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Thread: The New Iron Johns Seek Catharsis

  1. #1

    Exclamation The New Iron Johns Seek Catharsis

    Finally figgered out where @Danke has been spending his weekends...




    The New Iron Johns Seek Catharsis

    https://www.wral.com/the-new-iron-jo...rsis/18047298/

    Posted 4:14 p.m. yesterday

    By Hannah Seligson, New York Times

    On a Monday night in a sparsely decorated room in midtown Manhattan, a group of approximately 20 men including an endocrinologist, a sportscaster, a policeman and an employee of the United Nations were baring their souls.

    “I’ve been digging deep with my girlfriend and we are having those talks about moving forward in our relationship, and I’m having nights where I can’t sleep,” said Andrew Cummings, 44, an opera singer in New York who has performed at Carnegie Hall.

    “I’m angry that my health is deteriorating. I’m not ready to be an old man,” said Jeff Nichols, 70, a former consultant.

    “I’m checking in with some anger. I didn’t get accepted to the Ashtanga Institute, and I smashed two candles, which I know isn’t very yogic,” said another man, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional repercussions.

    ADVERTISING

    Ranging in age from 30 to 70, the men were gathered as part of the ManKind Project (MKP), a 33-year-old nonprofit with 24 chapters in the United States and 11 regions abroad. It focuses on men’s emotional well-being, drawing on elements like Carl Jung’s theories of the psyche, nonviolent communication, breath work, Native American customs, and good old-fashioned male bonding. Minus ogling women, drinking or fist fighting, of course.

    The goal, according to many affiliated with MKP, is to break down patriarchal and hierarchical ideas of masculinity. And the place to start is where another man, Socrates, did centuries ago: with the mandate of “know thyself.”

    MKP translates this as a process of cultivating awareness around one’s emotions, so they aren’t projected onto others in harmful and destructive ways. This is accomplished through a series of facilitated exercises, some of which involve props, aimed at bringing feelings to the surface and to hold a mirror to oneself.

    Men, who are less likely than women to seek out individual therapy, are increasingly looking for outlets in this fraught cultural moment of political acrimony, widespread economic instability and major societal reckoning over their behavior.

    The new popularity of mindfulness, yoga and wellness has helped men shift their focus away from work relationships, said Lucas Krump, 39, a founder of Evryman, a for-profit company that brings men together to talk about their feelings. (Krump used an exercise metaphor for his venture: “CrossFit for your emotions.”)

    Started in 2016 and now a B Corp (a business with a codified social mission), Evryman has grown to over 800 men in around 85 groups across 50 cities. Its slick website — black and white portraits of men, many of whom have the requisite millennial beard — touts a finding from psychology researchers that most men would rather be electrically shocked than be left alone with their thoughts. More sobering, in 2017 men committed suicide 3.5 times more often than women.

    At MKP, membership is at an all-time high and enrollment is up 8 percent over last year, said Boysen Hodgson, director of marketing and communications. “With Time’s Up Now and #MeToo, many men know they have to be more accountable,” Hodgson said. “A lot of them are saying, ‘I don’t want that to be me. I don’t want that to be how men are seen in the world.”

    Eka Darville, 29, an actor on the Netflix show “Jessica Jones,” has been involved with MKP since 2012. “The stoic male who doesn’t express or share his emotions, I see that as being extremely detrimental,” Darville said in a phone interview. “A lot of pathologies in society, such as entitled masculinity, are related to men who are repressed. The evolution from boyhood to manhood isn’t something that naturally happens.”

    MKP helped him navigate becoming a father of two. “There is no way I could have done that without a brotherhood telling me all the bull I was projecting onto my wife but also hold me with compassion,” he said.

    Many participants in these groups, including Darville, first try them in the form of a weekend retreat: The commitment is low, the camaraderie is high, and it can feel reassuringly like a return to summer camp (with faint echoes of the poet Robert Bly’s 1990 treatise, “Iron John”).

