water, like a clam holds a pearl.

I’m not saying she wants this all the time or that she can’t contain herself, she can. But if she’s a feminine woman at her core then she definitely wants this in the bedroom and in most other areas of the relationship too, because it’s what allows her to be her most feminine, flowy, and fiery self.

Our hyper masculine world demands women to be more masculine than they’d like to be just to compete in it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but, without balance, it can lead women to feel disconnected from their natural feminine essence. That’s why they want a relationship with an emotionally intelligent man whom they can trust to be in their natural feminine states.

I mean, imagine if you lived in a hyper feminine world and didn’t feel safe to express your masculine edge.

In some ways, you don’t really have to imagine, since we’re living through it right now. The cultural tide has shifted in the recent years as the waves of feminism, the Me Too movement, and “cancel culture” have washed over the US and instilled fear into the hearts of many men to the point of silencing them for the fear of being ridiculed or labeled a sexist.

I’m not suggesting there’s something wrong with the feminine movement, on the contrary, I think it’s an important step in our evolution as a species, but an imbalance in any direction—masculine or  feminine—leads to an incomplete society: a half society full of half people.

The world needs balance. You need balance. And all of us need an understanding and appreciation of the yin and yang polarity.

And all that starts with men understanding how to master their emotions. 

Emotional Alchemy

And for good reason, we weren’t taught it in school. 

We should have been, but we weren’t. And unless you got lucky, your parent’s didn’t either.

But it’s still a non-negotiable skill every mature man must develop if he ever hopes to attract and fulfill a mature woman, as well as simply find peace and purpose in his life.

But, too often, a man will struggle in one direction or another.

He will either suppress his emotions, which cuts him off from his vitality, intuition, and empathy, or he will be overrun by them, which leads him to lose his center, discernment, and power.

In either case, you’re left with an incomplete man or a half man, if you will.

This half man will struggle through life until he realizes that the source of his emptiness and misery lies in his poor relationship to his emotions. And that his poor relationship to his emotions branches out to affect every other relationship in his life, especially his romantic ones.

In last weeks newsletter, we talked about the power of cold approaching women and how we can leverage rejection for radical growth. But this is only possible with an effective method of processing that rejection.

Otherwise, a rejection, or any other overwhelming emotion could actually debilitate you instead of empower you.

This is why most men fear approaching beautiful women in the first place: they fear the feelings of shame, embarrassment, and inadequacy that will inevitably get triggered if they get rejected. And they’d rather avoid those feelings because they know they don’t have the right tools to process those emotions when they arise.

Their only options would be to suppress or explode, and both suck.

It’s like having to pick between constipation and diarrhea. Good luck.

But there is another way, a better way. A middle path that allows you to neither suppress nor explode but alchemize the emotion from a raw feeling in your body into a nugget of wisdom from which you can act upon prudently.

It’s essentially the same thing as emotional regulation but I like visualizing it as alchemy cause it sounds cooler and makes the process more fun. Is that a crime?

Plus, at this point, it actually does feel like alchemy to me; emotions are just energy patterns with a particular charge, and if you can learn to contain that energy and refine it into a different form that serves you, isn’t that alchemy? It is to me.

Call it what you will, but the process of refinement is the same. It’s called the BRAIVE method, and when you learn it, you will have developed a modern day super power.

Not because it’s some crazy, magical thing, but because most human beings lack this very basic skill of emotional intelligence. And you will stand out among the crowd of people—especially if those people happen to be men.

Mature women will notice it within you almost immediately; they have a sixth sense for this kind of thing. They can feel when a man is whole because a whole man is rare.

If this is the kind of man you want to become then keep reading.

The BRAIVE Method

B – Breathe

R – Recognize

A – Allow

I – Inquire

V – Validate

E – Express

Let’s cover the nuances of each stage using the example from my last newsletter where I got rejected by a girl I approached. You don’t need to know the full story to understand this, but it would give you more context. Check it out here if you’d like.

Breathe

Breathing slow and deep calms your nervous system and helps you to contain whatever emotion’s been triggered. This is an easy first domino to knock over and start the BRAIVE method. And it’s what I immediately began to do when the girl in the yellow sundress blew me off.

Remember, you’re not trying to extinguish the fire, that would be suppressing your emotions, but you’re also not letting it get out of hand. You draw a clear circular boundary around your emotion and say “stay there”.

You can also talk directly to your emotions and say something like, “Hey shameful part, I know you’ve been activated. Please don’t overwhelm me.”

Depending on how strong the emotion is, you may need to be firm with it and say, “don’t overwhelm me,” in a stern voice to get it to back off.

This isn’t being mean, this is being a good leader. Imagine your 4 year old daughter is about to run into the street during rush hour. This would not be the time to say “hey sweetie, would you mind not diving head first into traffic?” It’s the time to sternly say, “Stop!” and even hold her back if necessary.

Same here: breathe and contain.

