This is a free sample from Leaning Into Our Nature: The Readers Workbook, the self-study companion to Book 1 of the LION series. Copyright © 2026 AlphaPrime Counseling and Coaching Inc. All rights reserved. The LION Model™ is a trademark of AlphaPrime Counseling and Coaching Inc. Based on the book Leaning Into Our Nature by Justin M. Eastland, LMSW. This workbook is for educational and self-reflection purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are in crisis or need professional support, please contact a licensed professional. In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
The full workbook runs twenty chapters, with a Beginning exercise, a consolidated Self-Reading, and a closing summary page. This sample includes the opening pages you need to work Chapter 1: the crisis resources, a note on the framework, and the Two Questions.
If You Need Help Now
This book and workbook treat serious topics. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to one of the resources below before continuing.
- Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 (US and Canada)
- National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 (US)
- SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357 (US)
Outside the United States, please contact your country’s equivalent crisis services. The framework can wait. Your safety cannot.
A Note on the Framework
The LION Model is a clinical framework (a way of reading what happens between two people) developed by Justin M. Eastland, LMSW, in his practice as a clinical social worker and coach. It is a practitioner’s model: built and refined in the room, case by case, rather than drawn from a laboratory. That is both its grounding and its honest limit. What follows is offered not as proven law but as a working lens, one that has earned its keep in practice, meant to be put to work and, where your situation calls for it, to accompany the professional care this workbook supports rather than replaces.
Before Anything Else: The Two Questions
These two questions come first.
Before any action, to lean correctly. After any action, to become accountable. They are the first move every reader has to make against their own behavior. Without them, no one can discover what they need to do if they were misaligned. With them, every moment becomes readable.
THE TWO QUESTIONS
- Who do I want to be, the protector or the nurturer? The one you want is your nature; the one you have had to become is its inversion.
- Who am I (or who was I in reflection) nurturing or protecting in this moment, myself or someone else? This tells you whether you are leaning selfish or sacrificing.
The two questions work together. The first asks who you want to be. What you want (underneath circumstance, underneath who you have had to become) is a fact about your nature, and the question is honest attention turned on it. Protecting is the book’s frame-holding pole; nurturing is its signal-bringing pole. Neither is the better one, a marriage needs both, and needs them to stay different. The pole you want is the one you are built for; the pole pressure forced on you is its inversion, and the inversion is not the want.
The second question turns that same attention on your relationships rather than your nature: who are you nurturing or protecting right now, yourself, or someone else? Nurturing or protecting yourself is leaning selfish; nurturing or protecting someone else is sacrificing. Asked in the moment, or in reflection afterward, it tells you which way you leaned.
If you want to be the nurturer but find yourself protecting (bracing, going hard, guarding yourself) that hard turn is the inversion: who you have had to become, not who you want to be. You won’t feel safer for long. If you want to be the protector but find yourself going passive (folding, going quiet, stepping back to keep the peace) that is the inversion too. It can feel like protecting someone, but folding is not protection, whatever it feels like from the inside.
And you go first. You don’t wait for your partner to move before you do your own work. Returning to your own function, whatever pole you carry, is always yours to begin. One first move, though, is pole-specific: reconciliation. In the intimacy paradox the book describes, the frame-holding pole holds first, and that is what makes room for the other to set their guard down and come back to nurturing. Carry the two questions into every moment the book asks you to read. They are the first action before any lean, and the first action after any failure to lean.
Mark this page. Return to it.
Chapter 1: The Closed System
It didn’t start broken. The system isn’t visible when it’s functioning.
READING ORIENTATION
Chapter 1 opens with the book’s central image: a couple on a couch, leaning toward each other without effort, in a relationship that is working. The chapter’s point is that you don’t see how you’re put together while everything is running smoothly. You only see it when something breaks.
The system is closed in two senses. First, its parts are connected; you can’t pull on one without moving the others. Second, it doesn’t negotiate. It responds to what you do, not to what you think, feel, or intend.
Through Part II you’ll meet six parts (pressure, capacity, polarity, sequence, domains, and identity), and two signals (pain and peace) that run continuously underneath everything.
Key Terms From This Chapter
The closed system: How a person works as one whole. Six parts that move as one motion, not six separate levers.
Pressure: The load a person is being asked to carry, external present, internal accumulated, and relational.
