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Join CORE: 4-week training HERE
While each man’s story is unique, we share many similar struggles. We want to deepen our connection to our purpose in life, strengthen our bonds and relationships, and increase our ability to be present and aware, especially when faced with adversity.
Your path has been one of success and challenges, of highs and lows. You’ve navigated the complexities of modern life, balancing professional ambition with personal fulfillment. Maybe there’s a voice within seeking more – more depth, more connection, more authenticity. Maybe there’s a profound amount of pain that pushed you to finally reach out, and brought you here. Men like you, from all walks of life, come to MELD seeking a space where their experiences are not just heard, but deeply understood, valued, and shared.
The journey to effective leadership is both a personal and a collective endeavor. For over 30 years, we’ve developed our approach, crafting a path that combines the wisdom of experience with the clarity of scientific understanding. MELD is not just another leadership program – we’re a movement towards emotional fluency and relational depth.
Shared Journeys: Meet men who share your aspirations and understand your struggles. Here, every story matters, and every voice adds to the richness of our community.
Beyond Conventional Paths: You’ve tried the usual routes to personal growth and found them lacking, or the relief temporary. MELD offers something different – a journey framed in science and backed by decades of experiential refinement.
Real Growth, Real Connections: It’s not just about attending sessions or programs; it’s about genuine transformation and building lasting, authentic relationships from having an emotionally safe space to be yourself.
You Are Good Enough: It’s common to feel that while others succeed, the same paths might not unfold for us. At MELD, we understand this doubt. But here, you’re equipped with tools uniquely tailored for your journey and a supportive community to practice alongside. We’re here to affirm that this journey is for you, as much as it is for anyone.
No. The originator of EVRYMAN, Owen Marcus, who developed all the programs and trainings for EVRYMAN is now building MELD to provide an improved set of offerings. The key strategies that made EVRYMAN a powerful approach are integrated into MELD.
After developing and leading three cohorts of EVRYMAN’s professional training, we saw what was needed to take it to a new level. Our goal is to give men more than skills that they can’t get anywhere else, but also training how to turn those skills into a successful career as other graduates of our previous trainings have done.
I build containers for people to have profound, expanding experiences. I’ve worked 20 years in experiential and event production in North America and Asia, from festivals and concerts to retreats and conferences. I have always been obsessed with the elements of how something works, how an experience can be more than witnessed, but felt, and remembered. I get consumed in the “how”, the nuts and bolts, the guts, the machinery and mechanisms.
Almost a decade ago I began to seek quieter spaces, and in doing so I discovered layers of myself that were going completely unaddressed – that I was frequently at the whim of parts of me that I was not even aware of. So I set out on a journey and before long I faced the question “where is all the stuff for men?”
I was introduced to Owen’s work by a friend, and promptly started a men’s group. Astounded at the rate and depth of my transformation, a couple of years into my journey I began working alongside Owen to help deliver this work to the world.
For me it’s simple: When I feel better, I’m able to do better. When I do better, my family starts to do better. When I have more to give to my family, friends, and community, then I’m making my own small, positive impact on history. When each man begins to feel better, think about what kind of world that will be.
And so my mission is to clear a path for men to find this work and use it to transform their lives.
Growing up, I watched many men in my life suffer in silence. Their inability to feel emotions and share ultimately led them to divorces, loneliness, addiction, estrangement, and chronic illnesses. Luckily, I had male mentors in my life who demonstrated and taught me self-acceptance and courageous vulnerability.
I knew I wanted to work with men after being an educator for 10 years. There is a shortage of positive male role-models in young people’s lives today, and I want that to change. It quickly became my purpose to help men heal. Men “doing the work” not only benefits our young people but also our community, society, government, economy, and so on.
I am the man I am today because of the men who have held brave spaces for me. And today, I get to train men to be that man for others.
In the last 17 years, I’ve helped hundreds of men worldwide transform their lives through coaching, men’s groups, retreats, and online programs. There’s a leader in every man, and at MELD, we’re training men to be emotionally fit, somatically aware, and live with vitality.
I resisted getting into this work. It was only that my pain was greater than the fear that got me to start my first men’s group in 1995 in my clinic in Scottsdale, AZ.
The conventional approach to men’s groups began to feel inadequate for the deep, transformative work I wanted. After completing my straw bale home in the forests of Idaho, I decided to take all I learned and developed in my practice that I knew worked to create a new model. It was a leap of faith, and to my surprise, when I reached out to eleven men to join by the middle of 2005, we had a thriving group.
What began as the Sandpoint Men’s Group (SMG) grew beyond my wildest expectations. Nineteen years later, it boasts over 400 alumni and more than 50 active members. This journey led to the birth of EVRYMAN and now MELD, each step an evolution of my initial vision.
Throughout the years with SMG, EVRYMAN, and now MELD, I’ve encountered challenges that have shaped me in unforeseen ways, fostering immense personal growth. Like many of our men, looking back, I now see the deep satisfaction of what being myself and caring for others can do in aiding other men to transform. I was given a precious gift I love sharing with others. Some part of me continues to be surprised by how other men want to grow and how much fun it can be when we do it together.
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