PRIME Retreat: Oct 22-25, Northeast US: Learn More
PRIME Retreat: Oct 22-25, Northeast US: Learn More
Build the capacity to stay present when life gets difficult.
PRIME is a four-day, body-based training for men who function well, carry a lot, and still lose access to clarity, connection, or choice under pressure.
Packages from $2,350, includes meals
You do not have to become someone else. Just more of yourself.
Gain more reliable access to the qualities you already have — especially when stress, conflict, or uncertainty makes them harder to reach.
Through four days of embodied practice, you can begin to:
Recognize what is happening in your body before you react, withdraw, or shut down.
Stay more grounded and connected during difficult conversations.
Understand the protective patterns shaping your relationships and choices.
Access emotions without becoming overwhelmed or losing control.
Move through doubt and overthinking with greater clarity and direction.
Receive support instead of carrying everything alone.
Build more honest, trustworthy connections with other men.
Return home with practical tools for your relationships, work, family, and daily life.
Sadly, we cannot remove pressure from your life (alas), however, you can expand your capacity to meet stress with more presence, choice, and connection.
slow down enough to hear what your body and heart have been trying to tell you for years – what truly matters and why you’re here.
Sense and name what’s actually happening in your body instead of getting lost in your head. Build the confidence to stay present in moments that once made you shut down or lash out.
Discover how your patterns of protection show up in relationships and communication—and practice new ways of relating that actually work.
PRIME gives you tools to recognize when you’re in fight, flight, or freeze – and how to come back to center fast. Experience what real calm feels like in your nervous system and how to return to it under pressure.
The PRIME Retreat offers something fundamentally different from all other men’s programs:
Our science-based somatic approach bypasses traditional methods to access deep patterns living in your nervous system – you formed these patterns out of survival, yet parts of them no longer serve you.
We teach practical tools you will start using immediately to build resilience against stress and burnout, putting down what you no longer need to carry.
Rather than performing or intellectualizing about change, we help you access and release what’s built up underneath – the stored experiences, tensions, and patterns that have been interrupting your natural biology.
The Thyme is an 85-acre natural retreat center nestled between Connecticut and Massachusetts, in the heart of the Berkshire Mountains.
Only 2 1/2 hours from NYC and Boston.
Owen Marcus, a pioneer in men’s emotional wellness, brings over four decades of groundbreaking experience to guide individuals toward profound personal growth and emotional resilience.
Mike Sagun is an educator, SEP, and somatic men’s coach. in the last 18 years, Mike has helped hundreds of men worldwide transform their lives through coaching, retreats, and online programs.
Duncan Rich is a father, husband, and somatic men’s coach. Driven by a people-centric view of sustainability, Duncan believes that by raising emotionally resilient children, we are able to shape the future.
Immerse yourself in a series of targeted somatic exercises designed to sharpen your body’s sensory acuity. Learn to recognize and interpret subtle physical signals, enhancing your ability to respond to your body’s needs. This foundational session sets the stage for deep, embodied self-discovery throughout the retreat.
Delve into the complexities of your autonomic nervous system. Gain practical skills to identify and manage fight, flight, or freeze responses in yourself and others, to connect more deeply with the world around you. Confront long-held patterns and beliefs, paving the way for profound personal breakthroughs.
Under careful guidance, learn to embody and confront your internal blocks. Awaken and integrate dissociated parts of yourself, completing experiences that have been interrupted. Reclaim your innate power and rediscover your life’s purpose with renewed clarity and vigor. Bring previously disconnected aspects of yourself into harmony with your whole being.
Honor the journey you’ve undergone. Reflect on your experiences with new insights. Practice sustainable tools and resources designed to support your continued growth and evolution long after the retreat. Leave with a renewed sense of purpose and a practical roadmap for ongoing personal development.
George Faller & MELD Co-Founder, Owen Marcus
Men can be willing, insightful, and committed to change—and still lose access to what they know when pressure rises.
PRIME gives men an embodied, relational setting in which they can recognize their protective patterns and practice staying connected to themselves and others. The work can support your own development as a practitioner or complement the individual work you are already doing with a male client.
You can’t guide a man to a depth you haven’t experienced yourself.
PRIME gives therapists, coaches, and other healing professionals a firsthand experience of the MELD Method. You get to receive, participating first as a man doing your own work — transcending your role as observer, clinician, or facilitator.
Through four days of body-based practice, group work, and guided integration, you can:
Strengthen your ability to remain grounded and present under pressure.
Recognize protective patterns as they arise in your own body and relationships.
Experience how embodied group work helps men access emotions that may remain unavailable in conversation alone.
Develop a more practical understanding of how men regulate, connect, withdraw, and repair.
Build an experiential foundation for MELD’s Integrated Training.
PRIME is the suggested prerequisite for the MELD Integrated Training.
