Heal the Split

I am a member of two men’s organizations, the ManKind Project and the Tribe of Men. The ManKind Project (MKP) is an international organization of men that “empowers men to missions of service”. The Tribe of Men is a relatively new group (3.5 years old) that is centered (for now) in the SF Bay area, and is what I’m sharing about here.

From my heart, head, body, and spirit, I’m sharing here about something I am passionate about, a primary reason why I moved from one side of the U.S. to the other. As always, these are my experiences, opinions, and judgments. They may be similar or different from those of other tribesmen.

In this article, I share:

- Why the Tribe exists and a brief history
- What the Tribe is, its purpose and description
- Our principles and our relationship to intuition
- The initiation process and our ways of governance
- A few things I love about the Tribe
- Whether this is for you and what to do if you’re interested

My intention is to inspire men who either want to add something to your work in other men’s group or who are looking for something beyond what you can get from your current group. MKP, Sterling, and other men’s work I know of, most of which appear to focus only in these areas: accountability, wound work, and heart connection. These are but three areas of a much richer landscape in which to explore who we are as men.

What I share here may not be for all men. That said…if you are one of the hungry, if you have the calling for something deeper, my hope is to stir something in you.

(Note that I refer to the relationship of men to That Which Is Larger Than Us, and goes by many other names: God, The All, The Universe, the “big and murky”. In this article, I use these terms interchangably.)

Setting the stage: Why the Tribe?

In an article I wrote in the June 2005 MKP Journal, I wrote a section entitled “Rites of passage, the lack of initiation and its affect on society”:

“As a person passes from one stage of life to the next, their focus and energy shift, often dramatically. The phrase ‘rite of passage’ refers to an event demarcating those transitions.

“In tribal cultures, initiates were educated about how life would be different after the passage and what would be expected of him or her from the tribe. These points of change were preceded by preparation, steeped in ritual, and heralded with celebration. An initiate was prepared for weeks or months, or years, depending on the particular stage of life.

“Nowhere is the effect of the lack of initiation more apparent than in the United States. We now have two generations of American males who are essentially walking around as uninitiated boys in men’s bodies, whose fathers didn’t teach them how to be men. And for the first time in many millennia, we have a generation of boys growing up without regularly seeing mature, responsible men in their mature masculine power and vulnerability. Today’s heroes and public role models know well how to wield strength, but males living by strong principles are rarely to be found. And our current society has no inherent structure or institution of men who would be initiators.”

Okay…some of you might say, “That’s why I did my first men’s weekend (the New Warrior Training Adventure, the Sterling Weekend, etc.), and that’s why I’m in my men’s group.” Why something else? Here are three things to consider:

1. While I see those opening weekends as workshops in which a man has the possibility of launching his journey of self-exploration, I find that most lack one or more of these four essential elements that have always been a part of the masculine initiation:

- Preparation
- The tribe deciding an initiate’s readiness
- The tribe determining an initiate’s success
- The possibility for failure

2. The two primary elements provided by most men’s organizations are the opening weekend and ongoing weekly or monthly small groups. There are men in these groups who want to expand and deepen their experience and their work beyond what’s available in these two elements.

3. I wanted to be part of something that I, and other individual men, could shape and influence. At 22 years old, as a large organization, MKP seems rather entrenched in its ways, suffering from much of the immobility that a large institution has. Sterling is even older. And since many of the newer men’s groups spun off from other men’s groups, such as MKP or Sterling, they carry a common set of values or work style of the original groups they came from, something that I experience as limiting.

In contrast, while several of the early tribesmen initially shared a common body of work, we were able to start from scratch. Born out of a conscious collective sense of vision and purpose, from its inception, the Tribe has a stated committment to ongoing and constant transformation that is flexible and fluid. As we grow and develop, we are in conscious relationships with each other collaboratively as well as something larger than us. Each man who becomes part of the Tribe has the potential to help shape what we are.

