Energy for Life is very pleased to present the 2nd Whole Man Expo Saturday, September 8, 2012, 8:30 am – 6:00 pm at The Cable Center on the Denver University campus. Essentially, this event is being offered to honor and celebrate what folks admire, respect and value about men, as well as to educate the public about the types of challenges that contemporary men regularly confront. Men, women and teens are welcome and encouraged to attend.
Generally or traditionally, women have been raised from an early age to be more relationship-oriented than men. Since the advent of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, women have taken the lead in many areas of self-development. For example, career choices available to women and women’s participation in athletic activities and organized sports have proliferated in recent decades. Furthermore, women are outpacing men in earning college and graduate degrees and in acquiring middle-management positions. While men have made notable strides toward becoming more domestic, nurturing, collaborative and emotionally expressive, we continue to lag behind women in these areas.
Notoriously, men have significantly greater incidence of addictive behavior, (especially substance abuse), sexual abuse and violence in various forms and on all levels/scales: bullying, suicide, domestic violence, homicide and war. Male-perpetrated gun violence, often evidenced in my home state of Colorado (including one of the worst mass shootings in our nation’s history that occurred last month), has skyrocketed over the past 15 years. Women, however disturbed, virtually never resort to public shootings.
As of the late 1970s, guys began forming men-only support groups, which initially focused on a limited number of themes, such as our “father wounds” and garnering inner strength, in addition to physical prowess. Larger organizations, such as The Mankind Project and Promise Keepers entered the scene during the 1980s, mainly for the purpose of collective male character-building. Over the course of the past two decades, small men’s-support groups (which I have participated in and led) and religious-based men’s groups have become widespread in many parts of our country. The few million men who have participated in these groups, especially those doing so on an ongoing basis, have generally become more loving partners and fathers, more open with one another, giving to their communities, and overall, happier guys.
Women have been increasingly pulling/rooting for us guys to evolve along with themselves as multi-dimensional people. I strongly feel that the world at large needs a lot more models of well-integrated men and male “light-workers” to unify with one another and to collaborate with women in service of the planet. Thus, I founded Whole Man Expo in the Front Range of Colorado as a public, combined-gender gathering to create a template or “plant seeds” for what I truly hope will spread to other parts of our country and abroad.
I heartily invite you to attend our forthcoming Whole Man Expo on Sat. Sept 8, during which you can learn how men are overcoming adversity and can firsthand contemplate, experience and discover various qualities of enlightened masculinity. For additional information and to register, visit Whole Man Expo.
