I Lost Myself to Addiction and Pain Then Rebuilt a Life with Meaning
A former pastor who once built a church for men finds himself unraveling under the weight of addiction, infidelity, and a faith that no longer holds, and what follows is not a collapse but a return to something truer as Jason Lyle walks through the wilderness of grief, shame, and near self-destruction to rebuild a life rooted in honesty, curiosity, and self-love. In the quiet of the mountains and the discipline of daily practices like breathwork, meditation, and cold exposure, he begins to understand that healing is not about fixing what is broken but about shedding what was never real, reconnecting the mind and body through nervous system regulation, and learning how to create space between impulse and action. What emerges is a different kind of strength, one that invites men to face their pain without armor, to regulate rather than react, and to discover that the path forward is not about becoming someone new but about returning to who they have always been beneath the noise, the habits, and the hurt.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- How Jason’s life unraveled through addiction, infidelity, and a crisis of faith, and what it took to rebuild from the ground up.
- Why grief, when faced honestly, can become a powerful teacher rather than something that destroys us.
- How nervous system dysregulation drives impulsive behavior and the patterns we struggle to break.
- The connection between trauma, the body, and decision-making, and why change requires more than just willpower.
- How practices like breathwork, meditation, yoga, and cold exposure help reconnect the mind and body.
- What it means to create space between thought and action, and how that space can transform a life.
- Why many men struggle with emotional regulation and how learning self-love becomes the foundation for healing.
- How daily, consistent practices matter more than intensity when it comes to lasting transformation.
- The role of wilderness, solitude, and community in rebuilding identity and finding meaning.
- Why true healing is less about becoming someone new and more about returning to your truest self.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS JASON:
- How did your faith, marriage, and identity unravel, reshaping your understanding of God and the human experience of suffering?
- What causes sexual addiction?
- How did practices like breathwork, meditation, and cold-water immersion sustain you when you no longer knew how to pray?
- How did your awakening shape your calling to guide others through their own dark nights of the soul?
- What does it mean to be a man with a soul?
- You’ve said that healing helps a man become someone new because of his pain. What does that transformation look like? And why do you describe the healing path as sacred?
- How does Sacred Grit guide a man into true healing and spiritual awakening, calling him back to who he really is beneath the armor, the shame, and the survival strategies?
- How has helping men heal continued your own rebirth? And what truths do you now live by that once felt impossible to believe?
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Book your spot at www.thesacredgrit.com/call and use the code REBIRTH 💛
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I Lost Myself to Addiction and Pain Then Rebuilt a Life with Meaning
I hope this message finds each of you so very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to welcome Jason Lyle, a former pastor turned wilderness guide, whose coaching practice called Sacred Grit helps men rebuild their lives from the inside out. Jason is also the Founder of Adventures in Recovery, a nonprofit devoted to healing through nature and community.
Jason’s journey has taken him through infidelity, addiction, and the unraveling of everything he thought he was. When the structures of his life collapsed, Jason found himself drawn into the wilderness, both spiritually and quite literally. In the mountains, in the quiet, and in the raw honesty of being alone with himself, Jason began to piece together a new way of living.
Instead of letting grief destroy him, Jason allowed it to become a sacred teacher, which makes his story an inspiring one of healing and rebirth. Through breathwork, meditation, cold water immersion, and time in nature, Jason discovered that what had fallen apart was not his life. It was everything that was false about it. What emerged was a deeper, truer self, and a calling to help others navigate their own dark nights of the soul.
Jason leads men’s retreats, guides wilderness experiences, and teaches nervous system-based spiritual practices that help men process grief, rebuild faith, and reconnect with their purpose. His work bridges the spiritual and the practical, inviting men to face their pain with courage, regulate their nervous systems, and discover new meaning in their lives. As the host of the Sacred Grit show, he creates space for honest conversations about healing, resilience, and the kind of transformation that shapes us into someone new.
I’m looking forward to talking with Jason. He’ll be speaking with me from Dahlonega, Georgia, about what it was like to hit rock bottom in his life and how grief became his teacher. Also, the truth Jason now lives by that once felt impossible to believe, the nervous system-based spiritual practices Jason uses to help men process grief, and more. It’s sure to be a fascinating and enlightening conversation with a truly interesting man.
