Masculinity-Movies blog
posted by Eivind on December 2, 2011, at 7:26 pm
There’s not enough of me to go around. That’s the feeling I’ve been having lately. I’m involved in many activities and they’re all rewarding. And as long as I work a normal job four days a week, time is limited.
The big thing for me this fall has been my involvement with Authentic World. Bryan Bayer visited Oslo at the beginning of October to attend the Morten Hake Summit. The following Monday, Bryan and I put on event together following their Authentic Games Night formula which took off. A third of that group signed up to Authentic World courses on the spot and pretty much everyone there seemed to love what was going on. The room was on fire.
In the wake of that, Bryan and I realized there is so much interest here that we should start up some sort of activities. And all of a sudden I was the head of Authentic World Norway. So that’s taking time – particularly facilitating the currently ongoing Authentic Community Leadership course. We’re a group of more than a dozen Norwegians who meet up every Sunday to learn how to facilitate and inspire authenticity in our respective communities. It is very rewarding work.
Just this last Wednesday, we had our first trial run of an all-Norwegian Authentic Games Night. Everyone seemed to love it and we’re all hungry for more. I was facilitating with my buddy Pål Christian Buntz, who I will be working more with in the time to come. We’re a good team.
All of this means that I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to work on Masculinity-Movies. No time at all to be honest. But for me personally, it’s all part of the same “energy”. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the case with you readers.
Let me tell you that I was incredibly inspired to hear a man tell me the other day that reading my reviews had served as some sort of defining moment on his own personal journey. That reminded me of why I’m doing this. And I’m still committed.
In 2012, I will take more of my work into the world in the form of talks, workshops and media presence. In May, I will be speaking at a conference in Frankfurt (Men and the Future: Sex, Authenticity And Power). Maybe all these activities will mean that I can start making a living from this at long last. Too early to tell, but it feels good.
I’ll be with you with more material soon. I’ve been happy to see that the site has lived on just fine without my ongoing contributions to it. That makes me inspire to think what may happen if I start working hard on it again.
Have a great weekend!
posted by Eivind on October 31, 2011, at 8:40 pm
Hey guys,
I was in the UK in September for a rollercoaster ride of deeply transformative work. One of the things I did while there was to hang with my buddy Simon Anderson in Brighton (lovely town by the way).
I’ve had issues with tensions and imbalances in my body for many years now and have tried so many forms of body work to improve on the situation that I can hardly count them. Working with Simon is probably the most powerful body work I’ve done so far.
I was so fascinated by the profundity and simplicity of Simon’s method that we recorded a video about it when I was there. His method is very wholistic and I was inspired to find that it included mind, body, emotions, breath and spirit. If you want to learn more about how activating your body by dearmoring the emotional traumas stored in its tissue can improve your life, I recommend you check it out.
Some weeks later: Having been in the world for some weeks after working with Simon, I can feel a huge difference and that there is still work to do. I’m working on the trigger points that Simon gave me and that seems to be helping. And I’m walking quite differently, with a much more open hip region. So while there are still tensions left in my body, the difference before and after Simon is very clear. I also feel well equipped with tools to improve the situation on my own.
And if you’ve seen the whole video and are interested in how this work affected my relationships with women, I can tell you that they have transformed. What I can’t ever know is how much of the transformation came from working with Simon and how much came from all the other transformative work I’ve been engaging in.
Looking up Simon may serve you well if you just want to improve your general body performance or if you have problems and have tried everything – and without success.
I want to see you run Simon’s door down 😉
posted by Eivind on October 22, 2011, at 2:06 pm
How to start…
The first that comes to my mind is; Fun, exciting and refreshing.
The feeling of brotherhood (and not therapist/client relationship) and equal respect is always present, no matter how nervous, low or disconnected I feel. This is a beautiful thing to experience, since Ive personaly have not had much experience with this kind of relationship earlier. Neither with friends nor therapists. And this experience of brotherhood alone has been a very healing experience in many different areas in my life.
Eivind has a way of reaching out and giving a hand no matter where I am at, feeling that he truly shares excitement and honours every step of my journey into the discoveries of my world, be it the beautifull or the ugly, everything is appreciated and honoured. This is and awesome space to be in!
My biggest appreciation to Eivind is about the discoveries I made, because It could have taken me years of more hard work with something that never worked anyways. Ive been trying to solve my problems with the stick instead of the carrot all these years. And this has haulted my self-development, and causing a mess in numeourus areas of my life.
Thank you for helping me to discover how much i missed the ability to say “FUCK OFF” when it is appropiate, and staying with me while I establish the refreshing vision of wanting to take the world by the balls.
If I had not met you, I could end up like the non-swearing-wimpey-new-agey man with a vision of singing harre-krishna all day long … -oh lord help!
