I’ve been facilitating groups in Wairarapa for over a year. We currently have a fortnightly Thursday group in Featherston 7-9pm (contact me if interested). I’m now organizing a regular Tuesday evening group in Upper Hutt.

This group isn’t men only – I try to get a roughly even gender balance. It’s a format that men (and women – I’m not interested in replacing one story with another) can relax and be themselves, speak their world, not feel they have to tread on eggshells in order to uphold any politically expedient or virtue signalling divisive narrative.

Many men – myself included – appreciate a chance to be around others and be supported in not having to dial back their Here and Now experience. Not be coerced into a phony sycophantic version of themselves so curtailed and edited as to eliminate the possibility of any genuine human contact.

Exploring what it is like to remove the veil and deliberately get comfortable with yourself – including those aspects that some might deem masculine – around a mixed group of adults is profoundly transformative for a lot of men.

And you get to do it your way. You don’t have to hold hands in a circle, light candles or sniff incense. There’s no dreamy music playing in the background. We will meet in a comfortable yet unpretentious scout den.

What interests me is truth and the experience of humans opening up to it. Sometimes it’s heated, sometimes it’s contemplative, sometimes it’s amusing, sometimes emotional. But it’s always exciting and alive and connecting. And the two hours fly by before you know it.

I liken the groups to ‘They Live’ sunglasses because we have been so well trained to believe that honest connection is an impossible pipe-dream; experiencing it is seeing this deception.

For some, encountering first-hand the fact that men are not the evil oppressors we have been led down the garden path to believe – or simply seeing how much of the world many men carry on their shoulders – is like removing the blinkers that blind, divide, provoke, and destroy. It’s liberating and unifying for all concerned.

Seeing that the ways we have been separated and vilified against one another according to banal ‘identity’ groups (based on sex, skin colour, sexuality etc) are not in fact human behavioral rules written in the stars like immutable axiomatic natural laws. That in fact we do have an inbuilt capacity to Relate in small groups without pretense or burden or having to pay homage to the lies that we have to uphold loyalty or disloyalty, guilt or impunity according to where some bureaucrat has categorized us.

Relational groups are the antidote to divisive identity politics!

Let me know your interest via email relationalwai (at) gmail dot com or sign up to the facebook event.

Look forward to meeting you!

Warren

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If we have another 5 confirmed via email before the weekend we will meet at Akatarawa Scout Den, Hoggard Park, 40 Black Beech St, Birchville, Upper Hutt 7pm Tuesday 14th March.

https://www.facebook.com/events/721177501389966/

https://relatetrue.wordpress.com/about/