Losing my fear of men and responsibility

​

I did my Rites in 2010 and it was a game changer for me.  Before the Rites I was fearful of other men, felt lost in the world, and had a victim view of life.  My best friend nagged me about 10 times about going on the Rites.  I was done with lecture based, success orientated, ego centric sermons.   The Rites were different. I listened to men's stories of grief, failure, addiction, shame.  I shared my own story, a controlling Father who used name calling to coerce me.   After the Rites I felt more comfortable in my own skin.  I was able to relate to almost all men, my fear of other men had gone. I realised we were all on the same journey and struggling with the same things (if a man is honest).  I felt a lot more able to take responsibility. A couple of years later my best friend told me what a big change he saw in me.  The Rites have given me so much. After 15 years I still rely on some of the things it taught me.   I would recommend the Rites to any man that is searching for himself and wants to break patterns of negativity and fear.

​

Hugh from Gateshead

​

Stepping into the second half of my life

​

The Rites for me was a line in the sand turning 50 that year. I used it to mark the stepping into the second half of my life. Its impact for me was felt months after. It reminded me that I matter and (re) awakened my desire to be of service to myself, my family and community.

​

Jason from Dublin

​

The Rites showed me how to live my life

 

I remember my first night at the Rites.  I hadn't been sleeping well and this night was no different.  I spent the night awake and then went to meditate in one of the rooms.

 

The second night I lay in my tent after one of the activities and I just started giggling for no reason.  I realised this was energy moving.  I slept from about 4.30 /7am when I was gently prodded by one of my team members.

 

I knew I was going to go through quite a lot at the Rites and I was crying quite often, but I've never been amongst men that were there for each other so much in my life, a real brotherhood.

 

I enjoyed the rites immensely, I cried at just about every session but I never felt ashamed.

​

The Rites showed  me how to live my life.   I loved the solitude and the reconnection to nature  I felt lighter when I got home and slept the best nights sleep I've ever had which was recorded as a sleep score of 99/100 on my sleep tracking watch.

​

Grahame from Sandbach

​

Take stock and to rethink, to let go

​

I went on MRoP a few years ago with very little idea of what it might involve or how it might impact upon me. 

 

It definitely felt like the right move and something I should do although I also had some anxiety about being in my mid 60s and the physicality as well as whether I might at times feel personally exposed. 

 

Ultimately it was a tremendously positive time, yes a challenge but I still look back on times of personal growth and learning that have never left me.   The whole experience helped me to take stock and to rethink, to let go but also to move on. It did challenge me to think more deeply about what it is to be a man and specifically what kind of man I want to be, and what my male legacy might be. 

 

Three things helped in particular. 

 

• The honesty and commitment of the initiates who shared the Rites with me 

• The rich programme which in time became a trusted process

• And the wonderful elders who lead us with genuine honesty and care and celebrated our emergence through the other side 

 

If anything I've said resonates with you then don't hesitate, sign up and go for it. There is nothing to lose.

​

David

​

Seeing sacredness for the first time

 

Sacredness. I am an atheist.

 

The downside of not believing in God, or indeed not having any religion, was that I didn’t think that the concepts which I saw as belonging to religion, such as sacredness and spirituality, belonged to me. Or rather that I didn’t belong to them. In any case the words didn’t mean very much to me.

​

And then I did my Rites of Passage in 2013. I understood very quickly that the various rituals we participated in in the Rites were rather special. I now look back and recognise that it was my first introduction to the concept of ‘sacredness’. There is a state of mind I think that we need to open up to, in order to appreciate this concept. Previously my mind had been firmly shut to it. I had been a sort of Richard Dawkins-style atheist, one who believed that religion was inherently bad for us humans, that religion was a form of deluded thinking even. I wasn’t going to let those ideas get into my skull without some resistance. And yet during the Rites all that cynicism and defensiveness faded away – a benefit of being in a liminal space. If you haven’t done your own Rites of Passage via Male Journey you won’t necessarily know, but there is no religion on offer at all. There is no attempt at selling a belief system. But the Rites are steeped in a sacredness, and I might say a reverence for the process, which itself is sacred to those who are part of it.

