I was on a treadmill.

I was angry and lonely and unhappy much of the time. I used alcohol to feel good about myself and I felt ashamed that I did. "Is this all there is," I wondered? "Is this as good as it gets? What’s wrong with me? I live in a lucky country -- a place that thousands of desperate people were literally dying to call home and here I was feeling unhappy?"

Like millions of Australians I'd read news stories in 2001 about drowning "boat people". I suppose I'd felt sad for these people, in a distracted world-weary kind of way, but the truth is they were only a fleeting tragedy, forgotten as soon as I turned to more pressing news on the sports pages.

For the record, 353 asylum seekers -- including 150 women and children -- drowned on 19 October 2001 south of Java when an overloaded 19 metre boat sank on its way to Australia’s Christmas Island. The vessel – now known as SIEV X – sank within 10 minutes of foundering. Forty four people survived the sinking. The youngest to perish was a baby aged three months old. Among those to survive was an eight-year-old child who had lost family members.

What was wrong with me? I could shed tears over a lightweight Hollywood melodrama like Briget Jones's Diary but I was almost unmoved by the plight of drowning babies off Australia’s coastline.

My emotions were numbed. I sometimes felt the edge of an emotion welling inside me – fear, sadness, shame – but I’d learnt to withdraw to a place where I couldn’t be discomforted or uplifted. Somewhere along the line I’d severed a chunk of my humanity – and my capacity to feel and talk about my feelings were stunted.

A weekend of new possibilities?

The weekend as metaphor.

Going bush. Leaving town. Logging off.

I love these words because they signify Escape. Adventure. Downtime. Playtime. Ever since i was a kid i've loved the experience of packing a bag knowing that i was leaving home for a few days. There's something exhilarating about it.

Why? Because home is a known quantity. A kind of space-time continuum whose rhythms are familiar and comforting (and terrifying in a Ground Hog kind of way). But away brings on the the buzz of the unknown. The road less travelled. Life's unmapped terrain, crackling with potential. The prospect of a weekend away is one of promise. A chance to leave the humdrum of daily life and taste something else: the life i could have led; the life i could still lead if i only had the guts.

Time away is for me an opportunity to try on new ways of being with myself and with others. A time to experiment. A chance to be someone else, or a chance, perhaps, to be more authentically myself. That's part of what i wanted from my experience at the New Warrior Training Adventure: the weekend away as metaphor for self-enquiry and experimentation.

But there was more than that going on. At a much deeper level I was there because i was sick of myself. I desperately wanted to be somebody else but i had no idea how to begin being that person. From the outside, my life might have looked okay - I had the conventional badges of middle class respectability and success. But life sucked.

I felt jaded. Isolated. Friendless. Abandoned. I hadn't actually teased apart this clot of feelings and beliefs before i got to the weekend. But I could feel them dragging on me. They weren’t clear articulated statements so much as lead weights in my head, my heart, and my balls. Somewhere inside me the weekend represented the idea of a new horizon: a place where i might glimpse a better way to be with myself, my loved ones, and the world around me.

Nothing could have prepared me

... for what happened that night as i began my descent into a place that I had avoided all my life. I'd glimpsed it. Even brushed up against it a few times. But as i entered the circle of men that night i knew in my balls that i'd bought a ticket on a ride that i'd never taken before.

The men in this place were like granite -- their eyes glinted with a flinty hardness. And yet, there was something else here. Something soft and alive behind that granite black wall of men. It felt like a giant beating heart. And here's the thing: what happened that weekend is confidential. It was revealed in confidence. Imparted to men in secret, as it has been down the centuries and millennia. But what's not secret is the fruit that men like me might bear from having had the experience.

What i got is hard to say in a few words but a year later my life looks and feels better than i could have imagined.

