Healing The Father Wound - by Michael

COURSE

Healing The Father Wound

With Michael

In this 10-day course, you’ll experience a deep grounding in sacred masculine practice that will help you release patterns of pain and suffering and break the cycle of generational trauma you inherited. You will learn to embody unconditional love, expand your emotional awareness, integrate your masculine and feminine energies, safely process painful emotions, and discover the healing power of forgiveness. In the process, you will discover an inner strength that expands your capacity to feel deeply, let more of life in and become a healing force in the world.


Meet your Teacher

Michael is an artist, poet, teacher, father, world champion athlete and a member of the Ultimate Hall of Fame. He has received awards for his artwork from the San Francisco Arts Commission, The Center for Cultural Innovation, the Tanne Foundation, and the James Rosenquist Artist Residency. He has exhibited and performed his work in theaters, museums, colleges, and festivals worldwide, and has facilitated physical drawing workshops for the past sixteen years. He is best known for Drawing Gym, a hybrid of art and athletic endurance, and for his one-man shows of poetry and storytelling, Seeing the Invisible and Good Pain: The Art of Being Hurt. He currently teaches poetry and creative writing to teens in addiction recovery.

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10 Days

5.5k students

4.9 stars

13 min / day

Compassion

English


Lesson 1

The Absent Father

In this session, you'll acknowledge the specific pain you felt around the ways that your father was absent in your life. You'll learn to bring love and compassion to yourself as you name how you suffered, and identify what you needed from your father that he didn't provide. This session is about bringing clarity to our pain and unmet needs, so that we can make a clear and conscious decision to heal.

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Lesson 2

The Inherited Wound

In today’s session, we’ll create a space to look at the historical and generational trauma your father inherited, and how he passed on his own wounds to us. As we begin to understand the pain and the survival strategies your father adopted, we will practice compassion both for our fathers and for ourselves. This practice will help us move with greater ease and understanding when the pain of our past comes to visit.

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Lesson 3

The Wisdom Of Pain

In this session, we’ll learn how to accept the ways in which our father wound causes us pain. Rather than run from our pain, we will welcome it as a wise teacher that comes bearing gifts. In this grounding practice, we will discover how acknowledging our pain is essential to the healing transformation happening through us.

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Lesson 4

Unconditional Love

In this session, we will learn how to see the child within us with unconditional love and compassion. We will honor our own childhood responses to being hurt as acts of wisdom that protected us from greater harm. As we learn who we once were and who we became to survive, we prepare for the sacred work of reconnecting with the authentic part of us that holds the key to our healing.

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Lesson 5

Fathering Ourselves

In this session, we will learn to father ourselves by embodying the protective energy of the sacred masculine. When we bring compassion and awareness to the painful patterns in our lives, we learn to recognize and transcend these survival strategies, integrate their lessons and build our resiliency. As we become the father we always needed, we give ourselves the gifts of growth, healing and transformation.

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Lesson 6

Your Divine Masculine Gifts

In this session, we will learn about structure and containment as foundational principles of masculine energy. When we embody the masculine, we better understand how to integrate the feminine, how to open our minds and our hearts, and how to trust the life process happening through us.

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Lesson 7

The Courage To Feel

In this session, we’ll expand our capacity to feel more of life. Using the metaphor of a river, we will learn how our masculine banks both give shape to and are shaped by the changing flow of the feminine waters within us and around us. When we stop constricting our feelings and allow our hearts to be moved, we gain knowledge and wisdom. In facing our difficult emotions with courage, we find that we are actually stronger in our vulnerability.

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Lesson 8

Forgiveness And Freedom

In this session, we will learn the healing power of forgiveness. Nothing binds us to suffering and diminishes our capacity for joy as much as the need to be right. We will practice letting go of blaming ourselves, blaming our fathers, and anyone else we have begrudged. When we let go of our patterns of judgment, we open ourselves to the greater force of love. Into this new space, we will call forth the person we wish to become.

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Lesson 9

Healing In Relationship

In this session, we will learn the central role that being in relationship plays in our healing. While tending our emotional wounds begins in solitude and in the dark, sharing the gifts we receive on our journey brings us into greater harmony with the world. When wounds occur in relationship to others, it is in relationship to others that the work of our healing becomes visible. When we bear witness to the heart of another and allow ourselves to be seen in our own vulnerabilities, our common threads are revealed; we become spaces of healing and wholeness.