Jason, a warm welcome.
Thank you. You made me sound great. I need to get you to come on my show and introduce me.
It’s important to me that everyone knows the depth of who you are because we’re going to share you with everyone. Thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
From the Pulpit to the Barn: A Mission for Men
You’re welcome. Let’s start from the beginning. What first led you into pastoral work? How old were you when you got into pastoral work?
I was 33 when I got into it. I was adopted. I was put up for adoption at birth, and my parents got me when I was two weeks old. I had a Leave It to Beaver household. There are pictures somewhere of me at probably five years old, standing at her footstool, or I think we call them Ottomans now. I have a Bible laid open on the Ottoman, and I have a little suit on. I have one hand up in the air, and I’m slapping the Bible with the other, playing preacher.
When I was eight years old, I did what Southern Baptist called getting saved. Right after that, I read the Bible all the way through from cover to cover. My grandmother had given me a living Bible, which, back in the ‘70s, was a big thing. I read it cover to cover. I’ve always had a lot of curiosity around spirituality. I got very interested in church. I taught Sunday school. I taught a youth group. Finally, in 2004, I sold my plumbing company, started seminary, and started a church.
Was it a Baptist church?
Everybody called it the cowboy church. We met in a barn on Tuesday nights. I run the horses out and bring the people in. After that, I’d run the people out and run the horses in. I made the church for men because I recognized back then, in 2004, that men were not going to church. I wanted to create a space where they could.
We did church on Tuesday nights. We did it in a barn. We played country music. We had a meal before service. This allowed men to have a space to come. The men I was trying to reach worked six days a week. They didn’t want to spend Sunday morning going to church, so they did it on Tuesday night. The next thing would be, “I got to get the kids fed.” We’ll do a meal before service. We tried to remove all the excuses and create a church that felt comfortable for men. That’s how it came about.
It sounds like a very cool church.
It was a very special place. I’ll still have people who were a part of that process send me emails and talk about how special that time of their life was. It was a special time. That’s how I got here.
The Unraveling: Infidelity, Theology, and the Loss of Identity
What happened? How did your faith, marriage, and identity reshape your understanding of God and the human experience of suffering? That’s a big transition.
There’s another thing that followed me alongside my spiritual path, and that was sexual curiosity. I grew up in the Baptist church. We didn’t talk about sex. We acted like it was used to make babies, and that was it. I had a lot of shame around my sexuality, which came to be very early. I saw pornography for the first time when I was ten. I was having all the things that young boys do at that age. The youth group was teaching us.
That was when purity culture was starting to take off. We had all these ideas about no sex before marriage and no solo sex. I’ll say it that way. All those things were putting a lot of shame around something I was very curious about, but felt like I couldn’t talk about. I’m not blaming anybody for my behaviors, but that manifested itself. As I got older, girls became more and more a part of my life more than one at a time. I would try to maintain multiple girlfriends. When I was nineteen, I got married.
That tells you everything.
I thought for sure that that was going to fix it or that was the fix-all, but it wasn’t. I spent years trying to handle these strong sexual impulses. In 2004, I started seminary and church. Looking back on that, I thought, “That’ll fix me. God will fix me. This is what I’ll do. I’ll give my life to the Lord, and that’s going to fix everything.” Needless to say, that didn’t work either. In 2017, I had an affair, one of many, that ended my career.
Was it because the church found out and expelled you or something?
I admitted it and resigned. The church probably would have helped me get through it because I started the church, and the people were such kind people, but it wasn’t just the affair. My theology was unraveling. By then, I had two degrees, an undergraduate degree in Biblical Theology and a Master’s degree in International Community Development.
I was working in Uganda, trying to build communities in Uganda through sustainable economic growth. I had a lot going on, but my theology was unraveling anyhow. I didn’t believe the way that I used to believe, so I resigned. From there, things did start to unravel. I told people that when my paycheck was no longer tied to my theology, my theology could breathe.
When my paycheck was no longer tied to my theology, my theology could breathe. Share on X
As it started to breathe, it felt like I was losing something. It felt like the God that I thought I knew was not the God that I knew at all. My thoughts were like, “How could you let this happen to me?” In the midst of those affairs, it was easy with my Southern Baptist upbringing to go, “This must be how God made me. God has put this in front of me. I’m covered by grace. I’m going to heaven when I die. Nobody will find out because God’s going to protect me. God knows I need this in order to survive.”
