Brian Mattocks
Host and Founder of A Mason's Work - a podcast designed to help you use symbolism to grow. He's been working in the craft for over a decade and served as WM, trustee, and sat in every appointed chair in a lodge - at least once :D
Appears in 258 Episodes
The Best Version of You Lives Right Now
The one day mindset is a specific kind of trap. Once I have my act together, once I've earned the credential, once I've become the man who — all of it moves your agenc...
Using Feelings as Navigation, Not Decoration
Saying trust your feelings sounds like a motivational poster. Brian is making a more precise claim: the emotional content underneath your MacGuffin is not the destinat...
Stopping Is Not the Same as Quitting
A culture that treats quitting as weakness also produces people who keep executing on goals that were never going to work. When the objective you created is a fiction ...
Where the Feeling Gets Lost in Translation
Before the goal, before the plan, before the whiteboard, there is a felt sense of something you are moving toward. It lives in your body. It resists easy explanation. ...
Why April Feels Like a Broken Promise
It's April, and the gap between who you planned to be and who you are right now is hard to ignore. Whether the resolution quietly died in February or you hit your targ...
Softening Is Not Surrender
The word softening carries social baggage for men, and Brian Mattocks addresses that directly at the outset. Softening is not capitulation. It is not the resignation o...
Reintegration and the Seed of Joy
Twelve of the fifteen fellow craft in the legend turned back. They recanted, submitted to consequence, and reintegrated. From the outside, their culpability was not ob...
How to Redirect a Conversation Without Destroying It
Knowing the meta conversation is happening and knowing how to interrupt it are two different skills. Brian Mattocks works through a three-stage approach for redirectin...
The Fellow Craft Who Chose the Wrong Exit
The men at the center of the third degree legend were not villains at the outset. They were skilled craftsmen contributing real labor to a significant project, with st...
Every Hour the Stone Sits Unworked
There is a particular kind of meeting most people have sat through without being able to name what went wrong. It starts with genuine energy, a real problem, people wh...
Harm Reduction, Agency, and Closing the Loop
Brian closes the arc by bringing the full lodge process back to the launch space: how do you actually respond once a fear has been named, triaged, examined, and prepar...
The Preparing Room Is Not Optional
Brian addresses one of the most common mistakes people make when trying to do real internal work: skipping preparation. When a fear or challenge arrives and you are im...
Three Questions That Test a Fear's Credentials
Not everything that feels like your fear actually is. Brian walks through the examining room as a structured process for interrogating incoming fears before they are a...
Triage: How the Persuivant Routes Your Fears
Once the Tyler has passed a signal inward, the next question is where it goes. Brian draws on the role of the Persevant, known in most jurisdictions as the Inner Guard...
Naming Fear Activates Your Inner Tiler
Brian Mattocks, author of A Mason's Work, opens this arc by examining what happens after you successfully name a fear. The act of naming changes everything, because it...
The Power of Naming the Fear
In the conclusion of our series, we strike the "final death blow" to the shadow's control by giving it a name. By identifying the specific fear driving your patterns, ...
Slaying Dragons via Responsibility
When we catch the shadow in action, it often speaks the language of blame. Today, we discuss the "outrageously uncomfortable" but essential technique of reclaiming age...
Why the Shadow Exists
Shadow work can feel heavy and strenuous, but the reward is the difference between "freedom and slavery". We examine the mechanics of how the shadow forms as a rationa...
Identifying the Shadow
We introduce a central concept of Jungian psychology: The Shadow. This represents the parts of our behavior that have become invisible to us—the "rough parts of the st...
Building Capacity in the Mundane Middle
We begin the week by challenging the idea that strength is built during a crisis. Just as you wouldn't wait for an emergency to start going to the gym, the capacity to...