“I was a wooden man, incapable of experiencing the emotions in my body.” Amid male mental health month, we look back at our interview with boxer and community founder, Brenny Vanilla.
For humankind, death is part of the inevitable. But for some it comes too soon. Brendan McDonnell was confronted with this trauma at just 15 years old when he found his father hanging in the garage. There was a note addressed to him, the youngest of three boys.
This story is not about death, though. Rather, it is about rebirth and the 13-year journey McDonnell—now more commonly known as Brenny Vanilla in the beachside neighborhood where he resides in Bondi, Australia—has been on. For his interview with Mission, he is making his first-ever Zoom call (can you believe it?) from the cafe across the street from his home. It’s 10:30 am, and he has just finished leading a three-hour session at the G’day Guys Health Club (GGHC). After our chat, he’s teaching a class in Muay Thai, a practice he found after his father’s death, which became an integral part of his grieving process—“It gave me a place to belong, and it gave me a family when my family wasn’t able to support me because of their own grief.”
Naturally, the past informs the present, both subconsciously and consciously. For five years after his father’s death, Brenny was silent. During the years that followed, he dedicated much of his time to suicide prevention and tackling mental-health issues through his blog brendanmcdonnell.com and clothing brand Herman’s Hands. But despite making a lasting positive impact on many lives, this approach was not conducive to helping his grief, and his anxiety got worse. During 2019, Brenny attended more than 30 sessions with a psychiatrist, found breathwork an effective form of alternative healing, received treatment from a functional neurologist, attended various men’s groups, and put himself in a boxing fight—all in an attempt to teach himself how to feel. “I was a wooden man, incapable of experiencing the emotions in my body,” Brenny says. “My work with my blog and Herman’s Hands developed my intellect and understanding, but it took me even further from the emotions stuck inside me.” He now no longer identifies as or with ‘Brendan,’ who became known for sharing a darker perspective on his blog, and who, according to Brenny, “thought he had the answers to save the world. I think Brendan McDonnell is my alter ego. He’s the anxious, angry, upset little dude who used to live in me.”
However, last year was different for Brenny. While most people wanted to #cancel2020, this was when he was finally able to create some real “space” for himself, “space” being a common term used by Millennials and Gen Zers to encourage introspection over succumbing to societal pressures. Known around Bondi as the “Muay Thai boy” who had “trained every woman and her cat” over the previous four years, Brenny felt a need to explore and share a deeper practice. “All these walls of expectations that I had up inside my head were gone. We don’t have to be anyone, for anyone,” he says. What started as training two friends in his garage with the curtains drawn during Sydney’s lockdown has now become a daily ritual for many. As the restrictions lifted, more people, predominantly men, heard about the classes and came to train, commending the unique experience. One that begins with 30 minutes of silence and encourages members to confront their own truths. “It’s in the stillness, mate. It’s in the stillness that the answers come,” he says in his Brighton accent, recalling the words an old friend said to him, which he wrote on a Post-it and stuck to his wall. As the classes organically grew, Brenny formally created a holistic practice that he could participate in and facilitate. As he says, “I just model the behavior.”
Rooted in community, GGHC aims to create a sense of belonging and safety for its members, as well as a sense of humor and play. “Community is integral to healing. It’s non-negotiable. It’s part of being human,” Brenny says. The name is a satirical take on how one Aussie gym junkie would greet their Zoom exercise class during Covid-19 with an overenthusiastic “G’day” and proceed to clap their hands together, slyly flexing their muscles.
GGHC’s objectives include unpacking the ideologies linked to the toxic masculinity that can be found in a lot of gym environments. Sessions take you on a three-hour journey modeled on Brenny’s interpretation of the four archetypes of manliness—the Lover, Warrior, Magician, and Sovereign—that he learned about while attending the men’s group The ManKind Project. “To say g’day is to show up for yourself. You either honor yourself and all your states of being or you don’t,” he says.
While the classes are mostly attended by men, Brenny welcomes feminine energy, as essentially that’s what you are connecting with during the self-reflection meditation at the beginning of a GGHC session: the Lover archetype. Mirroring the idea of the Magician archetype, which centers around crafting your narrative, members are encouraged to share what came up during the meditation if they feel comfortable enough to do so. This happens while everyone is seated in a circle, over coffee that has thoughtfully been pre-ordered. The purpose? “To allow the associated energies to either be amplified—joy, love, gratitude—or for them to move with intention—anger, sadness, anxiety, pain.” One of the best ways to express such energy is through the Pump—the group’s nickname for the physical training and movement component, primarily boxing, which makes up the Warrior aspect. Finally, the Sovereign section sees the group arrive full circle with a Shavasana meditation to “check out physically and energetically, relative to how we checked in,” Brenny explains. Everyone is asked to set an intention for themselves moving forward and consider what part of themselves they would like to shed.
To be clear, GGHC is not crisis support—the work is in prevention. The health club “wasn’t created to save anyone,” Brenny says. “I don’t work in that world.” Despite this, he recognizes that the stigma regarding men’s mental health is still widespread, with research showing that eight Australians a day take their own lives, 75 percent of those being male. “I don’t live in the trenches where this statistic and culture run rampant,” Brenny says, reflecting on his privileged position of being able to make his home in Bondi, a pocket he describes as “cushioned, cozy,” and increasingly self-aware compared to his hometown in Adelaide, South Australia.
Believing in the law of attraction, Brenny trusts that his reality is a mirror of his internal compass. He speaks of his gratitude for the community he has built, having found people he has longed for in his life: “I have these beautiful connections and friendships I never had before with people who have creative approaches to life and aren’t afraid of love or to express themselves.” With so many creatives joining GGHC, he reflects on his own experience studying architecture and appearing as a “meathead boxer.” Sporting a perfectly defined eight-pack and lean definition of every other muscle on his body, Brenny is also highly intellectual and creative, and always felt a little displaced being at the intersection of those two worlds. GGHC has become a manifestation of that desire—binding together disparate worlds and creating a safe space for people to connect, feel good, and get healthy, from the inside out.
Furthermore, GGHC provides people with what is seeming-ly humanity’s greatest need and desire. “We need to be seen, heard, and held,” Brenny says. “I needed this space in my life. It just so happened that so many others did too.” It’s a continually evolving process that requires strength and vulnerability, and Brenny is still working to shed the pain and suffering from his trauma. Our conversation comes shortly after the anniversary of his father’s death, and Brenny identifies the turbulence that surfaced then. Despite his dedication to healing and nurturing the once-damaged core beliefs of “I am enough” and “my feelings matter,” he hasn’t fully recovered. He does, however, remain optimistic and committed to doing everything he can to heal. “I will prevent what was handed to me by my parents being passed on to my children,” he says, circling back to his belief in the importance of prevention and cultivating spaces that teach self-love.
As we journey through life, we must remember that each individual has an unseen history, a story that has shaped who they are today. “To boil it down, to be human is to love and be loved, and that’s a lot harder than it looks,” Brenny says with a laugh. “But if I can, you can too.”
@gdayguyshealthclub on Instagram, hermanshands.com
Images courtesy of: Alexander Nicolaou
