11 Ways Men's Work Changed My Life

Part I: Exploring the powerful medicine of Men's Work

Announcement: Men, 6 days left till the doors officially close for the upcoming chapter in Brothers of the Ever Innocent Heart. Apply by March 10th if you feel the call to join us.

This private council is a powerful and nourishing space for men to experience ongoing healing, growth, integration of wisdom, accountability, camaraderie, and to collectively discover what mature masculinity looks like in 2025. Monthly financial contribution is on a sliding scale to meet men where they are. You can read more about the brotherhood and apply here, or just go ahead and book a free heart-to-heart exploration call with me here:

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In 2025, many observers assert that we are in the midst of a ‘crisis of masculinity.’

Men are taking their own lives ~1.7x as often as women.

Huge numbers of men feel lost, confused, and uncertain of their role or value in a rapidly changing world.

Meanwhile, in the past several decades, the (mythopoetic) men’s movement has gradually risen to prominence.

The term ‘Men’s Work’ has nearly become a household phrase.

Countless men have been deeply impacted by the cultural resurgence of Men’s Circles & Men’s Work, and many of them will tell you that this work changed or saved their lives.

Why?

What makes Men’s Work so powerful and life-changing for so many men, at this moment in history?

In this post, I’ll attempt to answer this question, by speaking about 11 benefits I’ve personally experienced through this work.

I’ll start with a short summary of my history with Men’s Work, then I’ll attempt to elucidate why Men’s Work is so powerful for so many men.

Let’s get into it.

My History With Men’s Work

Men’s Work is powerful medicine.

I know this now.

After years of doing this work, I feel it in my bones.

I had a few scattered experiences with Men’s Work in my early- and mid-20s.

It was in 2020, though, at age 29, that I answered the call to dive much deeper into this work.

Since that time, Men’s Work has been a near-continuous current in my life. Here’s a concise timeline:

2020-2021: I passed through a profound ~16-month men’s rite of passage in Jiro Taylor’s Shambhala Warrior program.

2021-2022: I led a 2-month men’s journey of my own, with ~25 men, called The Sovereign Man.

2022: I completed Jonathan MacCaul’s potent 2-month Spiritus initiation for men.

2022: I completed Aleksander Brankov’s 2-month Coronation journey, an initiation for men focusing on the major masculine archetypes.

2023: I experienced powerful in-person men’s workshops with The Unmasked Man and The Sacred Sons.

2022-present: I led my first four in-person men’s retreats in Azores, Portugal; Yucatan, Mexico; and Iowa, USA. I plan to lead another in May of 2025 in North Carolina; feel welcome to reach out to inquire about this.

2022-present: I joined ARKA Brotherhood ~31 months ago and have been part of powerful (bi)weekly men’s circles there for ~24 months total during that time. This work has majorly impacted my life.

2022-present: ~30 months ago, I founded Brothers of the Ever Innocent Heart—a brotherhood & weekly men’s circle for men returning Home to Wholeness, Honor, Truth, and Love. I have held a weekly Sunday men’s circle for 30 months in a row—and a Tuesday circle for 22 months in a row.

2025-present: I joined The Alliance with Connor Beaton a couple months ago to further my men’s work education. It’s a potent space.

11 Ways Men's Work Changed My Life

What is so powerful about Men’s Work?

Why have I invested so deeply in this modality for the past 5 years?

Good question. Let’s speak to 11 key elements:

1. Deep Healing

Men’s Work is profoundly healing, especially if you stay with it over a substantial span of time and become truly intimate with a group of good men.

There is something intrinsically primordially medicinal about sharing a space of profound Presence, Truth, and Love with a group of open-hearted men.

To proverbially strip yourself naked week in and week out—sharing what is truly real and raw on your heart, with a circle of brothers who do their best to hold you in Non-Judgmental Presence & Unconditional Love—is like a cold cleansing shower for the soul that can border on a religious experience.

Through sincerely engaging this work, you are literally bringing the healing Sunlight of Love to your deepest wounds and the darkest corners of your being.

Through this practice, you are learning what it is to be held by your brothers in a warm, cozy Bonfire of Loving Presence, and in turn you are learning how to ignite and stoke this Bonfire within your own Heart—and to carry it with you all the days of your life.

Through staying put over a long span of time in the Transformational Oven of a well-held Men’s Circle, you are quite literally re-patterning the way you relate to Life, Men, Yourself, & Humanity on deep levels—creating new imprints of Love, Safety, Connection, Camaraderie, & Trust, while dissolving & transmuting old (ancestral) imprints of fear, un-safety, standoffishness, separation, & distrust.

