Becoming Better Men

story by GREGG STEWART

What does it mean to live a soulful life? How does today’s man find meaning and purpose in our fast-changing world?

For over two decades, Richard Palmer has been leading men’s workshops and gatherings in Ojai to demystify the role of the masculine in our society. We sat down to talk with Richard about modern men — from the wounded boy to the initiated man to the wise elder — and how we, as men, can learn to discover and fulfill our soul’s purpose.

When I ask Richard what led him to this work, his answer tells me we are about to have a conversation di erent from what is typical for me.

“I grew up in a violent household,” Richard begins. “My father was an alcoholic. Our home was frenzied and fractured. There was no beauty, and nobody was speaking the truth. So I became obsessed with truth and beauty.”

Richard says those early childhood wounds grew into a sensitivity and became the gateway to discovering his gifts. One of his greatest gifts is helping men discover their soul’s purpose. Whenever he’s working with men, he’s looking for where they’re most deeply wounded. It’s the doorway to their riches and wealth — their life’s purpose.

“Where you are the most wounded is right next to where you are the most gifted,” Richard says, and his words stop me in my tracks. “The place where we were most hurt is the place where we become most exquisitely sensitive. And that sensitivity leads us to our giftedness.”

Let’s pause here because I’m about to timejump a moment. After hearing these words from Richard, I shared them with my wife, and we both burst into tears in the middle of Beacon Co ee. It’s a profound sentiment, and I beg you, don’t miss it. If you want to discover your innate giftedness, you must have the courage to look where you’ve been most wounded. Your soul’s purpose and gifts are sitting right next to that wound. I see it so clearly in my life — the childhood incidents that led me to have a passion for storytelling, and advocating for others.

“When we are honest about where we were hurt — and show vulnerability — it opens a doorway to this gold mine of deep healing work,” Richard says. “That’s where healing and art come together — what I call the soul work. When we live a life imbued with telling the truth and revering beauty, what we’re doing is bringing the healer and the artist together. Healing and art. That’s the soulful life.”

The courage needed to look at where we are most wounded takes a level of vulnerability many men avoid at all costs. I ask Richard why men find vulnerability so challenging, and what we, as men, can do about it.

“The greatest terror a man has is the belief that ‘if you see my shame, I’ll die,’ and it’s a lie.”

“When you have a safe and sacred space — like a men’s group — that dose of compassionate listening is what dissolves shame. Men don’t trust it. But when we get into a kindhearted atmosphere of other men holding our story with sacredness, the shame gets smaller and smaller.”

But it never really goes away, does it?

“No,” Richard says with a hearty laugh. “I can still find all my shame sources. But, it doesn’t run me anymore. It’s more an echo. It doesn’t disappear, but it’s the risk to be exposed and naked that has a curative quality. It’s men’s greatest terror, but as a society, as men, we have to move through it.”

Our conversation turns to men’s initiation practices within our culture, and the challenge that modern men have so few rites of passage into manhood. The step into manhood is ambiguous, and for many, comes with losing their virginity; “Attaboy, yer a man now.” However, in Indigenous and ancient cultures, the rite of passage into manhood is the opposite of a sexual experience.

I learn from Richard that, in Indigenous cultures, when a boy begins having lustful thoughts and glances, that’s the elders’ cue to take the boy away for initiation into manhood. In this rite of passage, elders teach the boy to discover ‘the goddess standing behind the girl.’

“It’s like looking at a tree and seeing the spirit in the tree as opposed to looking at the tree as only lumber,” Richard says. “So, you move from looking at the world through the objectivity of the mind and you shift to the subject of the heart. Boys need to be taught that. Otherwise, they’re driven by their

“The wounded boy only has two choices,” Richard explains. “He shuts down or he rages. Implosion or explosion. He has no ability to tolerate tension between opposites.”

And what triggers men into that wounded boy state?