A little history — It all started with a workshop…

About three years ago, outside of San Francisco, Tim Kelley and Keith Merron began leading a men’s workshop, the Sword and the Scepter. (Tim co-conducted the first workshop I took and has been at the forefront of my consciousness work.) The Sword and Scepter workshop is a three-and-a-half day exploration, in which men work with their relationship to masculine power. Most of society’s models for male power are from child or adolescent places, whether it be action heroes in the movies, or corporate or national leaders. So in addition to the lack of initiation, most men have never been in the presence of mature male power. And of those few who have been in such presence, even fewer have much skill in wielding power. Do you find yourself being “a bull in a china shop” or “a New Age Sensitive Guy”? Neither of these is particularly balanced, nor is what is needed to meet the challenges our world will face in the near future.

On the last day of the first Sword and Scepter workshop, we had what I would call a “heart conversation” on the lack of initiation in U.S. society. A man jumped up and said, “I’m 40 years old, and I have no idea what it’s like to be initiated. I want that!” I was just about to speak up and say, “You could take the New Warrior Training Adventure”, when Tim said, “Hang on…we’ll get back to you.” Given that my experience of Tim, and the work I’ve done with him, are of the highest caliber, I decided to sit tight and see what they came up with.

Four men designed — actually “divined” would be a more accurate description — an initiation process for themselves and three other men, including the man who originally spoke up during the workshop. During the process of designing the initiation, they realized that, in male initiations, the initiates were always initiated into something…and the Tribe was formed as the destination for initiated men. Hence the Tribe came into being, and now the Tribe has a life of its own as a community. So while the Tribe was born out of one man’s desire for initiation, the Tribe itself is what men are coming for, and the initiation is the gateway into the Tribe.

What the Tribe is and who we are

The Tribe of Men is a men’s organization (currently in the SF Bay area, soon growing to expand to other places). We explore our relationships to power and our expressions of power. Most of us have done (and continue to do) deep consciousness work.

Men come to the tribe with different backgrounds and history of working on themselves. Some have been trained in Avatar or Non-Violent Communication, some bring organizational development work, others are steeped in energetic work or have experience in various spiritual paths, such as zen, tantra, shamanic and Western religious traditions. 20% of us have had at least one year in a mystery school. To me, the Tribe is an expanding tapestry of desires, values, consciousness, spirituality, vulnerability. We incorporate reason, emotion, intuition, body, and spirit…and different men bring different proportionate mixes of these. We have empiricists and intuitives, and among the tribesmen are construction contractors, computer tech folks, artists, and leadership trainers.

The one thing that tribesmen have in common is that, before each of us came to the Tribe, we had, not only a yearning, but a prior demonstrated commitment to working on ourselves.

Purpose and Description of the Tribe

In another article, I clarify the difference between mission and purpose. I see mission as a goal or task, and we can have many missions throughout our lives. In contrast, our purpose is why we’re here, and can be articulated as a statement of our essence, something we carry from our first breath to our last. This is embodied in our statement of purpose and the Tribe’s description:

“The purpose of the Tribe of Men is to expand the consciousness and integrity of men, both individually and collectively, in service to all beings and to our planet. We recognize that modern society can be seen as a battle between the love of power (mastery through accumulation and ego gratification), and the power of love (transformation through healing and growth). As men of both power and love, we are aligned with the forces and processes that move us toward more growth, healing, wholeness, and love.

“We challenge and support each other to live and act in accordance with our Principles – guidelines that point the way toward fulfillment of our human potential. We are committed to the process of continual self-inquiry and shared learning. This process supports, deepens, and challenges us as men. Like many cultures before us, we strive for wholeness and excellence in life. Our goal is to become powerful, loving, effective men who are engaged in a continual process of unfoldment, becoming fully human.

“Our tribe is a learning community where we express ourselves fully, authentically and responsibly, and actively measure ourselves and each other against our Principles. We strive to take right actions and to stay aware of their consequences, to widen our perspective and expand our awareness. We dedicate ourselves to deepening our connection to the natural and divine forces around us and within us. We align ourselves with others who share this path of awakening, self-development, and social engagement. We recognize that we are a part of a much larger whole – one that has no name, no permanent leaders, and almost no structure. We choose to live as free, expressive individuals while remaining aware, responsible and accountable for all our relations, including our families, our communities, and our planet.”

