Emerald Greenforest works with Men on Purpose. She joins Tatiana Berindei to discuss the million dollar topic – what men want. Emerald has an international reputation as an author of 7 books & contributing author to another 15 and as an inspirational speaker having presented nearly 500 times in 8 years on both live & virtual stages. Listen to this riveting conversation between two powerful women intent on creating the space for men to truly step into their greatness.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Sex, Love, and SuperPowers podcast show. I’m your host, Tatiana Berindei, and I am thrilled to have with me today Emerald Greenforest. We’re going to be discussing what men want, purpose, connection, and emotional clarity. Emerald is known as the empress of encouragement, and she is the founder and lead visionary of the Creative Age Consulting Group. Emerald Greenforest has an international reputation as an author of seven books, a contributor to another 15, and also as an inspirational speaker, having presented nearly 500 times in eight years on both live and virtual stages. She’s the creator and facilitator of Leading Like a Legend, an exclusive invitation-only total immersion retreat for her clients who she calls the men on purpose, the leader who has made their money and now wants to make their mark. I’m so excited to have you with us today, Emerald.
I’m so excited to be here, Tatiana. Thank you so much for offering me the platform and also for the great work that you are doing here in serving the audience that’s being gathered around sex, and power, superpowers.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. It’s a beautiful, beautiful offering.
Thank you.
I’m grateful to be here.
Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s big work. It’s a big topic.
Mm-hmm.
I’m really excited for this conversation today, but I want to dive in and ask you what are your superpowers?
I’m a voice of clarity in a sea of confusion.
Oh, I have so many. One of the things that I’ve been doing actually, Tatiana, recently I was guided to actually acknowledge my gifts. I went through a process where I actually listed out many of my gifts, both my skills and life experience gifts, as well as my supernatural gifts. I would say out of all of my superpowers, the one that people must report back to me is my capacity to help people get clarity. I’m a voice of clarity in a sea of confusion. I use my seeing and my knowing, my claircognizance, and my clairvoyance, in service to that, but I’ve worked with all of my clairs, my clairaudience, my clairsentience to exercise all of those muscles. My greatest superpower I think is my connection to my source.
Yeah, well I think that is the greatest superpower of all. Thank you. That’s beautiful. Clarity is such a gift. It’s such a huge gift because without it we don’t know how to move forward. We don’t know which direction to go, and so thank you for using your gifts in that way to help so many people.
Mm-hmm.
We’re talking today about what men want, and I want to just speak to an awareness. I’m very aware that here we are, two women, talking about what men want, and I’m so curious how you came into your current work of supporting men in this journey.
Great question. I’m going to wind us back for a number of years to before I had a spiritual awakening, and I want to kind of talk culturally about me, I’m going to call it my generation of women. My generation of women came into a cultural expectation where we were kind of at a bridge point where we were expected to be out in the world and working, and making money, and simultaneously be at home and being the cook, and the housekeeper, and all of those things. We are a kind of unique generation in that we bridged the worlds between the masculine and the feminine and part of what happened, for me at least, and for many of my contemporaries, is many of us became what I would call masculinized women.
Yeah.
We were immersed in environments where in order to create money and work, do the work that we were called to do at that time, we immersed ourselves in more purely masculine environments. For myself, I came in through my … One of my first jobs after I got through with the waitressing in my teen years, one of my first jobs was with a paving company, so I was like one of three women out of the rest of the people were all men. I came in through construction, and then I moved from the paving company into working in the real estate industry, which was also heavily male. I was, for most of my life, I was one of the few, the few handfuls of women in a predominantly masculine environment.
Then, of course, I got married. I had a child. I had a son. I have a lot of experience personally in being in masculine environments, and then when I had my spiritual awakening, a big piece of that was for me to shed some of this masculine armor, the suit that I put on. The one man that I used to work with, he called us boys with breasts, women who were in the industry that were acting more masculine than feminine, and he would call us boys with breasts. When I went through my spiritual awakening, I was called to access more of my feminine side and did do work for a number of years predominantly with women, and I spent many years helping women find their voice, and feel great asking for money. How I helped them as I actually held the masculine pole for them to be able to be served.
Then I went through another transition, a spiritual transition, and as a result of that, the calling shifted and the new calling that came through was now it’s time for you to serve men. I followed the call. I answered the call. I feel like I do have a unique background and skill set that enables me to be able to speak into and hold space for men who have also been, here’s an interesting thought that’s coming through, Tatiana, men who have been masculinized in a toxic way.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you for that little lens into your journey. I think it’s such a really beautiful one, and it’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. I mean, it’s the foundation for this show of really wanting to bring about more of that balance and seeing how your generation did lead that sort of masculinization of women, and it still continues today. I see it in some of my contemporaries, and it’s something that I’ve had to undo as I’ve gone into the business world a little bit more, and it’s a thing.