It was all the lies that we tell ourselves, especially addicts, and the deals that we make. If anybody is addicted to anything, you know what that feels like. That faith completely unraveled. Not long after that, I found another job. I was working a blue-collar job. In the midst of that job, I had another affair and lost another job.
From having the affair?
Yes, because it was a lady who worked in the office. She was the wife of one of my superiors.
The Anatomy of a Trigger: Why the Brain Goes Offline
You we surrounded by very judgmental people.
I lost that job, and that is when I went into wilderness therapy. I didn’t go in, but I was working as a field guide in wilderness therapy. I was working 8 days on and 6 days off. I was out in the woods with kids for 8 days, and I’d come back home for 6. It was there that I started exploring what nervous system regulation looks like.
I met a man named Rob Gent, who was the chief clinical officer of the behavioral health company I worked for. He came in one night and was teaching a training. He started teaching how the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala disconnect from one another. When the body has actions that don’t make rational sense, it’s because we’ve lost control of our nervous system. He started teaching about nervous system regulation.
When the body acts in ways that don’t make rational sense, it’s often because we’ve lost control of our nervous system. Share on X
It wasn’t long after I met him that my children, who were adult children, found out about the last affair. It was not very pretty. They didn’t want to speak to me or have a lot to do with me. I was planning my own suicide. I was lying on my left side in my bed at 2:00 in the afternoon. I had a plan exactly how I was going to do it.
As a bit of a last-ditch effort, I went to my computer, sent Rob Gent an email, and said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m in a bad place. I could surely use some help.” He emailed back almost immediately, and we set up a Zoom call. We got on that Zoom call. He introduced me to nervous system regulation and taught me about cold water and breathwork. That night, I started. I got in cold water.
He explained it in a way that the rational brain is getting connected back to the nervous system. The nervous system propriocept danger when it’s not dangerous, but we’ve learned that it is. For my case, that was preverbal trauma. It’s about getting your rational thoughts downloaded into your body so that you have rational actions, not irrational actions.
It was immediate for me. I tell people all the time that it was all the theology, all of the therapy, and all of the twelve-step work, because I was in recovery for sex addiction. All of that stuff that was rolling around up here in the prefrontal cortex of my brain downloaded into my body. Theology started making complete sense. I had access to something bigger than myself that, for the first time in my life, was not binary. It was not black or white, in or out, or heaven or hell.
It was this beautiful, universal energy that accepted and loved everything. It doesn’t have lines or boundaries. It’s not bound by a leather book, a belief system, or a doctrine. It is what it is, everything that is loving. When I was able to get that down into my body, it changed the way I saw everything. That’s where I rebuilt my faith from. It was that particular spot.
The Biology of Belief: Rebuilding Faith from the Body Up
How did that change your viewpoint of theology, God, and all of that kind of thing? I’m very curious about something else. You’ve opened this door. What causes sexual addiction? What did you learn that causes that?
The thing that changed theologically is exactly what I said. I stopped seeing God as we’re right and everybody else is wrong. If people ask me, and they say, “Are you still a Christian?” I’ll say, “I don’t believe in mainline evangelical Christianity, but I was raised in Georgia, for God’s sake. We love mama, Jesus, and grits down here.”
That is still my framework. Even though I don’t believe in things like the inerrancy of the Bible, the literal miracles, and things of that nature, I still believe that Christianity is a way. I subscribe to that, but I don’t believe it’s the only way. Once I learned how to regulate my nervous system, it was very much true. You start experiencing that thing that’s larger than the rest of us. It’s this divine energy that is so beautiful, so big, and so all-encompassing that there’s no way to get your hands around it, and certainly not write a freaking book about it. It’s a huge energy.
Sex addiction comes from two places. Some men will have an addiction to the male orgasm, which is more powerful than heroin. We know that. It’s an extremely powerful experience. I don’t expect women to understand the power of that feeling, but it is a powerful feeling. Mine was the second version. Mine was a connection.