The Integrated Training is a 2-part, sixteen-month personal and professional program in somatic work, relational skill, emotional leadership, and group facilitation for men who want to deepen their own capacity and learn to lead other men.
Some men understand their patterns but still cannot access a different response when conflict, criticism, uncertainty, or emotional intensity arises in real life.
They may have made meaningful progress in therapy while continuing to shut down, overthink, become reactive, withdraw from connection, or carry everything alone. This is usually not due to a lack of insight or willingness on their part, nor is it a lack of skill on your part. The man’s protective system has learned to take over before a new choice becomes available. And that system is more than intellectual, it is physical.
PRIME gives men a structured environment to practice something different through body awareness, relational exercises, calibrated challenge, and connection with other men.
PRIME can give a client:
Practice staying present when discomfort or emotional intensity arises.
A community of peers with whom he can practice honesty, connection, support, and accountability.
Opportunities to recognize patterns that become visible through real-time group interactions.
Space away from his usual roles and responsibilities to focus on his growth.
New experiences and observations he can bring back into his ongoing therapeutic work.
Support integrating what he is learning into his relationships, family, work, and daily life.
PRIME may be appropriate for a client who:
Is engaged in meaningful personal growth and wants more opportunities to practice.
Struggles to remain emotionally present with his partner, children, or other important people.
Has difficulty recognizing, communicating, or staying connected to what is happening inside him.
Relies heavily on control, overwork, withdrawal, numbing, or self-reliance.
Wants deeper access to purpose, confidence, emotional awareness, and meaningful male connection.
Would benefit from practicing alongside other men in a structured, facilitated environment.
Is stable enough to participate safely and responsibly in experiential group work.
PRIME is designed to complement therapy, not replace it. It is an educational and experiential training, and is not psychotherapy, mental-health treatment, or crisis care. Participants register and complete MELD’s intake process directly, so you do not need to share private clinical information with us.
*Opens a prewritten email in your email application. Add your client’s address, personalize the message if you wish, and send.
I’m sharing a program that may complement the work we’ve been doing together. MELD PRIME is a four-day, body-based retreat training for men who want to become more grounded under pressure, understand their protective patterns, and build greater capacity for emotional awareness, relationships, purpose, and meaningful connection with other men. I think it may be worth looking into and deciding whether it feels relevant for you.
You can learn more here:
Listen to George Faller, LMFT, EFT talk with Laurie Watson, PhD, LMFT, LCMHC about his experience at our PRIME Retreat. (Contains explicit language and lots of ads.)
A 2024 study published in the American Psychological Association’s (APA) journal, Psychology of Men & Masculinities, tracked the progress of a group of 14 men in order to explore the efficacy of the MELD Method.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-50444-001?doi=1
The study finds that men who participate in MELD’s programs experience:
The study reported men feeling and managing their emotions better, experiencing more positive affect and joy. They became less reactive and more centered.
Participants became more attuned to their emotions, needs, and patterns of behavior.
Participants experienced growth in their interpersonal relationships, platonic and romantic, feeling more connected and safe with others. They reported being more authentic and able to share their feelings openly.
Men noted being more adept at resolving conflicts in their relationships.
Participants developed a more compassionate relationship with themselves, becoming less judgmental and more present. They learned to advocate for themselves, set boundaries, and ask for what they need.
Men gained clarity on their personal values, as opposed to adhering to normative expectations. This led to more purposeful living and integrity.
Many men’s retreats inspire, but few help you rewire your operating system to discard old patterns and create new ones.
At MELD PRIME you’ll practice body-based skills to discharge stress, express cleanly, and leave with an integration plan you’ll actually use. It’s a reset for your nervous system and your relationship to life.
4 days of experiential training in our science-based, somatic method for shedding the protective patterns our nervous system has created for us, and bringing lost, disconnected, or frozen parts of ourself back online.
We slow down, teach, practice in triads and small groups, spend time in nature, eat good food, and of course relax and integrate.
The word “soma” is Greek for “body”, “somatic” simply means “of the body”. What that means is that we work with the signals and wisdom of the body to get “underneath” behavior patterns and beliefs. Intellectually understanding what isn’t working is great, but it doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to make sustainable changes. That’s because our patterns live in our body and are reenforced by our nervous system.
Consider that 80% of information in your system flows upwards from your body to your brain [1]. Whenever something happens in our world, our body is first to react – first we have a physical experience. Then, we have an emotional experience, and THEN we have a cognitive, intellectual experience.
Yet we live in a “top-down” world where our lives are determined and dictated from the mind. While the mind is a very powerful tool, it cannot be the only voice represented in the conversation. Understanding why we do what we do is only part of the puzzle. The mind can often function as the biggest distraction from the root of an issue due to its power to rationalize, as the nervous system instinctively works to protect us from feeling discomfort.
