The Men I Come From

The Men I Come From

Every man is shaped by the men who came before him.

Their strength. Their silence. Their rage. Their devotion. Their failures. Their gifts.

Whether you knew them or no, they live in you. In your patterns, your body, your relationship to power, your capacity to love.

In this episode, José Alejandro does something different. He reads a piece of spoken word he wrote about the men in his lineage: his father, his paternal grandfather, his maternal grandfather, and what each one left him to carry. Then he talks honestly about what it actually took to stop repeating what was passed down and start consciously choosing what to pass forward.

This is an episode about generational patterns. About the difference between a man with cojones and no corazon, and a man with corazon and no cojones. About what happens when power has no container and what happens when it gets suppressed so hard it leaks everywhere.

And it's about the moment José stood in a vision during ceremony, watching the chain of inherited pain move from great-grandfather to grandfather to mother to him, raised his hand and said: it stops with me.

That choice is available to every man listening.

In this episode:

• A spoken word reading of The Men I Come From, José's original poem about his lineage
• What his grandfather's unchecked power and his father's suppressed anger taught him about integration
• Why shaming men without giving them resources created the problem in the first place
• The difference between corazon and cojones and why real manhood requires both
• The vision in ceremony that changed everything
• What it means to complete your lineage rather than repeat it

This episode is for you if:

• You've ever felt the pull of patterns you didn't choose
• You're carrying something from the men who raised you that no longer serves you
• You want to understand the difference between repeating your lineage and completing it
• You know the words "it stops with me" and you're ready to mean them

"You are not just a man. You are your ancestors' prayers. And the ancestor future generations will one day name."