“Underneath all wounded boys and ‘boy-men’ is this tarpit of shame,” Richard says. “One of the main reasons why men’s work is so important is that when we are in that shame state, we get destructive and violent. So, it’s an emergency that boy-men learn to get initiated through mentors and elders.” impulses. They must be taught the sacredness of life.”

What are the practices to create more opportunities for initiated men?

When Richard and his colleague, Tom McGee, lead men’s retreats, they are often asked, “What is an initiated man? And how do you shift from wounded boy to initiated man?”

“There’s this wonderful philosopher, Rollo May, who said freedom is the capacity to pause between stimulus and response,” Richard says. “And so, it’s the pause that creates that ability to grow into a man. Boys don’t pause. They just implode or explode. The initiated man, instead of shutting down or raging, they get introspective, curious, and reverent. But the only way to do that is you have to pause to find that place.”

What are the ways we can support more men to learn how to pause, and thereby experience true freedom?

“We need to call on our elders,” Richard says. “One of our culture’s challenges is that elders have kind of checked out in the last century. We need to call them back. And it’s two-pronged: They need to be honored, which they don’t feel because we put them in homes. And at the same time, elders need to stand up and say, ‘Damn it, I have something to say, and it has value.’ Why not take the elders with big medicine to share, and put them in schools where they can give back? They don’t even care about the money. Mentors need mentees.

“I’m at that stage — age 58 or 60 is the doorway to elderhood. I’m in that place where it’s not about me shining anymore. It’s about helping others find their gifts so they can shine. That’s the true spirit of the elder: wisdom, singing, dancing, storytelling. This is what the soul life is all about.”

And this is how we heal?

“Yes, but it’s more about aliveness,” Richard says. “Even grief can have aliveness — where you’re present to what you feel. Even in grief, I am pulling my hair out, cursing, stomping — and I’m alive! I’m grieving that big because I loved that big. You can’t grieve big unless you love big. When we don’t grieve, we tell our soul it doesn’t matter. The hell it didn’t! We should be outraged by our loss to help us move through it. That’s an example of the soulful life.

“We live in what Robert Bly called the ‘Sibling Society,’ where we got our caps on backward and only interact with our peer group, but we don’t look to elders. We’re obsessed with information but not wisdom. All that information is what pushes out the soul. Many things about our modern life push out the soul, like ‘busyness.’ People ask if I’m busy, and I say, ‘No, I will never be busy,’ because that pushes the soul out of my life. I never see clients back-to-back. I do groups in the evenings and reserve two hours every morning for writing. That’s my soul time. If I don’t live this way, how can I ask anybody else to live a soulful life?

“The life of the soul requires some rigor and courage. As we become adults, we hide our souls and our emotions, and we live in what I call Flatland. Joy comes down, grief gets pulled up, and you have this little bandwidth, this little wafer to live inside — what I call the beige life. But ecstasy opens it up.”

Richard is readying to publish his eighth poetry book, A Man Needs Brothers, a compilation of poems all oriented towards men.

“Poetry, of course, is about telling the truth,” he says. “Music is the greatest of all the arts. When I’m in what I call the dream stream of writing poetry, I’m trying to become musical. In the end, I’m an old-fashioned romantic, a poet, and a soul advocate. My work is soul activism.”

Contact Richard Palmer at www.mentoringthelifeofthesoul.com for more information.

CBD, an important compound found in cannabis, is known for its myriad therapeutic properties.

Hailed by A-listers from Kim Kardashian West to Tom Hanks and Bubba Watson as somewhat of a magical elixir, CBD has been shown to relieve anxiety and depression, help with insomnia, and reduce seizures. Indeed, the CBD space is of growing interest to entrepreneurs, scientists, and consumers — an industry projected to hit in excess of $16 billion in the U.S. by 2025.

Ojai-based entrepreneur Will Kleidon, the founder and CEO of Ojai Energetics, is a trailblazer in the CBD industry, having patented a groundbreaking water-soluble technology for CBD consumption. He’s also chairman of the California Hemp Council, and pioneering a range of hemprelated projects including new studies into the endocannabinoid system and supercapacitors made from hemp.

