Three decades
finding what
actually works.
You’ve built the career. Maybe the family. By most measures, you’re doing well. And yet there’s a version of you that hasn’t fully shown up yet — in your relationship, your work, your own skin. That feeling isn’t weakness. It’s information.
You’ve tried to think your way through it.
You’ve read the right books. Done some therapy, maybe. Tried the productivity systems and the morning routines. You understand yourself, intellectually — probably better than most men do. You can name the patterns. You can trace them back.
And still. The irritability shows up when you don’t want it to. You go quiet when someone needs you to stay present. The connection you want with your partner, your kids, your own sense of purpose slips just out of reach.
You know what you want. Getting there is another thing entirely.
Here’s what most approaches miss: the problem usually isn’t insight. It’s physiology. Before your mind can change, your nervous system has to change.
“Regulation precedes insight. The body is often the most workable entry point — especially for men.”
It’s not your psychology.
It’s your physiology.
When we can’t express ourselves or take action, evolution does something efficient and costly: it disconnects us.
When stress keeps coming and there’s no real outlet, we adapt. We endure. We get good at appearing fine. Over time the disconnection becomes the norm — we stop noticing we’re in a low-grade survival state. We’ve become so practiced at managing the pressure that we’ve forgotten what it feels like not to carry it.
The body keeps the score, as the researchers say. But it also keeps the solution. When the nervous system finally learns safety — in relationship, in community, in the body itself — the things that seemed stuck begin to move. Not because you finally figured something out. Because something in you finally got to relax.
Most men can answer a question about how their body feels before they can answer one about how they feel emotionally. That’s not a deficit. It’s a doorway. And it’s where this work begins — lowering the chronic stress load that shapes your behavior, narrows your emotional access, and keeps you defended in the moments you most want to be present.
MELD: A physiology-first approach
to men’s development.
The method follows the body’s own logic. Regulate first. Then deepen relationship. Then let community reinforce and stabilize the change. It’s not top-down. It doesn’t start with telling you who to be. It starts with what’s already happening in your body and builds from there.
Start with physiology
Stress lives in the body before it shows up in behavior. Lowering allostatic load is the first move — everything else follows from there.
Real relational contact
Growth doesn’t happen in isolation. Repair, honesty, and real connection change what the nervous system expects from other people.
Community as medicine
The group is not just support. It’s a mechanism. Belonging is biologically consequential — it changes how you regulate, heal, and become.
I didn’t start this work because I had answers.
“I started it because I had a level of pain I could no longer ignore.”
In 1995, I was carrying more than I knew. I had clinical experience, training in somatic psychotherapy, and a successful integrated medical clinic in Scottsdale. I had studied with Ron Kurtz and Peter Levine — the people rebuilding how we understand the body’s role in change. I knew a great deal, intellectually, about healing.
But knowing and experiencing are different countries. My own pain, long managed and avoided, finally demanded something more than understanding. It demanded me to actually go through it — with other men present.
I built a straw bale house in the woods of North Idaho and started the Sandpoint Men’s Group in my living room. I had no idea it would become what it became. I just knew it was working.
The work, in numbers
From a living room in North Idaho
to a global method.
The Sandpoint Men’s Group
Over 500 alumni and 60 active members. What happened in that room over years became the foundation for everything that followed — the first long-running evidence-based men’s group in North America.
From EVRYMAN to MELD
Men’s Emotional Leadership Development. A physiology-first, embodied, relational, and communal approach to men’s development — studied by researchers, presented at the American Psychological Association, and taught to coaches, therapists, and facilitators across the world.
Couples Intensives & Retreats
Collaborated with EFT therapists trained in Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy to lead couples intensives and retreats internationally. Relationship problems are often physiology and attachment events before they’re communication problems.
NEUROS
Organizations like Google X saw firsthand how nervous-system regulation and authentic connection change what teams are capable of. NEUROS brings body-based practices and authentic connection into corporate environments where chronic stress and disconnection quietly cost everyone.
Thirty years of serious, specific work.
Owen has dyslexia and Asperger’s Syndrome. He mentions both not as background detail but as essential to how he works: he sees patterns others miss, attends to what’s happening in a room rather than relying solely on what people say, and builds frameworks from observation rather than convention.
He lives in the woods of North Idaho, where this work began.
- Original member, United States Association for Body Psychotherapy (USABP)
- Member, Division 51, American Psychological Association — Society for the Psychology of Men & Masculinities
- Presenter, APA Annual Meeting
- Trained with Ron Kurtz (Hakomi) and Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing) in the 1970s and ’80s
- Integrates Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) in couples work
- Co-founder, MELD and NEUROS
- Work studied by leading researchers; programs featured in national media
The problem is often the model,
not the man.
If you’re at the point where you want something different — not just something better — I’d like to introduce you to the work.