[1] Porges, S. (2007). The polyvagal perspective. Biological Psychology, 74(2), 116-143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2006.06.009
The MELD Method is a science-backed process for slowing down, and safely and effectively confronting what’s been hidden in our unconscious.
Created by Owen Marcus in 1995, The MELD Method is grounded in 7+ decades of research in how stress impacts the body, including the work of Ron Kurtz (Hakomi), Dr. Stephen Porges (Polyvagal Theory), Sue Johnson (Emotionally Focused Therapy), Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing), as well as Attachment Theory, Internal Family Systems, breathwork, and many other lineages.
The process is designed to holistically restore a man’s natural ability to live in alignment with his deepest purpose, feel profoundly fulfilled in his relationships, and contribute to the world in ways that are truly meaningful.
MELD is a health and education organization serving men and addressing the challenges men face – from a man’s perspective. We work with men who are ready to do their own inner work to achieve amazing results that traditional therapy cannot offer.
MELD is not a boot camp that beats you up and humiliates you, nor do we engage in new-age, mythopoetic concepts of what masculinity is and isn’t. We don’t offer prescriptive advice or one-size-fits-all solutions. Our approach honors the unique story, struggles, and aspirations of every man.
Nope. This state is a result of your nervous system, which is designed to protect you, working perfectly.
Here’s what’s happened: When you were young, you had many experiences that were too big for you to process. You did not have the skills, the model, or the safety to fully express and process your experience, and as a result, part of you was left incomplete. In order to protect you from the discomfort of incompletion, your nervous system, started to withdraw you from connection to what you were feeling.
This is all of us.
This became a pattern, because we had to. Now that we’re adults, those patterns have features that no longer serve us.
With careful facilitation, a protected container, and a supportive group, we can shed the elements that are holding us back, while keeping all of the positives that we’ve built for ourselves.
Men regularly tell us that they get more from working with us than they’ve received from decades of therapy.
That may sound like a brag, but it’s a fact.
Science-Rooted Approach: At the heart of MELD’s methodology is a deep commitment to a science-backed approach. By weaving in over five decades of physiological research and the therapies that emerged from this extensive study, MELD’s methods and trainings are not just innovative but also grounded in proven scientific principles. This commitment to research-based strategies provides a solid foundation for all of MELD’s programs, guaranteeing reliability and effectiveness.
Body-Based: MELD’s somatic (body-based) approach speaks to men’s physicality and tendency towards action. MELD addresses your Somaware™, the system with which you perceive and translate the unconscious signals of the body into conscious, actionable information, focusing on the impacts of stress and other experiences on your physiology. Somaware™ is the bridge between the physical sensation and non-physical concept, our shorthand for the system that makes the unconscious –> conscious.
This body-based approach recognizes the intricate connection between the physical body and emotional well-being. By employing techniques that directly engage with the body’s innate wisdom, aka “getting out of your head and into your body”, MELD facilitates a deeper experience, leading to emotional mastery, peak performance, deeper connections, and the capacity for profound personal growth.
Community: MELD often works with men in groups, helping them break out of patterns of isolation that society has forced us into, building deep bonds and creating community. This community focus allows individuals to learn, grow, and heal within a supportive network, as our biology demands. The shared experiences within the community foster a sense of belonging and provide a safe space for open communication and mutual support. This aspect of MELD’s ethos taps into the human need for connection, leveraging the journey of personal development to be more enriching and powerful.
Causal Orientation: Rather than merely addressing the effects of personal challenges, MELD focuses on their causes. This approach identifies and addresses how the root issues have manifested in unconscious protective patterns, leading to more effective and lasting change. By understanding and tackling the underlying causes of challenges, MELD helps men achieve sustainable growth that builds on itself.
MELD’s unique blend of science, body awareness, community engagement, and a focus on causality creates a holistic impact that transcends traditional wellness and growth methods. MELD men experience not just temporary relief or superficial changes but deep, lasting transformation that permeates all aspects of their lives.
Enjoyable, Supportive Venues: Long before MELD and throughout our leadership at EVRYMAN, our team designed and led immersive trainings at retreat centers such as Kripalu, Omega, 1440 Multiversity, Joshua Tree’s Campbell House, Race Brook, Thyme, and Menla. Those places weren’t chosen for prestige. They were chosen because environment changes the work.
Men go deeper when the setting supports them. A space that is beautiful, quiet, and held with care lets the nervous system settle. Once the body settles, the man can follow.
We’ve learned that emotional safety is only one part of real transformation. The physical space matters just as much. It needs to feel good—comfortable, grounded, spacious, in nature, and alive. When a room or landscape holds you rather than jars you, you relax quicker, open easier, and connect more honestly with yourself and with each other.
And yes, it also has to be enjoyable. This work isn’t about deprivation or confrontation. It’s about creating the conditions where men can be real, drop the armor, and have the kind of conversations that actually change something. Authentic connection happens when the environment invites it.
