Interview with Tom Daly

Tom Daly is a therapist, writer, a master teacher and personal coach, as well as a nationally respected elder in men’s soul work. He is the founder and Director of The Living Arts Foundation through which he teaches The Inner King Training and The Inner Sovereign Training. These cutting edge programs initiate participants into "their greatest and most compassionate Selves." He is author of "Wildmen at the Border".

Tammie: What led you to do the transformational work you do with men ?

Tom Daly: My work with men began as a personal response to my own feelings of uncertainty about what it is to be a man and a father in this culture. In the late sixties and early seventies, I wanted support in being a single father and I didn’t want to depend on women as I had for most of my life. I started my first men’s group through a local free school in 1971. I have both been in and have led men’s groups continuously since that time.

My passion for trying to understand my own growth process led me to working and learning together with thousands of other men. This work has been one of the great joys of my life.

Tammie: In a 1995 interview, you shared that the common thread throughout your work addresses the shadow at some level. What is the shadow, and how is it significant? Why should we embrace it?

Tom Daly: Shadow is all the parts of ourselves that we don’t identify as our everyday persona, the latent, marginalized, denied, and unclaimed parts. We all come into this world with incredible potential. As we grow, some of these gifts are put into what Robert Bly has called "the shadow bag we drag behind us." For example, we may have been punished for showing our anger, or shamed for our tears, or rejected for showing our natural exuberance. So we put anger, compassion, and exuberance into the bag. We use a lot of energy to hide them and keep them from coming out. Many of our gifts are forgotten, suppressed, left undeveloped, or projected onto other people, individually and collectively.

My belief is that everything we’ve put into shadow is a potential treasure. We often spend lots of time and energy keeping the shadow bag from spilling over and this keeps us from living our lives fully. When we can bring parts out of our bag safely, play with the energies we have locked up and enjoy ourselves in the process, our shadows become a gold mine of creative, useful energy. The personal cost of not owning shadow shows up as alcoholism and drug addiction, depression, family violence, workaholism, "internet-ism", pornography, and countless other dysfunctional patterns.

The social and collective cost of not owning our shadow is equally devastating. By projecting our disowned parts onto others, we make possible the great social "isms" that wrack our world. I believe that racism, sexism, class-ism, materialism, terrorism, and nationalism are the direct result of un-owned shadow.

I believe that by personally owning that which we project and hold in shadow, we can make powerful steps toward health, personally and collectively.

Tammie: From your perspective, why are we so fragmented today?

Tom Daly: While I don’t doubt that we are very fragmented in some important ways, I want to discuss briefly the assertion by some that we are more fragmented today than our ancestors were. We have such a tendency to romanticize our ancestors by thinking they lived in a more idyllic age when humans were more connected to nature and more connected in communities. Because we now have a longing to connect more with the natural world and the capacity to imagine such a time, we project that possibility on to our collective past. I believe that it is possible that there are more people living today who feel more connected than there ever were in the past. We certainly are more interconnected globally than ever before. I am not sure that living a less complicated life and closer to the earth equates with living a less fragmented life.

Clearly we are more focused on our connections and responses to other humans than our ancestors were. We now depend more on other humans than we do on the wilderness or the farm for our survival and that is a direction that we as a species have been moving toward for hundreds of years. There is no doubt that the process of urbanization has accelerated tremendously in the last century. Surely this disconnection from the natural cycles of nature adds dramatically to our feelings of being lost and alienated. But what in us has driven this process and what meaning it has for us as a species is something perhaps we can only discover by living the questions.

Many of us who are willing to feel the disconnection from the sacred wildness, sense it as a deep grief. And that very process brings me back into connection. Seemingly that is not a direction that most people want to go willingly. We try very hard not to feel the pain of the suffering around us. We want to hide from the fact that we are the cause of so much suffering. In fact it seems that the more we see and hear about suffering the stronger our desire becomes to avoid it, deny it, suppress it, blame others, and harden ourselves. Essentially we put grief into shadow.

How we got to this place has been the subject of countless books and articles. And the books about how counter this trend are now filling the book shelves, hundreds of titles with themes like: how to live more simply, how to live with soul, how to be happier, and how to find the path to personal meaning, how to reconnect with our bodies and the earth. What I haven’t seen is a serious inquiry into what is it about us as species that has brought us to this point. Something is driving us to become more and more self-conscious both individually and collectively and at the same time has made us more insensitive to the world around us.

We seem to find it impossible to reduce our birth rate by conscious choice, and that alone makes it very likely that we will exterminate other species and ultimately make life very difficult for the vast majority of our own species in the near future.

The relatively new field of evolutionary psychology suggests that we perhaps we are a the mercy of our genes. The prime directive of the genetic code is "reproduce...get the DNA into the next generation anyway possible and try by whatever means possible to protect that genetic investment." This is a bit more ruthless than most of us want to see ourselves and certainly doesn’t fit our model of humans as conscious masters of our own fate. Perhaps our shadow, our arrogant thoughts of ourselves as the most highly evolved species, is what fosters our disconnection and alienation. Whether we will acknowledge our arrogance and come back to a deeper and more soulful connection with our world is an important question of our times.