Episode #54 - How to Become a Conscious Creator

If you listen regularly to The Eversio Experience, you know we talk a lot about the female body, hormones, nervous system regulation, and what it means to live in alignment with your health. But this episode goes somewhere we have not gone before, and honestly, somewhere I did not expect to feel this much. We brought a man into the room. Not just any man, but someone whose work I have watched transform someone I love very deeply.

Mike Prince is the founder of the Conscious Man Project. He is a former high-performing corporate leader, competitive athlete, and by every external measure, a man who had it all. And yet, at the peak of it, he was empty. A Lyme disease diagnosis became the unlikely doorway into a completely different kind of life, one built on conscious creation, intentional presence, and the kind of vulnerability that most men are never told they are allowed to feel.

This conversation hit differently. And I think if you are a woman who loves a man — as a partner, a father, a brother, a friend — you are going to feel that too.

What Does It Mean to Be an Unconscious Creator?

An unconscious creator is someone who is living a life they never actually chose — they simply got very good at building the one that was expected of them.

Mike's answer to this question stopped me in my tracks. He described it as simply not asking questions. Going to work. Paying the bills. Listening to authority figures. Chasing the next achievement without ever stopping to ask: Is this actually mine? He had the career. He had the house, the marriage, the second baby. And he sat at a bar stool having what he called "surface level conversations" and felt absolutely nothing.

That is the definition of functioning versus thriving, and it is a distinction we have normalized almost completely in our culture. We are so good at surviving that we have forgotten to ask whether we are actually living.

The moment Mike realized something had to change was not dramatic. It was quiet. It was the weight of a life that looked perfect from the outside and felt completely hollow from the inside.

Sound familiar? Because when I heard him describe it, I thought: I know a dozen men like this. And I used to be the woman right beside one of them, not realizing it.

The Body Always Keeps Score: What Living Out of Alignment Actually Does

When the life you are living is not aligned with who you truly are, it does not stay in your mind. It moves into your body.

Mike was living under enormous pressure, navigating a corporate career that was not aligned with his truth, going through a Lyme disease diagnosis, and doing all of it in the middle of a global pandemic. What happened? His body broke down. Chronic inflammation. Dis-ease. A physical manifestation of years of suppression.

This is something Dr. Desiree and I talk about all the time in the context of women's health, but it applies just as powerfully to men. The body is not separate from the emotional and psychological life you are living inside. It is a mirror for it.

What struck me most was what Mike shared about where he is right now. He recently put in his notice at his corporate job after years of doing the inner work alongside it. And since making that decision, he told us: his energy has shifted dramatically. The Lyme disease that has been part of his story for years? He said he does not feel it in his body the way he used to.

I will be honest — I got a little emotional in this moment. Because I know that journey. I lived a version of it myself with my own autoimmune condition. I healed internally years before my body caught up. And watching Mike describe being at that threshold in real time, where the last piece is finally releasing? I felt like I was witnessing something sacred.

The body is not separate from the story you are telling yourself. It responds to the truth you are finally willing to live.

The One Thing Men Almost Never Name (But That Is Almost Always There)

In Mike's coaching work with men, there is one thing they almost never name in a first session. It is visible the moment they walk in. And it is fear.

Fear of judgment. Fear of disconnection from the people they love if they tell the truth. Fear of being seen as weak. Fear of what they have not yet been willing to say out loud.

Mike described the retreat space he creates as sacred because it gives men permission, often for the first time, to hear another man say the thing they have been quietly carrying. And in that moment of hearing it spoken, they realize: I am not broken. This is not just me.

There is something profound in that. Dr. Desiree has said it to me so many times: every healing journey begins the moment someone becomes unwilling to keep lying to themselves. For men, that moment often requires a witness. Someone who has been there. Someone who says: I felt that too. You are not alone in this.

At Eversio, we believe there are only two lenses through which we can view any moment: fear or love. And if we could survey eight billion humans today? I suspect we would find more fear than love. Which means this work, Mike's work, matters more than we can measure.

What Women Are Doing That They Think Is Helping (But Is Not)

This was the part of the conversation I was not prepared for. And it is probably the most practically useful thing in this entire episode for anyone in a relationship with a man who is struggling.

When a man is grinding himself into the ground to provide, and the woman in his life congratulates him, tells him he is doing a great job, thanks him for supporting the family — she means well. She is expressing love. But according to Mike, it is not helping. In fact, it can make it harder.

Why? Because the man who is not aligned with his work already knows it. Deep down, he knows it is not what he wants. And when he is celebrated for it, the weight gets heavier, not lighter. He is now sacrificing his truth and being congratulated for the sacrifice. He cannot back out without disappointing the people he loves most.

