I'm honored to announce the offering of this
workshop to men who are curious about Fathering, the role we fill as men who
want to be the best and most confident role model for their sons. If you
are drawn or attracted to this type of work, please contact me using the
information at the end of this announcement.
Sacred Fatherhood
Workshop:
Conscious Fathering
toward Wholeness
Sacred Fatherhood is designed to guide and
support men in one of the most sacred tasks of their lives: being the most
Father possible. This is an opportunity for men to engage 3 stages of
Fatherhood – as an active Father, as a Father whose active time has passed, and
as a young man who is not yet a Father; every man can access each stage at any
time in his life.
When women give birth to the newborn child, a newborn Father is
also created. This new Father exists to guide, support, and protect the infant
to become the most human that child can be. The new Father often has, as his
only model of this awesome task, his own father. And each man being incomplete,
brings forward his strengths as well as his lack of wholeness, often not
knowing what those are until they appear.
Sacred Fatherhood’s purpose is to help each
man recognize those strengths and areas of enhancement, to bring them into the
light of day, to untangle the tangled nest. This identification helps each of
us see the unfinished tasks to be completed so we become a healthy mature human
for our children to model from, just as we did from our fathers.
This four-part workshop is based on the four seasons of spring, summer,
autumn, and winter, and the four phases of a man’s life: spirit/birth, childhood, adulthood, and
elder/death. Each part of the workshop corresponds with the season/phase and time
of day: sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight.
Session 1 – Spirit/Birth and Entering the World
This session of newborn infant, sunrise, and springtime focuses
on the movement of the human from in utero, from the time in the
unknown, liminal space of pre-birth to birth and infancy. We will explore
questions such as these: What do we, as
Newborn Fathers, know about this time as infants? What is it like to witness
the birth of our child? What was our own birth and infancy like? How
do we, as Fathers, be with our infant child? How did our fathers interact with
us as infants? Were we nurtured and protected? Were we healthily cared for,
physically and psychically? Were we given over to our Mothers for total
care, missing the archetypal input of the Father? Were we left undone? We
will spend time delving into that
pre-ego time of life, where little mental memory exists but where
emotional/psychic memory lives. We will use our stories and imaginal fields to
rediscover that part of ourselves which informs us as Newborn Fathers and
teaches us about how to be with our newborn children.
Session 2 – Childhood and Exploring the World
As children we explore the mysterious gardens of both our
natural and cultural worlds. This noontime of summer and rapid growth, strong
sun, long days and wondrous nights are filled with curiosity and exuberance. How do we as Fathers support our children in
that rich playground of dirt and worms, birds and trees, and imagination, where
we converse with the other-than-human
voices which use no words? What were our childhood experiences like? Did
we explore our natural world by interacting with those others on our terms, or were we restricted by messages about
“getting hurt,” “stranger danger,” or “dirt makes you sick”? How will we
support our children to explore the garden of nature? How will we support
ourselves, and what are our own unfinished tasks from this time in our lives?
Session 3 – Adolescence Benevolence or Coming of Age in the
World
This dusk time of setting sun and autumn is when we begin to
look for trouble so we can find out who we really are, what constitutes our
authentic Self, and where that Self fits into the world. This time of
adolescence and early adulthood is a time of solitude within, as well as
stepping out and into the larger society and culture to find our individual
place in the world. This may be a long search in human time. As Fathers, we
begin to be with our children in a different way than when they were younger. As
individuals moving through this phase (and some people coming to this workshop
are doing this work now), we push away from family and caregivers, declare our
independence, and come back home for safety and guidance as we encounter the
unknown. As Fathers, we feel the terror of letting our children go, both to
succeed and to magnificently fail. This tension between the outer world of
watching our children go into the world and the recognition that in many ways,
internally, we are the same as they are as we work our unfinished tasks, the
tension is as taut as a bow string; it is like walking a razor’s edge. We find
ourselves saying to our children “wait while I complete that task myself so I
can return to support you in the same task.”
Session 4 – Elder Death and the chill of Winter
Into the time of midnight and the season of winter, this is the
phase of Elder and passage into the unknown, that time we have resisted
throughout our younger life and the exuberance of youth, the time we have
ignored or denied. As a Sacred Father, this is the ripe opportunity to
ingratiate ourselves with our own father. This is when we examine the man who
brought us into the world, who raised us the best he could. We bring together
loose ends, unfinished business, and the incomplete tasks that not only make us
whole but bring healing to our father and model wholeness to our children. We discover
these incomplete places by stepping into the known but unfamiliar landscape of
the midnight time, that place outside about which poet David Whyte says:
“the night has eyes to
recognize its own,
there you can be sure you
are not beyond love.”
We begin to see we are no longer immortal, nor are our own
fathers. Regardless of whether they are alive or dead, we can do this very hard
work of reconciliation which leads us to wholeness.
This workshop is designed for groups or individual men and is an
introduction for deeper work designed specifically for the individual. I have
not scheduled specific dates but will do my best to accommodate each man's personal
schedule. This work is most effective and impactful when coordinated with the
sun and moon calendar, i.e. sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight and new, half, and full
moons. Each session will be approximately three hours in length; each session
builds on the previous session, so ongoing participation is necessary.
The cost for the twelve-hour, four-session workshop is $400.00.
Private individual work is $70.00 per hour.
Please contact me for more information at:
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