Hi! Welcome back, so soon. I typically don’t post more than once a month, if that, but here is an exception. I’m pretty riled up this week and feeling my excitement and passion around men’s work, which many of you may know is a deeply important part of my life and leadership path.
There are many important conversations happening in the world around how we as men can show up for our families, communities, selves and each other in better ways.
If this is a topic that is alive for you, or a community you are engaged with in any way, please share this with your people. The second part will come shortly.
Thank you.
This week, I am tuned into Calling All Men!, an online summit hosted by Michael Skye. There are featured interviews with Adam Jackson, one of the co-founders of Sacred Sons; Steven Jenkinson, the amazing elder, death worker, and artist behind Orphan Wisdom; Ashanti Branch, whose program Ever Forward was featured in the film ‘The Mask You Live In’; Trevor Spring of Sonz Youth Mentoring, and many others.
It warms my heart to hear these men share their personal stories around what brought them to men’s work, why they feel this work is important, and also their perspectives on what is happening right now, and how can we continue to build connection and community in ways that can rewire our conditioning around what it is to be a good/successful ‘man’ into something that is more connected to our personal and collective depth and wisdom.
Skye’s premise for the summit is that there is a crisis in men, particularly young men, right now, and he asks each leader what they think the crisis is, and how can we respond in a good way?
I’ve been feeling excited and riled up by listening to these interviews, and want to contribute some of my thoughts to the conversation.
Who am I to talk?
I am a father, husband, brother, and son. It has been my life’s work, particularly in the past eight years, to heal the wounds of abuse, trauma, and disconnection that I experienced as a child, and also that which lives in my DNA. Part of my purpose on this planet is to help facilitate healing in and between men.
My path led me into men’s work in my late twenties, and has been instrumental in my own healing and learning to offer containers for others to do their work. I have participated in many larger organizational offerings, rites of passage work, wilderness immersions, and lead groups regularly.
What is the crisis?
Let’s slow down a bit, and zoom out our awareness. It’s true that young men, particularly young white men, are experiencing a crisis of identity, purpose, and disconnection.
But young men in this country are not living in a vacuum. What could these young men be responding to? Any number of recent dizzying tech advances to which our bodies and minds are not adapted? An overwhelming amount of information pounding at the doors of our consciousness in each moment? It is absolutely true, as many men in Calling All Men! have pointed out, that a young person experiencing an attuned, curious adult male sans agenda would make a massive positive difference in their life.
Indeed, that is exactly what Ashanti Branch, Trevor Spring, Adam Jackson and others are doing in their own ways: attempting to provide that which they needed at another point in their lives.
But the ‘crisis’ doesn’t start—or stop—with men.
What else alive is also experiencing crisis right now?
Everything.
Everyone.
We as the denizens of this planet are facilitating the earth’s sixth mass extinction event. Climate change, which we humans also had a big hand in, is affecting weather patterns all over the world. The sea level is rising due to melting ice caps, which is causing the oceans to warm, which tosses so many downstream things out of balance. That’s just one small tangent.
Let’s slow down again. A lot can come up when we name those big things. A sense of powerlessness, helplessness, or shame can arise. Maybe even a need to protect, or defend.
The practice is learning to be with those feelings, together. When we begin to talk about racism, gender fluidity, politics—these are the moments where we can slow down, together.
It’s learning how to be with our own big feelings—the pandemic gave many of us a lot of good practice opportunities—and also, just as important, learning to be with the feelings and experiences of others.
It’s a difficult task, especially when no one has ever done that for you. And it’s not always learnable—some men are literally so far gone into narcissism and shame that acknowledging that another person’s experience is real will never be an option for them.
I know that in my own body because, for a long time, I was on that path. I was so wounded, carrying all of my hurt around that I could not see or acknowledge anyone else in my world except insofar as they interacted with me, and even then, I could only feel what I felt; my empathy mechanism, if you will, was not just broken, but rusted out and laying abandoned in a ditch.
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Trevor Spring spoke to the down regulation that can happen in men’s circles—that feeling of being “dropped in” together, the experience of feeling safe in a group of men.
I’m not talking about Safe Spaces where the purpose is to avoid offending someone; I’m talking about sitting with a group of men who witness you in your pain and darkness and your joy and won’t try to fix or rescue you, or project their own stories on you. You can just be together. That potentiality, in and of itself, is one of the most profound and healing aspects of modern men’s work.
But it’s not the whole pie. We cannot just take turns speaking into a circle, and moving on to the next man. The relationship is what heals: the attunement, the curiosity, the reflection. When we engage with each other from an internal place of witnessing, compassion, truth, and empathy—that’s how we can build together.
And from that place of allowing each human to be exactly as he is, she is, they are, we can just see what wants to happen next. Maybe the young men don’t want to be any versions of ‘men’ that we inherited, or know anything about. If that’s so, it has to be okay.
The question is, can you be okay with you—a true mensch—while that which has given you status and meaning in a changing world begins to crumble?
The earth is changing so fast, who can keep track?
The glaciers are melting, old gods are dying, defunct myths are being reborn, the sea is rising and humans who are neither male nor white have taken the world stage, or will soon.
It’s okay, man. You’re not less, now. Feel your body. Feel your breath. Feet on the ground. Hand on your heart, gut, balls.
Thank God. You’re still here.
We can relax the song and dance of our male conditioning, and get down to doing the deeper, albeit less glamorous work “behind the scenes” that, quite frankly, White men for the last few hundred or thousand years have largely avoided, having preferred, evidently, to do a lot of outer work in the world.
What we are left with is the legacy of our ancestors: the state of the world, the state of men. And not just men’s relationship to being men, but, for example, women’s relationship to men, and the impact of being women in the world that has unfolded until now.
It is time to do our own work as men—both our inner and outer work, to embody something that our younger brothers, sons, and grandsons see as worthwhile, life-giving, tuned in, congruent, reliable, trustable. Yes, we must learn new skills ourselves. Rites of passage and purpose work and mentorship and sacred combat and new education systems and new mythologies, yes. We can practice curiosity. We can practice connection. We can practice relationship, integrity, and living from whatever values are most important to us.
Most importantly, however, we can learn and practice repair.
I’ll speak more about repair in part two.