00:02.01
Gareth Pickering
In 2018, I was part of a multi-day Tantra retreat. was a seven-day retreat that was for men and women, and it was all about what they called life force mastery.
00:14.53
Gareth Pickering
And the byline of the retreat was called the Sacred Sexual Shamanic Experience. I've always enjoyed sex. I've also had a journey with sex addiction in my life. And the idea of doing a retreat that was potentially putting sexuality under the microscope felt like it would be important work for me to do.
00:33.04
Gareth Pickering
This was also part of a a healing journey that I'd been on since 2014, where I left Johannesburg in 2014 at a real low point in my life. At the time, I was spiraling in alcoholism. I was stressed out.
00:45.99
Gareth Pickering
I was starting to get super sick. And I was really in a pretty dark space in my life. And so I went on this adventure that... took me to 45 different countries, got me to understand multiple different healing modalities. And this was the first time that I was on a Tantra retreat. And it was a seven-day retreat where you lived on site with men and women and were understanding some of the various tools and frameworks that traditional Tantra had that had been repackaged in sort of a new format for the West and for for modern men and women to be able to implement into their lives.
01:18.44
Gareth Pickering
Somewhere around day three, the facilitator said, today we're going to break up into men and women. Women are going to have a women's circle and men, you're going to have a men's circle. And i was like, oh, fuck. This is not what I feel like. I was excited to be on this retreat to be able to connect with men and women.
01:33.06
Gareth Pickering
But the idea of just going into a men's circle was not something that I was excited about doing at all. Anyway, day three comes. We split up into our two different sections. And the one of the facilitators, a man, is holding a space for the men that are on the retreat, probably about 12 of us And he says, we're going to step into the circle and you're going to share something that you've been holding as a challenge for most of your life. And take a moment just to tune in into what that is and trust the first thing that comes into your awareness.
02:02.29
Gareth Pickering
So we all close our eyes and we stand around for a moment and just tune into what's the first thing that comes up that feels like it's been a theme that I've had a challenge with for most of my life. And the first thing that came up was my sex addiction.
02:14.11
Gareth Pickering
the The relationships that I'd had in the past that I'd continually been hunting and chasing down a woman. And it felt like at a time that was out of control completely. And over the last four years leading up to that point between 2014 and 2018,
02:27.52
Gareth Pickering
I felt like I'd done a decent amount of work on this. I was on a journey of radical honesty and I'd been through some relationship coaching and worked with a couple of mentors. But I still felt like I had this as a theme in my life that I was going to bring. And I was already in this retreat and I was like, okay, let's bring it. I'm going to bring this to the circle.
02:45.48
Gareth Pickering
So the circle starts and men step in, each of them sharing a different theme that they'd been dancing with in their life. And as the circle comes around, it's getting closer and closer to my point to step into the circle and to share this one thing that feels like it's been a challenge in my life for most of my life.
03:03.84
Gareth Pickering
Just as ah as a side note to this, this is also not something that I had spoken to anybody about, really. A few of my very close friends knew that I'd had challenges with intimacy and had multiple different lovers, but I'd never spoken openly about it, especially not to a group of men who I didn't know.
03:19.17
Gareth Pickering
But I was on this retreat anyway, and I was going to go for it.
03:25.03
Gareth Pickering
It comes round, it comes round, it comes round. The guy next to me goes and now it's my turn to step in and I can almost not hear my heart is pumping so hard in my chest. I'm nervous. My palms are sweaty and I step into the circle and I share openly.
03:42.19
Gareth Pickering
Since losing my virginity at the age of 13, I have pretty much spent most of my life chasing women and going after intimate connections as a way to make myself feel better. I've often kept them in the dark, in the shadow. I felt um a lot of shame. There's been a lot of secrecy around my intimate connections.
03:59.20
Gareth Pickering
And there have been times in my life where I felt like it completely controlled me. Some version of that. And as that comes out of me, I'm looking around the circle expecting, I don't know, ridicule, laughter.
04:11.48
Gareth Pickering
Yeah, maybe just feelings of not being accepted. And as I look around that circle to the other men that are there, I experienced nothing except pure presence, compassion, and complete love. That's all i can describe it as.
04:26.35
Gareth Pickering
and I was like, wow, that this is amazing. And as I stepped back out of that circle to let the next man step in, I felt like I'd energetically taken a rock out of my backpack that I had been carrying for most of my life.
