The ManKind Project for 25 years has put on a weekend training for men called the New Warrior Training Adventure. Up to 60 men volunteers pay to assist up to 40 men experience the power of journeying through their own initiations.

I did the training 15 years ago and was immediately impressed with the quality of men who staffed the training. They were caring man who wanted to make a difference. Over the last 15 years, I have sent in some form or another 50 men to the training. Every one of them got more than they expected.

Last year Peter Clothier wrote a good article for Huffingtonpost on the training – check it out.

Many of the men in Sandpoint Men’s Group have done the training. It is not a requirement to be in the group. Men do the training because it works.

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Often we see a man in the group stuck in one of these or possibly bouncing between a few of them. We don’t consciously always use this model to work with the man, but we can go back to it for clarity.

What is your favorite player?

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This need can become an obsession to find your purpose so to be released, as David Deida describes in his book The Way of the Superior Man. If you get it right, then as a man you will feel this sense of accomplishment, being released from the burden of your work. The limitation of approaching life just for the release, or as some would say the kill of a predator stalking his prey, is the release is fleeting and ethereal. It is never enough.

True purpose is the why, not the accomplishment, not the content. I would say it is the how you are being and doing, the context. When reconnected to your purpose, the why or the how of your life now directs your actions, not someone else’s purpose. With your true purpose guiding you, your passion becomes the fuel for your life.

What is your desire, as Guy Sengstock asks in his podcast? What do you really want? I write about the importance of knowing what you want here. Discovering your want(s) is a multilayered process. In working with men and women, along with myself for over 30 years, I discovered that often what we think our purpose is, proves to be only the first layer. You may think you are working to make money, then you determine you are working also for recognition, then you find out you are working for something to do. This keeps going on until you hit the bottom – your purpose.

A man’s direction in life, totally related to his connection to his purpose – is what women are attracted to in a man. A woman instinctually wants a man who is living his purpose – you could also say, willing to die for it. She needs a man with purpose because he determines direction that allows her to align with something beyond herself, as my good female friend Chris says. I know, this sounds chauvinistic. It is not. We need women to ground our purpose and renew our spirit.

Years ago, I learned from studying with a shaman; men are the seed, women are the womb. Women take the seed to birth the baby. There is now greater honor than to be a mother of a baby or a man’s purpose.

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The Healing Journey™

Have you ever asked yourself, why can’t I get over X or achieve Y? You’re smart, you make things happen, yet there are these X’s and Y’s that won’t move.

You aren’t alone. We all struggle with creating what we want in life.

The biggest things that get in our way are stress or trauma. I used to teach Mindfulness Stress Reduction to Type-A-personality professionals. Before the end of the 8-week class, these people learned how NOT to let stress take them out. Often they would surprise us with how their lives changed.

When one class began, I remember one woman, a VP for a large bank, bragging about how hard and long she worked. She claimed she often was on her two phones simultaneously. She didn’t take lunches or vacations and worked upwards of 60 hours per week.

Before the end of the class, she had removed her second phone, was taking lunches, and worked no more than 40 hours per week. What amazed her was not only how she was happier, but how she was getting more done.

Animals Do It

An old colleague of mine, Peter Levine, Ph.D. first taught me that wild animals don’t have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD); they naturally deal with trauma.

We all know we are hardwired to survive—fight or flight. Yet when we can’t defend ourselves or run away, we have a third option – we freeze. When a deer can’t outrun the mountain lion, she goes into shock and pretends she is dead. Hopefully for her, the mountain lion will believe she’s dead and leave to return for a later meal. Once safe, the deer comes to. She goes through recovering from the trauma, and runs away.

Stress and trauma progressively build in our body/mind from all those times we didn’t use fight or flight, and we just grin and bear it. However we can re-teach our physiology so it doesn’t default to freezing, but releases the stress. Then we’re back to behaving like wild animals.

But “releasing” does not mean we get into fistfights, or run down the street to escape stressful situations. In the vast majority of situations, it means we are breathing and speaking. To be able to release current stress, we often need to release the old stress and trauma.

The Quick Way

Many body/mind therapies indirectly remove the frozen stress response. The quickest could be a process called the Healing Journey™, developed for Sandpoint Men’s Group (SMG). In the course of 30 to 45 minutes, a man with the guiding of a trained facilitator travels back to the event(s) that created the trauma that was never fully experienced. The man physically experiences that frozen stress (trauma) as the block he can’t get over and possibly the cause of his PTSD.

We have a natural ability to regain balance once the block that prevented us from experiencing our resources is removed. It’s as if the stored energy converts into usable energy to move through our blocks. Beneath the block lies a hidden gift – a skill that was entrained as we learned to hide our trauma. The acceptance of our stress and traumas eventually leads to discovering the positive aspects of what the previous events created. Those gifts are powerful and only available if we journey through the trauma to our healing.

SMG and Sandpoint Women’s Group (SWG) use the Healing Journey™ developed by Owen Marcus as a way to expedite chang

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