BreakThroughCircle.com, the Asheville Wildmen
& the New Moon Brotherhood present
EMBODIED COMBAT
BreakThrough Circle
Express Your Healthy Masculine Power
SAT JULY 2, 2022 10:30-6:30pm
plus optional included Communal Dinner until 8pm
An Asheville-based Wildman Event for Men
Have you experienced unhealthy expressions of masculinity?
It’s likely that you’ve experienced intimidation, bullying, fear for your physical safety, fear of being humiliated, shaming and emasculation...simply for expressing authentic parts of yourself.
These experiences create unmet needs around the SAFETY, CONNECTION & POWER that boys and men require in order to truly thrive. These unmet needs cause unintended negative consequences in how men think and behave in relationships.
These needs can be identified and addressed in healing ways that shift how we think, behave, and live our lives.
The EMBODIED COMBAT BreakThrough Circle is a FUN opportunity to somatically heal and repattern the Fight - Flee - Hide - Fawn - Freeze - Collapse patterns that arise with such exposure to unhealthy masculine energies.
This is NOT a martial arts training.
We will NOT teach you HOW to fight.
We will offer you a courageous and fun place to push and be pushed...
...and invite you into processes that heal the wounds caused by masculine aggression from fathers, authority figures, peers, and other wounded humans.
Our ancestors dealt with physical resistance daily. Today, there aren’t many healthy containers where this can be expressed. Even a lot of martial arts studios express toxic elements of combat. Many men are missing healthy physical expression from our lives, so it tends to come out in unhealthy ways.
There is tremendous healing potential in men connecting, pushing, pulling, and being resisted physically. There is a part of us that is still a bit like a puppy...and when we allow that playful, physical part of us to be expressed, we feel more deeply connected within ourselves.
This process includes movement games, physical engagement, and wrestling. All interactions are optional, with expressed consent, and intended for healing and joyful exertion.
You will have the option to step into embodied, healing-focused hand-to-hand combat with allies who are working WITH you, not against you.
You will experience the joy and freedom of using your masculine assertiveness and even your masculine aggression in healthy, respectful ways.
This event will include guided hand-to-hand combat, powerful ceremonial aspects, and emotionally healing opportunities.
It can be healing to the nervous system to wrestle playfully, with men who respect you and mean you well.
These embodied combat interactions are facilitated by Josh Zamrin, who brings his powerful warrior energy and his deep sensitivity.
Hunter Ball offers his skillful Group Facilitation.
James Mayfield Smith follows the combat rounds with individual and group BreakThrough processes.
Together, we use wizard-like somatic facilitation tools to guide us towards healing moments. We'll address whatever may have come up during the combat, including:
- Dad stuff
- Fear of the aggression of boys and men or fear of our own aggression
- Healing around being bullied or contributing with bully energy in the past
- Inner child work & inner teenager work
- Healing around how the masculine has shown up in our lives.
- Creating new ways to be with and express our own Power
Space is limited!
Register to attend the
EMBODIED COMBAT BreakThrough Circle
Important EMBODIED COMBAT BreakThrough Circle
Dates, Links & Logistics
NOW: Enrollment is open for the Sensitive Wildman Individual Coaching Program (which includes a free ticket to the EMBODIED COMBAT BreakThrough Circle), for men who seek emotional healing around relationships or who want healthier ways to experience fear, anger, or shame. Contact James at [email protected] or text 816-645-2600 for details.
WEDS June 29, 2022 7pm-8pm ET: Optional Zoom-based Meet and Greet. Zoom link to join (for registered attendees and men who are curious about this event).
https://breakthroughcircle.as.me/?appointmentType=34612556
FRI JULY 1, 2022 Enrollment Closes
SAT JULY 2, 2022 Noon-6pm ET (8pm for optional no cost dinner): EMBODIED COMBAT BreakThrough Circle in Asheville, NC. Includes organic snacks and an organic, locally sourced communal dinner. You may choose a carnivore option or a vegan option.
WEDS July 7, 2022 7pm-8:30pm ET: Optional Zoom-based Post-Gathering Integration. Zoom link to join (for registered attendees only): https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8166452600
Your Guides for this Journey are
James Mayfield Smith
Joshua Zamrin
&
Hunter Ball
James Mayfield Smith
BreakThrough Coach. Facilitator. Adventurer.
James Mayfield Smith is a Somatic BreakThrough Coach and the founder of BreakThroughCircle.com. Since 2006, James has participated in advanced-level men's work, has led 50 transformation-focused retreats in the US and abroad and has facilitated over a thousand clients to transform key emotional dynamics in their lives.
James discovered the healing power of men's work and attuned inner work facilitation during a time of deep grief and shame in his own life. He's spent over 20 years of serious inner work healing the anxiety, insecurity, loneliness, physical abuse, bullying, emotional neglect, trauma, and negative conditioning of his childhood and teenage years.
