About You… building the life YOU want

This blog is about serving men, and the women who love men. Supporting you, with what you need, to create the life you want, is my goal. Through stories, research, personal and professional experience, and how-to guides I hope to give you what you need to be that man you dream of being.

We’re leaving behind the duality of being macho OR sensitive, and entering into the new place of relaxed power. We are no longer just hard-ass men; nor are we men trying to be emotionally real by solely modeling women. We are teaching each other that a man can be strong and open simultaneously. We are teaching each other how to succeed as Remarkable Men.

From my adventure, and those of other men I’ve had the privilege to work with, I’ve learned something vital: more than anything, what holds us back from being the men we want to be is that we never learned what it means to be a mature man, a Remarkable Man.

We didn’t learn it because, first, it wasn’t taught to us or modeled for us.

Second, even if it was, we were often too busy just surviving.

I am here to tell you, if I can learn and change, so can you. I am here to show you the simple ways to do it, and support you in doing it. I want to give you the support I often didn’t have. I won’t lie; I’m selfish. Helping you get what I didn’t get fills a void in me. So, do me a favor–let me help you build the life you want.

Daily I post on social media interesting stories related to men, women and relationships. One good place to see them is on my Google+ account.

Ken Solin, Dan Doty and I are developing the nonprofit Men Corps to further not just the new paradigm of masculinity, but to create fun ways for men to be that man they want to be. Look for an exciting video project we are assembling. We will want you to participate.

Owen Marcus, MA

One of the most prominent symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome is social immaturity. Needless to say, having Asperger’s (and dyslexia along with dysprarxia) put me well behind the curve growing up.  In those days, no one wrote or taught about overcoming Asperger’s. So during my 35-year journey of healing, I had to be my own beta tester on how to grow up and be a man. I literally had to forge my own path, with no signposts or guidance. With all that trial and error behind me, figuring out what moves people forward and holds them back, learning how to get men where they want to go, I now help other men on their journeys to being the men THEY want to be.

The rebuild

When you have to take something apart to rebuild it, you learn a lot more about it than from just observing it. To survive, and then succeed, I needed to disassemble my mind and my body. I dealt with every component of who I was. Like a man breaking down an engine to rebuild it, I broke down what made me strange and immature. I learned things I didn’t particularly want to know about myself–but I was able to rebuild myself as who I wanted to be.

Over the years I began to see universal patterns beyond my own experience. I began to see short cuts to deep, sustainable change. I started to apply these skills to helping other men, and amazingly, they worked for them, too! My suffering as a geek growing up suddenly had value for others. Men were creating the lives they wanted by following the path I laid out with their help.

Education

Along the way I picked up a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and a Masters in Health Education focused on Body Centered Psychotherapy (an active  member of the Untied States Association for Body Psychotherapy). I operated a leading holistic medical clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, for 17 years, while doing corporate training and teaching classes in, and running a company for, Mindfulness Stress Reduction. I was doing all this while operating a Rolfing and coaching practice. I worked with more than three thousand clients and students, and they were all my ongoing field testers for refining my approach to deep and simple change.

In my postgraduate training with some of the masters in body-centered psychotherapy, mindfulness, PTSD therapy, and shamanism, I learned skills that aren’t taught in any university. In healing my problems, I learned how to break out of the boxes of what our culture expects a man to be. In working with men, I learned what it means to be a man.

Today as a Sculptor of Change I work as:

An Artist – with Rolfing I literally sculpt new bodies and as catalyst for creating a new life
An Entrepreneur – my career is a history of repeatedly developing cutting edge businesses
A man – practicing what I teach, I am again reinventing myself, working toward my new, daring vision of the man I want to be

My passions

Micro-communities

If you read my posts you know I’m passionate about men’s groups and their power to simply teach men what they didn’t get to learn. Well, that passion expanded into teaching everyone how to develop their own micro-community. As we progressed from a primitive, to an agrarian, to an industrial, then to a communication culture we progressively lost deep connections with people. The experience of a micro-community beautiful brings back what we often didn’t realize we were missing.

Man Camp Weekends

Out of our passion for micro-communities Ken Solin and I developed Man Camp Weekends as an immersion into 48 hours of a men’s group. For one weekend a men gather in a beautiful location to experience the healing and benefits of sitting with and enjoying other men. Men move their lives forward in ways they never could alone. They experience the fun being real gives them. These men also have the foundation to start their own micro-community of men.

Empowered Empathy

There is a believe as men we aren’t emotional – that’s bs. We are. How it shows up can be different than it would for women. Our Emotional Intelligence needs to include a Masculine Intelligence. Being a man for years had a negative connotation, as if men had to apologize for being a man.

Good men are realizing that being a man empowered by his empathy benefits everyone. He knows that how he expresses his emotion may be different than his partner. He learned that as much as he needs to listen to her feeling he needs to listen and express his. He learned that women are attracted to a man who not only listens and expresses, but takes a stance for his emotions.

For more on these topics check out my posting on Ashoka’s Changemakers site.

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Check my LinkedIn profile with its resume and “recommendations”. For more bio details go to this page.

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