The power of such re-pattering is difficult to overstate.

This level of healing can ripple outward into all areas of your life, bringing healing to all your existing relationships and allowing you to form healthy new relationships.

It can allow you to finally relax in your own body, calm your nervous system, ground yourself on Earth, and viscerally feel an embodied sense of Trust in Life.

It can open you up to new pathways, callings, and creative possibilities that you could not have seen or embraced before, due to your heart and body being tight, rigid, clenched, closed off to Life.

2. Growth & Integrity

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

— Jim Rohn

There’s a lot of truth in this classic quote from Jim Rohn.

We are social creatures, and to a massive extent, we take our cues from those around us.

By osmosis, we absorb a huge number of our basic attitudes, standards, approaches, understandings, imprints, templates, energetic orientations, maps, models, and directions in life, from those we spend the most time with.

As such, it is truly powerful to spend large quantities of time with Heart-Led Men of Vision & Integrity who striving to show up fully in life, in service to the Whole.

To do so is to place oneself in a kind of upward-spiraling gravitational field, in which one is naturally summoned upward toward a fuller, truer, and more honorable expression of oneself.

3. Integration & Accountability

In a similar vein, there’s tremendous power in consistently meeting with a group of honorable men on the path of truth, week in, week out.

This gives you a built-in time every week to really take stock of how you’re doing in life, what you’re feeling, what’s going well, what your challenges are, where you are leaking energy, and how you’re progressing toward truly integrating and embodying your deepest wisdom in daily life.

There’s a natural virtuous cycle of accountability that takes place here. By showing up for yourself and your brothers week in and week out, in a tribe of men committed to healing and true integration, you are naturally more motivated and inspired to “walk the talk” and really live and embody your wisdom.

You come to feel a sense of being bonded as brothers under noble principles, and so there is a sense of sacred duty to be a man of integrity, day in and day out, especially when no one is watching.

4. Heart-Opening

Opening the heart and returning to the heart are indispensable on the path of truth. The heart knows the truth of non-separation, radical gratitude, and universal Love.

I have gradually come to see heart-opening as the most fundamental pillar on the path of truth. So long as the heart remains closed, no matter how much we “grow,” we will feel cut off from ourselves, others, and Life.

I thought my heart was open in years prior, yet the heart-openings I’ve experienced in the past 3 years have shown me that there was so much deeper to go—and probably there always will be.

In the past 3 years, I’ve placed a special focus on heart-opening in my personal practice, and I credit this focus as a major factor in the great deal of positive change I’ve experienced during that time. I now regularly feel this sense of warmth, coziness, gratitude, and at-home-ness emanating from my chest, that I didn’t experience in the same way before.

Men’s Work is an incredible modality for opening the heart, and I believe it has been a crucial piece of the puzzle for me. To witness the ever evolving, real, raw stories of your brothers, week in and week out, cracks you open. It touches you on a deep level of shared humanity and shared suffering. It opens you to deeper empathy, compassion, and connection.

5. Grounding

I was heavily in need of grounding a few years ago after some massively ungrounding psychedelic experiences, and Men’s Work really assisted me in this regard.

Men’s Work is a distinctly earthly modality. It brings you into your body. It relentlessly refocuses you on your ‘on the ground’ human experience. It asks you to share about your human-level issues, struggles, and emotions, and to deeply listen as others do the same.

Thus, it anchors you powerfully on Earth, on the ground, in your body, in service, here and now.

6. Humbling

I was also in great need of humbling in recent years, after becoming quite grandiose and ego-inflated in the wake of some huge psychedelic experiences.

Men’s Work humbles you.

It’s a distinctly ‘equal eye level’ modality. Yes, there is a circle leader or facilitator, but the leader also shares vulnerably from the heart and participates in the work as ‘one of the guys.’

So there is little room for ‘all-knowing gurus,’ or a significant sense of hierarchy, or teacher-student dynamics.

Everyone shows up as a fellow man on the same tumultuous path of life. Everyone has ample chance to listen and to share their wisdom for the good of all.

Also, the fact that a large portion of the experience is simply shutting up, being still, being present, and deeply listening to other men, is also humbling. It’s not about you, it’s about the whole. This also helps to cultivate an attitude of selfless service.

