How It Works
The Father & Son Journey Intensive
Here’s a basic format for how we set up the process for your intensive.
A father’s need to be right. A son’s need to be independent.
A father’s acceptance of his son as a man can be as difficult as a son’s acceptance that his father is just a man.
A father’s need to be mentor. A son’s need to be thought of as an equal.
All these things make it difficult for fathers and sons to really get past their role expectations
and really get to know each other and accept each other as they really are.
Developing The Capacity For Listening
Requires A Humility That Instills Confidence
Requires Us To Face & Question Our Most Fundamental Ways Of Being
Takes Us Into Uncomfortable New Territory
Confronts How 'Being Right' Is Hidden In Our Ideals & Values
Understands Yielding & Receptivity As Ego Strengths & Relational Skills
Shapes Our Ability To Speak With More Authenticity
Being In Groups With Other Men
YOU WILL BE AN ACTIVE MEMBER PARTICIPANT WITH A SMALL ‘ALLY’ GROUP OF MEN
This group gives you a chance to learn and grow in ways that can help your father-son relationship. These groups are useful ways to get real and honest feedback about your ways of being in relationship. As you gain more confidence or clarity about your ways of communication, you can bring these learnings to your conversations with your father or son in real time, while the learning is fresh and clear.
Opening ourselves to others for feedback requires humility. It also requires a certain amount of ego strength that can tolerate un-binding one’s ideas about ourselves and gives us a better understanding of the ways we have an impact on our most significant others.
Doing Challenge Experiences As Father & Son
ENTERING INTO ENCOUNTERS THAT REQUIRE MUTUAL RELIANCE & A SHARED VULNERABILITY
Once we cross the threshold into the Journey myth of the unknown, we confront the inevitability of going where we have not gone before. This requires humility, courage, and a willingness to be ‘new’. It implies that we will not necessarily be immediately successful in our new ventures, but we can share in being vulnerable together, and being in the unknown together.
Here, we make our own path, as we go, and we do so together. This is what forges a new type of lasting bond. Learning comes from finding our way as we explore and risk deeper listening, more honest speaking, and growing our ability to suspend judging ourselves or the other.
What will most likely emerge from this shared, common ground of vulnerability is new strength, and a growing capacity to hold one another in respect and regard.
These experiential adventures will be conducted with a few other father-son teams, and each team will also learn by witnessing the ways other fathers and sons venture into the unknown together.
Participation in Communal Gatherings As Father & Son
Each evening, we come together as a larger group of men to share our experiences of the day. It is a rare opportunity to listen to what is most real for other men and to hear what it is that matters most deeply to them. It is a practice of speaking from the heart and listening from the heart.
During these times, you may simply want to others speak and learn from these deep listenings. You may be able to choose to speak to the community of men about what you are learning about yourself that is new, as a father or as a son.
Or you may choose to speak directly to your father or son about something that matters to you and be witnessed by the group as you do. Again, these are potent and rare opportunities to witness and be witnessed, in deep and meaningful ways, about what it means to be a man.
You Make The Path By Walking It
“Traveller, the path is made by your own footsteps
And nothing more.
Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveller, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.”
-Anthony Machado