May Micro-Blog

The big event for this month has been delivering a Council 2 ‘Going Deeper with the Way of Council’ training for my dear brothers in The Male Journey (Home | The Male Journey ).

One year in the planning, the weekend seamlessly wove together Male Journey’s annual ‘Stokers Gathering’ - a coming together of the men who facilitate regular local Council circles for men across the UK - with a Council 2 training. We spent the weekend in a wonderful and well fitted-out Quaker hall in a small Lancashire village.

As a Male Journey local group Stoker myself for over 16 years now, it’s always a joy to meet up with these guys, and a privilege to be part of them / us deepening our appreciation of the profound wisdom of Council, and sharpening our skills as ones who create the right conditions and intention for powerful spaces of healing, growth and transformation to occur.

In Council 2 we draw on the stories and the scars of the participants every bit as much as on the knowledge and experience of the trainer. What emerges is always unique, potent, and special.

This year we were able to welcome a brother-from-another-men’s-movement - a man who leads Council-based men’s circles with a different organisation, based in Germany. Everyone benefitted from the added richness of fresh perspectives, and we all properly bonded in and through Council, that most human and universal of practices.

We were building on the foundations of a well-attended Council 1 training 12 months earlier, and as with previous Male Journey events, a crew of volunteer cooks stepped up to keep us (very) well-fed through the weekend, and trustees and ‘task-circle’ members took care of most of the planning and logistics.

We even found time for the customary ‘Saturday Night Social’ where we took turns delighting and amusing each other with small gifts of poetry, song, music, and jokes. (And yes, I did take a guitar, and no, this time I did not murder a Led Zeppelin classic, I brought one of my own gently compositions).

It’s always a good event when you know you need to allocate 15-20 minutes before you leave on the Sunday, just to hug everybody! Here’s to whatever we cook up together in 2026.

Here are some reflections on the course by some of those who took part:

“The work in triads was both a huge learning and a powerful affirmation of ‘how I show up’ in the work. The richness of the experience will stay with me for a long time to come. The in-depth revisiting of the four intentions truly reinforced the wisdom of the Way of Council as a sacred encounter. Naming the highest standards …”

“…gratitude to you Dave. I felt you were a true alchemist by the way in which you imperceptibly drew us together and held us…or through you ‘Council’ held us… in a strong container. From this I deduce that you had a very strong Intention, which helped us all to trust the process. This in turn set us free to speak our truth. Weaving in and out of teaching and then living the teaching in forms of Council created bonds of brotherhood that I could hardly have imagined possible in such a short period of time.”

“Dave… has a steady and grounded style that sets the group at ease and has a deep experience and humanity that he brings, which facilitated the group feeling held and safe to share and be vulnerable. Doing that, whilst making sure we all learnt what we needed to was pretty impressive…”

“…a deep dive into a very experiential training that consolidates everything you have learnt about Way of Council and leaves you with an exciting and fresh enthusiasm for the practice to take out into the world.”