Reflecting on "Men's Work"

but first, some personal journaling

I find myself in the perpetual habit of avoiding writing. And following through with writing to develop something through from the rough draft to something publishable. Resistance.

I want to say I’ve been a little distracted working on ghost writing and editing a re-release of a book for Hilaritas Press, but that’s not entirely true. I’m resisting again. The editing went ok, but I’m resisting the ghost writing and transcribing and transmuting four hours of conversation into two or three new chapters. Resistance.

I have been training for a week of pedaling in the French Alps. Signing up for an annual bike tour motivates me to get into shape. I feel better and have more energy overall when I’m in cycling shape. And I want to kick some ass, so I overtrain. And even when I’m not overtrained, I’m often just exhausted. The bike training happens through will power, and then I let everything else that I can slide. Writing slides first, and then it just goes deeper from there.

I started a new candida and Lyme treatment, low dose immunotherapy, which shows promise, but it’s the kind of thing that we dial in slowly. It’s having an effect, but more of a net negative than a positive with the first round of treatment I started on Friday (April 25). I find hope. The new treatment includes a new thought paradigm. My whole perspective is shifting, but I’m impatient. I want weeks to take days. Let’s dial this bitch in!

Somehow this has become a journal entry of sorts, and I’m ok with that.

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Last week I was interviewed by Taylor Ellwood on his Men’s Mysteries podcast/Substack channel. Taylor is a long time practitioner of western esoteric spiritual practices (magick) and lately into “men’s work.” I’ve written a bit about my involvement in men’s work over the last decade, and a couple interesting questions came up in our conversation which I’ve been wrestling with since.

What is Men’s Work?

For me, I started doing deep interpersonal work one-on-one and in groups when I went to grad school for psychotherapy in an experiential educational setting at Naropa University. In some shape or form, every class was group therapy, and one-on-one work was heavily incorporated into the program. Later I would train in Gestalt Therapy at the Gestalt Institute of the Rockies, and I also participated in other trainings that were experientially oriented in these group containers of primarily dyadic (one on one) work. In all of those containers, we did deep interpersonal and intrapersonal work. Later on, I started sitting in men’s circles and associated trainings, and found a similar container with similar styles of work rooted in psychodrama and experiential, Gestalt style therapy as a whole.

The major difference for me, which I struggled to articulate with Taylor, is that by removing sexual attraction (as a straight male in a community of mostly women) from a vulnerable space, I found myself able to stay grounded and drop in deeper into my own work. In some respects it’s just that simple. However, I think there’s more to it that I glossed over during the chat.

In engaging with men’s work, I found a community of like minded men focused on growth and personal development. In some sense, I found my people. I found a community. Men often tend to lone wolf and go it alone, and the power of shared experiences and community can be a complete game changer. As an only child, I tend to overlook these things. The concept of brotherhood comes across as foreign to me. As a mega-introvert, my default need is to be alone, and as my kids are growing up and leaving the nest, this dynamic is changing rapidly, but when they were younger, it was awfully hard to find that solitude I craved so badly. (And sometimes it’s just a matter of giving myself that permission.) Maybe this is a tangent, but building community is one of the last things to come to mind for me.

Culturally, I think we, as men, do have some big questions in front of us around the subject of “toxic masculinity,” and that feels like another blog post all together. Repeating what I said to Taylor, it seems to me that women “grew up” and empowered themselves in the women’s lib movements of the 70s and continue to do so, while men have been caught off guard, completely bewildered, and find ourselves staring blankly, still trying to figure out what happened, blaming everything else, and with no clue how to catch up. (/cynicism)

Setting that aside, when I moved from the world of experiential psychotherapy into men’s work, I discovered other aspects of self we didn’t really examine which I consider to be masculine aspects. Experiential psychotherapy focuses a great deal on emotional expression and regulation, whereas men’s work adds in mission and purpose, and accountability, for example.

So right away, I want to say that we all have the masculine and feminine inside of us and this discussion has nothing to do with gender and sexual orientation in that regard.

For the masculine, the hero’s journey seems to be an external experience that may involve following/finding your missions and purpose in life. (It’s been said that a man may have many missions, but one purpose.) The ManKind Project focuses a significant chunk of time on crafting a Mission Statement. The Uncivilized Nation has members develop a Building Statement. What are you building? That’s a very masculine question, IMO. And following your mission, and building something meaningful to you seem to follow that Hero’s Journey arch with elements of courage, action, challenge, and reward. On the other hand, I’ve come to understand that for women, or the feminine more accurately, the Hero’s Journey is an internal experience of growth and development. And I would argue that men need to embrace that internal experience just as deeply as the external mission, purpose, and building side of the Journey. And those are gross generalizations. The entrepreneurs I work with have to focus on building, and often overlook their internal experiences. I’d argue that this oversight often holds the key to wherever they find themselves stuck.

And perhaps I’ve digressed. Or perhaps not.

In men’s work, a lot of emphasis is put on accountability. Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Make clear agreements with others, and yourself, and stick to them. If you break the agreement, that’s ok, and… and there is something to unpack and examine in that broken agreement. There’s work in the broke agreement, often in the form of self awareness and realization.

Curiously, the sister organization to the ManKind Project, Women Within, does not incorporate Accountability into their trainings from what I’ve been told. I find this curious. In the ManKind Project, we teach emotional awareness which I consider a part of the feminine, however, WomenWithin does not teach accountability, which I’d consider masculine. No judgement there; just curiosity.

At this point I’ve gone a bit tangential once again. What is men’s work? Well, within that, I’ve found brotherhood and community, which is huge. And what I’d call masculine character components of accountability, mission, purpose, and “building.” And at the end of the day, it’s a container in which one can work on real, meaningful interpersonal (and intrapersonal) self development. I still don’t know that the “men’s” part of “men’s work” is all that extraordinary, but again, maybe that’s the only child in me coming out and minimizing brotherhood. I can’t say. Or perhaps on a broader perspective, to me, it’s just another container for “The Work.” Most of my experience of this nature over the last twenty years comes from a psychotherapist training container and a men’s work container. The different containers provide a different context and “energy” from which The Work emerges. And a different community from which to receive support and practice integration. And that does make a big difference, but at some level, The Work is just The Work.

[So now the obvious question is, “WTF is The Work?”]

The second question I was left with from my conversation with Taylor was:

How does the esoteric fit into Men’s Work?

To be continued…