The September offering September 7 & 21 for the Sacred Fatherhood workshop is quickly approaching. The deadline for signing up is this Saturday August 31. Contact me directly if you or someone you know is interested. Dennis


Turtle Journeys Connect with Nature – Connect with Self

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 his strengths or incompleteness 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. The workshop are scheduled on the first and third Saturdays for the months of September 7 & 21, October 5 & 19, and November 2 & 16. August offering is on the 10th and 24th. Participants can do the first day one month and the second day a following month. I will also attempt to accommodate each man's personal schedule if necessary.

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. First day, first session will be at sunrise (which changes each month); second session will be at high noon and there will be unstructured, personal time between each session. Second day, first session will be evening time coordinated with sunset (which changes each month) and second session will be late evening affording time in the dark with unstructured, personal time between sessions. Each session will be approximately three hours in length for a total of 6 hours daily. Each session builds on the previous session so participants will need to do the first day, Sessions 1 and 2 before doing the second day, Sessions 3 and 4.

The cost for the twelve-hour, four-session workshop is $400.00.
Private individual work is $70.00 per hour.

For more information please contact me, Dennis Grannis-Phoenix at:
207.691.9003 (cell) dgp189@gmail.com (email)