30/08/2020
My September program is about to begin – you may register @ HealthyMasculine.com
For me “Awakening the Healthy Masculine” gatherings are in response to what I was seeing in my community development career all over the planet — where I continued to witness the immature and shadow sides of the masculine constantly undermining the basic goodness of human connections, and the world that we know is possible when we collaborate together for a common good.
As an international Community Development professional, I have worked and lived in urban + rural Canadian & US communities, in northern remote First Nation villages, in rural Mexico, as well as in the remote island in the South Pacific, and now, these last 5 years I have spent in Scotland, England and France. Over these 20 years, and in my youth growing up with a single mother of 5 children in a middle-class Canadian city, I have witnessed plenty of destructive immature masculine energy in my life. The dominant “power-over”, control, bullying, and emotional shutdown that I have witnessed, all lead towards what has become known as "toxic masculine” behaviours. While I have felt my own shame, deep grief, and a longing for healthy mentorship, I realised something — that I myself require co-mentorship in order to relearn how to be in my own healthy and mature parts of myself, while learning how to acknowledge my own immature ways of being.
Sadly, I have struggled to find enough models & mentors in our society, as I battled not to through in the towel and give up. Instead I have responded — to my sadness, my shock, and my embarrassment of witnessing and watching the immature masculine destroy what I can see that has such potential for increased human-human connection — by offering spaces for us to grow together, to question our own inner ways of being, and to share this in circle with each other, as a way of co-mentoring each other through this re-learning process with all genders together, in circle. To do so, I have found it supportive to be guided through the lens of an awareness of the human ‘archetypes’.
I have a strong sense that the time has come for humans to co-mentor each other if we are to transform and transition into new cultural narratives that define what it is to be living in our Healthy Masculine fullness, while offering a renewed story of the sacred masculine in a post-patriarchal world — which is where I invite a nourishing and reciprocal relationship with the feminine. The energies of Being & Doing. Balancing the Ying & Yang inside all of us.
Although I much prefer meeting in person, due to craze and shutdowns of Covid-19, I have made theses gatherings available on-line, now offering them globally, which has its own powerful way of connecting folks from all over the world to practice healthy ways of witnessing and being together.
I’d love to have you join in circle with me, so that we can continue to collectively heal the old "power over” learned ways of being, in order to begin to re-learn healthy was of being together, with practice, in a safe place, so that when it matters most, we will collectively have the skills to show up for ourselves, for each other, and for this world.
