PABLO PALACIOS
HUSBAND, FATHER AND FOUNDER OF FATHERHOOD CULTURE
I remember my childhood as full of wild play. I was born in Stockholm to a Swedish mother and a Chilean father, and I grew up in a communal housing complex with over seventy apartments. My neighbors were my best friends, and we were often around ten boys running around until a parent called us home.
The sense of community I experienced there—the feeling of belonging to a place and its people, of belonging to the village—is one of the cornerstones of the life my family and I are trying to build today.
As a boy, I fantasized about heroic deeds and life as a football player. That dream carried me through my teenage years, and it wasn't until I was nineteen that I let go of elite football.
At eighteen, I traveled alone to Chile to live with relatives. I thought I was going home. Throughout my upbringing, I had built an identity around one truth—I am not Swedish.
But reality was unavoidable. Dirt roads, gunfire, and a culture I didn't understand shook me.
And I realized that I was more Swedish than I had ever wanted to admit.
In my twenties, the pursuit of adventure was everything. It led me into the military and onward to studies in journalism.
But the journey also turned inward, taking me briefly into monastic life within the yogic tradition—a period that has profoundly shaped how I view body and mind today.
It was after this that I wrote the book Thoughts Between Heartbeats, a book about the search for identity, which later, when translated into Spanish, gave me the opportunity to travel across the Americas once again.
In 2018, I moved to Copenhagen with my pregnant wife.
I didn't speak the language, I didn't know anyone, and three weeks later I started carpentry school. At the same time, a gnawing feeling began to grow inside me. I was going to be a father—and I started to realize something that terrified me:
I understood that I was a boy in a man's body.
For the past eight years, my greatest focus has been on becoming a man.
Like so many other men, I never underwent any initiation into male community. As a young man-to-be, never experiencing a psychological and spiritual death of the boy and child's life, only to be ritually reborn as a man, is one of the consequences that modern society suffers from.
Young men carry explosive energy, and the saying—"Initiate them, or they will burn down the village to feel its warmth"—aptly captures their longing for guidance.
To grow up without men to model oneself after is directly harmful, and it was this absence of expectation, admiration, and guidance that drove my anger to a point where rage consumed me.
Instead of stepping into life and taking responsibility—both outwardly and for my inner world—I turned to addiction, hatred, and withdrawal from relationships and social life.
The realization that I was a boy blaming my life and the state of things on the world was a reality check of epic proportions.
I understood that the story I was telling myself about myself had to change. I had to build myself into the person I wanted to be and create the world I wanted to live in. I had to own myself.
Even though eight years have passed, every day is a choice to step into my power.
To choose to stand in alignment with my word and my beliefs.
To choose life, joy, and the playfulness that comes with expanding and mastering myself as a man, father, brother, son and friend.
To take on more responsibility and strive for freedom. To build brotherhood among men and allow myself to be held accountable by other men.
Today, I live in the Danish countryside with my wife and our three children, dedicating my time to my family and my vision and great passion—MEN.
In this work, I build processes that reconnect men with their deeper wisdom and their bodies.
I believe that the inner voice that guides us through life, even when faint or hard to hear, can be strengthened through connection with the body.
By linking mind and body, and integrating the sexual energy with the stomach, heart, and head, we men can discover our true strength.
A treasure that often lies hidden at the bottom of the dark lake within our inner landscape—the place the boy within us may fear most to visit.
I see that our time is marked by great confusion and pain; I see masculinity and men who have retreated from leadership, both in their own lives, in their families, and in society at large.
In my work with men, I see men and fathers who stop hiding from their inherent power and love.
I see men who dare to dream big, who speak their life's vision with clear intention, and who take responsibility for the direction of that vision.
Here lies the path forward—for me, for you, and for humanity as a whole. The world longs for men who can lead with integrity, passion, strength, and love.
But for this to happen, we must first own ourselves, and then work together for a better world.
Owning yourself as a man means journeying into your pain—emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically.
It means asking the big questions: what story am I telling myself about myself and the world?
It means honoring your body, taking responsibility for your health and your relationships, and understanding that there is a greater purpose here.
As men or fathers, our ultimate duty is to be of service to others.
But to do so, we must understand the higher purpose and plant it in our hearts so that we can orient ourselves towards our "true north", every day.
As men, we are here to build a better world—nothing less.
And it begins with us, so that we can raise strong men from our boys, so that the generations to come can model themselves after us.
As men who show the way, with courage and heart.