How did i put it to a bloke the other day?" I feel omnipotent," I said, rather grandly. "I feel like there's nothing i can't do. I feel all of the wide-eyed enthusiasm and joy of being a boy all over again. I feel that life offers me a dizzying palate of possibilities again. Every moment zings with colour and nuance and texture, and at the core of this my renewed capacity to feel my life again."

Here’s how another man described his experience:
click here

On route to my weekend adventure.

"What have I got to lose?"

I signed up with these words rolling around in my head and held them close for a few weeks as i ran movies about what I'd be doing on the "New Warrior Training Adventure", as they called it. As the day drew nearer it dawned on me that I'd actually signed up for something that I really knew nothing about.

I had no idea about what was going to happen, or what I would be asked to do. And yet somehow, my friend Shawn had got me to sign up for 48 hours of what, exactly? How had he managed that? Would i have to run over flaming red hot coals? Tell the shameful sins of youth that I'd never confessed to the alcoholic parish priest? How real did I really have to be?

By the time i turned into the driveway of the old YMCA campsite at six on a Friday evening i was running fear. Big time.

There was a solid bloke standing beside the front gate. He was wearing a dark oilskin coat and a battered, moth-eaten Akubra that looked like he might have borrowed it from scarecrow. He had black heairy legs and wore black rubber thongs on his feet. I couldn't see his eyes under his hat brim but in the fading light i saw that his cheeks were stubbled by a three-day beard growth. As I turned into the driveway he gave me a glance and scribbled on a battered clipboard.

Now my heart was pounding. "G'day," I ventured in a friendly tone as I wound my window down. He made no sign that he heard me, and since he stayed standing erect my words were addressed to the three big buttons that fastened his brown oilskin coat.

I felt ridiculous. "What kind of a greeting is this?" i said to myself. More silence followed. I looked straight ahead and smiled stupidly at the buttons on the bloke's big midriff. This was definitely my first meet and greet with a human stomach.

I came to the project a year ago

... through a man called Shawn who said he'd been living in fear and denial. His fear, he said, was a fear of men. A fear of being real and truthful. Of being honest with the men in his life.

"I didn't trust men," he said matter of factly, as we ate lunch together. As he said these words I felt fear and shame. I said nothing but as he continued to speak my feelings rose and lodged somewhere in my heart and my guts. I shoved them down, as I was used to doing, away from scrutiny. Far from the tender parts of me that could feel anything at all.

Shawn said that he'd been on an adventure -- something he called the New Warrior Training Adventure. He said: "This might sound cliched, but the weekend i went on was the most incredible journey, the most amazing and wonderful thing i've done or witnessed in my life.

I offered him my interested, smiling face, not the cynical one that said said, "What a wank. Sorry, not for me. I am not a flaky new age mea who calls men "brother". I told myself that I knew all about Shawn's mates and his his weekend adventure. "I am not into navel gazing neo-hippies and burnt out blokes who'd missed the boat," I told myself. "I am not interested in hanging out with dreamers and failures and losers."

Except Shawn did not fit the bill. He was a man ththat I admired and trusted. A likeable man. An interesting, successful man. And here he was sitting across the table from me, brimming with life and vitality. His his eyes were shining with the memory of something beautiful. Something utterly compelling. Something that I was hungry for.

What the project is and isn't

What it's not. A front for religion, government, industry or a get-rich-quick scheme.

What it is. A community that teaches men to live life with integrity and conscious choice.

To what end? So that men can live a life mission that makes the world safe and tolerant and compassionate.

How? By each man living his mission of service through action in the world. By pursuing an unswerving love of truth and a willingness to live it.

But it takes more than this. Changing the world calls for a journey of self-transformation that invites men and women to look within so that they can start to love and heal themselves. This is the living heart of the project.

Changing the planet, one man at a time.

It's an ambitious call to action. And yet it was Margaret Mead who said, "never doubt that a thoughtful group of citizens can change the world. For indeed it is the only thing that ever has."

Put another way, the Mankinf Project is spurred by a belief that each man has the potential to make a profound difference to the world.

Are you that man?