04:40.77
Gareth Pickering
And I left it in the middle of that circle as I stepped back out.
04:45.62
Gareth Pickering
And I was reeling. I was like, what the fuck just happened there? Like, how how did I shift so much? How did I feel so light just by speaking about the one thing that I had spent my entire life making sure that I never spoke about?
04:58.43
Gareth Pickering
And the circle went around and other men shared different topics. Other people had challenges with intimacy and power and money and father stuff and abuse. And they shared all of these things. And every single time somebody shared, it felt like there was a piece of their story that in some way resonated with me.
05:16.70
Gareth Pickering
The end of that day three, I got into bed that night and i was like, wow, I'm still quite blown away by what happened. Just by the fact that I had spoken about something that I had never spoken about before, genuinely it felt like 75% of that problem was gone.
05:33.66
Gareth Pickering
There were still threads for sure, but I had moved a shit ton just by having this this conversation. And i was like, wow, this is fucking amazing. I couldn't believe what had happened. As if that wasn't enough, in the the final four days of the seven-day retreat, four other men came up to me and said, Gareth, thank you so much for what you shared there.
05:52.94
Gareth Pickering
What you touched there really resonated with me. i' have a frequency of that as well, or I've battled with that as well. And thank you so much. It feels like it was really healing for me as well. my mind was absolutely blown. i was like, holy shit.
06:06.58
Gareth Pickering
Not only had this been so powerful and transformational for me, but it had touched at least four other men in the circle. And those are only the men that had the courage to come forward and say something. It probably resonated with maybe every single man in that circle had had some version of this or knew somebody about that had struggled with this.
06:25.14
Gareth Pickering
And me sharing it had not only helped me, but it also supported every single other man in that circle. I realized in that moment that this technology of men's work that I'd never been exposed to before really has the power to potentially be able to change the world and to help us heal many of the problems that we see out in the world.
06:45.33
Gareth Pickering
And so what the fuck is men's work? What is it? what What was it that happened there in that circle that day that helped me heal such a big part of my experience just by having a conversation and by speaking about it?
06:58.14
Gareth Pickering
Men's work is not therapy. Men's work is also not kumbaya. Men's work, from what I understand, is an ancient technology that we all used to have connection to, that we all used to have access to when we lived simpler lives and we lived in community.
07:16.10
Gareth Pickering
You would have lived in a place where you were surrounded by families and you lived together and worked together to support that tribe. Every single day, you would have been working with the men inside that tribe to be the provider, to be able to create security, to create shelter, to organize food, whether that was through hunting or farming.
07:34.76
Gareth Pickering
And when you had challenges, you had a group or a circle of men that you would sit with every single day, maybe in the morning having a coffee, maybe in the evening around the fire when the wife and kids had gone to bed.
07:45.66
Gareth Pickering
And you would speak authentically about what was going on for you in your life. If you weren't authentic about that and you were deceptive or not bringing what was truly a love or, you know, wearing a mask, pretending to be somebody else other than who you genuinely were.
08:00.84
Gareth Pickering
that break in trust would have impacted every other man and his family inside that circle. And so there was ah an unwritten code that you would bring what was authentically alive because you knew that by sharing it, you were being able to held in that space. You would be able to be held in that space and be able to share what was up and be able to receive reflection from the other men. You knew that by sharing it, you automatically started to heal. And you knew that when the other men shared things, that gave you the opportunity to be able to hold and support them. And by them sharing,
08:30.94
Gareth Pickering
And being completely honest about what was moving for them in their lives and their relationships, that was the piece that created a very, very strong container, almost like a pillar that supported the tribe. And that included your family.
08:43.91
Gareth Pickering
And then life changed. And then we lived in nuclear families. And then we worked in factories and in corporations. And the time that you spent was pretty much from sunrise until almost sunset, working maybe in a boardroom or in a cubicle where the conversations that you had had nothing to do with your family or protection or your personal challenges or emotions. And in fact, those are actually, they have no space in the boardroom, perhaps where you even work today.
09:08.52
Gareth Pickering
And so what happens is you still have the challenges of everyday life. You have the the pressures of being a man in this world, some of the challenges that come from things like the Me Too movement, the inverted commas, toxic masculinity. I don't like that word because I don't believe max masculinity is toxic. I think we have unhealthy expressions of masculinity.