    MKP’s retreat is the New Warrior Training Adventure, which has been completed by over 60,000 men: a two-day initiation of sorts that costs, on average, $675 and includes blindfolded walking tours and cold showers for those who choose. Some retreats have optional nudity, in an effort to promote healthy body image.

    “The weekend is a little strange at first,” recalled Zvika Krieger, 35, who attended one 11 years ago and now helps to facilitate the MKP retreats in the Bay Area, where he runs a technology policy organization. “You are pushed emotionally, but there is certainly nothing that happens you are ashamed of after.”

    After completing the New Warrior Training Adventure, many men join Integration Groups, or I-Groups, where they continue, on a weekly basis with the guidance of a trained peer facilitator, the “work,” as it is called in MKP, that was started during those 48 hours. I-Groups are attended not just by woke, liberal elites on the coasts. Kansas City, Missouri; the greater Carolinas; Atlanta; Indianapolis; Milwaukee; Memphis, Tennessee; and Louisville, Kentucky, all have sizable groups, according to the organization. Evryman has a half a dozen groups in Montana and over 20 in the Northern Rockies. In March, one of its retreats will take place in Logan, Ohio, the first in the Midwest.

    The Evryman weekend is called the Open Source Retreat ($475 to $975, depending on accommodations) and brings together 50 men and eight leaders who have completed something called Men’s Emotional Leadership Training (MELT) “to set aside cultural norms and be transparent, honest, and vulnerable with each other,” to quote from the company’s literature. The goal is to “leave feeling like we shed 30 pounds of emotional baggage.”

    — Let It Flow

    Ebenezer Bond, 42, the founder of a marketing agency, said that until getting involved with Evryman he hadn’t had a cathartic drag-it-out cry since he was 16. The retreat he attended in late 2016 opened the floodgates.

    “I was skeptical at first — I even deleted an initial email with the invitation to the weekend,” Bond said. “But it was the single most transformational experience I’ve had as an adult male. I was able to express emotions in front of other men, something I’d never done before.”

    Simon Isaacs, who was invited by Bond to a later retreat, said he “panicked” when he learned, five minutes before he arrived at Race Brook Lodge in Sheffield, Massachusetts, that there would be no consumption of alcohol and minimal cellphone use.

    “I thought, ‘What am I supposed to do: express myself?'” he said. Now Isaacs, 38, a founder of the millennial parenting site Fatherly, attends a weekly Evryman group and calls it part of his “emotional retraining.”

    Perhaps the biggest endorsement is Isaacs’ wife, who has told him to “keep going.” “I’m a work in progress,” he said.

    Chimezie Uzodinma, 32, an information-technology professional in New York who has been involved with MKP for a decade, credited his weekly group for pulling him out of hopelessness and despair. “There was a moment when I thought I was going to die alone and I was very depressed,” he said.

    But MKP and Evryman are very clear that they are not offering group therapy. “We don’t pretend to be counselors or therapists, but sometimes people come at the suggestion of their individual psychotherapist,” said Scott Fried, a motivational speaker who works with at-risk teenagers and often facilitates his I-Group on Monday nights in New York.

    Still, personal-development groups such as this have raised concerns about unlicensed therapeutic work. “There is no meaningful accountability for Large Group Awareness Training,” Rick Alan Ross, an expert on cults, wrote in an email, using the term to refer to a personal training program that claims to help people reach their full potential.

    Ross said he has received complaints about MKP and a similar group, the Sterling Institute’s Men’s Weekend, which bills itself as two days of “introspection, fun, heartbreak, and triumph.”

    However, elements of the MKP philosophy and curriculum have been used in state prisons since 2009 through the Freedom Within Prison Project, a nonprofit that helps incarcerated men work through their emotions.

    The main facilitators of the prison groups are five men who credit MKP as the catalyst for their nonprofit. And in a 2010 peer-reviewed article about men’s health and social outcomes, researchers concluded that “MKP-related beliefs and social support significantly predicated positive outcomes.”