After being put up for adoption, I remember sitting in my therapist’s office one day, and we were talking about my sex addiction. He said, “Jason, it’s worth mentioning that you spent your entire life trying to get back to the only place you probably ever felt at peace, and that was inside of your mother. It’s worth considering the disconnection with your mother.” He pointed me toward books like Primal Wound and all these different things about adoption. That helped me get my head around it.
Sex addiction comes from 100% the male orgasm and wiring the brain, like any other sex addiction. Although I would say that type of sex addiction is like an alcoholic walking around with a shot of vodka in their mouth that they can’t swallow. When you have a sex addiction, the junkie and dealer live in the same body. The other one is separation anxiety, and that’s what I had. It was separation anxiety from birth.
When you have a sex addiction, the junkie and dealer live in the same body. Share on X
The 5:30 AM Anchor: Cold Water and the Amygdala Smoke Alarm
Can you explain something else to me? What is with the ice? I never heard of cold-water therapy.
I’ll try to explain it in a way that’ll go a little quicker. We have a body and a brain. Those things are connected by the nervous system. The central nervous system runs from our brain down to our spine. Our brain sends signals down to our body, and our body sends signals up to our brain. When we say something like, “I’m hungry. I’m angry. I’m sad or whatever we might say.” Those are things we feel in our body before we think of them in our mind.
We don’t feel hungry in our brains. We feel hungry in our bodies. We don’t feel lonely in our brains. We feel lonely in our body in the center of our chest. When we cry, that emotion comes up from down. We know through research of the vagus nerve and also neurological work inside the stomach that the stomach has as much neurological networking as a cat’s brain does. Neuroscientists would say that we have more than one brain. We have one in our chest and one in our stomach. They’re all connected to the vagus nerve.
When I get into cold water, what I do is I set off the smoke alarm of my amygdala, which is the smoke alarm in the brain. The amygdala sits at the top of the brainstem. It is responsible for setting off alarms when we are getting it or when we’re in danger. That’s a perceived danger. The amygdala does not work in language. The amygdala works in proprioception. It’s an allostatic load.
Whatever my body perceives as danger, it sets off the amygdala. The prefrontal cortex goes offline, and we’re all of a sudden living from the amygdala. The way that worked in my life is if I felt any kind of threat of abandonment, I didn’t have rational thought. I was working from the amygdala. The way I soothed that amygdala was through sex, flirtatious acts with women, and relationships. I would then be able to bring that prefrontal cortex online.
That’s when I would say, “I can’t believe I did that. I don’t want to do that. Why do I keep doing that?” Those behaviors that make no sense that I keep doing are coming from the amygdala, not the rational thought. I get into cold water, and I do it every morning at 5:30 AM. Every morning in my life, I pop in the cold water tub. I set off that smoke alarm on purpose. I make it go off on purpose. The cold water sets it off, clearly, because you can’t live inside ice-cold water.
What I do while I sit there for three minutes is that I close that prefrontal cortex through my own decision. I breathe and talk to myself, like, “I’m okay. I don’t need to go anywhere. I’m fine. This is three minutes. I’m not going to die in three minutes.” I start training my brain how, in the midst of dysregulation, to regulate itself by sitting with the dysregulation long enough to bring my prefrontal cortex back to life.
They build a practice, as I have in the morning, but then they have tools all day long that they use in the midst of anger, depression, anxiety, and addiction. Whatever you call it, you want to use it in there. I teach them how to regulate it, get control of it, and make the next right decision, which is mostly loving back toward themselves.
How do you get the men, and girls, too, but men who, many of them, are closed off? They’re so blocked by this persona they’ve developed. You also had developed a persona. How do you get them to open up to all of this? A lot of them would probably say, “That’s crazy. What do you mean you’re going to put me in cold water?”
Usually, and not to be too crass, their life has to come apart. The wheels have to come off. Most of the men that I work with, I would categorize them there. They’ve tried therapy. They’ve tried twelve steps. They’ve tried all manner of things, and they cannot seem to get it together. That’s when they come to me. I have 2 or 3 therapists that I work with. They love me. If I can get these men regulated in a twelve-week program I use and then send them back to their therapist, the therapist will be like, “What did you do to this human being?”
