How to Walk to a Men's Group

Every Tuesday evening for the last few weeks, I would walk down from my house to a discreet yoga studio, tucked in an alleyway in the small town where I live.  There, I would meet with a group of ten men. There were old men, young men, men who were parents, single men, strong men, men who felt overwhelmed and men who didn’t feel anything at all.  Some shuffled slowly into the space, their spent days dragging and clinging desperately to their heels.  Others breezed through, kicking off their beloved sneakers into a discrete pile against the wall of the studio’s vestibule.  I crouched onto my knee and untied the black laces of my hiking shoes, the soles all worn and uneven, the bottom having been ground off from a thousand kilometers of foot travel to work and back home over the past two years.  I placed them along the edge of the wall alongside leather dress shoes, dark work boots discoloured with dirt and mud and the line of runners and sandals.  Baseball caps, scarves and wool hats hung on wall hooks. I knew some worked as doctors, dentists, bricklayers, construction crew, service workers and IT professionals.  The only thing in common was only this moment and the warmly lit space where we gathered.

So for three hours, we would share our stories, tiny clipped vignettes of the happenings unfolding in our lives. 

About an hour before most meetings, my body would bristle and protest, my stomach plunging, my legs heavy as ice, frozen to the edge of the dining room chair.  I could just stay and drop myself into the forever waters of my smartphone, I thought.  But then I would set an anemic resolution in my mind: “I just need to show up.”   There, the declaration would be printed onto my memory like some logo etched onto a new bar of soap, only to be washed away in moments as my thoughts churned and bubbled.  

Somewhere deep in the firmament of my mind I managed to bury my hurts, smoothing out the bumps into an even affect.   But, I would still feel the faint edges of this declaration in the churn, just enough to remind me to put on my shoes, zip up my hoodie jacket and head out.  

So with every step, I would meet a moment of resistance who would accost me, slamming in front, slowing my pace, doing whatever to distract me from making it to the meeting.  But this time, my fifth time having pushed my way through past this, Resistance came in the form of a cunning plan.  This time it would be simple, because at that moment I did not feel anything at all, so there would be nothing to share.  I would be just breathing.  That’s all I would be doing.  I would just show up and I would just listen to others and that would be it.  Simple.

At the studio, as the men entered and revealed themselves, I would beeline to an open seat among the tight circle of chairs, drape my hoodie over the back and sit down heavy in silence.

The facilitator of the group gently roused our attention with an invitation to close our eyes and feel the ground under our feet.  His prompts would ask us to sense the ground supporting us and notice how this felt.  I would hear the breathing of others, slow and deepening in unison as I sharpened my own focus on the thin fragile coolness of the floor.

He would then call our attention back into the room.  Since the meeting agenda was flexible, he would invite us to share whatever feelings or thoughts arising in the moment.  The discussion would undulate, as the men would panhandle for a nugget of weekly news from their burbling memories.  

An older man with short cropped hair, wearing a beige T-Shirt and practical blue cargo work pants, leaned towards the center, and offered something new: 

“Ya know there’s these guys at work, eh.”  he began.

“And they just yammer with each other.  Yammering over everyone at the shop, eh, how they hate this, how they hate that.  Elections, wars, doom and gloom.  No regard for anyone else.  And not doing anything.  All day, all they do is parrot the media’s shit-talking…”  The corners of his mouth tightened into a tiny smile, “Aw man, it’s just depressing… ”

I would then rub my back as it ached and rebelled against the angle of the chair.   Then he would continue, “Ya know, I guess what you can’t hold and transform, you’ll transmit.”   

This gem, one among many that evening, would grind layers off my scarred hubris.  During a pause, my words would slip past the bars of my teeth, my tongue lashing after them.  But it was too late.  I couldn’t hold them back.  I couldn’t transform her words, so now it rang out in the form of my own shaky voice:  

“She wants a divorce.”

In that circle, at that moment, I finally heard her.  These were her words. Her sadness, her regret watering a desert with her tears, her lost hours wasted waiting for my season of sadness to pass, her feelings ditched and abandoned halfway up her road of future promises and joys.  I then confessed to the numbness that I felt and to the enormity of this “thing”.  Twenty eyes in kinship then held me as the chasm under me cracked and buckled.  They saw me with all my flaws and foolishness.  They held me as my words crashed across this terrifying expanse.

You see, I didn’t find many spaces in my life where I could experience in person a feeling of being seen, let alone trek across the dark regions of how I actually felt.  I dug into the belief that my dominion as a man was to ‘suck it up’ when adversity struck me hard.  Later I would find that obsessing over my work became the numbing balm for my suppressed distress which only heightened my loneliness, deepened my depression over time and strengthened my resolve to never reveal my inner turmoil to anyone.

And yet, I did.

Somehow on that Tuesday evening, I managed to dodge Resistance and find a fellowship in a physical place where I could carry my shame and failure as a partner.  I didn’t cry.  This was a surprise.  I didn’t feel overwhelmed.  I didn’t have to think or explain anything.  My body was learning a lesson in real time.  As it relaxed, it experienced release.  And from release, it experienced a sliver of openness.  I could sense something real.  

For me, this group of men embodied a humble invitation.  They invited different parts of me to disclose, to pull up their own chairs into this circle.  These men would be able to acknowledge what I could not.  They could regard what I couldn’t see.  They could contain what I couldn’t hold.

Later, after the meeting concluded,  I started to head back uphill again, taking one step at a time, my soles gripping the pavement.  As my breath deepened, I could feel my body lean slightly toward the street lights ahead of me.  There, they would split the ochre of the night and would lead me home.