    — Eye Contact a Must At Evryman, Krump said he and other organizers “intentionally didn’t include spirituality” in their approach. “The groups, which don’t have specific leadership, start with a rather agnostic meditation. Then participants share how they are feeling and try to identify where those sensations are appearing in the body.

    Next is a more in-depth round in which the men are asked whether they have met “their stretch”: a commitment or goal for the next week based on what the person had worked on in the group. These can vary from making time to do restorative yoga every day, to connecting on a deeper level with family over the holidays — something Peter Nesbit, 34, a finance executive at a software company, said he was able to do over Thanksgiving weekend with his parents in South Dakota.

    Then each man is given around 10 minutes to talk more at length about what’s going on with himself. Group members ask probing follow-up questions: “How do you feel? What do you need to let go of? What do you want? What do you need from the group?” The prodding often elicits frustration, anger and sadness. Screaming into a pillow is not uncommon.

    “I’m just afraid to be with myself. I don’t want to feel fragile and afraid,” said Kevin Hermann, 27, an entrepreneur, at one Monday evening Evryman group at a Williamsburg loft.

    There is something undeniably powerful about a group of people, let alone men, sitting and listening intently — cross-talk, interrupting and giving advice are highly discouraged — without distraction or interruption. And eye contact is a must.

    This may sound like basic conversational etiquette, but “holding space,” as it’s called in the personal development world, is, at a minimum, cathartic in era of constant distraction and always looking for the next best thing. In some cases, it can feel quite profound.

    Sex, sexuality and relationships are big topics. “We have millennials come to groups or training whose introduction to sex has been through porn, and no one talked to them about the link between sex, intimacy and love,” Krieger said.

    Now in his 30s, Krieger, who also goes to therapy, says he feels lucky to have started the MKP when he was 24, before he was married or became a father. “I can now see when I’m shutting down, or I’m really getting defensive,” he said. And in the #MeToo era, issues of reconciling past sexual behavior come up, said Ben Fleisher, 40, who runs a men’s group in Woodstock, New York.

    “We had one situation where someone talked about how they reached out to a woman because he felt like he may have crossed the line, but the woman didn’t think it was sexual assault,” said Fleisher, 40, an alumnus of Sterling’s Men’s Weekend who works as an acupuncturist. “This topic in general is an area where we need to dig deeper. Many men are struggling to come to terms with #MeToo and how they feel complicit in abuses, even if they aren’t the perpetrators, by not taking a more active stand for a woman’s sovereignty.”

    Lest this all comes off as self-indulgent, devotees of men’s groups say blunt-force honesty is something that keeps them coming back. “I’m very verbose and have a lot of opinions,” said Krieger, who has been training for almost seven years to be in a volunteer leadership position in the MKP. “I started getting feedback that it was totally killing the energy in the circle and wasn’t leaving room for other people. Since I’m the boss at work, no one is going to tell me that to my face.”

    Some are unflinching in requesting feedback. Instead of having a blowout party on his 50th birthday, Fried told his I-Group that he wanted each person to tell him something he needed to work on. Fried, now 55, said the experience made him realize that “I come with a lot of victimhood because I got infected with HIV. But the group has called me on that and helped me recognize that I’m a powerful man.”
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11



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  3. #2
    I think you meant @oyarde

    "It focuses on men’s emotional well-being, drawing on elements like Carl Jung’s theories of the psyche, nonviolent communication, breath work, Native American customs, and good old-fashioned male bonding.

    ...
    MKP’s retreat is the New Warrior Training Adventure, ... a two-day initiation of sorts that ... includes blindfolded walking tours and cold showers for those who choose. Some retreats have optional nudity, in an effort to promote healthy body image."
    Pfizer Macht Frei!

    Openly Straight Man, Danke, Awarded Top Rated Influencer. Community Standards Enforcer.


    Quiz: Test Your "Income" Tax IQ!

    Short Income Tax Video

    The Income Tax Is An Excise, And Excise Taxes Are Privilege Taxes

    The Federalist Papers, No. 15:

    Except as to the rule of appointment, the United States have an indefinite discretion to make requisitions for men and money; but they have no authority to raise either by regulations extending to the individual citizens of America.

