Men’s Work

Mill Valley Counseling Therapy

Echo Rock Therapy Center

Men’s Work

Our culture has changed, and today’s men are challenged to find a new role.  We don’t have a simple example of manhood anymore. Without the traditional work-apprentice relationships and meaningful rituals from cultural institutions, most men have achieved only a partial initiation into manhood.  There is a deep longing inside each of us for something our ancestors received, but that is missing now.  So we swing between the salesman’s belief we can accomplish everything, and the addicts belief he is helpless.

Grant Rudolph did something with that longing.  He was one of the organizers of the first men’s retreats in Mendocino in 1984.   Starting there, the path to fully potentiated adult manhood has been charted by Robert Bly, Robert Moore, Michael Meade and many others, who have helped delineate a man’s inner need for initiation at each stage of life.

Decades ago, Grant had to try with 18 different elders, before he found someone who understood what was needed and could see him through all the way.  Carl Jung initiated Joseph Wheelwright, who passed it on to Donald Sandner, who gave it to Grant.  Now the first three of those elders are gone, and Grant has taken up the challenge to pass on his incomplete understanding of the gift to other men.  This gift is shaped not only by Jungian archetypal depth psychology, but also by what has been relearned and reinvented in the Mytho-Poetic Men’s Movement.

Initiation doesn’t happen by attending a weekend workshop.  Profound shifts only take place with careful preparation.  They first require isolation from the daily flow of life, and then second, much concentrated effort.  Many men approximate the first two steps; they find a way first to retreat, and second to puzzle and suffer over their wounds.

The third ingredient to initiation is the hardest to find in our culture: the blessing of the elders.  Men need their specific stories heard, in the context of the universal, by someone who speaks both linear and symbolic languages.  Their shinning gold destiny needs acknowledgement by an initiated man or council of elders who see their unique place in the soul of the world.

This is a lot to ask for, and many elders shy from the challenge.  But great assistance comes from the lineage of elders who have passed it on, and from the “hard wiring” of archetypal patterns inside us all.  The ancestors and the inner friends are eagerly waiting to help us, as soon as we ask.

Many old stories talk about how the teachings are lost, again and again, and must be rediscovered by each generation, and reshaped into the words that can be heard in the world that generation inhabits.

We do not have all the answers about initiation. But we share a longing to be nourished by the search.  And we know how to search for clues in the maps we inherited from men long dead, passed on in their initiatory stories, myths and folk tales.

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