They don’t get more information into their head. They’re learning how to get that information down into their body. The difference between a bad decision and a good decision is a freaking decision. If I could teach men how to get the tiniest bit of space between thought and action, and inside that space, they can grab that thought and go, “Wait a minute, that’s not what I want to do.” I’ve changed their lives. People say, “This sounds ridiculous,” until they sit and think about it.
It is 100% the most logical thing that you can ever do. All we’re doing is training the decision-making process. Most men make impulsive decisions, as I did. It was thought to action. I’m teaching them how to feel, think, grab, take a deep breath, and then go, “Is this what I want to do?” They fail. I tell my guys all the time, “Relapse is research. If you relapse, we did a little research. Let’s find out what went wrong. Are we using the tools?” To use the tools is awareness, and awareness is huge. I’m sorry. I could go on for hours.
I want to know what tools you teach them.
I teach them several things.
You’re barking right up my tree. This is all about healing, especially for men. Girls, take notes for your man. What kinds of tools do you provide them? I love that you send them back to a therapist. You open them up, get them to start to change their perceptions and their choices, and then send them back for more help. I think it’s marvelous. What are these tools you give them?
Let me say this to the ladies. This will work for you. I am a man. Men, most generally, need to attack something. We struggle with sitting and talking about something to death. Eventually, we need action. That’s what the tools are. I want you to think about your nervous system as a loop because that’s what it is. Their signals come from the body up, and their signals go from the brain down. That loop is meant to be open. That means when the body sends a signal up, the brain is meant to go, “Is that true? Is that not true?” regulate itself, and then speak back to the body, like, “We’re okay.”
It’s also the other way around. The body is meant to send a signal up to the brain. That signal gets interrupted by trauma. It brings men into a hyper-vigilant state or a hypo-vigilant state. It is 1 of the 2. Either they’re completely activated all the time, where they’re always wanting to fight, always wanting to run, or always anxious, or they’re deactivated all the time. They’re emotionally unavailable, checked out, and don’t want to engage. That means the gate is closed on one side or the other.
I help them open those gates. Here’s how we do it. We build a practice that they can do. Some guys practice for an hour in the morning because they have time. Other guys practice for fifteen minutes. We’re doing reps every morning of our lives. We do it every day. It’s like going to the gym. It’s like a healthy diet. We’re adding in these reps. We’re training that nervous system to speak to the body and the body to speak to the brain. Once they start doing these reps, we build an anchor. They have an anchor point.
The Tool of Surrender: Hands on Head and the 90-Second Rule
What is the rep like? Is it where they’re thinking?
Yoga, breathwork, meditation, and cold water are the four pieces.
You’re getting guys into yoga. That’s fantastic.
Some of them. A lot of them gravitate to the breathwork and the cold water. Yoga lets them feel the signals in the body. Breathwork helps them control the autonomic nervous system. Meditation helps them catch and see the thought. Cold water helps them work on the impulses. When they take my twelve-week program, I strongly encourage them to do some facet of all four. That’s what they’re doing in the morning. They’re building this anchor. Some of them only do fifteen minutes or so, but it’s working.
I have a little lock screen that they can put on their phone. When they pick up their phone, it’s the Sacred Grit logo. It says, “Hands on head, take a step back, and breathe.” That’s the number one tool. When a man feels that trigger coming, he puts his hands on his head. That’s a sign of surrender. He takes a step back. He’s retreating from his trigger, and he takes a deep breath. When he takes that deep breath, he takes it all the way in as far as he can and holds it for five seconds.
He then takes another sip of air, holds that for five seconds, and lets everything out. I have him set a 90-second timer and tell him, “Do not make any decisions for 90 seconds.” If he gets to the end of that 90 second and he still feels dysregulated. I want him to splash cold water on his face. I want him to go for a walk. I want him to do whatever he needs to do within the next five minutes to change the direction of his decision-making process. In the beginning, guys struggle with that because they are also beginning the process. They have morning and evening forms that they fill out. It’s tracking data.
That’s fantastic.
Every day, I have the spreadsheet downloaded. It’s giving me their data. It’s like, “How regulated was I?” I have numbers on, “How confident do I feel in making decisions for my life today?” I’m like, “Did you practice? What did you do? How long did you practice? What triggers you? What are three things that went good today? What’s one thing you wish you could do today?”
