“Be a man. Man up.” Patriarchy has taught men to hide our feelings, that crying is a sign of weakness, that grief is bad for business. But sadness is a necessary emotion and left stuck in the body, grief leads to violence, anger, and war. 

Bell Hooks names in her book Will to Change that “the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

It is time. This is an invitation into the deep ground of emotional life — not as an intellectual exercise, but as a somatic, earth-rooted practice of presence. In this daylong gathering, we will slow our nervous systems enough to feel into the undercurrents of our experience: the weight of grief, the fire of anger, the ache of longing, and the wild abundance of gratitude and joy.

We will meet what has been held in the body — the places where emotion has been armored, frozen, or ceded to stoicism — and learn relational, somatic practices for feeling through without collapsing, expressing without performance, and transforming without repression.

In the lineage of men’s wellness work cultivated by organizations such as Kinhood — which holds that men’s work is about connection, nurturance, accountability, expression, and embodiment — this workshop creates a field of care and witness large enough for vulnerability and resilience to grow together.

Here, we engage the physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies through breath, movement, voice, ritual, and relational presence. We honor emotion as a living language of the body — not something to fix, control, or hide, but something to listen to and integrate.