Principles, Structure, and Intuition

In my article “Beyond Accountability and Agreements”, I begin with a fundamental question: “How can we conduct relationships without having to have every single aspect of our relationships covered by agreements?” How do we function without a bunch of rules?

I have sat in circle after circle where men submit to enforced rules and adhere to imposed standards. To me, this sets up not only a dependency on the rules and standards, but also creates an ongoing parent/child bonding between man and organization. In that first article, I wrote: “The amount of structure and rules, and men’s reliance on strict, detailed protocols seems anathema to nurturing the development of intuition and self-trust around intuition. Our relationship to the ‘big and murky’ gets the short shrift.”

In contrast to many men’s organizations, including our governments and most businesses, the Tribe has very few rules and no hierarchical structure. Instead. the Tribe offers us set of principles that we strive to align to.

“We honor these principles as guides and standards toward which we measure ourselves and grow ourselves. They support each of us to live deeper, fuller, more effective lives. They serve our own well being and the well being of everyone with whom we come in contact. These principles are not fixed truths, however. We are in service and are guided by our own hearts and our highest ideals. These principles - and our tribe - serve those ideals. Rigid adherence to the principles as though they were unbending rules, or venerating them as all-important, would violate the principles themselves. These are our guidelines, the lights by which we see our way forward.”

Note that these are not rules that are handed down to us to follow as children, but “lights” that help us, as men, rely on our intuition and our relationship to That Which Is Larger Than Us. This creates a much more high-functioning collective organism.

The principles are grouped into four categories.

Integrity and Wholeness
- I speak my truth, and invite others to speak theirs.
- I communicate my feelings and intentions clearly.
- I keep my commitments and fulfill my obligations.
- I take responsibility for my impact.
- I care for my body, my family, my community, and my planet.
- I embody masculine power.

Growth
- I am committed to a never-ending journey of self-exploration.
- I am both student and teacher, always learning from everything and everyone around me.
- I seek to become a better and better instrument of my higher purpose.
- I courageously explore the depths of what it means to be fully human and fully a man.

Love and Compassion
- I give and receive love, exploring and honoring all of its aspects.
- I reach out to others with empathy and understanding.
- I am flexible and understanding with myself and others.
- I see and treat myself and others as expressions of the divine.

Purposeful Work
- I set goals and intentions that serve myself and others.
- I do work in the world that is a true expression of myself and my life’s purpose.
- I apply myself fully to my chosen endeavors.
- I express my power in service.
- I am guided by a greater spirit, sometimes called the “big and murky”

Initiation: Preparation and Challenge

The tribe’s initiation process spans three to four months. The initiation process includes the following elements:

- Guidance. Each initiate has a guide who helps prepare for the journey, but doesn’t make the whole journey with him.

- Preparation. In a self-assessment process spanning 4 to 8 weeks, each initiate examines, in depth, his relation to the principles.

- Presentation of findings. Each man presents his self-discoveries to three men who stand for the Tribe, gathering and inquiring what is needed to divine a “life-size” challenge, uniquely designed for the initiate and oriented to his life specifically.

- The challenge. Over the next two months, each initiate engages with his challenge, bringing him repeatedly up against his “stuff” throughout those months, in service to his transformation.

- Presentation of evidence. The man returns to the men who are standing for the Tribe and provides evidence that is used to determine whether he met his challenge. Like all traditional male initiation processes, the real possibility for failure exists, as well as the possibility for sustained transformation.

Men in the Tribe support each other through the loving act of challenge, both challenging each other and being challenged. Initiates going through their initiation cycles, and initiated tribesmen, sit together in a challenge group, consisting of 5 to 8 men who meet monthly to do their work. This is roughly equivalent to an I-group, but consists mostly of a work round. The work can be deeper, since facilitators come to the groups with a larger range of tools and rely on their intuition to facilitate work that can be outside the bounds of pre-defined processes. Facilitators stay with the groups for many months or a year, until the facilitator and the group collaboratively determine that the group can be self-facilitating

Collaborative and intuitive governance

In keeping with the Tribe’s culture, our governance utilizes very few set processes or rules. Decision making is done collaboratively, in which we require consensus and, where possible, we strive for unanimity, always endeavoring to take into account the needs of all tribesmen. This is not simply a heady intellectual exercise…we are not afraid to bare our teeth.

