For the past few years I’ve hosted one-off and multi-month men’s groups.
A men’s group is when a group of people-who-were-cultured-as-men gather in an intentional way with the goal of untangling societal gender conditioning and becoming more powerful, caring, and aware humans.
Many decisions are made about a baby’s future based on their genitalia. If a baby is born with a penis, our culture will automatically start referring to that baby as ‘he.’ The baby will be given a masculine name, and join one half of society’s long-formed patriarchal division. The baby will inherit the culmination of all the beliefs, thoughts, and opinions of what it means to be a ‘man.’
He will be put into a blue room, instead of a pink room. He will be conditioned to prefer gym class over dance class. He’ll be subliminally told what interests to have, what hobbies to have, how to dress, how to behave, how to walk, what career to pursue, what character qualities to cultivate. Once the identity of ‘him’ gets slapped on that little penis-bearing baby, his entire world of potential is cut in half. He’s been relegated to the ‘blue’ world instead of the ‘pink’ world.
It’s my belief that the blue-pink (ie man-woman) distinction is entirely arbitrary to begin with. But even if that isn’t your stance, once the baby is in the blue world there’s a whole lot of poison and garbage he also inherits that must be sorted out.
He’s born into a culture where men don’t know how to feel, dance, express, or open their hearts. A culture where logic shits on intuition, and the mind shits on the body and spirit.
In such a world, those born into pink rooms come from a heritage of being told they are second-class citizens whose desires don’t matter. These societal stories have led to a culture of abuse that has aggrandized and empowered men while violating, devaluing, and quashing women.
When a man begins to wake up to our culture’s warped ideas around gender and masculinity, he will fall into two general camps.
In one camp he recognizes just how much unconscious violating and repressing of others he has done throughout his life. He sees that he’s lived as a bull in china shop and he recognizes that he must build his awareness of impact, practice emotional vulnerability, open his heart, increase his sensitivity, learn about consent, learn to ask for help, and learn to empower others.
In the other other camp he feels repulsion by all the men around him. So he energetically castrates himself, and rushes to become an ally without first looking at his own demons. This man must do the work of finding his own power, leadership, integrity, willingness to offend, and spine. He must look at ways that he, as a person born into the cult of manhood, has also caused unconscious violence in his past.
This work is incredibly important, and cannot be done alone.
I bring men together to vulnerably share their stories, struggles, and triumphs. To learn to open their hearts and feelings, become trustworthy, and lean on other men. To find our power together, and to tether our ambitions to our hearts.
Whether you like it or not, if you were born with a penis you were born into the blue side. You have options. You can jump to the pink side, you can embrace the blue side, or you can say the whole gender game is horse shit. That is a personal decision.
It is our collective imperative to see through the confines of gender. To empower people of all gender expressions, to lift up those who have been oppressed, and to collectively open and connect our hearts so that we can dismantle the patriarchal cultural narratives that have kept all of us from who we truly are.
If you’re interested to participate in a future men’s group, or could see benefit in 1-on-1 work, please visit this page to tell me more about yourself.