The Pillars of Sacred Grit: Honesty, Curiosity, and Self-Love
One thing that’s coming to me as you’re telling me all this is these are men who spend all their time taking care of everybody else, and you’re helping them to take care of themselves. They don’t have any concept of self-love for themselves.
The basis of Sacred Grit is self-love. My pillars are honesty, curiosity, and self-love. Honesty is where you are. That doesn’t mean confession. That means position. Curiosity is, “What can I do now to get out of this?” Self-love is, “Can I love myself to do it?” You’re right. If I can get them to love themselves even a little bit, and they get a win or two under their belt, they’ll take off and soar. It’s amazing how it works.
They change. Do you hear a lot from their spouses or from other people with words like, “Thank you, Jason. You changed our lives.”
They’re like, “I’m not even married to the same man anymore.” I hear that all the time. They’re like, “He’s not the same man he used to be.”
I like this one better. This version is much better.
He’s able to regulate himself. He’s not living with all these triggers. He’s able to hold his own discomfort.
That’s amazing. You have a story about a man who changed your perception of what you were doing. Do you want to tell us about that?
I have a couple, but I’ll share one with you in particular.
It was during a men’s hiking trip. If you want to add one more, go for it.
I have a friend of mine. Chuck started Adventures in Recovery with me. We’ve been buddies for years. We worked in Uganda together. We’ve been all over the world together. When we started Adventures in Recovery, it was mainly for addicts. We were beta testing all this stuff. I knew it worked for me. I knew it worked for Chuck. I knew it had worked for 4 or 5 other guys. We started working with drug court, which is what we call it here in Georgia.
It’s an accountability court for men who had been forced into recovery. We started using it with them and started seeing unbelievable success. I started having people contact me. We started seeing wild success. Chuck had a friend whose son was killed in an ATV accident. He was sixteen years old. The ATV flipped over on him. This guy could not get his life put back together. He was struggling. He was on medications. His marriage was about to fall apart, as most marriages do in that situation.
He’s an attorney. He has four different practices in four different locations. He was not able to work. He was having whole days where he would shut down. Chuck decided that we would do a trip for grieving fathers. His name is Chad. We took Chad out, and then we took a couple of other guys who had also experienced loss in their lives. We go out into the woods, hiking. I start getting his story or his lowdown and hear what all he went through. It was tragic. It was rough.
On the second day, we always do our cold water immersion, breathwork, yoga, and meditation. I took him through all those things. We went through the whole process and gave him the neuroscience behind it. The next day, as he was driving home, he sent me a text. He said, “I don’t know what you did to me, but all I want to do is go home and put my life back together. I have found more peace than I’ve ever found.” About a week or two later, we found ourselves on Chad’s basement floor. I taught Chad the whole thing.
I gave him all the neuroscience and how it works. He has taken off. As a matter of fact, he has become one of my best friends. We are heading out into the woods, and he is bringing dads out with him who have lost kids. He’s using the same methods. I had another young man who started smoking meth with his father when he was thirteen years old. He had struggled to stay sober. At 33 years old, I started to work with him. He sent me a text on his 34th birthday, and it said, “Thank you for the first sober birthday since I was fourteen years old.” We worked together.
Now, he’s got a family. He’s got children. He’s got a job. He’s four years sober and is still practicing on a regular basis. He’s getting in the water. He’s doing the breathwork. He comes to men’s retreats. He participates in Adventures in Recovery. These stories changed my perspective. In the beginning, I experienced this moment of rebirth.
I don’t know how else to describe it. I was in a very specific place when that happened. I tell the guys all the time that this is about consistency, not intensity. It’s about doing it every single day. Those are the ones who experienced the most out of it. I haven’t had anybody relapse who was doing the program every single day.
You’re teaching them to change their mindsets, which is the message that the body gets. You’re teaching them to stop themselves and say, “I’m recognizing what’s going on here. Let me switch to the other track.”
They’re like, “Is this what I want to do?” and then love themselves to do the thing that they want to do.
Adventures in Recovery: Healing through Nature and Community
They’ve never given themselves permission. That’s a foreign concept for them to love themselves. Tell us all about Adventures in Recovery. It’s a nonprofit. It leads men through wilderness trips. It’s mentorship. It’s a community. You have these self-love retreats. Let it rip. Tell us all about them.