We recognize that neither the masculine propensity toward hierarchy, nor the feminine tendency to treat everyone as equal in all decisions, are balanced. Accordingly, the Tribe has no permanent hierarchy or leaders: Men step into leadership as needed, and then step out when no longer needed. Any man in the tribe is encouraged to try on leadership, and the tribe exists because men who are called to lead, step up. I love the dance between being leader and tribe member.

This fosters a relationship in which men develop an intuitive connection to That Which is Larger Than Us and deepen their trust of that intuition. As an example, at our semi-annual initiation weekend, 10 men came together (3 men from one group, 5 from another, the initiate, and his guide) and made a precedent-setting decision during a lunch break, with no facilitator and no rules. To me, it was a magical time.

Checks and balances emanate from (a) the idea that power shall not be concentrated in any one man or small group for long periods and (b) our ability to reflect uses and abuses of power (and lack of power) to each other. We are vigilant, not just for individual shadow, but also for group shadow, recognizing that the necessity for reflections in shadow work also applies to collectives.

Five things I love about the Tribe

There are many things I love about the Tribe…here are a few of them:

1. Principle. Each initiated tribesman takes on a lifelong commitment to align with a set of principles for living that aren’t lived by in our current society. While you may notice that none of the principles are particularly new, the combination of them hasn’t been seen before. We in the Tribe recognize and embody the sacred values of tribe, bringing them into our modern lives. None of us can be in alignment with all the principles all the time…it’s the dance between being in and out of alignment that sets the stage for our growth and learning.

2. Depth. In the opportunities provided by doing basic men’s work, many men have a new-found relationship to their feelings. In the Tribe, we go further, recognizing that our authentic self goes vastly deeper than our feelings. And while we like heart connection, we don’t only want heart connection, but connection and balance between heart, head, body, and spirit. In addition, we hold both ourselves and each other accountable, not just for our word and agreements, but we also hold each other accountable for showing up as men of both power and love. Every men’s organization I’ve seen has, as a foundation, the matter of integrity…but for me, as a tribesman, being in integrity is in service to my wholeness, rather than in relation to some authority that defines how we should behave or act in the world.

3. Quality. The Tribe seeks men who have already done work on themselves. A third of us began our shadow work, some time over the last 10 years, with a 12-day conference in the Maui jungle. And before seeking entrance to the tribe, most of us took the Sword and Scepter workshop, working with our relationship to male power. Accordingly, we don’t teach men from scratch how to work on themselves from a rudimentary level. I am moved by the high quality of the men and the high quality of the work. My own initiation challenge helped me catapult myself in the direction of my life’s purpose.

4. Collective wisdom. In group settings, men don’t just do their individual work, we also frequently access the wisdom of the tribe (what some men might call “what spirit wants”). For some of us, this goes beyond merely having trust in what spirit wants…we develop an active relationship with spirit. And rather than just having individual men who access spirit and then report to us, we tend to look for harmony and dissonance, honoring both. Nowhere else have I found this focus on collective psyche.

5. Purpose. Some tribesmen hold the view that everyone has a purpose that was set before we were born. Purpose is different than mission, and there’s a difference between mission emanating from our personal material, and mission rooted in our purpose. I vibrate with this in my deepest core.

What other tribesmen say

“What I love about the Tribe is the extraordinary impact of my brothers who share the journey I am on, and the sense of encouragement and challenge I receive from them. I love the way we raise issues and then consistently fold those very same issues back into our own learning. I love the sense of knowing men are there for me and with me. I love that I am challenged and even required to be the best of who I can be, in order to be a respected member of the Tribe. And I love that others are holding themselves to that same standard…. I love that we are committed to a common cause for the planet, and that we are not alone in our unwavering resolve to lift the planet to a new level of consciousness in our lifetime. I love the depth of the conversations we are in and the depth that I am required to go to in order to make a difference in the Tribe, in my family, and on the planet. I love the juicy ambiguity of it all — that requires I seek connection with God/the universe/That Which Is Larger Than Us, and with others, to figure out how to proceed.”