What actually helps? Questions. Real ones. Are you sure this is what you want to be doing? If you could transition to something different, I am here for you. The finances might get tight for a while and we will figure it out together.

That kind of permission, the soft landing that says your truth matters more than your paycheck, is what allows a man to begin the honest conversation. And on the other side of that conversation is, in Mike's words: joy, presence, patience, and purpose.

When a man has found his purpose? His family becomes the center of everything. He becomes the leader he always had the capacity to be. I have seen it. I live with it. It is real.

The Third Space: The Simple Thing That Could Change Everything

One of my favourite moments in this episode came when Mike introduced something he called the "third space."

If a man only has home and work, he is operating with just two faces. One face for his family. One face for his colleagues. Neither space is safe enough to let the mask fully down. A third space, whether that is a men's retreat, a breathwork circle, a martial arts class, time in nature, or a community that asks nothing of him except honesty, is where the armor can finally come off.

My husband Craig finds his third space in the mountains. He does the retreats with Mike. And I can tell you from the inside of that relationship: the man who comes home from that third space is fuller. More present. More himself. Not because the mountains or the retreat fixed him, but because he had somewhere to be completely unguarded. Somewhere that was not about performing for anyone.

Ladies, if the man in your life does not have a third space, that might be the whole answer.

It does not have to be a retreat. It does not have to cost anything. It just has to be somewhere he is allowed to exist outside of his roles. Where he can take the mask off, breathe, and remember who he actually is.

Masculine and Feminine Are Not Opposites; They Are Partners

The most healing reframe in this entire episode is this: masculine and feminine are not in competition. They are not opposites. They are forces that exist within each of us, and the goal is not to dominate one or eliminate the other. It is to find the balance.

Mike described something I have watched unfold in my own marriage. When Craig started to allow himself to rest, to be present, to trust his intuition and stop performing constant productivity, he did not become less of the man I love. He became more of him. More whole. More here.

And what happened to me when he stepped more fully into that grounded masculine presence? I was able to soften. I was able to let go of the control I had been gripping with both hands. I stopped running on the kind of heavy masculine energy that was pushing my own genes toward disease.

We do this to ourselves as women, too. So many of us in the Eversio community are living in a constant state of performance. Achievement. Speed. Control. Those are not bad qualities, but when that is all we have, we burn out. We get sick. We lose ourselves in the pursuit of doing everything for everyone.

The divine feminine is intuitive wisdom. It is the permission to feel deeply, to rest without guilt, to trust that the hug is enough and not everything has to be solved. When I finally gave myself that permission, the more creative I became. The more me I felt. And that became an example for everyone around me.

We are not here to conquer these two energies. We are here to work with them, together, in ourselves and in our relationships.

What a Consciously Designed Day Actually Looks Like

One of my favourite questions Dr. Desiree asked Mike was this: not what does a conscious life look like in theory, but what do you actually do on a Tuesday?

His answer was not what I expected. It was not a rigid five a.m. routine stacked with habits. It has evolved into something much more fluid and intuitive. Morning water with salt and lemon. A five-minute stretch. Some quick breathwork. And then, the moment he hears his little one awake upstairs, he closes the laptop and goes to sit with his family. Because that nervous system regulation, that joy, that connection — it feeds him more right now than any workout does.

He drives his kids to school, and every single morning they talk about what integrity means and who they are going to be that day. At dinner, the family shares what made them happy and what they could have done differently.

He said something that I keep coming back to: I have the tools now to know what's important and what's not.

That is the whole thing, is it not? Not a perfect morning routine. Not a six-step protocol. Just the discernment to know, in this moment, what actually matters. The ability to put the phone down, do five minutes of breathwork, and walk back into your home with your energy shifted.

That is what conscious creation looks like in a real life.

What the World Needs More of Right Now

At the very end of our lightning round, I asked Mike to finish this sentence: The world does not need more men who perform strength. It needs men who...

Without hesitating, he said: who love.

Not strength. Not stoicism. Not performance. Love. The courage to love yourself. The willingness to be vulnerable. The decision to stop the divisiveness and extend that love to the people around you, even the ones you do not yet understand.

Wholeness begins when we stop treating masculine and feminine as opposites to conquer and start recognizing them as forces we are meant to work with, together. The masculine gives direction. The feminine gives depth. Without the balance, we burn out performing. Or we disappear pleasing. And it does not have to be that way.

Mike is living proof. And Craig is living proof. And I am living proof, in my own very different version of this story.

Listen, Connect, and Go Find His Reel

If this conversation stirred something in you, go listen to the full episode. And then find Mike on Instagram or visit his website. 

As always, we are just here to keep the conversation going. More fungi, less pharma. More love, less performance. More of each other, together.

Sending love, 

Brandi.