What if the cure for “Toxic masculinity” isn’t to neutralise it but to encourage a different type of masculinity. A type of masculinity that can be a Healing Tonic for society; a source of healing and growth not pain and destruction?
Traditional Cultures for millennia have known that boys needed to be taught how to handle both power & pain for them to take their place as generative men in their culture. These lessons were taught in ritual & ceremony through initiation & Rites of Passage, sadly our modern culture has no such mechanisms to teach our boys these key lessons & we see the fingerprints of boys in men’s bodies reacting in pain & misusing power all over the negative aspects of our society.
Centre for Men & Families Australia has been on a journey to bring back initiation practices into our society for the last 20 years. Working with an international community we have worked to establish Rites of Passage process that is captures the timeless wisdom of traditional cultures without furthering the colonial wound of misappropriating specific practices of any specific culture.
Two things are core to the process; embodying those key learnings of teaching how to handle power and pain & knowing that the key ingredient to initiation are the Elders that hold the process as much as the practices themselves.
And so, we have spent these years building on the decades of work we inherited, working on the formation of Elders & initiatory processes. Helping men develop into grounded, spacious men whose egos are in their rightful place providing personal strength & yet not taken too seriously & needing too much tending.
How do we do it? How do we maintain it so men can live it into their families and communities? Can Safe, emotionally literate men who are confident in their sense of who they are & where they belong really help heal our culture?
Come let’s find out!