These tools changed his experience of himself at depth. He now moves through life with curiosity, aliveness, and a more embodied sense of connection and empowerment of his unique gifts. James facilitates men and women through their own initiatory journeys of connection and empowerment.
James has a 32 year old son and a 20 year old daughter and is deeply committed to helping the world become a safer and more magically adventurous place for them and for all men, women, boys, and girls...one BreakThrough Moment at a time. His work lives this mission.
James utilizes mythic, imaginal, shamanic, somatic, and bio-energetic tools to create shifts one's inner landscape in ways that change the experience of outer circumstances. His specialty is working with a client’s central nervous system and somatic wisdom to cultivate a BreakThrough Moment, because experiencing a BreakThrough is the most rapid and powerful way to shift a life-long pattern. James supports and guides you closer to yourself so that you can discover your deeper truths and fuel your mission of self-expression and service in the world.
Joshua Zamrin
Performance Coach. Trainer. Warrior.
Joshua Zamrin's martial arts and athletic training includes karate, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, tennis, football, and track & field. He competed heavily in wrestling throughout his scholastic years and this is where he learned and embodied many concepts about masculinity and what it means to be a man in our culture. While grateful for some of these lessons, he also discovered the toxicity of many of them and is excited to rewrite these limiting, distorted, and damaging stories.
Over the next decade, Joshua stepped away from competition and combat and discovered a love for working with and holding space for clients around health, wellness, spirituality, and embodiment practices. This led him to movement and coaching certifications including:
NASM Certified Personal Trainer
WMC Performance Enhancement Coach
Functional Movement Screen Specialist Level 1
CrossFit Level 1
IIN Health Coach
CHEK Holistic Lifestyle Coach Level 1
IAHC International Health Coach
Over the past couple of years, Joshua has felt the call to step deeper into men’s work and has been co-facilitating and sitting in men’s circles. This work has led him to a rekindling of a love for combat with the physical body, a more evolved form of combat than what he grew up with. After having a breakthrough experience at an embodied masculine retreat, he decided that it was time to bring this medicine to his local brothers.
“Until very recently, almost all men had to deal with physical resistance on a daily basis. It’s an energy that’s encoded in us at a cellular level that needs to be expressed, and a lot of us aren't getting that need met. When that need isn’t fulfilled consciously, it expresses in unconscious, unhealthy ways. Embodied Combat creates a safe container for those energies to be liberated. These are big energies that our partners, our families, and even our therapists cannot hold space for. And when those energies are liberated, that’s when breakthroughs happen. That’s when we bring light to the parts of ourselves that society has demanded that we suppress in the darkness. And in that darkness is where the source of your true power lies. Embodied Combat is an opportunity to heal the masculine wounding in the individual, as well as the collective.”
-Joshua Zamrin
Hunter Ball
Facilitator. Brother. Explorer. Creator.
Hunter is a Leader in the Mens’ Work community. He brings his love for holding space and his acute curiosity to question the narrative of what is possible. Knowing that we as men can help each other heal, Hunter created his own mens’ circle 5 years ago. It is still active and strong.
Hunter is also co- founder of the New Moon Brotherhood, an Asheville-based open mens’ circle community. The New Moon Brotherhood invites men out of their mind and into their body and heart using compassion, connection and challenge.
Hunter utilizes Authentic Relating tools to discover what is real and in the moment in groups and circles.
Hunter’s love for the outdoors and nature allows him to feel connected to the divine wherever he goes. He brings this love into wilderness rites of passage work and to events connecting men with nature and with one another.
EMBODIED COMBAT BreakThrough Circle Packages
This event is already priced to be very affordable. We do have a partial scholarship available for a man in financial need, if required. Choose from the options below or click the link to schedule a FREE phone consultation with James to discuss your specific needs.
Enter your email to receive more info about Wildman and BreakThrough Circle events
Wildman Events Include Experiences that Cultivate:
Fun, Playful Movement
Healthy Masculinity
Emotional Well-Being
Connection
Confidence
Personal Power
Schedule a Free 25 min Phone Call with James to discuss the Embodied Combat BreakThrough Circle
or other Wildman Gatherings and BreakThrough Circle Events
The Healthy Wildman
The healthy Wildman is a powerful, healing archetypal energy that a man has access to when he feels at his best. For his Wildman energy to become accessible, a man needs 3 essential things:
SAFETY
CONNECTION
& POWER
This Wildman work creates safety, connection, and empowerment so that you can access the healing energy of your inner Wildman.
A man in touch with his Wildman is deeply connected to nature and to himself.
He belongs in this world and he knows it in his bones.
He feels safe.
He feels connected to Mother Earth, to other men, to women, and most of all, to himself.
This brings him great courage.