I caught up with him at the Ojai Energetics headquarters in downtown Ojai, where we discussed everything from CBD’s role within the cannabinoid spectrum to the history of hemp and cannabinoids for space travel.

When did you first become interested in cannabidiol (CBD)?

I first learned about the therapeutic benefits of CBD when I met Lawrence Ringo, one of the modern geneticists of CBD, in 2009. He was part of the early movement that recognized CBD’s value and how it had been inadvertently bred out of the cannabis stock via people chasing THC, and this really sparked my interest. Then in 2013, when I was experiencing some issues with mild anxiety, I was looking for a CBD dispensary online and came across an ad on Amazon. I ordered the product, and when I got it realized that it had been made with hemp from China, where it is grown in very heavy-metal rich soils. The thing is that hemp is actually incredible at decontaminating soil, but you don’t ever want to eat that hemp because it absorbs all the toxins. So this stu was filled with junk, and basically toxic sludge. I thought that someone must be making a clean version of a CBD product, but when I looked into it, I found that nobody was. And so that was the impetus for me to start my own company.

What was your journey from there? Did you just jump right into it?

Yes, I did. This was actually my senior project at Prescott College. I had been working in a curriculum around the science of terpenes and essential oils, and part of it was running an essential oils business. I folded the CBD into that platform, and it took o . Initially the business was called Raw Remedies. Ojai Energetics came later, in 2014, and was founded as the first triple bottom line public benefit corporation of its kind. What that means is that as a business we exist as a catalyst for good and put people and the planet before profits.

We usually only hear about the health benefits of CBD and the psychoactive properties of THC, but there are so many other compounds on the cannabinoid spectrum. How do they work in conjunction, and how e ective is CBD on its own?

I often liken CBD to the trumpet section (of the cannabinoid spectrum) because it’s loud and does a lot. But the cannabis plant produces over 113 known cannabinoids, and beyond those it produces a total of around 418 known compounds, including terpenes, enzymes, and bioflavonoids, so it’s incredibly complex. Our bodies have evolved for millennia intaking the full spectrum of complexes, primarily through secondary dietary intake by eating the animals that were fed hemp. So the argument is that having the entire orchestra is better for us than just the trumpet section alone. That being said, CBD is useful, and you can no doubt get benefits from it in an isolated format.

by KERSTIN KÜHN photos courtesy Ojai Energetics

However, the best way to fully nourish our endocannabinoid system is definitely through a full spectrum of cannabinoids. What is the endocannabinoid system? It is e ectively the conductor of our body’s symphony of parts. It has receptors in every single system of the body, and its job is to ensure that each and every system is working in harmony and at optimal levels. Another thing it does is maintain homeostasis so that any time there is an oxidative stress event, our bodies produce cannabinoids internally to fight the oxidation. The way to think of it is that an oxidative event is like our cells rusting, and the job of the endocannabinoid system is to stop that from happening. So if you can give your body an e ective dose of cannabinoids, it fuels your body’s engine and makes sure that all the di erent parts in your body are working at their optimum. What makes your products at Ojai Energetics unique is your patented, watersoluble technology. How did you develop this?

Through serendipity I met a chemist, who told me that he had figured out solubilization techniques for cannabinoids. I said: “That’s awesome! Can we do it without synthetics?” And he said, “No.” So I pushed him to figure that out, and about six months later, we worked out how to do it using only certified organic plants. This was a big deal, particularly when you go into the parameters of nanoencapsulation, because having nonsynthetic compounds makes a big di erence around safety profiles. Traditionally when it comes to encapsulation, a petroleum derivative is used, and while for short-term usage the benefits outweigh the downsides, with regular consumption it has been well documented that these complexes will collect in the liver and build up and cause air tissues in the cells around the liver and spleen, so it’s less than ideal. We perfected that, patented it, and then launched it.

Beyond the clean aspect of the product, why is this water-soluble technology such a game changer when compared to traditional CBD oils?

