Retreats
The Men's Resource Center offers retreats that include experiential individual and group activities, discussions, and relationship building. Men leave the retreats refreshed and renewed, with strategies for improving their lives. The facilitators provide a safe and supportive environment in which each participant can choose his level of participation and self-disclosure.
Birth, Death & The Places in Between: How to get where you want to go
How many roads must a man walk down? Last count, 137. But seriously, we’re all on journeys and like it or not, we all face challenges and developmental issues along the way.
On this retreat, we’ll explore the various routes and landmarks of our lives. We’ll discuss where we are on our individual paths, while discovering and processing barriers that interfere with our progress. Men can help each other find meaning, fogiveness, dreams, plans and closure. Since life is a journey, we’ll help each other on the trip.
Men who attend the retreat will work on questions such as:
- What keeps you from getting what you want?
- What are the passages that a man needs to go through?
- Are you stuck on the journey?
- How can you tell if you’ve completed the tasks associated with each passage?
- How does your past affect who you are now?
- How do you find your personal power?
- Does life happen to you, or do you make life happen?
- What is your mission?
- When in hell is life going to get easier?
When men leave the retreat, they’ll:
- Feel renewed, with greater clarity about who they are and what they want to be
- Feel more confident and in touch with themselves
- Experience a greater connection with other men, partners, family, friends and nature.
- Enjoy a greater sense of well-being
- Leave with a plan for changing their lives
The retreat staff will create a safe and supportive environment in which each man can chose his level of participation and self-disclosure.
Loving Relationships
We want so much to love and be loved. It seems like it should be so easy. But we often enter relationships with excitement and hope, only to find ourselves at best living with a sense of perpetual longing for something more, and at worst harboring feelings of disillusionment, abandonment, and hostility. What goes wrong? What keeps us from getting the love that we want and deserve?
In this one-day workshop, we will explore ourselves and our relationships. We’ll find answers to some difficult questions:
- How do we lose ourselves in relationships, eroding both ourselves and the relationship?
- How does our tendency to engage in projective identification – seeing our mothers and fathers in our present partner – color and undermine our relationships?
- How does our socialization as men influence who we choose as partners, what we want from them, and what we do when we don’t get what we want?
- How do we balance the demands of our work in a hyper-economy with the time and attention a relationship needs?
- How do we avoid abusive and controlling behavior, maintaining respect and empathy for our partners?
- How do we handle the inherent problems associated with a relationship – the developmental stages, conflict, and personality differences – in a way that helps create and sustain a healthy relationship?
Our retreat will include experiential individual and group activities, discussions, and relationship-building. We will leave the retreat refreshed and renewed, with strategies for improving our relationships and our lives in general. The facilitators will provide a safe and supportive environment in which each participant can choose his level of participation and self-disclosure.
Our Fathers, Ourselves
We are our fathers. More than anybody else—our mothers, our teachers, the media—our fathers have influenced who we are. Sometimes their influences—their affirmations of us, their sense of integrity, their respect for our mothers, and their involvement in our lives—have helped us become stronger, more loving, more respectful and joyful men. Other times, their criticism, domineering roles, emotional and physical absence, and in some instances, their verbal and physical abuse have resulted in anger, fear, rigidity, emotional problems, and alienation from ourselves and others.
Because our fathers have been so influential, the more we know about them, the more we know about ourselves. Finding our fathers is perhaps the most important step in our journeys to explore ourselves and to become more humane, fair, open, and fulfilled human beings.
Our retreat will include experiential individual and group activities, discussions, and relationship building, providing opportunities for insights and personal growth. We will leave the retreat refreshed and renewed, inspired to live our revisioned life. The facilitators will provide a safe and supportive environment in which each participant can chose his level of participation and self-disclosure.
The New Frontier: Men and Soul Work
Male socialization is the process in which boys learn how they are supposed to think, feel, and behave as men. Manliness is equated with being tough, strong, aggressive, and powerful, and always in control. Boys get called names such as weak, wuss, or sissy when they behave outside the masculine box. They are disrespected and ostracized. The pressure to fit in is huge. The result is that males squash their humanity and starve their souls.
In this retreat, we explore the costs of living and maintaining the masculine mystic. We aren’t responsible for how society trained us as men, but we are responsible to make the changes necessary to reclaim our humanity and nurture our souls. Exploring the frontier of our heart and soul is our most difficult task in the new millennium.
We explore and find answers to intriguing questions:
- What did society tell us a real man is?
- What are the psychological, relational and spiritual costs of staying in the masculine box?
- Why and how is the male gender role changing?
- How does fear get in the way of making changes?
- How can we take steps to reclaim our humanity by getting in touch with our emotions, relationships, and mission?