– Robert Lautt, Tribesman

“As an MKP New Warrior active in my weekly group and supportive of my center’s council, I still hold that my [opening] weekend was the single most life-changing force in my adult life. As such, it deepened my longing and search for something more. It was no coincidence that my search brought me to the Tribe of Men. While some of the Tribe’s principles and practices may be familiar to the New Warrior, there is a lot more there. Men in the Tribe seem to admire New Warriors for our clarity, warrior communication and fierce loving energy. Likewise, I see great value in the Tribe for the man seeking to go further on his growth journey. I am particularly impressed and inspired by the Tribe’s commitment to collaborative governance and consensus building. They also share a greater openness to what we often call Spirit in MKP. While in MKP, being an order of men, we look to our kings, leaders and elders for guidance, men in the Tribe have an almost innate openness and commitment to the collective.”

– Jose Merida, Dragonfly, Northern California New Warrior and Tribesman

It’s not for everyone

The Tribe doesn’t tell men how to be men. Men who become part of the Tribe can have a hand in shaping what we are becoming organically.

Tribesman can learn to facilitate process work and group process. Our facilitation training, as well as our governance groups, is held as frequently as our personal work groups meet.

And…the Tribe isn’t for all men.

- It is for a man who feels “called” to something and knows what that is, but doesn’t know where to find it.

- It is for a man who feels a tugging from inside, a calling to something, but doesn’t know what that is.

- It is for a man who doesn’t know he’s called, but those around him know that he’s called.

When I say “called”, I’m not talking about the desperation that many men felt before they started doing men’s work, a desire for relief from isolation, loneliness, or our wounds — shelter from the storm. By “called”, I am instead referring to a sense of being pulled towards something deep and murky. And only some of us are in touch with this yearning.

Accordingly, the Tribe does not recruit or enroll. We explore, share, and offer.

As I wrote above, the Tribe is not a place for men to begin their work. There are many places for men to learn the basics of how to work on themselves, and there are workshops and organizations that are well-equipped to start men on their journeys. I find that sitting in circle with tribesmen who have already been on a path of growth and consciousness continues to keep the quality high, both of the work and of the men.

If you’re interested…what to do

For men in the Bay area, just contact me at the email address below. We can set up a conversation to see if the Tribe might be for you, and you can attend an introductory event to get an experience of the Tribe and to meet other tribesmen.

For men in places outside the Bay area: We are just beginning to exploring how the Tribe can expand to other areas. We look forward to the conversation (of the heart, of course). Here are some ways for you to consider:

- Come to the Bay area to take the Sword and Scepter workshop. While the workshop is not connected directly to the Tribe except through overlapping participation, a great first step towards the Tribe is to work with your relationship to masculine power, which the Sword and Scepter is uniquely designed for. Men from locations other than the SF Bay area have come to participate in this workshop.

- Arrange for a Sword and Scepter workshop in your area. If 15 or more men in your area are interested in this 3.5-day exploration of masculine power, I recommend it as a starting point for gathering sufficient critical mass to bring the Tribe to your area.

- Start a challenge group. Some tribesmen did not begin with the Sword and Scepter workshop, and it is possible to form a challenge group. Forming a challenge group will necessitate a greater degree of support from the Tribe.

To explore any of these possibilities, let me know by return email at cal [at] healthesplit [dot] com.

Alternatively, you can check out www.tribeofmen.org where you’ll find starter pages (there will be much more content on the coming months).

With fierce love,

Cal

(C) 2006 Cal Simone

[First published in the MKP New Warrior Journal, December 2006.]
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[Note: Cal is not a leader of the Sword and Scepter workshops, and does not gain financially from those workshops or from men becoming members of the Tribe.]