​

In the years since doing my Rites I have had many occasions to sit with the idea of sacredness and I have found my own sacred spaces. Often they are somewhere a bit remote. They often involve rocks and water and trees, and that must say something, I imagine, about the sacred in me that is drawn to these spaces. I have visited many places that others have considered sacred, such as churches and wells, and circles of standing stones. They haven’t always moved me in the way that they have others, but that’s OK.

​

I also had a lovely introduction to the idea that our actions and things we do can be sacred, from the book “Manhood” by the Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph. In it he shares conversations with Aboriginal elders who told him “Going for a walk is sacred. Digging a hole is sacred. Making love is sacred.” Yes.

 

Sandy from Perth, Scotland

​

Naming and honouring the wounds to my masculinity

 

I grew up in a family of matriarchs, powerful, loving and fantastic women, while the men in the family were largely absent, mostly due to the demands of work, but robbing me of sound male role models. The effect this had on growing up was that I’d  gravitate towards friendly women and be fearful and timid in the company of men. I came to experience it as emasculation, yet was at a loss to know what I could do to remedy it…till I found the Rites. 

 

Here I discovered the freedom to name my fear and my grief and, in the company of other men, experience that vulnerability was not weakness but strength. 

 

Naming and honouring the wounds to my masculinity, in the company of brothers on the same journey of discovery, set me on the road to freedom. I can now look through the masks of hubris and bravado and relate to the seemingly ‘big guys’ as my brothers…free from fear.

 

       Richard from Liverpool

​

The beginning of a truer journey 

 

I grew up comparing myself with other boys and men — classmates, fathers, men on screens and comic book heroes. And always, I came up short.
Not strong enough, not sporty enough, not built for the rough-and-tumble.
I lived on the edges of masculinity, distanced from the centre.
“Rough boys” frightened me.
I yearned for their ease and belonging, even as I recoiled from the toughness and boldness they embodied. That quiet ache of “no place to be” followed me into early adulthood, at times deepening into depression and suicidal thoughts. 

​

And life also offered me some initiations on the way: heartbreaks that cracked me open, seasons of suffering that also pitched me into a period of enquiry and growth.

​

When I heard of the Men’s Rites of Passage, something in me leaned forward and another part shrank back. I longed for the company of men — not specific men, but the ancient circle of brothers — and yet I doubted my right to stand among them.

​

The Rites carried me into unfamiliar territory that somehow felt older than memory. There, in that company, I laid down my armour.
I let myself be seen — in light, in darkness, in shame.
I trusted men with the softest parts of me and found they could hold them without harm. Much of the time I felt doubt, unsure, that I was going through the motions, as though nothing was shifting inside. Yet beneath my doubts it became clear that something patient and steady was working in me.

​

And when I emerged, something fundamental had changed.
I no longer felt “less-than.”
I stood in my power.
I was no longer afraid of men; I felt my place among them.
I saw the anger I carried and the necessity of brotherhood in helping me to work on it. The Rites were not an ending but a threshold.
A turning toward growth, toward living in a way that helps more and harms less — for myself, for the ones I love, and for the wider world.

They helped me put down old burdens, old stories that had weighed on me for years.
This was my initiation into manhood — not a final arrival, but the beginning of a truer journey. Xx

​

       Francis from Wye Valley

​

You don’t have to walk it alone

 

2023 was the year my world narrowed and then, slowly, widened again. I lost my mother, watched my cousin die by suicide, grieved the loss of a baby, and then faced my father’s passing. Each loss felt like a new language of pain I didn’t know how to speak. I carried them all at once — a heavy, private load that made the simplest days feel like crossing a desert.

 

I found the Male Journey’s Men’s Rites of Passage almost by accident, in a sleepless scroll. What I found there wasn’t a manifesto or a lecture — it was a place that listened, a community that named the quiet hurts men carry. That listening gave me permission to do something I hadn’t allowed myself to do: to mourn out loud. It gave me tools to grieve, to cry, and to say goodbye without shame.

