Knowing the Conscious Man – 2025

Bookings Now Open:

We are designed as part of nature to encounter life with amazement and wonder. And yet, our predominant transactional consumer culture trades this for a fiction i.e. that your happiness and ‘worth’ is found through productivity, material gain, technological advancement and social status.  The fiction leaves most men with a profound lack of fulfillment, chronic disconnection, loneliness and a frustrated search for meaning.

Men can go for days, weeks, months or years without encountering their own wildness, rarely sharing an authentic, deeply intimate moment with themselves and those they are closest to. It is a critical time for us to stand up for ‘inner work’, a time to listen to our own soul, heal ourselves, and reclaim our wild beauty. The good news is that embedded in our psyche by nature, is the potential for a bigger, more sensuous, more imaginative, more intimate and vital life. As Bill Plotkin posits, ‘it’s time to take another look at ourselves’.

The Knowing the Conscious Man Intensive invites participants to look more deeply at themselves using nature as a mirror of their inner landscape.  It is about offering courageous men a deep sense of possibility – an alternative, soul infused, more meaningful and conscious way of embracing and walking your individual path.

The workshop asks a lot of you – if you are drawn to register, prepare to be significantly stretched on the path toward psychological wholeness. Using nature as a mirror, you will be supported to explore the deeper questions about your life – questions that have no right to be ignored. The workshop will take you as deep as you are willing to go – it is being held at ‘Raven’s Nest‘ in Venus Bay south east of Melbourne.

This is a camping-only program and some previous personal growth experience is expected of applicants.

Overview:

During the workshop you will:

♦ Encounter Bill Plotkin‘s Nature Based Map of the Human Psyche as a core navigational tool. (The ‘Wild Mind Map’ is a holistic model to reclaim and embody the many facets of our innate human wholeness granted to us by nature yet suppressed by our experience of the prevailing ‘ego-centric’ culture).

♦ Access the four windows of knowing

♦ Open up to deep somatic ritual and non-ordinary states of perception

♦ Cultivate an intimate conversation with your internal world as a reflection of the natural world around us

♦ Experience spacious solo time in nature using nature as the mirror of your psyche

♦ Proximate into a deeper relationship with the wounded and protector parts of yourself.

♦ See your physical body as a manifestation of your inner ‘story’

♦ Experience ‘soul hygeine’ with practices for tending often tighly held parts including grief and shame

♦ Meditation, deep imagination and dreams

♦ Time in Council and lots, lots more!!

Date: Nov 27-30, 2025
15 in stock

Note: This intensive is for men who are willing to:

ask deeper questions of themselves

  reach outside of their ‘comfort zone’

open up to possibility

 It is recommended that you have previously completed other personal growth programs.

This could include the Awakening the Conscious Man Intensive, Menergy, the ManKind Project etc – we will review your registration.

Logistics:

♦ This is a 3 night residential intensive held in Venus Bay (170 kilometres South East of Melbourne). It is a fully catered (with the amazing Chef Ashley Mariani), camping-only workshop for up to 16 people. A tent and camping gear is required.

Date:  5PM (2PM Arrival & Setup) Thursday Nov 27- 2PM Sunday Nov 30, 2025

Venue: Raven’s Nest retreat centre – Venus Bay – click the link for more information.

Investment: your time and $1295 minimum – a 50% deposit will hold your place.

Guarantee: What you put into this workshop is directly related to what you take out! The intensive will stretch you…in a good way!

Your Facilitators

David Mallard is a uniquely experienced trainer, coach, mentor, guide, adviser and consultant. He has been deeply involved in men’s development work for 25 years and co-founded Melbourne Men’s Group Inc. in 1998 with Dr. Roger Hilton. David is trained in Breathwork, accredited in the DiSC personality profile, holds a Cert. IV in Training & Assessment and has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees.  He is currently a student in the professional ‘Wild Mind Training Program‘ with the Animas Valley Institute of Colorado. David has extensive senior executive leadership experience in corporate Australia working closely with CEO’s and Boards – in parallel he has facilitated, coached and guided hundreds of men’s group meetings, workshops and seminars. David is also a council member of Soulcraft ANZ Inc.

Chris Caldwell is a counselling psychologist, supervisor, teacher and group facilitator with over forty years’ experience in the field of healing and personal development.  Chris has explored and trained in diverse fields during his practitioner career including the body mind model of Wilhelm Reich, formal meditation and yoga trainings in Australia and India, extensive practice in dreamwork and depth psychology as initiated by Carl Jung and extended into the transpersonal work of Stanislav Grof. Amongst other things, Chris currently teaches transpersonal counselling at the IKON Institute of Australia.