For me working with men and running men’s retreats is all about healing. Healing the seen and the unseen within ourselves. For men our trauma so often manifests in our struggle with our relationship to our emotional body. Another way of saying that is that men are disconnected from their hearts. The price of living in a world that has lost connection to the deep sense of interconnectedness that enshrines our divine nature. It’s not that men can’t and don’t experience compassion, love, kindness, grief, these qualities and emotions we associate with the heart. But it’s like how we talk about the mind, that we only use 10% of it. So men are using a vastly reduced amount of their hearts capacity to feel their way through the world. And like any machine, that has working parts, those parts are all 100% necessary to lead a full, healthy, well balanced connected life. 

There are many reasons why men are the way they are, be it traumatic childhood experiences, inherited trauma carried epigenetically, through the family line, the societal line etc etc. Any kind of trauma that has not been faced and healed will adversely affect our relationship to ourselves on so many levels. In a sense cutting us off from aspects of ourselves that allow us to live richer, more grateful, loving lives. 

These held traumas, often unconscious, often show up as chronic anger, frustration,  emotional numbness, depression, unhealthy habits or addictions, the list goes on. The retreats and gatherings are concerned with meeting these held traumas in ways that can support the body doing what the body is designed to do, which is to come back into balance. And under the right circumstances, in the right environment the body will deal with the held trauma and heal itself, releasing, metabolising, digesting, growing.

Among some of the modalities we use over the course of our retreats is ceremony with Saoró Cacao. Holding a ceremony and using this plant medicine for the very purpose for moving into a deeper connection with the wisdom of our heart. We have found these offerings to be truly magical, and truly healing. The medicine of the cacao plant assists the healing nature of the body in metabolising the embodied wounds and opening an internal pathway to feel, witness, experience, BE through the wisdom of the heart/emotional body. 

Article/image by Michael Ryan