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Danke View Post
    I think you meant @oyarde

    "It focuses on men’s emotional well-being, drawing on elements like Carl Jung’s theories of the psyche, nonviolent communication, breath work, Native American customs, and good old-fashioned male bonding.

    ...
    MKP’s retreat is the New Warrior Training Adventure, ... a two-day initiation of sorts that ... includes blindfolded walking tours and cold showers for those who choose. Some retreats have optional nudity, in an effort to promote healthy body image."
    Can't be Oyarde:

    Minus ogling women, drinking or fist fighting, of course.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by Danke View Post
    I think you meant @oyarde

    "It focuses on men’s emotional well-being, drawing on elements like Carl Jung’s theories of the psyche, nonviolent communication, breath work, Native American customs, and good old-fashioned male bonding.

    ...
    MKP’s retreat is the New Warrior Training Adventure, ... a two-day initiation of sorts that ... includes blindfolded walking tours and cold showers for those who choose. Some retreats have optional nudity, in an effort to promote healthy body image."
    I hate to break it to everyone , but they have been ripping people off . There is nothing native merican about Karl Jung , naked male bonding , blindfolded walking or any of that gay $#@!
    Do something Danke

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by oyarde View Post
    I hate to break it to everyone , but they have been ripping people off . There is nothing native merican about Karl Jung , naked male bonding , blindfolded walking or any of that gay $#@!
    You should start a legitimate club and emphasize ogling women, drinking and fist fighting.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  7. #6
    Wow

    What ever happened to walking up in a Roadhouse because you didn't leave?

    http://columbiabusinesstimes.com/201...ough-the-ages/

    (1970s) Gladstone Manufacturing Co. was the live music joint in the ’70s. With its dirt and concrete floors, potbelly stove and a live goat behind the bar, this place was so far out in the country (across from the Ski Hi drive-in movie theater on Old 63) that patrons could hoot and holler without a care in the world.
    Oh, the fond memories..

    1970s — Gladstone Manufacturing Co.

    Neil Miller remembers exactly where he used to go to listen to local music in the '70s. What was a used furniture store on Old 63 when he first came to town became one of his favorite hangouts, Gladstone Manufacturing Co.

    "It was made into basically a roadhouse — outside of town and illegal everything," Miller said.

    The roadhouse hosted a slew of local bands, some of which are still playing around town. Miller said it has always been difficult to find places to listen to and play local music, but Gladstone's was the creative ground for musicians and music fans to pack in and hear tunes that were truly original.

    "You, as a customer, didn't know what you were going to hear," Miller said. "You knew it wasn't going to be on the radio, and that it was hot, and that it made you want to dance."

    Ron Lee opened Gladstone's in 1973 at 3111 S. Old 63 and ran it for about 15 years. Both Miller and Lee said it was a place where all levels of society met.

    "There were a lot of hippies, and bikers, and businessmen, and professors and everybody," Lee said. "All people: doctors, and lawyers and people who met their wives and husbands. We had several weddings out there."

    The "proverbial juke joint," as Miller described it, was calm on weeknights, but brought in 200 to 300 people on the weekends.

    "It was sometimes a wonderful experience, and sometimes it was a mess," Miller said. "A lot of people who were there are dead now. Wretched excess does have its limits."

    The roadhouse Lee heated with a wood-burning stove was popular through its last year under Lee's management in 1988, although business was more down than up when disco hit. Lee sold Gladstone's around the time his first son was born, when it seemed like it was time to focus on family.

    "Ron got married, I got married, we all got married," Miller said. "And the next thing you know, you're a soccer coach and not a keyboard musician. Life does that to you."

    Although Miller said Rocheport General Store reminds him of Gladstone's because it hosts local music, Lee said there's no place similar to — or as wild as — the old roadhouse.