09:28.39
Gareth Pickering
And I think one of the unhealthy expressions of masculinity that we have is not being completely honest and authentic. The same way that I had been inauthentic to the people that loved and trusted me throughout my entire life when they asked me how I was, not once did I share with them that I was battling sex addiction, not once.
09:46.07
Gareth Pickering
What happens when I don't tell them what's genuinely alive for me? I'm not being honest with the people that I say that I love and trust the most. How am I supposed to build trust with you? If you ask me how I am, I say I'm fine and I have this big monster that I'm battling on my own and I don't share it with you.
10:02.16
Gareth Pickering
That would be like us sitting around the fire I know some huge secret that could potentially kill our entire tribe and I don't bring it as a theme to this potential sacred space that we have as a men's circle.
10:13.53
Gareth Pickering
This is the technology of men's work that I woke up to that day in that circle. From that moment, I knew that this was my gift to bring to the world. This was going to be my mission. I was going to connect as many men as I possibly could to this power of the men's circle and to create spaces for men to show up, not to perform, not to have some heavy story that you need to bring, but to show up as authentically and truthfully as yourself.
10:39.99
Gareth Pickering
I believe that when you are able to articulate what's happening on your inner worlds, when you can genuinely stand in front of somebody that you love and trust and speak about what's going on inside, not a mask, not a story, not what you think I want you to say, what's genuinely allowed for you.
10:55.55
Gareth Pickering
When you speak that out loud through your mouth, you build trust with yourself because you're not being inauthentic. When you build trust with yourself and then you have the courage to step into a space around people that you love or with your partner or your investors and you say to the people that really matter to you, share what's genuinely allowed for you in every single moment without a mask in a space of true authenticity, you build power and trust with them too.
11:22.53
Gareth Pickering
And this is the power of men's work from ah how I understand it. And this opportunity that you have now become a part of that has basically been my life's work since that circle in 2018 is the father, son's brother's tribe.
11:38.01
Gareth Pickering
We create spaces for men to be able to come together and to have a space to be authentically yourself. It's a remembering. It's not got anything to do with anything else.
11:48.61
Gareth Pickering
It's the recognition that you know this stuff. You know the most authentic expression of you exists inside. And when you take the time to show up in these circles, let go of any of the masks and show up with your most authentic expression, you're going to start to reclaim so much power and build so much trust with yourself.
12:05.18
Gareth Pickering
The byproduct of that is more confidence. It's feeling more clear on your path. It's feeling that same feeling that I had when I shared what was heavy for me that day, that feeling of lightness that you're not holding the world's challenges on your own.
12:19.30
Gareth Pickering
It's a safe space to be able to say, fuck, the world's crazy right now. What are we all going to do about it? And to be able to sit together and be surrounded by men who are on a similar path to you that want a better world and um have our own fears and our own worries about what we see in the outer world.
12:37.20
Gareth Pickering
This invitation for you to be part of this tribe is really something that is my life's work. The fact that you're watching this episode or listening to it on a podcast really means the world to me. And if you are a man who is committed to your path, that wants to show up as an integrated father,
12:53.02
Gareth Pickering
that wants to be a purpose-driven leader, someone that is committed to their unique path, that wants to show up as ah as a husband and a lover, have powerful romantic connections, a good sex life, to be able to have a space to be able to share what's authentically allowed for you.
13:09.70
Gareth Pickering
Welcome to Men's Work. This is not something that is very common in the world right now. are Even on my personal development path, I hadn't heard about it until 2018. But I really see that this is the medicine that has got the opportunity and the ability to be able to heal many of the challenges that we see in the world right now. And I believe one of my teachers, a spiritual teacher called Ramda, says,
13:33.11
Gareth Pickering
The only work that we need to do is in the privacy of our own hearts. And this men's circle, the opportunity for you to step into a ah sacred and safe space and to share what's happening in your inner worlds is the healing path that I think many men are looking for.
13:47.89
Gareth Pickering
If you're interested to find out more about the Father's Sons Brothers Tribe, try out the King Circle for free. It's a monthly men's circle that we host the last Sunday of the month. It's open to men of all ages, stages, races,
14:00.79
Gareth Pickering
anybody's available to drop into the circle and to experience the power of what happens when men come together in an intentional way to put down the masks and to show up as your best and most authentic self.
14:12.56
Gareth Pickering
I hope to see you in one of our gatherings soon. Peace, brother.