This alignment allows him to show up in an authentic way, with his full power and sovereignty.
And this brings him great freedom.
Wounded Masculinity
When a man's early family environment and life circumstances interfered with getting any of these essential needs met, then his behavior as an adult will display symptoms of an unmet need. When a man has unmet emotional needs around one of these areas, his life will show symptoms such as these:
Insecurity Anxiety Fear Isolation Playing Small Defendedness Rage Shame Addiction Loneliness Regret Mistrust Relationship Issues Sadness
Find your unmet emotional needs and you'll find the most direct path for effective inner work. If these symptoms are showing up in your life, then they are invitations to look at your unmet needs and begin to meet them, so the symptom can go away. As with any of our Wildman programs, you'll experience powerfully facilitated experiences that cultivate a state of deep safety, connection, and empowerment so that your healthy Wildman energy can flow freely.
Unfortunately, our western society doesn't support this kind of power and sovereignty. Our cultural and family conditioning get in the way. Family, school, careers, and society all attempt to domesticate us and diminish our powerful masculinity. Those in authority often try to inhibit our full range of options and make us feel disconnected, guilty, and ashamed, so that we become easier to control or easier to sell products to. Our "leaders" rarely encourage us to claim our full power. The authority figures in our lives...parents, teachers, and well-meaning adults are themselves captives of a civilization overflowing with wounded, toxic masculinity. They perpetuate the patriarchy and often shut us down in our earliest attempts to stand up for what is right. And then we turn around and do it to our own kids.
Most men never learn how to channel our masculinity in healthy ways. We learn from a very young age to hold back, to play small, and to not shine too brightly, or else risk being humiliated. Or worse, we adopt the overcompensatory strategies of toxic masculinity, and we lose our authenticity or our depth and we become unsafe for others. As we get older, the peers we grow up with usually shame us in similar ways to how they were shamed at home. We get it from all sides...
All this shame and effort to contain our free spirit and wild nature costs us dearly. Our health, our passion, and our vitality all suffer when we dim our light and hold back the genius that resides within.
Why Gather with other Wildmen?
You can access your Wildman in nature, with a safe, healthy community of brothers. By experiencing peak physiological states of connection and empowerment, we cultivate non-ordinary states of consciousness that connect us back to the earth and to ourselves.
We utilize playful, fun ways to recover your sovereignty and connect to a place within you that is already healed. When you learn how to presence yourself from this healthy masculine, rather than from the wounded masculine or the limits of your conditioning, your options expand.
Such work brings tremendous personal power that we can use to say no to things that don't serve us and to instead live a life that is meaningful for our unique path.
Our Wildman events provide intense initiatory experiences designed to get men CONNECTED and EMPOWERED.
These unique, one-of-a-kind offerings are not available anywhere else on the planet. It is the result of many decades of intense inner work and facilitation training from a deeply bonded group of powerful men's work leaders and facilitators.
It really is possible to heal the cultural conditioning and personal family wounds that keep you feeling disconnected and disempowered, so that you can begin to give your full gifts to the world.
This work accomplishes that.
COVID-19 Policy and Agreements:
If the Wildman Gathering is cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions on large gatherings, we'll refund your full payment.
To reduce COVID risks, we are holding this program outdoors.
The pandemic requires greater consciousness from every one of us, including respectfully disagreeing on opinions, recognizing early symptoms, and preventing community spread. Voluntarily choosing to adhere to the agreements below protects all of us, regardless of opinions on COVID and respective vaccinations.
1. Illness Policy
Please refrain from attending if any of the following are true:
- You have been exposed to anyone with COVID-19 within the last 15 days.
- You or anyone in your household has had a fever within the last 72 hours.
- You or anyone in your household has had flu-like symptoms (including fever, cough or shortness of breath) within the last 72 hours.
- You have a fever of 100.4°F or above or other signs of illness upon arrival.
If you begin to experience fever or flu-like symptoms (including cough or shortness of breath) while at the retreat, we will ask that you head home.
Facilitators and support staff will be following the same illness policy as participants.
2. Hand Washing
Wash your hands frequently throughout the day. We encourage you to bring your own hand sanitizer and wet wipes with at least 60% alcohol to use when necessary, including at the following times:
- Arrival and Departure
- Snacking or food prep
- After going to bathroom
- As needed
3. Social Distancing & Masks
This program is “smile friendly” or maskless. However, we will honor your sovereign choice to wear a mask for your own or others protection. If you would rather not have physical contact with anyone else during the event, we will honor that as well. To let other people attending the program know that you would prefer to maintain social distance and do not want any physical contact, we ask that you either:
- Wear a mask in the traditional fashion over your nose and mouth
- Or wear a mask loosely in a prominent position over one of your arms. This will be the signal to other participants and staff that you are social distancing.
By registering for this event, I acknowledge that I understand and agree to these terms.