7. Service & Space-Holding

Building on the last point, Men’s Work done well is a continuous practice of Holding Space for your brothers, in service of the whole.

For any man called to be a coach, healer, space-holder, or facilitator, this is an invaluable experience—to regularly hold space, listen deeply, and offer questions and reflections to brothers.

Beyond that, it’s valuable for any man to build an attitude of Service and an aptitude for Space-Holding, as these will be great assets for any man in all of his relationships and vocational endeavors.

8. Friendship & Brotherhood

You form authentically deep friendships through Men’s Work.

It’s called brotherhood for a reason.

This should not be underestimated.

The presence of just one true friend can make a life-saving difference in a man’s life.

Having even one brother who truly believes in you and is in your corner, is a tremendous boon that can change the course of your life.

Fellowship is an ancient mythic medicine.

9. Shadow Work & Blindspot-Illumination

Part of the purpose of Men’s Work is to call you out on your ‘bullshit.’

To call you up.

To help you see your own shadows, blindspots, where you lie to yourself, and where you are out of integrity with yourself and all of Life.

Often this happens implicitly, simply through listening to heart-centered brothers sharing openly about their own process.

It’s explicit too, though. A good men’s circle will create space for reflections and constructive feedback, in which your brothers can be direct and let you know what you might not be seeing about yourself and your life—in all areas, including oft-under-examined areas like sexuality, money, relationships, and so forth.

Many men’s circles also place an importance on healthily integrating one’s ‘inner monster’ or ‘junkyard dog’—i.e. acknowledging one’s most primal, rage-full, and aggressive aspects, bringing love to those aspects, holding them in the fires of the open heart, and ultimately healthfully integrating them in service of Love—transfiguring them into qualities of assertiveness, healthy boundary-setting, protectiveness of the innocent, and a warrior spirit.

10. Ceasing to Play the ‘Nice Guy’ and Leaning Into Your ‘Masculine Edge’

No More Mr. Nice Guy by Robert Glover is a great book that I’d recommend for all modern men. We’ve discussed and explored some of its concepts within Brothers of the Ever Innocent Heart.

Basically, Glover’s thesis is that, as a result of the dramatic rise in absent or overworked fathers post-WWII, combined with the rise of (both healthy and misguided forms of) feminism, we’ve seen a massive surge in men who embody the ‘Nice Guy’ archetype.

Due to abandonment wounds, absent strong male role models, and a subsequent feeling that one must ‘do everything right’ and be a ‘good boy’ in order to receive love, countless men have become ‘doormats’ and people-pleasers who never rock the boat, or fight for anything, or go after their callings, or stand up for their true needs and values (in relationship), and thus end up highly resentful, as they aren’t respected by their partners or those around them, and they miss out on what they truly want out of life.

The remedy for ‘Nice Guy syndrome’ is to start leaning into your ‘masculine edge,’ reactivating a warrior spirit, becoming more honest and direct, going after your passions and callings, clearly stating your needs and boundaries, consciously leaning into tensions or conflicts to work through them, and cultivating some of the more noble ‘traditional’ masculine qualities.

Men’s Work—and surrounding yourself with brothers who are consciously moving beyond the ‘Nice Guy’ archetype—helps you do this.

11. Physical Training & Holistic Well-Being

The physical training & nourishing of the body is often a strong value in Men’s Work and Men’s Circles.

There is a fascinating correlation between a strong, vital body and a deep inner strength—resolve, resilience, a warrior spirit, and a sense that you can handle whatever life throws at you.

Being around men who hold this as a core value, naturally inspires you to do the same.

For myself, I can definitely say that the Men’s Work I’ve done has deeply inspired and ignited me in this regard.

The results have been powerful. My nervous system feels significantly calmer. I feel more embodied. I feel strong and healthy. I sleep better. I feel more emotionally balanced. I feel more grounded. I feel more in my healthy masculine. I feel ready for what life throws at me.

READ PART II HERE:

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Brothers: 6 days left to join us for this next chapter…

Once more, men, 6 days left till the doors officially close for the upcoming chapter in Brothers of the Ever Innocent Heart.

Apply by March 10th if you feel the call to join us.

This private council is a powerful and nourishing space for men to experience ongoing healing, growth, integration, accountability, camaraderie, and to collectively discover what mature masculinity looks like in 2025.

Monthly financial contribution is on a sliding scale to meet men where they are.

You can read more about the brotherhood and apply here, or just go ahead and book a free heart-to-heart exploration call with me here:

Love & Strength,
Jordan