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Lesson 10

Claiming Your Masculine Gifts

In this session, we will conclude the course with meditation and affirmations that help us to integrate all we’ve learned. The pain we have inherited is not meant to keep us small—it is meant to awaken us to a powerful guiding force within. When we embody our masculine gifts, we discover that what was absent in our fathers is present within us. In our expanded capacity to behold all parts of our lives with love and regard, we discover how deeply we belong.

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Ask your teacher

This course includes 119 community questions and 11 audio replies from Michael. The community classroom and teacher audio replies are only available via the app.

119

4.9 (281)

Recent Reviews

Anna

Anna

January 23, 2026

Michael’s class on Healing the Father Wound is a profoundly wise, compassionate, clear and accessible gift. It’s a supremely helpful and healing treasure.

Frank

December 9, 2025

This course, paired with my own simultaneous reading of Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, was life changing. Thank you. Truly. Thank you.

Brandy

Brandy

December 6, 2025

This is an excellent, rich course. I had to listen to several lessons a couple of times to really take in all that was being said. It made me deeply appreciate the divine masculine in new ways, realizing I had neglected this part of my self. My only criticism is that the affirmations are often too long and go to fast. Also, there is often not enough of a pause in the meditations to actually do the work proposed which feels like lost opportunity. (I particularly noticed this in lesson 9 by the fire.) Even so, these are minor issues to what is a poignant and impactful course. 🙏

Hanisha

Hanisha

November 28, 2025

Loved this! Exactly what I needed to help activate and open my muladhara chakra that had felt stuck! Thank you so much! 🙏🏽

B

B

November 14, 2025

Fantastic course. Deep and revealing. Not an easy work to do but definitely opened my mind and my heart, ignited curiosity and compassion in me. Thank you Michael for delivering such important teachings - I had no idea others experienced similar issues. A very focused and needed course 🙏🏼

Jen

Jen

July 31, 2025

I really enjoyed this course. It healed the father wound that I didn't even know was that deep. Thank you

Amelia

Amelia

July 15, 2025

Thank you for this very helpful course.

Nicole

Nicole

July 7, 2025

This helped me identify the wounds , helped acknowledge them and now work on them . This is what I needed .

Marit

Marit

July 1, 2025

Thank you. Very helpful 🌱💫🙏

Dawn

June 26, 2025

Really good food for thought. I will revisit. Thank you

Jaclyn

Jaclyn

June 16, 2025

Thank you for this gem! This was a beautiful gift that you shared with us all. It is like a big hug of support on this healing journey🙏💗🌷 Thank you💗

Jovita

Jovita

June 10, 2025

Thank you Michael for this Gem 💎 of Healing Journey. An amazing course with plenty of insights woven into an intricate net that is being built up layer upon layer in each day, creating the container of masculine where the feminine can be experienced, ultimately allowing to heal. Beautiful story telling, in just the right speed, with soothing deep voice that make you feel embraced. My deepest gratitude to you 🙏🏻 Love and blessings to you and yours 💝✨💫

Kalèla

Kalèla

June 5, 2025

Salamat

Gaby

Gaby

May 20, 2025

Thank you for these teachings!! Such a beautiful and powerful course! This has been so transformative and healing for me. For the past 7 months I have been doing a lot of inner child work and it was with this course that things finally shifted. Discovering in it not only the father wound, but the mother wound as well. This 10 day course really took me around 4 weeks to complete. Taking my time to process each lesson and moving forward to the next when my soul told me to do so. Thank you! 🙏🏼

Deb

Deb

April 26, 2025

Wow … l have done courses but this is life changing…. My heart is open.Thank you … Thank you … Thank you so

Joanna

Joanna

April 18, 2025

So powerful 🙏❤️

Yoyo

April 4, 2025

Transformational! By far the best course I have taken. Every lesson was on point and exactly what I needed. Michael’s wisdom and poetic style are pure delight. After the course, I feel emboldened, fierce and more solid within myself. Thank you 🙏🏾

Pamela

Pamela

April 3, 2025

I feel I experienced so much healing through this practice. This helped me to feel and release a lot of father pain. I feel so connected to the safety of the masculine. Both my child inside and I were surprised that “I” can provide the much needed father energy. I really feel it to be true. The river bank analogy really hit, it was so tangible. Thank you so very much for this, truly healing.

Gwenaelle

Gwenaelle

March 30, 2025

Amazing journey thank you 🙏

Brittany

Brittany

March 17, 2025

I’m so appreciative of this course! I did some days a second time to really soak up those lessons. This kind of work is tough to do but in this course it’s done with so much compassion and love. If you’re on the path to heal your father wound this is such a beautiful resource. I hope Michael releases more courses! He’s a lovely, gifted teacher.

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