Recognize

Once you’ve taken a few breaths and created some space between you and the emotion, it’s time to dive deeper and familiarize yourself with it. Ask yourself:

• Where do you feel it in your body? (It could be in multiple places)
• What does it feel like? (e.g. Hot? Cold? Tight? Sharp?)
• What emotion is it? (Label it so you can unblend yourself from it)

The goal of this step is to become so good at spotting your emotions that you know exactly which ones have been activated the second they get triggered, and eventually anticipate their arrival. Plus, when you focus on your body your thoughts are less likely to spiral out of control.

The process may look something like, “I feel a hot, fiery feeling in my chest, a tightness in my jaw, and a deep frustration—Oh that’s my angry part again. Hi angry part, please don’t overwhelm me”.

Allow

Now, all you’re going to do is allow the feeling to be there. Notice where you might be resisting it and slowly relax your body and mind to embrace the feeling.

It’s like jumping into a cold shower and trying to keep your body as relaxed as possible instead of resisting the chilling cold, tensing up, and becoming frantic.

This is, once again, where your breath will come in handy. If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed or slipping into too much discomfort, then breathe deeply and ground yourself.

Contain the emotion but allow yourself to experience it like a warm fire: too close and you’ll get burned, too far and you’ll freeze. Find the sweet spot.

At first, allowing the feeling to be there might feel wrong to you. You may notice an urge to tense up, resist, escape, dissociate, or distract yourself from the feeling. You must be vigilant and go in deeper. As deep as you can. All the way to your razors edge and then…just sit there.

Over time, your capacity to withstand uncomfortable emotions will increase, and you will find yourself able to tolerate more tension and discomfort. This is how you grow your emotional muscles and become rejection-proof.

This is what I did when I sat in my car after being turned down. I held my hand over my heart, breathed deep and felt the uncomfortable sensation of shame that was crawling up my bac and simply allowed it to be there.

Inquire

To develop a better relationship with your emotions, it helps to imagine them as actual beings inside of your body (like in Pixar’s Inside Out.) You need to get comfortable talking to them as if they could talk back, because they can, and they will.

Get curious and understand why your emotions are there and what they want.

This is where you start to Inquire:

• What do you need me to know?
• What are you afraid would happen if you weren’t activated right now?
• How are you trying to protect me?
• What would you have me do?

These questions, and any questions asked with a genuine desire to understand, are great.

Your goal here is to gather as much intel as you can. Go in like a detective mapping out your emotions’ motives, fears, desires, and needs. This alone can be enough to soothe them and get them to calm down because they’re feeling heard.

When I did this with myself in the car, my shameful part was telling me that he felt like he had made a fool of himself and that everybody thought he was stupid, and that this meant that I would never receive love from anyone again and die a lonely miserable death, and then go to hell because I was bad.

Validate

Once you fully understand why an emotion is activated and how it’s trying to protect you, it’s important to validate it.

Validation does not mean that you agree with it, condone its behavior, or let it do whatever it wants, but it does mean that you empathize with why it’s there and feel genuine compassion for what it fears.

I did this by telling my shameful part that it was OK for him to feel ashamed. I understood why he would feel this way, and why he felt like he made a fool of himself. I told him I appreciated how he was trying to protect me because I knew that all he really wanted was to be accepted and loved. And he was trying to reach that aim in the only way he learned how.

Express

Lastly, it’s time to express that emotion. It’ll take some time for you to develop the discernment to know the right course of action to take, but with time, you’ll get it.

Expression might look like honoring and leveraging the power of your anger to confront someone you’ve been procrastinating on having a difficult conversation with. It might also look like going to the gym and punching a bag a few hundred times to respect and channel that energy when no other practical action can be taken.

It may mean listening to a burned-out part of you that needs recovery, and treating yourself to a massage. Or it might simply look like placing your hands over your heart, focusing on the part of you that needs your love and attention and just being with him. (You’d be surprised at how far that can go.)

And that’s exactly what I did with myself after the rejection. I just sat with myself in my car with my eyes closed and my hand over my heart connecting to my shameful part. I reminded him that I was there with him. That I loved him and would never abandon him. And that I was proud of him for having the courage to approach the girl. I also reminded him that other people’s approval has no bearing on my love for him because my love for him is unconditional.

A couple minutes of that is all it took for that part to relax, my emotions to subside, and me to bounce back and feel better than ever before.

This is the power of the BRAIVE method. This is the power of Emotional Alchemy. With practice, you can absolutely become the type of man who can effectively contain his emotions while simultaneously leveraging the wisdom buried inside them.

Doing so will make you rejection proof and allow you to approach any woman you want at nearly anytime. But it will also help you sustain a healthy relationship with your dream girl when the time comes.

If you want help with any of this, shoot me a DM on Instagram and let’s chat. I do 1-on-1 coaching and also have a group challenge called Conquer Cold Approach running at the beginning of every month.

That’s all for this week. Thank you my friend.

Breathe deep, face fear, become whole,

Danny