goodmedicine

A dear friend of mine - Sukhema (aka Larry Butler) - and I recently came up with the idea of putting together a workshop on Men & Friendship for a bunch of potentially interested guys. The invitation we put out was:

Sukhema & James warmly invite you to a two-day residential workshop we're facilitating on Friendship ... Friendship is clearly so central for wellbeing, resilience & even life expectancy.  We'd like to explore three overlapping areas - background facts, personal journeys, and experiential exercises.  For facts, we'll consider why Robin Dunbar, emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford, states that "Friendship is the single most important factor influencing our health, well-being, and happiness."  See his recent paper Why friendship and loneliness affect our health for more on this. For personal journeys, we'll look at our own experiences of friendship over our lives, at how we feel about our friendship networks now, and at how we would like them to evolve in the future.  And for experiential exercises, we'll focus particularly on deepening emotional connection and how we can support this crucial form of 'soul food' in our lives.

James & Sukhema have been friends for over forty years and for some decades we've been getting together for about 24 hours every 3 months to review and plan our lives.  At our most recent meet-up, we had the idea of facilitating a workshop on friendship - firstly as a pilot for some of our male friends, then possibly for a later mixed group, and maybe later still as a workshop we'll offer more widely. 

Well we ran this idea past our friends ... and we're on. Sixteen of us are due to spend a couple of days together next month looking at Men & Friendship!