Welcome to Grateful Heart Monday, where I start the week off writing about a special piece of gratitude from my life, which for today is for something that occurred last Monday evening at a ManKind Project (MKP) group I once was a regular attendee of.
I think it might be good to start off with a very quick explanation of what MKP actually is, especially if you’ve never heard of it before. In short, it’s a men’s spiritual organization that was founded on the principles of helping men learn to lead lives of integrity, authenticity, and service. Within MKP, after a man embarks upon an initial weekend, known as the New Warrior Training, he usually joins what’s known as an Igroup, which essentially is a circle of men who regularly meet and use the processes from their initial weekend to guide and assist them in healing any of their wounds endured from life.
With that being said, I’ve been a member of MKP since 1999 and have been part of various MKP groups that have met weekly or bi-weekly in the Washington D.C., Boston, and now Detroit/Toledo areas. Currently, the group I regularly attend is one I helped to start in the Toledo area in the past six months or so. But, before I did, the MKP group I was a member of actually resided in Ann Arbor and met on Monday nights near the University of Michigan.
There, I grew quite close to a number of men from that group, each of whom helped me to accomplish much on my spiritual journey during the course of almost two years of time. Unfortunately, I became at odds with a few of those men during the summer of 2017 over the way some of the processes were being run and abruptly left the group, along with a few others, early that fall because of it, solely to start a new group much closer to home.
Regrettably, my abrupt departure from that group though wasn’t what MKP stood for and actually put me out of integrity with both myself and them. You see, when one leaves an MKP group for whatever their reason, they always attend one final meeting to officially check out, giving others in the group a chance to process their departure and to also officially close the door in a clean fashion.
It took me almost 10 months to find the courage to return to that group for one more meeting in the hopes that I could cleanly check out, get back in integrity, and provide some healing for men who had been affected by my hasty action. And last Monday night was when that took place.
At first, it didn’t necessarily go as I had hoped. The two men I had been most at odds with last summer appeared to be even angrier with me and said my presence there was only creating more disruption for the group. When the two of them opted to not stay that evening for the meeting because of me being there, I felt an incredible sense of shame at how things might have been different if I had just stuck around a little longer last summer and used the MKP processes to work through the issues I had with the group.
Nevertheless, for the nine men who remained, there was quite an amount of unrest after that. Some suggested cancelling the meeting that evening, while others said I should do my check out and head home. Thankfully though, when I offered to do an amends and work through my out-of-integrity actions, they all chose to stay and hear me out.
Over the course of the hour that followed, I utilized processes that I’ve only found exist in the MKP realm to get back into integrity. Through them, the nine men there were able to accept my amends and in turn, help me through a piece of spiritual work that left me feeling supported, loved, and embraced, which is precisely the gratitude I have to start this week off with.
These men could have easily asked me to leave, or opted to leave themselves and not have a meeting at all that night, but they each remained and did their own spiritual work to forgive me for my hasty action that had left things in their group in a slight state of chaos last Fall.
Having nine brothers warmly embrace me in my tears, and honor me for walking through my fears to get back into integrity with them, was such a huge blessing. And while I’m saddened that the two men I was most at odds with have chosen to not forgive me at this time, I remain hopeful that one day they will. Until then though, I still have an incredible amount of gratitude for the brothers of this Ann Arbor MKP group for choosing to look beyond any judgments they may have had of me and see me instead as not only their brother, but also their friend…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