Connect with José: Newsletter: josealejandro.co/newsletter Free Resources: josealejandro.co/resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So today I want to talk about the men that I come from. Not to honor them blindly, not to blame them either, but just because I genuinely believe that you can't understand who you are as a man until you understand the men that made you possible, the men that made you, the men that you come from. Their choices live in your body, their wounds live in your patterns, their strengths, and their shadow lives in you right now, whether you know it or not. This is Jos Alejandro, and this is the initiated path. And this episode is a little bit different. So it's not a teaching, it's not necessarily uh, you know, the same approach that I uh I'm taking on the other episodes, but I wrote this poem, The Spoken Word, about the men in my lineage literally a year ago. So I'm gearing up to go on my fourth intensive of the year for teacher training that I'm a part of, an embodiment teacher training. And last year I was literally a week away from heading into the fourth intensive of the first year. It's a 1,000-hour embodiment teacher training. And uh I had the uh I was invited, we all had an invitation to do a sacred offering or pretty much uh uh uh end-of-year project, and mine was to invoke uh to to bring the room deeper by invoking the men in my lineage. So I wrote this spoken word, and it brought tears to many people's eyes. It was really powerful, it brought tears to my eyes, just writing it, reading it, expressing it, practicing it. Every time I read it, it brought something up for me. So I want to share this with you, and I hope it moves something in you as well. And then I'm gonna talk about what it actually means for me and for really you. So stay with me. Here we go. I stand here because of all the men in my lineage. The ones I loved, the ones I feared, the ones I never met, but whose choices and experiences live in me. They gave me more than their name. They gave me silence, rage, devotion, defeat, and love. They taught me how to hold it all and how to drop the ball. This is the depth I come from. My father, José Manuel Rodriguez, was a stoic man, quiet, patient, enduring, but underneath that was fear. Fear of conflict, fear of his own power, fear of becoming his father. So he stayed soft, he avoided the fire, he didn't dominate, but he also didn't protect. And I learned that corazon without coones collapses. I learned that niceness without a backbone leads you astray. His father, my grandfather, Jose Romero, committed murder three times, twice men, and once his wife, who he caught cheating and in the act. He had eleven children from different mothers and spoke four different languages. They called him Machista, Mujeriego, Marparido. He died with poison in his liver, shame in the stories no one wanted to tell, and redemption in the ones he confessed at his deathbed to my father. And yet he lives in me, in my body, in my mind, in my heart. I carry his shadow and his flame. I had to learn that cojones without corazon leads to destruction, and to become the powerful man that I am, I must release the shame of the parts of me that I fear most. My mother's father, Rafael Jorge, taught me structure. He taught me tradition, he taught me resourcefulness and leadership. He also taught me control, how leadership without love turns into law. I once challenged him and he said, This is just the way that I am. My grandfather was like this with me, with my father, my father was like this with me, and I'm like this. Deal with it. And that day I remembered a vision I had in a plant medicine ceremony. My great-grandfather yelling at my grandfather, my grandfather yelling at my mother, my mother embodying the weight of the man who wait who raised her yelling at me. And I stood in that vision, raised my hand, and said, It stops with me. Depth isn't how much you know, it's how much you're willing to feel. Depth is holding your power without weaponizing it, holding your heart without collapsing. Depth is breaking generational patterns, not with blame, but with breath, with boundaries, with corazong and cojones. It is owning your generational gifts as much as the generational curses. So close your eyes, feel your father standing behind you, and behind him his father, and behind him another man, and another, and another, silent and unseen. Feel the weight, feel the inheritance, and now feel this. You are literally the living edge of that line, but you are not alone. With every step you take, you dance with your ancestors and create a new legacy. Okay, so why did I share that? I'm sharing it because it's mine to share, but I'm also sharing it because I know it's not just mine. So this pattern, men causing harm with uncontained power or through completely shutting it down, is not uniquely unique to my family. It's uninitiated masculinity moving through generations. My grandfather had no container for his rage, no men around him who could hold him accountable, no one to say your power is real, but it needs to be oriented towards something greater than yourself. So it destroyed, destroyed his family, families, it destroyed his health, it destroyed his life. And my father, even though he didn't get raised by him, he did get raised by his grandparents, he heard all these stories and he saw that, and he swung completely in the other way. So he was his father was oftentimes used as an example of the man not to be, and although there were many qualities that absolutely um are not an example of the type of man that any man should be, there were also positive qualities, and there were also things that he did that um my father was not allowed to see because it was this image that they wanted to paint of him. And my father, because of that, bottled everything, suppressed his anger so hard that it didn't come out as violence, it came out as just absence of emotion because he was so caught up in his defeat, so caught up in his unexpressed anger, his passivity, that a man who physically was there was not always really there for me. And now I have a beautiful relationship with him. He's done a lot of incredible healing, but it just goes to show the pendulum swing that oftentimes happens in multi-generations of men. And here's what I know after years after doing, after years of doing this work with men, after years of doing this work for myself, shaming does not solve this problem. Shaming men without giving them resources is actually what creates this problem in the first place. We all have a shadow, we all have parts of ourselves we're not comfortable owning. We all carry