Capacity: What you have available to absorb pressure without breaking form. Built up by good choices, drained by bad ones.
Polarity: How capacity gets shared. A relationship has two functional poles (masculine and feminine) that split the load between them.
Sequence: The four-step path every decision travels: perception, conscience, execution, connection.
Domains: The four parts of life where things go right or wrong: mental, spiritual, physical, relational.
Identity: Who you’ve become. Built by everything you’ve done, repeated under pressure long enough to harden.
The non-negotiable: Life responds to what you do. Not what you think. Not what you feel. Not what you mean. Not what you know.
In Your Own Words
Two of these terms carry this chapter: the closed system and the non-negotiable. The other six are a preview of Part II, and each gets a full chapter ahead. Put the two into a sentence you’d say out loud; for the previews, a rough pass is fine, or leave them and return when their chapter arrives.
The closed system:
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
Pressure:
________________________________________________
Capacity:
________________________________________________
Polarity:
________________________________________________
Sequence:
________________________________________________
Domains:
________________________________________________
Identity:
________________________________________________
The non-negotiable:
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
The Three Behavioral Tests
From the model. Because life responds to behavior and nothing else, the book offers three tests that ask whether behavior is aligned. They are not about success or feeling. They are about direction. You will be able to run them more precisely as you move through the book; meet them here, and return to them often.
- The sequence runs clean. Perception is accurate, input is processed without distortion, projection, or assumption. Conscience assigns meaning that matches the evidence. Execution follows without avoidance or escalation. Connection reflects the execution’s intent. (You will meet the sequence in full in Chapter 8.)
- Polarity holds under pressure. Each pole restrains its natural pull toward its distortion and operates from the assertive center, masculine protecting and directing without crossing into force, feminine nurturing and tempering without crossing into withdrawal. (Polarity is Chapter 5.)
- Behavior matches stated standard. Your behavior reflects the standards you claim to hold, under pressure, when it costs something, not only when it is convenient. When internal standard and external behavior are the same thing, identity is aligned.
The signal of misalignment is always consequence, not discomfort, not awareness, consequence. And a single misaligned action doesn’t break anything; a repeated pattern does. Direction, repeated, becomes identity.
Reader Work
From the book. This is the author’s closing prompt, the core exercise. Everything else in this section supports it.
THE AUTHOR’S PROMPT
Find one moment in the past seventy-two hours where your behavior didn’t match your intent. Don’t analyze it. Don’t diagnose it. Don’t try to determine which step failed; you don’t yet have the language for that, and the language isn’t the work. Just locate the moment. Say it out loud, alone, in one sentence: On Tuesday night, in the kitchen, I said I was fine when I wasn’t. Then ask one question: was I leaning into my nature there, or away from it? You don’t need to know yet what your nature requires. The rest of the book will give you what to do with what you find.
Your work
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
Working It Through
Run it through the two questions first: which did you want to be in that moment (the protector or the nurturer) and who were you nurturing or protecting, yourself or someone else? Carry both answers into the prompts below.
Locate the moment in time. When was it? Where were you? Who else was there?
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
Write the one sentence the prompt asks for. “On _______, in _______, I _______.”
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
Was the gap between behavior and intent small or large? Describe the size in your own words.
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
Without trying to fix it: was that moment a lean toward your nature, or away from it?
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
To Carry Into Conversation
Use these to open a conversation, with a counselor, a trusted friend, or, where the chapter has permitted it, your partner. They are not for diagnosing another person. Answer them about yourself first.
- Understanding is not the lever, behavior is: that’s the chapter’s claim. Where in your life have you been waiting for insight to produce change?
- When was the last time you noticed yourself running cleanly? What did it look like from the inside?
One-Sentence Capture
The moment from the past seventy-two hours, in one sentence:
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
Where This Goes Next
Chapter 2, Nature as the Reference, asks you to name the tradition that has shaped your sense of what a well-lived life looks like. Chapter 3 gives you forty-eight hours without the word “fine.” The full workbook carries the work through twenty chapters, four parts, and a consolidated Self-Reading at the end of Part III.
The complete Leaning Into Our Nature: The Readers Workbook is available on Amazon. It is meant to be used alongside the book, Leaning Into Our Nature: A Modern Return to Ancestral Values by Justin M. Eastland, LMSW.
For questions about the books or workbooks, use the inquiry form at theleaningmethod.com.
