STORY

MOB is a gathering of men.

Outdoors, roaring fire, meat on the bone, good whisky, decent cigars...

Men in the UK are isolated, we suffer in silence.

Blokes don’t know how to open up about their battles or their fears ...so they lone-wolf it.

MOB is where men can meet in a kind of Fight Club setting, where

“The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club”.

MOB is not a fighting circle, but it is a place of authentic honesty. The things men wrestle here are their own regrets and demons.

In a cancel-culture of de-platforming, men can live terrified that a mistake from their past can catch up with them. But who can truly say he has never made a mistake? Who has a wardrobe free from skeletons?

And so men have learned to live with bravado and pretence as a mask to cover & hide their deep anxiety or aloneness.

MOB is a rare moment where men let down their guard, and find common ground, brotherhood, a pack.

We never lived in an age where men are so connected, but so disconnected. Plugged-in, clued-up. But checked-out, ground-down.

Many men never break out of the rat-race gerbil-wheel-cycle and because of this pattern the overwhelming majority of men in the UK are either lost, anxious, or living in some sort Matrix of solitary confinement.

They have no pack, no great purpose, and live lives of quiet desperation. All of this is why the number one cause of male death in the UK is suicide.

Where do men go?

Few ever go to counselling. We’ve lost the working men’s clubs. We don’t go to church.

Pubs are closing across the country. Blokes are retreating into isolation.

So where do men go? They come to MOB.

MOB began over a decade ago.

Two friends were flying home, somewhere over Greenland, returning from an outdoors men’s retreat in the American Rockies. They had been to a gathering, a wilderness conference,

a place of honesty, challenge & inspiration. The two friends opened up to one another on the long eleven hour flight back to the UK, talking candidly about their personal journey, their own struggles, and the marked differences in culture between America and the UK, and how British blokes don’t do things the same way the Americans do.

In the UK, we’re not a culture of therapy, or psychology or ‘shrinks’. We tend to feel awkward around speaking about our battles.

British men wear masks. We tend to hide.

In the UK men will default to bravado, pub chat and banter. Where can men in the UK go to for something more honest? Where do we go to have our hard questions heard?

As the two friends landed in Heathrow, they decided to start something small and intentional, so they invited another five men, seven in all, to form a type of masculine social ‘experiment’ which they called Band of Brothers.

The initiation rite was for each man to tell his own story, as candidly as he dared.

The Band of Brothers (BOB) met every fortnight around a fire pit, to talk openly about their story, their marriages, their struggles, their businesses, their dreams, their disappointments, their successes, their failures, their wounds, their scars, their hopes.

Nothing was off the table.

Over seven years of meeting each fortnight, these seven men forged a deep fellowship of empathy. Mental damage was healed, despair was reversed, depression was lifted, courage was given and received.

Seven men’s lives were literally changed by something as simple and profound as unhurried time together round a fire. An ancient practice that has been forgotten.

Three years ago the Band of Brothers realised that they had forged something very special, and incredibly rare, and they knew many more men in the UK needed something similar.

In 2016 Band of Brothers opened up the circle to more men, they gathered in a woodland and the circle grew, from a Band of Brothers to a Mass of Brothers.

The woodland where the gather is treated respectfully, led by one of the men who is a forester & tree surgeon. Dead windfall is cleared and cut up for logs. A fire is built in a safe clearing away from healthy trees, a whole lamb is slowly roasted, and as night falls, and men finish work, they gather around the fire to share story.

Thus MOB was formed...