facultyexplore advaya’s teachers
Explore advaya's faculty of teachers, scientists, practitioners, philosophers and storytellers, who share multidimensional, local and diverse narratives from across the world.
Bayo Akomolafe
Sophie Strand
Satish Kumar
Vandana Shiva
Veronica Strang
Manda Scott
Beloved Sara Zaltash
David Abram
Dr Andreas Weber
David Whyte
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Dr. Predrag Slijepcevic
Charles Eisenstein
Aisha Paris Smith
Brontë Velez
Ian MacKenzie
Ian MacKenzie is a filmmaker and writer who lives on the Salish Sea with his partner and young son.
For over 12 years, he’s been tracking the global emergence of new culture. From the desert of Burning Man to the heart of Occupy Wall St, he has sought and amplified the voices of visionaries, artists and activists who have been working toward planetary system change. He is most known for his films Sacred Economics, Amplify Her, Occupy Love, and Lost Nation Road. He has studied with Stephen Jenkinson at the Orphan Wisdom School since 2012, and Tamera Healing Biotope since 2015. In 2019, he founded The Mythic Masculine podcast and in 2020 he launched A Gathering of Stories.
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Liberating gender: queer and trans futurities
The cisheteronormative constraints of gender harm all of us, and queer and trans voices have paved the way in challenging them the world over. What sorts of healthier masculinities can emerge from widening the spectrum of gender, and breaking the binary? How can leaning into the liminal help us traverse uncertainties as paradigms shift, and help us open pathways towards futures in which all genders can be expressed, and flourish, in diversity?
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Masculinity today: rituals, identity and mythos
Our journey begins with a diagnosis of contemporary masculinities within a historical, social and cultural framework, with a focus on how wider sociocultural forces shape men’s relationships. We will explore the impulses behind contemporary “men’s work”, and historically and culturally contextualise this movement in contemporary history. Why is it seeing a resurgence today? We explore the intra- and inter-personal worlds that shape contemporary masculinities, and seek to understand how they are textured by unseen patterns of power, and influenced by events in our recent past.
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Meeting our monsters: what lies at the heart of patriarchy?
What lies at the heart of patriarchy? Looking to potential solutions, we ask: how can addressing the Mother Wound allow men to (re)establish a profound sense of connection to this earth, and to others, that they are deeply, and naturally longing for? Continuing on from the previous module, we’ll connect the dots through the psychological and mythic roots of patriarchy, to explain the ongoing, destructive drive for masculine domination. We invite a look within towards internal narratives that shape behaviour and thus, culture. We will also look outwards, through the mythopoetic lens, illuminating ancient stories and revising cultural myths, exploring the stories the patriarchy has coopted and constructed.
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A time with no fathers: fathering, patrimony and eldership
What does it mean to father a culture, and how can we, regardless of where we are on the spectrum of masculinity, participate in this fathering? In this module, we explore the role of culture and community in providing initiatory pathways towards growing up masculine, and/or into men. What happens when there are few initiated men, and an absence of holding? Attempts to reconstruct rites of passage are operating within this crater, and can remain stuck in its fundamental limitations. How might we collaboratively, life-givingly, initiate and liberate generational men’s work?
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Decolonising masculinity: Indigenous thinking
In the spirit of truly decolonising masculinity, we ask: if the solution is not to supplant an oppressive universalism with another, what might we learn from restorying masculinities back into place and culture? In this module, we dialogue with Indigenous guests who reframe some of the most intractable paradoxes in the “culture wars” by offering perspectives that include multiplicity.
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Rewilding masculinities: embodying the future
In our final module, we seek to collectively rewild the masculine. How do we reroot and reroute masculinities, in service of healing the earth? If masculinity has become a monoculturing myth within a dominator paradigm, how do we feed it as compost, back to the earth, and encourage its regeneration in a diverse, flourishing form? In our final week together, we look to restory and reclaim together: not to find one singular answer, but to open up more pathways and questions to bring to the future.
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Composting the mycelial masculine
What if hidden in the soil below the monumental myth of patriarchal masculinity there was a rhizomatic biodiversity of alternative masculinities? What does it mean to create an ecosystem of narratives, rather than uplift a singular story? Looking to the past for ingredients to compost into better stories for the future, Ian and Sophie bring their personal experiences and mythic mycelial systems into a conversation about their own exploration into the myths of the masculine.