I think calling it out and bringing it to consciousness is so important in terms of being able to work with it and being able to find … Because we all have both of those aspects inside of us, the masculine and the feminine, and how do we balance those in a healthy way both as women and as men, and then if we’re in heterosexual partnership as well, or not heterosexual partnership, I think there’s always that balance of those energies. I know something that you shared with me when we were in communication before this show is you and I have both worked with indigenous people and in my experience, there’s a real focus on how those elements really come into a dynamic interplay, and an interweaving, and a balancing in a lot of those cultures.
Absolutely. What I would want to interject here is that even though I would say masculinization of women, I’m going to actually add again the word toxic masculinization, because I feel like our culture is heavily polarized in the toxic masculine, not necessarily the sacred masculine.
I completely agree with you. Let’s name it. Let’s name it. What’s the toxic masculine?
Men are three times as likely as women to commit suicide.
The toxic masculine is so far removed from nature, so far removed from spirit, so far removed from its own life force that it becomes, that the dynamic becomes destructive, self-destructive, completely emotionless, or actually it’s not really emotionless, it’s the emotions are suppressed and buried so deeply that they become toxic physically. Men are three times as likely as women to commit suicide. They are more likely to have heart attacks. There’s just so many, alcoholism, drug abuse, deep anxiety, drugs, divorce, so many problems.
It’s been shown that men who are separate from rather than in partnership with are significantly more likely to die tragically or from some horrific diseases than men who have found their way into their emotional clarity and their emotional capacity. I think the biggest, biggest challenge of toxic masculinity is the disconnection from life itself, like such that there’s no conscience at all about actions that are not in service to the preservation of life, that is not stewardship, that is not honoring the resources that have been provided and that create all kinds of mental, physical, and emotional dysfunctions.
I’m thinking right now. I was reading Ken Wilber recently, and he used the term fuck it or kill it.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
What it boils down to, right?
Exactly. Exactly. Feeding, fighting, and fornicating is what …
Mm-hmm.
I was taught in the Peruvian tradition through the Healing the Light Body School by Alberto Villoldo. He’s a cultural anthropologist who’s worked with the indigenous medicine people of Peru for 40-plus years, and there is a part of our development, and I think it’s the limbic brain, but I could be incorrect about that, so please don’t quote me on that, but I think it’s the limbic brain where really all we’re focused on is feeding, fighting, and fucking.
Mm-hmm.
When we’re in that mode, no matter whether it’s masculine or feminine, but predominantly the masculine has been societally and culturally conditioned to be running in this mode. When we’re in this mode, we cannot access our higher levels of consciousness. We cannot access our creative capacity. We are simply running in fight or flight. We’re running on adrenaline, and it’s ultimately destructive to life itself, and so the work is really about decoupling from this dynamic of running in the limbic brain and helping men and women, but mostly men is where I’m being called to serve right now, to trust that they can safely access and process these suppressed emotions and as a result transcend into a place where they are able to really access their creative capacity, their god-self as creators.
One of the things that really drew me to this was watching my own son go from this incredibly creative, expressive, kind, generous boy. I mean, he was definitely a boy. He was a boy-boy. He wasn’t a girly boy, but he was sensitive, and he was kind, and he was generous, and he was expressive, and he made art, and designed cars. I have drawings from when he was a child where he had these cars that were cars that were running on magnets so that we didn’t need to use gas anymore, and it was running on the magnetic force field of the earth, and he was designing these things as a child.
My intention was to have it be a healthy environment.
Then he got into middle school and started to enter into adolescence, and there are no good rights of passage in our culture for young boys, and one of the first things that happened was he got punched in the gut by a kid on his way home from school for God knows what, and I watched him shut down over time, from middle school into early high school, to the point where he ended up getting involved in drugs, and ultimately made multiple suicide attempts, and was engaged in heroin, and all kinds of horrible, horrible things. I watched this beautiful, sensitive, intelligent, kind, creative, magnificent being transform in spite of the fact that he was living in an environment that … My intention was to have it be a healthy environment, to the best of my ability. The world itself was teaching him that he needed to be somebody other than who he naturally was, and therefore he took it out on himself.
Yeah. Your story speaks so closely to my heart. My brother was similar, and the drugs eventually took his life, but yeah. It’s heartbreaking to watch. I’m so moved by this conversation. I hate to do this. We have to take a quick break, and when we get back we’re going to dive deeper into this work. I really appreciate your passion. I can feel the drive behind this work in you. I can feel the mission behind it. I would love before we take a quick break if you could tell everybody how they can find out more about you.
You can find me at emeraldgreenforest.com, and I do have a gift, Tatiana, for the folks who are listening. It’s called the instant clarity exercise. It’s an eight-minute audio that you can find at emeraldgreenforest.com/gift.
That’s so beautiful. Okay, so we’re going to take a quick break. We’ve been talking with Emerald Greenforest about what men want, purpose, connection, and emotional clarity. More when we get back. I’m really excited to dive in deeper, so stay tuned.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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