    "I can't really put my finger on exactly just what it was," Lee said. "It was the music, it was the times, it was the way people were. And I probably should have kept it open, and people were mad, but it seemed like the thing to do."
    https://www.columbiamissourian.com/n...74b5ea90a.html

    It is because places like this have closed that people need "Support Groups".
    Last edited by pcosmar; 12-08-2018 at 10:00 PM.
    Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.
    Ron Paul 2004

    Registered Ron Paul supporter # 2202
    It's all about Freedom

  8. #7
    Then participants share how they are feeling and try to identify where those sensations are appearing in the body.



    “We had one situation where someone talked about how they reached out to a woman because he felt like he may have crossed the line, but the woman didn’t think it was sexual assault,” said Fleisher, 40, an alumnus of Sterling’s Men’s Weekend who works as an acupuncturist. “This topic in general is an area where we need to dig deeper. Many men are struggling to come to terms with #MeToo and how they feel complicit in abuses, even if they aren’t the perpetrators, by not taking a more active stand for a woman’s sovereignty.”
    I kinda feel sorry for them but damn...
    Quote Originally Posted by Ron Paul View Post
    The intellectual battle for liberty can appear to be a lonely one at times. However, the numbers are not as important as the principles that we hold. Leonard Read always taught that "it's not a numbers game, but an ideological game." That's why it's important to continue to provide a principled philosophy as to what the role of government ought to be, despite the numbers that stare us in the face.
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    This intellectually stimulating conversation is the reason I keep coming here.

  9. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by pcosmar View Post

    It is because places like this have closed that people need "Support Groups".
    Yup. And you can blame THAT on M.A.D.D. and their draconian drinking and driving crusade.



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by pcosmar View Post
    Wow

    What ever happened to walking up in a Roadhouse because you didn't leave?

    http://columbiabusinesstimes.com/201...ough-the-ages/



    Oh, the fond memories..


    https://www.columbiamissourian.com/n...74b5ea90a.html

    It is because places like this have closed that people need "Support Groups".
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    Yup. And you can blame THAT on M.A.D.D. and their draconian drinking and driving crusade.
    Late to the party.....

    The gin-mills of olde cannot be replaced with touchy-feely $#@!.

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    Yup. And you can blame THAT on M.A.D.D. and their draconian drinking and driving crusade.
    The anti drinking and anti smoking neo-puritans showed up at about the same time.

    I recall, back in the 80s, thinking that the ramifications of their caterwauling and screeching would be father reaching than just eliminating smoking in restaurants and killing off the gin mills.

    But good god damn, I never expected all this...
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11

  13. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Suzanimal View Post


    I kinda feel sorry for them but damn...
    I was going to title this thread "How NOT to get laid, Part Two"

  14. #12
    Catharsis is what internet be for:


















    Quote Originally Posted by TheCount View Post
    ...I believe that when the government is capable of doing a thing, it will.
    Quote Originally Posted by Influenza View Post
    which one of yall fuckers wrote the "ron paul" racist news letters
    Quote Originally Posted by Dforkus View Post
    Zippy's posts are a great contribution.




    Disrupt, Deny, Deflate. Read the RPF trolls' playbook here (post #3): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...eptive-members

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    I was going to title this thread "How NOT to get laid, Part Two"
    I clicked thinking it was something uninteresting like welding but...color me suprised when I saw it was about Danke's gay tribe, lol.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ron Paul View Post
    The intellectual battle for liberty can appear to be a lonely one at times. However, the numbers are not as important as the principles that we hold. Leonard Read always taught that "it's not a numbers game, but an ideological game." That's why it's important to continue to provide a principled philosophy as to what the role of government ought to be, despite the numbers that stare us in the face.
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    This intellectually stimulating conversation is the reason I keep coming here.

  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Suzanimal View Post
    I clicked thinking it was something uninteresting like welding but...color me suprised when I saw it was about Danke's gay tribe, lol.
    Welding...uninteresting?

    Be still, woman.

    Last edited by Anti Federalist; 12-09-2018 at 07:07 PM.



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