It was 2009. I was burnt out, depressed and broken. Like Icarus, I’d persistently flown too close to the sun. Time to come down.

“It might take 10 years Duncan” a colleague at the college I worked at said to me then. Well.. lots of insight there. Whatever we wish to call our nervous breakdowns, burn outs, heartbreaks, spiritual crises etc, my experiences that followed this first ‘descent’ took me to places I’d never imagined.

My colleague, seeing me back then, had the insight to see that ‘Project Duncan’ might take a long period of unravelling and re-organising. My identity as an inhabitant of a male body was one of the pieces that needed attention!

A Thames Valley lower/middle class white boy, I experienced many of the taboos of a modern, westernised construct of masculinity - hide yourself away when it hurts, be fearful of uncomfortable feelings, don’t show vulnerability, never admit weakness, and at all costs stay on that bus that tells you you’re important and that your life is about you..

I wanted to explore questions. I remember at one painful point early on in my 40s, that I would commit to feeling, and feeling it all. It was a necessary period of walking in the wilderness. Then when I came across the mystic and poet St John of the Cross, what spoke to me about the ‘dark night of the soul’ was how this ‘night’ is an opportunity to burn away:

“the deep roots of our woundedness, roots we cannot actively reach and eradicate”

(Dark nights of the soul btw are not exclusive to being any particular age, and may continue night after night, year after year.. as long as they are needed..!)

Looking back, these beautiful projects were joyful, funny, sometimes intense, exciting times where groups of men, seekers all, were brave enough to gather and express their vulnerability, their strengths and tenderness; to explore their competitiveness and access their playfulness, for the sake of discovering more about what it meant to them to be a man.