Adventures in Recovery has become the free expression of what I do. It’s a community of men. Anybody can join. They could go to RecoveryAdventures.org. There’s a link on there to sign up. I’ll get back in touch with them. What we do is have these hiking trips twice a year that are meant to bring new men into the program. That’s how they come in. They learn these practices and get connected to the community.
We have two Zoom calls every month. Those Zoom calls are practice-specific. We always talk about one of the practices. We talk about nervous system regulation. It is an open conversation among the guys. We have an app called Circle. It’s like a social media app. The guys can post on a message board. They can message one another. They mentor one another. All of this is free. We’re going to Colorado to climb.
They fly into Colorado and meet you in Colorado. They take off these weeks in their lives and do that.
We’re going to go climb three 14,000-foot peaks. We’re doing community as men. The second level of that is Sacred Grit. Beyond that, we have retreats, which men pay to come to. That whole weekend, the first thing is nervous system regulation and the basics of it, and then we talk about honesty, curiosity, and self-love. They leave that weekend with every tool they need to move forward in their life.
From there, they can be a part of the Adventures in Recovery. They mentor with the other men. They can talk to the other men. I specifically, beyond that, encourage them, if they can, to do a twelve-week program with me. It gives them a nice head start to be able to get regulated and to be able to then go to therapy if they need to, to unpack some of that trauma that some of them are holding. Also, we do one-on-one calls. They’re one-hour sessions.
I love that you keep in touch with them. You keep it fresh. You prevent them from falling back into their old ways of thinking until it becomes a real part of their new identity.
It’s not a magic pill. That’s what I tell them. They’ve got to continue on the path and continue to rewire that brain so that they can find the man that they want to be and the ability to be that man.
It’s wonderful. In all of this that you’re doing, what truths do you live by that once felt impossible for that pastor in the Baptist church to believe?
It is that the most important thing I can do is to make a decision to love myself, no matter how that looks to the rest of the world. That sounds narcissistic, but I would argue it’s the exact opposite. If I’m loving myself first and I am living by the truth that I know in the middle of my chest is how I need to live, that is the furthest thing from narcissism that there is. That’s giving myself an internal regulation that I can, in turn, extend out to the rest of the world.
I don’t need anything from the rest of the world because I’ve already found everything I need inside of me. I can come to the world and get everything I need from the world because I’ve already accessed it inside of myself. For the rest of the world, the community that I’m in, and how I interact with the spiritual community, I don’t need them to be anything for me. I need them to be who they are with me so that we can all be whole together. That’s the biggest truth I’ve learned.
You’re inspiring them. You’re a wonderful role model for them. It’s terrific.
Thank you.
Do you have a special promo to tell our audience about?
If they go to TheSacredGrit.com, they can click on the link to book a call. Those are consultation calls. Normally, I do fifteen minutes for somebody to run through. For your audience, if they’ll book that call and put on there, “I heard about you on the show,” I’ll give them a free 30-minute consultation. I will help them design their own nervous system regulation process, and they can try it every morning for however long they want to. I’ll share 2 or 3 videos with them that I’ve made. I’m building a course that will be in school, but I will share the videos with them explaining breathwork and the cold water. They can go ahead and get a head start.
How about if a woman calls you? Can she talk to you about her husband for fifteen minutes?
She sure can. She talked to me about her husband for two hours. I’ll try to fix him for her. I tell people all the time that what I’m trying to do is rebuild men. We live in a world where men have lost their way.
They’ve lost their heart. You could feel free to disagree with me, but to me, they are not connected to their hearts. Everything is, “I got to be a man. I got to be macho. I got to take care of this.” That’s a big problem.
That is a huge problem. It’s not the way this works.
Sacred Healing: Finding the Divine Within the Body
You’ve said that healing helps a man become someone new because of his pain. Explain that to us. What does that look like? Why do you say the healing path is sacred? I could not agree with you more. I’d like to hear it from Jason.
Here’s the thing about pain. Pain is the strongest motivator to move us toward healing. The signals of our body that are painful are telling us that there’s something in our body that needs attention. Our emotional pain is telling us that there’s something in our soul that needs attention. The path of healing is sacred because the only way that you can heal is by touching the sacred inside yourself.