the inheritance of men who never learn how to hold their power with integrity. The question is never whether that shadow exists. The question is not whether we have trauma that's impacting our occurring world and the way we show up in the world. The question is whether we face it or we bottle it. Whether we blame our parents, blame our grandparents, blame our lineage, or we own that maybe it was not our fault what they passed down to us, but it is our responsibility. We accept the generational gifts along with the generational uh trauma. Because what gets suppressed doesn't disappear, it leaks, it finds another way out, it shows up in relationship, it shows up in leadership, it shows up in the body, it shows up in the sons and daughters who inherit what we refuse to look at. And I was afraid of my own power for a really long time. I was afraid of becoming something like what I came from. So I swung, I overcompensated, I over I owned my power at the expense of others, and then I also swung in the other direction and relinquished it completely out of shame. And neither of these are healthy, neither of these are integration. Both of these are the uninitiated boy trying to navigate something that no one ever showed him how to hold. So, one example was my grandfather who had cojones without corazon. I mean, obviously, he had a big heart. I didn't get to know him well. He died when I was about four years old. But what I mean by cojones is he had the balls to go for what he wanted. He had the balls to really do whatever he felt like doing, oftentimes unconsciously and oftentimes not necessarily in alignment with who he actually, in his core and essence, really was. But he was a bold man. And my father had the corazon with alcoholness, so he sacrificed everything that he wanted to go after for the sake of being present in my life, being there physically in my life, which I'm deeply, deeply grateful for. Both are costly, right? So real initiated masculinity, initiated manhood is a strong spine and an open heart. It's the ability to be strong and soft and tender and gentle. It's the capacity to be dangerous without being a danger, to hold a boundary without building a wall, to feel fully without collapsing into our emotions. And men need real spaces where they can practice owning their power, where they can build a real understanding of their strengths and their weaknesses, their shadows, their unhealthy patterns, where they can hold humility and dignity at the same time. Not because they're broken, but because we need to initiate ourselves into a practice, into an understanding, into a knowing of how to do so. And that is exactly why initiations are so important. Not to shame our weaknesses or our shadows or our trauma or our patterns or negative uh limiting beliefs, but to integrate them, not to suppress our power, but to orient it in a direction towards our purpose, towards the things that are most aligned and we're being called to move towards and deepen. Not to repeat the lineage, but to actually complete it. And that vision that I had in my ceremony, I mean, regardless of how you look at it, we could look at it in the most practical sense. I maybe projected that vision. I truly felt it was a spiritual experience. Um, and it was God showing me uh just an image of the work that I was doing. But if we really look at it, it was a reflection of the work that I was doing. It was my great-grandfather speaking to my grandfather, my grandfather, to my mother, my mother to me. It was a chain of inherited pain moving forward out of unconsciousness, out of wounds that were never witnessed, out of patterns that were never named, out of power that was never properly held. And I was the transitional character. I stood in that vision in the presence of all of them, and I raised my hand in choice, and I said, it stops with me. And that is what initiation makes possible, right? So initiation is not about perfection, not about erasing where you came from. It's about facing the threshold. You could decide to keep going the way things are, or you could choose to take responsibility and create a shift. It's a conscious break in the chain. And a man who sees the pattern clearly enough to choose differently, who does the work that his ancestors never had access to, who becomes the man that future generations look back on and say, that's where something changed, that is a man on the initiated path. You are not just the product of men who came before you. You are the living edge of that line. And every fucking choice that you make, how you hold your power, how you love, how you repair, how you show up, how you lean into self-reflection, how you spend time alone, how you apologize, how you integrate your lessons instead of just leaving them as failures, but rather really learn from them so you can move differently. That is being on the initiated path. Every choice you make is a choice to initiate into the man that your ancestors prayed for. I think the most powerful thing a man could do is stop running from where he came from and start understanding it. So often we feel shame or anger or disappointment about our fathers, about our mothers, about our grandparents, about our lineage, but that just perpetuates more pain, more shame, and more unhealed wounds. The most powerful thing a man could do is stop running from where he came from and start understanding it. So I share that line again because it's not about repeating the pattern, it's not about running away from it, it's about turning around and facing it and deciding to really understand why it looked that way and how you want it to look different. The men in your lineage, the ones who got it right, the ones who caused real harm, they are all part of what made you possible on both sides of that spectrum. The work is not to erase them, the work is to integrate what they gave you and consciously choose what you pass forward. That is the initiated path. So if this episode moves something in you, share it. Because the man who needs to hear it, a man who needs to hear it, probably is going isn't going to find it on his own. You can put it in front of him, and that is initiation as well. If you want to go deeper, my newsletter is where I write about this work a little bit more intimately in written form, josealejandro.co slash newsletter. And if you're interested in resources and practices, check out josealejandro.co.co slash resources. Remember, you are not just a man, you are your ancestors' prayer, and the ancestor future generations will one day name. You don't become initiated by accident, you become initiated by choice. See you on the next episode.