 

Where are men held when they’re angry? Who guides them through rage without shaming them? Too often the options feel brutal and small — the bottle, the numbness, the distractions that pretend to be courage. But what if anger could be held, witnessed, and transformed into something honest and human?

 

How do I love again? After so much loss I wondered if my heart had a map back to tenderness. The answer came quietly: love was never lost, only buried under fear. In nature I found a mirror — stillness that showed me my true self was love, not just a warrior. My warrior could stand down so my lover and wise king could lead.

 

Why cry? Because tears were the language my grief needed. Crying wasn’t surrender; it was release. It was the way I said goodbye and made room for what comes next.

 

I learned to be held — not by pretending everything was fine, but by letting people and places hold me while I was not fine. I learned that vulnerability is a kind of strength and that grief can be a doorway, not a prison. I found peace in nature, clarity in community, and a new rhythm in my heart: one that lets tenderness lead.

 

To Male Journey and to everyone who listened without fixing: thank you. If you’re carrying loss, anger, or the question of how to love again, know this — you can be held, you can cry, and you can find your way back to love. If this resonates, share it, or hold it close. You don’t have to walk it alone.

 

Quintin from Sussex

​​

It has made all the difference

 

Encountering the rites has been an important stepping stone in my journey as a man and as a human being. I come from a family that was dominated by strong women that I had come, in some cases, to experience as role models to be imitated. My sensitive, creative, receptive, feminine qualities have always been welcome and encouraged in my family of origin. 

​

Conversely, the men in my environment tended to take on shadow roles – or were ‘feminine’, sensitive men themselves. Only one man – my paternal grandfather – stood out in my family as carrier of ‘masculine’ energy, but I experienced him as rigid, authoritarian and was a bit afraid of him (although, even him, had a ‘soft’ side too). I grew up fearful of authority, but also rebellious to the established order – although my way of rebelling was always a ‘quiet’ (feminine?) one.

​

Growing up, I naturally tended to prefer the company of girls/women, starting from school and then on at university. Discovering my being gay did not help, as I grew up at a time and culture in which it still wasn’t straightforward to “come out” – and so I didn’t until I was about 21. So being with men wasn’t easy, although, since school, I also had male friends; masculine energy could be frightening and overpowering at times, especially when coming from heterosexual males of the “alpha” type. I knew for a long time I had to address this imbalance, and to fully own my masculinity, within the whole of me. Many years later, through Richard Rohr, I came to know of the existence of the rites of passage; out of the blue, hearing a call from somewhere I could not identify, I decided to apply on the spur of the moment. It was exactly what I had been waiting for.

 

Shorty before my attendance, a friend of mine took his own life. Apart from the shock and the grief, there and then I felt that now I had to go to the rites not only for myself, but for him also, and “see what I would see, and feel what I would feel” not through my eyes only, but his also. For me, the experience of the rites is inextricably bound with the life of my friend Luke, and ever since then, I have come to feel more and more that had he discovered the rites for himself, perhaps he would still be here with us today. It was too late for him, but it may not be for others who are struggling and would benefit to feel the warm embrace of a circle of conscious men.

For me attending the rites was the beginning of a journey – or rather, if I want  to be more precise, a stepping stone in the unfolding of a life’s journey; precisely as it should be, as this is the original meaning of the rites of initiation: an intentional stepping into the larger community, so to become more fully aware participants within it. 

 

For myself, it is a journey that will never stop until I live, but I’m so glad I found this milestone along my path. It has made all the difference in me welcoming and coming to terms with the fullness of my embodiment as a male, and it allowed me to gently uncover parts of myself that had lied hidden or dormant, unacknowledged, for years. I believe the rites have made me a fuller, more rounded person.

​

           Max from Italy

 

Still curious to know more?

​Complete the form below for a call back from one of our elders! We’ll do our best to call you back within 48 hours.