Pain is the strongest motivator to move us toward healing. Share on X
Almost all spiritual traditions teach that our body is the temple. Folks sometimes will say it’s humanistic thinking or stoicism, but it’s not. Even if there is a grandfather in the sky somewhere, sitting on a throne, throwing down light and bolts, my only experience of that is inside of me. Jesus taught it. The Buddha taught it. The Bhagavad Gita teaches it. All of the spiritual traditions teach that the thing that will heal us is inside of us.
I’m working on a new book. The one that’s about to come out is a memoir. It comes out at the end of April 2026. I’m working on another one called A Man after God’s Own Heart. I was writing it, and I’m starting to put it together. I put in there that there is this internal connection that we have to find in and of ourselves that will bring everything that we’re looking for in and of ourselves.
All other information outside of us that comes in is pointing us to that one thing. It’s like the Buddhist principle. The finger that points at the moon is not the moon. It’s the finger that points to the moon. All this information, even the information that I give out, is not necessarily your truth. It’s to point you toward the truth that already lives inside of you, and that is the sacred path. I tell people sacred grit is divine determination. It’s having the grit and determination to dig inside of your own soul, remove all that stuff that you’ve piled on top of your true self, and find God in the most unlikely place inside your body.
From Victim to Creator: Reclaiming Masculine Agency
That’s beautiful. Tell me. When a guy comes to you, and he’s full of regrets, resentment, and judgment, and this one did this to him, and this one did that to him. He’s like, “I’ll never forgive this one.” How do you get them to let it go and to process that?
I teach them that the victim keeps their addiction alive. As long as it is everybody else’s fault, I have a reason to be the way that I am. I tell every one of my guys, “If I stayed a victim of my perpetrators, then I’m giving myself a reason to continue to have the decisions that I’ve had. Once I say no, and I’m forgiving that and letting that go, I will no longer.”
The victim keeps their addiction alive. Share on X
Here’s the way I frame it. You are giving control of your life over to everybody else. Real men and masculine energy are about taking control of our own internal soul. That’s how I frame it. Sometimes, they still struggle with it. There’s some pretty heavy trauma out there. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of it yourself.
For sure. I have my own experiences, too.
That’s the starting point. Their life has to come apart. When that happens, they’re pretty much open to a lot of things to try to get it put back together.
That’s great. Tell me. You teach that joy is not something we chase. It’s something we notice. What does that mean when it comes to healing and rebuilding a life?
You have to choose to be happy. We have created this dynamic in our world that happiness is something that happens to you, but happiness is something that you choose to be. I think it’s Richard Rohr who said, “We can’t think ourselves into a new way of being, but we can be ourselves into a new way of thinking.”
I love that. That’s a beautiful thing.
If someone’s having a terrible day and they make themselves smile, they feel it all the way down into their body because their vagus nerve recognizes, “The body is smiling. I must be happy.” You can choose happiness, or you can choose to be a victim. You could choose to be angry, bitter, mad, and sad. Those things feel a little bit better because the nervous system is stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
To you, you feel more regulated when you’re there, but that’s not the true you. The true you is happy, whole, and healthy. When you choose to be happy, whole, and healthy, you start living in that direction. You start changing the way you think. You get top-down and bottom-up regulation. You’re a whole human being.
When you choose to be happy, whole, and healthy, you start living in that direction. Share on X
That is true joy. That’s wonderful. Instead of letting grief destroy you, you’ve allowed it to become a sacred teacher, transforming your story into one of profound healing and rebirth. I personally want to thank you for helping men to heal, transform, and evolve. God knows we need that. For this inspiring conversation that aligns so deeply with the spirit of the show and from my heart, I wish you abundant blessings. Truly.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. As I like to say, to be continued.
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About Jason Lyle
Jason Lyle is a former pastor turned wilderness guide and founder of Adventures in Recovery and Sacred Grit. After walking through deep personal loss, addiction, and the unraveling of his faith, Jason rebuilt his life through adventure, mindfulness, and honest connection with God. Today, he leads men’s retreats, teaches nervous-system-based spiritual practices, and hosts the Sacred Grit Podcast, helping men reclaim faith, courage, and purpose through self-love and resilience.
