Breakthrough is a unique opportunity for deciding to love oneself, women, men and children. It’s the practice of committing and recommitting to the challenge of jumping in right in the places where you’ve been hurt the most. It’s taking the time to see where boys are terrorized into first despising girls, then fearing other boys, all the while cultivating such a deep self-hatred that any connection to their own humanity is lost. It’s this disconnection that sets boys and men up to be spiritually empty human impersonators in this society, running for every little thing that makes them feel good, instead of acting on the basis of their principles and the knowledge that they are good, inherently.
Anonymous Breakthrough Graduate
For me, Breakthrough has meant giving up old beliefs that men are bad and scary. It has meant deciding to love men and see them as authentic, good human beings. It has meant looking at and letting go of compulsive behavior. It has meant forming committed, responsible, and challenging allyships with other men and women – all of whom think well of me, love me, and demand that I do the same in return. It has meant returning to my inherent state of being, the place in which I resided as a small boy, where I fall in love with myself, others, and life – over and over again, day in and day out.
Anonymous Breakthrough Graduate
I have gained a deeper sense of internal peace around my identity and value. I have established my connection in a community which is based on healing and changing the world. I have become active in challenging myself and others, in areas where I accepted limits on my love because of old patterns, convenience, and giving in to feelings without thinking.
My relations with other men have changed because now I seek out lasting personal friendships, where before I stopped short in professional and business connections.
Dale McCauley - Breakthrough Graduate
I realized that the connectivity of fear ranges from the smallest personal gesture, like flipping somebody off – to the largest genocidal interruptions that have burned a swath of terror throughout recorded history. I felt a shift happen inside me that arose from the wisdom that the loving attention we practice in Breakthrough creates an environment of personal and communal awareness that is at the center of love, and therefore at the center of life. And that this loving attention is the most powerful force in breaking the stranglehold that the connectivity of fear has on our individual and collective consciousness.
Scott Mulvaney – Breakthrough Graduate
During the past year, I had an extended stay at the VA hospital because of a severe depressive episode. I was given intensive psychotherapy – both group and one-on-one – and finally enrolled in a 28 day program. This program taught me many of the tools that Breakthrough uses, including boundaries, listening, affirmations, emotional history – a long list. And though these tools were valuable, I never felt completely safe. The program gave us tools but, like a Band-Aid or pain pill, they treated the symptoms and failed to address the real disease – the core beliefs that lay at the heart of our individual depressions, addictions, and abuses.
Breakthrough has allowed me the time, loving attention, safety and support for these tools to really work their magic. I admit, I didn’t get it at first. But now – especially when I interact with my children – I see how loving attention is the key. Breakthrough has helped me and my fellows to release that hidden love, and the teaching teams have had a great physical and metaphysical effect on us. Breakthrough has helped us create the sacred, loving, and safe space that is necessary to do the hard emotional work.
Scott Mulvaney – Breakthrough Graduate