Benjamin
posted by Eivind on October 22, 2011, at 11:34 am
In 2010, I dropped by Morten’s summit for one day to check out what the people and speakers there were like. I was inspired to discover a whole new pocket of people committed to self-development and relieved to have some of my preconceptions around the pick-up community drop away.
This year, I stayed the full weekend. The main attraction for me was to come and hang with Bryan Bayer. I have followed the work of Bryan and Decker Cunov of the Authentic Man Program for several years and benefitted greatly from it. It was in fact I who told Morten about them in the first place. It’s always fascinating to observe the patchwork of life’s events come together in a singular moment in such a way.
What strikes me this year, as it did last, is that these guys are young. Most of them must be in their early 20s. And they seem fucking hungry. It resonates with a feeling I’ve had for a while – that the young men of this world are dying for elders. They crave for mature men to teach them what it means to be a man and how that is different from being a boy. Not in fake macho ways that involve strategies and adopting a personality that isn’t yours, but simply in learning how to be yourself fully. No, it isn’t pickup. It has evolved. They look, it seems to me, for that ultimate blessing we all yearn for: the realization that when we face the world with our masks dropped, powerful in our vulnerability, the world loves us for it. And that sets us free.
On the other hand, the man who sleeps with women using inauthentic strategies in order to fill a hole that looks curiously similar to his own self-loathing perpetuates suffering in his life experience. These men don’t operate in the realm of adulthood, however; they live in perpetual adolescence. And what I sense so strongly at the Morten Hake Summit is that those men who sell that snake oil are not nearly as inspiring to young men anymore. Now they want the real deal, the juicy meat on the bones. They want to learn to be themselves and discover that that is magnificent.
When Zan Perrion addressed the audience, I saw that so clearly. The room seemed transfixed. He spoke the truth. He spoke like a man, a leader. And people were inspired. I was inspired. He reminded me of what is possible.
And of course, hanging with Bryan was awesome. It felt like meeting an old Bro, even though I never met him in the flesh before. He is such a fountain of wisdom and a genuinely good and authentic person. I know he has a lot to teach me. And it seemed like everyone there absolutely loved him and what he did. I was pleased as pie to see that my discovery of AMP’s work online several years ago had come to this. Bryan and I did some great stuff together the Monday after the Summit. That is now snowballing and I will write more about that later.
Thanks, Morten, Knut and the rest for showing me what I needed to see – that being inauthentic isn’t trendy among young men anymore. And it confirms my gut sense that there is a wave of authenticity spreading across the globe and it is crying for us all to be leaders in times of massive change.
This is happening right now.
posted by Eivind on October 14, 2011, at 4:03 pm
Me and Rajyo (co-founder of Celebration of Being) at Winchester House at the end of the workshop
This last month has been intense. I have done some sort of workshop every weekend. Powerful experiences each and every one of them. I finally have some downtime to integrate and feel what has happened. So far, it’s a bit of a blur. Though I feel clear that a lot has shifted inside of me. After all, participants at each of these four workshops have communicated something akin to “life-changing” and I did friggin’ four of them. Oh lord.
I came to the Isle of Wight to do the Noble Man workshop on the recommendation of a New Warrior Brother. He had done the Noble Man workshop before we were both initiated on the same New Warrior Training Adventure in June. I like the man and trust his judgment, so I decided to go.
I have done a huge amount of work with men by now. But women have been conspicuously absent from my learning environments. I am clear that I want to change that and so the Noble Man arrived at an auspicious and fitting time.
To make a long story short – I loved the workshop. I’m not entitled to tell you about the processes themselves, but what was richly rewarding for me about our time together was the deep sense of mutual love and respect that permeated the ritual space. It was an environment of true healing and the processes that we were taken through spoke to me deeply. The female facilitators described it as a rite of passage and though my mind still cannot quite tolerate the idea that women can offer a rite of passage to men (it goes against all the wisdom of our ancestors), I can but embrace the potency of the experience.
Many of the women on “staff” reported that they fell back in love with men and with their own femininity and that alone makes my heart sing.
For me, the biggest takeaway is that I can be sensitive and vulnerable and still be attractive to women. I have spent a lot of time trying to build a masculinity befitting a mature man and in the process, I have lost some of my boyish playfulness and young curiosity. Embracing my inner two-year-old and bringing him into life with me is now a more probable and inspiring concept for me. That alone is huge. I’m tired of not bringing all of me.
I am tired as I write this and know that while I could make a long story out of this, my mind can’t take it right now. So I will leave you with my heartfelt recommendation of the Noble Man with Celebration of Being. Rajyo, Gina, Debbie and the other women there were a delight and moved me deeply and I loved bonding with the guys there too.
There’s not enough of me to go around. That’s the feeling I’ve been having lately. I’m involved in many activities and they’re all rewarding. And as long as I work a normal job four days a week, time is limited.