One movement of a much larger breath.
On Being Man can be mistaken for a self-contained men’s course. It is not. It is the men’s pathway within a wider body of work.
The men’s pathway within HIER Life.
HIER Life is contemplation-based work that tends wellness and healing at the level of the spirit — the reconciliation of what has been divided in a person: body and soul, presence and action, earth and Spirit. On Being Man is the pathway walked out of that work for men, most often men past the middle of life.
A companion pathway for women travels its own route, and is still to come — the hope is that it will one day be developed in association with a woman, so that it is spoken in a voice that has lived it rather than reconstructed from the outside. Two pathways, one respiration. On Being Man is the exhale; it waits, as every exhale does, for the inhale that completes it.
The depth is confessional in origin and universal in reach.
The roots of this work are unmistakably Christian, and run through a particular contemplative stream. Yet what it points to — a constructed, performing self laid over a deeper, given self that is waiting to emerge — can be felt, and trusted, by a man who holds no creed at all. It is describable in the body before it is confessed in the church.
So the room is genuinely open, and without gatekeepers. The explicit practices of the tradition remain available to any man who wants them, and are pressed on no one. We do not run a covert conversion, and we are watchful that spiritual language never becomes a way of exerting pressure. Words about God, when they come, are there to illuminate a man’s experience — never to foreclose it.
What it is, and what it is not.
It is
A serious, unhurried company for a man crossing into the second half of life. Spiritually serious, rooted here in the Caribbean and shaped by what Caribbean men themselves have said they carry, and honest about what it can and cannot promise. A place to move from performance toward presence, and toward a life that gives something back.
It is not
A doctrine of the one correct way to be a man. Group therapy under another name. An attack on achievement, provision or strength. A covert religious recruitment. A programme whose secret aim is simply to get men to talk about their feelings — nor a Caribbean coat of paint over an imported ideology.
The task is not to make a man less capable. It is to make sure his capability is no longer the only place from which he knows who he is.