I would say that the majority of the population has never taken an e ective dose of CBD. … (The) water layer in our mucosa membrane prevents regular fat-soluble compounds from e ciently entering our bloodstream, because through the digestive process, our body will try to filter out any unrecognizable or toxic compounds. What this means is that by the time our body processes a CBD oil and it enters the bloodstream, 90% of the cannabinoids are destroyed by the enzymes in our liver and stomach. So if you’re consuming 20 milligrams of fat-soluble CBD, your body can at best absorb 2 mg. By being water-soluble, our encapsulated CBD oil bypasses this entire process and enters straight into the blood safely and e ectively, allowing users to fully absorb it. What’s more, our technology has a very rapid onset, with users feeling the benefits within 30 seconds or less, as opposed to 30 minutes or more with a fat-soluble, traditional CBD oil.

You recently created a CBD product for NASA. Tell me more.

Yes, we patented cannabinoid therapeutics for space travel. When you go into space the oxidative stress on your body is unprecedented. You can imagine this as your cells rusting at a much higher level in space than on Earth. The endocannabinoid system is the best way to respond to this both from a therapeutic and nutrient standpoint, so (with our product) we’re checking all of NASA’s issues, from immunity to mental health, and bone density.

Your company has many di erent arms and you’re working in di erent areas of utilizing cannabis. What are some of these areas?

The cannabis plant is unique in that it has over 50,000 known usages. Our parent company is the IP (intellectual property) creation company, and we hold the majority of IPs for cannabis products pertaining to a variety of di erent areas, from soluble cannabinoids and consumer applications to pharmaceutical usage, materials like 3D printing hemp houses that are structurally sound and bulletproof, fireproof and waterproof, as well as sequestering to create energy storage. And then we have di erent divisions, including the supplements division and a pharmaceutical division. Under the pharmaceutical division we have two drugs that are entering phase two trials at Cedars-Sinai for adjunctive therapy for breast cancer to mitigate the side e ects of chemotherapy, particularly neuropathy. It’s a young field but it’s very promising.

You are also the chairman of the California Hemp Council, and your company is working with a number of government departments. In a nutshell, can you tell us about some of those projects?

One of our projects is around renewable energy. Hemp is the strongest natural fiber, and when you carbonize it, it turns out to be very e ective for energy storage. We figured out how to make supercapacitors that are similar to batteries in that they can store and dump a lot of energy at once. Right now there’s more than enough sun in California, but the issue is with energy storage, and the supercapacitors solve that problem. We’re very excited about our technology because it can provide the solution not just for the main grid but also microgrids. We’re working with the U.S. Department of Energy and in partnership with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to take this tech and bring it to full commercial scale.

So will hemp save the world?

Hemp has helped catalyze each epoch of humanity. There’s indirect evidence of hemp usage during the Paleolithic age, and while the leading hypothesis of what led us from hunter-gatherers into farming is around wheat and beer, another one is around the ability to fish. The earliest technology for this was, of course, the use of nets, which people could set in rivers and stay in one spot. And we know that hemp was the primary cordage used for this from ancient times all the way up to now. We also know that from the agricultural revolution onward, hemp enabled technology for nautical exploration, which started spanning the next epoch. The etymology of the term canvas is derived from cannabis. And during the industrial revolution, hempseed oil was used as a lubricant as well as a fuel that diesel engines could run o (of) as a petroleum alternative. And now we’re in the age of the petroleum era, but many petroleum products can be fully replaced by hemp, and it can therefore enable us to transition from the petroleum era to the post-petroleum era. That is what our tech is looking at – how we can provide regenerative solutions for nonregenerative inputs in a cost-e ective way.

