I’m so grateful to John Ehrhart for suggesting and being lead manifester for our podcast series, Restoration Dialogues. As it says in the introduction to the show, “Welcome to Restoration Dialogues, where ideas and the felt experience of being human come together to support personal and collective healing—the restoration of ourselves and our society.” Going beyond concepts and the intellect, we aim to cultivate the experience of interbeing, which we understand to be the foundation of peacemaking and the key to our survival.

As I post this we have four shows available, including the most recent with Tom Daly of the Men’s Leadership Alliance. Tom has been doing rites of passage and “men’s work” for a long time. He spoke of the serious consequences for society when it fails to initiate its adolescent boys into adulthood (consequences that are all too clear in the ignorance and violence that permeates our society).

The responsibility for initiation lies with men—men who take it upon themselves to address their own wounding and are thus able to step into true forms of maturity and elderhood. These are the men who can and are, in many places, initiating the youth.

So many of us men (and women) still yearn for blessing from our fathers—to hear from their lips and feel in their love toward us that we are okay just as we are. When that blessing doesn’t come, a deep wound is created. Men will tend to try to heal that wound with all sorts of attempts to make ourselves feel better at the expense of others. Women will often try to heal the wound by being lovable to, and loved by, the men in their lives, sometimes at tremendous cost to themselves.

As Tom points out in the interview, anywhere there is war and violence, we’re going to find men who have not been initiated into true adulthood and maturity—men hungry for power and desperate to prove themselves. So many men caught up in a tragic attempt at self-initiation—trying to do alone what needs to come from community members in ritual spaces.

Healthy initiations and rites of passage are key practices in creating a nonviolent world. Communities everywhere need the unique visions and the wisdom, need the energy and loyalty to the common good that only initiated adults can bring. I’m deeply grateful for organizations such as the Men’s Leadership Alliance and the Mankind Project for offering boys and men opportunities for initiation and growth.

As Tom also notes in the podcast, it’s vitally important for every man to be a part of a men’s group. I know how restorative this is from my own experience. I knew so little about the vulnerable side of men before joining a men’s group a few years ago. It’s been an essential part of my healing to learn that we share the same fears and feelings, and to witness the beauty of men who redefine what masculine power is and live from their hearts.

With violence being the core problem we face, any work, any practices, that address the root causes of violence, are practices we need to survive.