A man arranges chairs in an oval shape in the attic room of the Brackendale Art Gallery. It’s 6:30 on a Monday night, and everyone else will arrive shortly for 7:00 p.m. After the eighteen chairs are set up, Ian Coll lights incense. The small stream of smoke wafts through the air, past the brightly lit walls adorned with paintings and photographs. Soon enough men of all ages and backgrounds start to trickle in through the small doorway, and pockets of conversation fill the room.
Men’s Night has been running in Squamish since the summer of 2024. It is held once a month, it is free to attend, and on a typical night somewhere between 15 and 20 men show up. Some have been coming almost every time since the beginning. Others drift in and out depending on the season, the year, what is going on in their lives.
The man behind it, Ian Coll, is a Squamish-based coach and yoga teacher. He grew up with severe Tourette’s syndrome and OCD, conditions that brought on what he describes as years of nervous system dysfunction, toxic pathways, and self-sabotage before things came to a head in 2021. That was when he first attended a men’s group himself, through an online program, and then found his way to a men’s group in Vancouver run by one of the program’s facilitators. It changed things for him enough that, a few years later, he decided to open a space of his own.
“I think you want to work with men, but you’re too afraid to admit it,” his business coach told him in the spring of 2024. He said she was right. A few months later Coll rented a room and started with four guys.
Since then, over 150 different men from Squamish have walked through the door.
Each session runs two hours and follows a loose arc. It opens with some kind of movement or breathwork, something Coll calls an embodiment practice, designed to get people out of their heads. From there comes a check-in, either as one big group or broken into smaller ones depending on the size of the crowd. Then there is a theme, which Coll introduces and which the group works through together in various ways, through conversation, paired work, or open sharing. The nights have covered fear, integrity, relationships, patterns, addiction, grief, fatherhood, and a person’s relationship to death, among other things. The session closes with the group reflecting on what they learned and what they want to carry forward.
Tonight’s session started with various seated back stretches and breathwork, the room’s silence only broken by the hissing sounds of deep breathing through pursed lips. By the end of the exercises, everyone is noticeably calmer, and focused on the present.
Everyone then broke off into three groups of four to five men, forming their own small circles. Over the course of 24 minutes, each member shares their ‘truth’, which is the night’s theme. Everyone shares personal events, career milestones, family struggles, or anything else on their mind for six uninterrupted minutes.
After each man had their turn, all the chairs are returned into the original circle. A new exercise began where the group again shared their truth in short bursts of a sentence or two. There is no judgement or comment on anyone’s words, each person just chimes in with their own ‘truths’ whenever they see fit.
Coll holds a 200-hour yoga teacher certification, a trauma-informed coaching certification accredited through the International Coaching Federation, a degree in communications, and has spent seven years doing embodiment training, men’s retreats, and one-on-one work with a leadership mentor. He makes the group donation-based.
“I don’t want there to be a financial barrier,” he said.
Niklas Mey has been attending since close to the beginning. He moved to Squamish from Germany seven years ago and hasn’t looked back. He and Coll met through an entrepreneurship community Coll was running at the time, went for a hike, and discovered they had both been doing similar work with different mentors. Mey credits Coll with actually taking the leap to make Men’s Night happen.
“He’s born for this,” Mey said. “I’m really impressed. And he keeps getting better.”
For Mey, the nights have become what he calls a cornerstone. Many of his closest friends in Squamish came through the group. But he describes it in simpler terms too, a monthly ritual you know you can count on, a way to check in with your feelings and share them with people who are there to hold that part of you.
He draws a comparison he finds useful, even if it sounds unlikely at first. Growing up in Germany, his family went to church every Sunday. The first part of the service, sitting and listening to the sermon, brought people into something he likened to a meditative state. The second part, the singing, was a time to be expressive, a place to put your emotions into sound. Although he is no longer religious, Mey said that there was a community need that the men’s night filled, just like church did in his childhood.
“People wouldn’t tell you, oh, I’m going to church to feel myself and express my emotions,” he said. “But that is literally what they do. This is what we do here too. It just looks differently.”
Terry Barkman has been coming for about eight months. He heard about the group through Ian directly, and he said he tested the idea carefully before committing, asking Coll to defend his approach to his satisfaction before deciding to give it a chance. He kept coming back.
Squamish, he points out, is a town organized around activity. You can show up at the crag and find climbing partners, and those people might become your friends, but the friendship lives inside the activity.
“One thing that’s important to me, and I think it’s important for a lot of guys, is to connect with men in a way that isn’t centered around an activity,” he said. “Which gives you space to go deeper, to share things a little more meaningful.”
He remembers walking in for the first time and freezing because there was incense burning, which was giving him a headache. Coll noticed from across the room without being asked, came over, and offered to get rid of it. Barkman said that was a big reason he came back a second time.
Coll said the feedback he hears most often from men who finally show up is some version of the same thing, they had been sitting on the outside for a long time, and then they came and realized how badly they needed it.
“They’re just kind of tired of the surface-level banter over mountain biking or a beer,” Coll said. “They want to actually connect with men on a deeper level around challenges and their relationships.”
The numbers he points to are blunt. Burnout, mental health struggles, and suicide rates among men are at their highest. Roughly 25 percent of women are receiving some form of mental health support in a given year, compared to around 12 percent of men. Part of that gap, he argues, is simply a lack of places to go.
“There’s not a lot of spaces for men that are safe, that are led by people that have training,” he said.
Men’s night in Squamish offers men a dedicated time and space to connect with other men, typically on the last Monday of each month. The group is run only by donation.