Over the 15-plus years I have delivered CSA boxes in Ojai, I have put hundreds of di erent items in the boxes, but fennel has been the most polemic. I can’t count the number of times I have picked up a returned “empty” box only to find a slightly shriveled fennel bulb with its sad wilty fronds looking like the kid who didn’t get picked for kickball. A frequent comment made by CSA members when I am cheerfully chatting with them about the contents of the share I have just dropped o is: “Would you take the fennel back … we never eat it and I hate to waste.” Other comments include “I love it, but my husband hates licorice”; or “Is it good? I have no idea how to prepare it.” Sometimes it feels like people are actually o ended it’s included in their share. But fennel isn’t an ingénue. It doesn’t need to prove itself to anyone and would never stoop to defending its lofty place in the academy of vegetables. It has been both star and supporting actor in countless great scenes. When Ouzo, Arak, and Raki were looking for the perfect player to balance out the cast, Fennel got the call. At sunrise, when Toulouse-Lautrec was wandering Paris streets after staying up all night working on next week’s Moulin Rouge poster, was it wine sloshing around in his hollowed-out cane? Definitely not. Beer? Perish the thought. It was the Tremblement de Terre (Earthquake) Cocktail, a potent mixture of cognac and absinthe (wormwood and fennel) that powered fever dreams and the pink elephant parade down the Boulevard de Clichy into the heart of Montmartre.

To truly understand fennel’s relevance and magic, one must go back to the time when humans were recently formed of clay by the hand of Prometheus. To celebrate his achievement, Prometheus invited Zeus down for some barbecue at the Villa in Mecone. Prometheus, that OG trickster, loved pranking his Old Man Zeus and had the pitmasters put together a couple of “special” entrees for the big guy. One was a “selection” of beef in an ox’s stomach and the other was just bones wrapped in “glistening fat.” Needless to say, Zeus was not impressed and demanded to speak to the manager.

When Prometheus showed up to see what the problem was, he blamed the sta . After some real housewives of Olympus drinktossing and table-flipping, Zeus hid fire from humans as punishment. And just ’cause Zeus has always been kind of extra, he made them forget that it even existed. In the years that followed, humans, huddled up in an e ort to endure the cold, dark nights in their caves, opined in their misery that something felt like it was missing. When lightning storms lit up the night, you can imagine the unemployed and deflated resident shadow puppet artist saying: “Damn, wouldn’t it be nice to have just a tiny piece of that flash so I wasn’t so dependent on the full moon?” But Zeus was still pretty pissed about being punked by Prometheus and wasn’t super inclined to make things easier. Prometheus actually felt crummy about leaving his creations hanging and, perhaps more accurately, just loved to get in the last word. He knew where Zeus had stashed fire and formulated a plan. The next time Zeus took a little vacation or sequestered himself in his room with one of his gnarly migraines, he would sneak up and steal it back for his human buddies. When at last the timing was right and Zeus was out of pocket for a window of time, Prometheus looked around for something to hide the fire in.

Guess who rose a stalky hand for this epically dangerous journey? Fennel, of course. You know the rest of the story: Zeus finds out and he’s mad, again; he chains Prometheus to Mount Olympus, where an eagle eats his liver every morning and it grows back at night, only to be eaten again the following morning, day after day after day, until Hercules shows up and frees him.

Now fast forward some years (OK, millenia) to a little village at the foot of a volcano called Vesuvius, which incidentally is dedicated to Hercules. Seems Big Herc was on his way to Sicily via Cumae and found himself on the “Phlegraean Plain” (a place of fire), a nice enough place except for all the Giants that roamed the area. With a little help from some of the Gods, Hercules cleaned up the place and named it Pompeii. Years go by and in the mid70s (A.D.), Dr. Pliny the Elder hangs up his shingle in Pompeii and starts seeing patients. Being a citizen wasn’t all just feasts and orgies. Apparently, it was still a fairly dangerous place and people got sick a lot. So when Aeschylus came in screaming that he had just been bitten by a Balkan whip snake, what did the wise Dr. Pliny apply to the wound? A poultice of fennel, of course. And when Hippocrates sat down in Pliny’s o ce and revealed his wife refused to kiss him on account of his horrible lamb breath, ol’ doc Pliny naturally prescribed, “Chew two of