I work with men, communities, and organizations on the conditions that make wholeness possible. I study what it means for men to belong, to matter, to be seen as whole.
Assistant Professor · UNC Charlotte · Charlotte, NC
The research, teaching, and collaborations that make up my working life — and how to reach me if you'd like to be part of any of it.
Braveheart Gillani is a scholar, practitioner, and engineer whose work bridges disciplines and communities to address systemic violence, foster a sense of belonging, and advance climate and social justice. With over a decade of engineering experience in the global energy industry and expertise in social work and community-based system dynamics, he brings a systems-oriented perspective that integrates micro-level lived experiences with macro-level structural and environmental change.
His research and teaching examine how gender norms, organizational cultures, and social and ecological policies interact to shape health, safety, and sustainability outcomes, particularly among marginalized and climate-vulnerable communities. Braveheart’s scholarship highlights the links between extractive economies, masculinities, and environmental harm, and explores pathways to healthier masculinities and greener, more equitable futures.
Braveheart looks forward to fostering meaningful dialogue, exploring shared priorities, and contributing to the Violence Prevention Center’s mission of advancing research, education, and practice to prevent violence, promote well-being, and build resilience in the face of social and environmental challenges.
Masculinities · trans masculinities · care work · fatherhood · belonging · community researchThank you for wanting to see this part of me — it means more than you might know that you're curious. This corner of the site is kept just for people I've shared it with directly.
Don't have the password? Email me at braveheartbelongs@gmail.com and I'll gladly share it.
Inspired by Nick Offerman’s healthy masculinity.
Certain values have become a compass for me, not as doctrine, but as orientation. They call me toward simplicity, toward peace, toward integrity in the alignment of inner conviction and outer action. I find in them a language for what I have always believed but struggled to name.
I am trying, more and more, simply to become more myself — a wandering and whirling dervish, a poet-philosopher looking for anam cara wherever I go, someone who has stopped apologizing for taking the long way around a question.
I believe we are accountable to one another, to the earth, and to those who come after us. I believe the inner life shapes the outer world. I believe slow, careful attention is a form of love. These convictions run through everything I do, in the classroom, in the field, and in the quiet.
My scholarship studies men and masculinities — awe, belonging, and the slow work of wholeness — and I try to learn from all of it: from the data as much as from the rivers, the mentors, and the quiet courage of the people I study alongside.
Healthy masculinities · working class masculinities · trans masculinities · LGBTQ+ health · anti-racism in higher education · climate and environmental justiceComing soon.
Plus 20+ further peer-reviewed publications spanning adoption, gender-affirming care, and community practice — see the CV below or Google Scholar for the complete list.
Happy to share the full text of any manuscript — just email me.
Teaching and mentoring have become, for me, two names for the same practice: one formal and scheduled, the other slower and less bound by a syllabus, though both ask the same question: what does this particular person, in front of me, need in order to keep becoming who they are? I teach online, in person, and in hybrid rooms, at the graduate and undergraduate level, across social work, engineering, and the spaces where those disciplines overlap.
I come to mentoring as someone who has been mentored far more than I've earned, by teachers, and by writers and thinkers I return to like living wells. My own practice tries to follow what they gave me: not a script handed down the same way to everyone, but discernment, giving each person exactly what they specifically need, and having the humility to be wrong about that and adjust. I've come to think of it less as instruction and more as witness, the discipline of looking at someone closely and reverently enough to see the magnificence already moving through them, and holding that noticing steady until they can carry it themselves. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and it is one of the great honors of my life to watch the people I mentor come into their own and flourish.
Last updated: July 23, 2026 · This list changes. Come back.
Books and voices that are living in me right now. This list changes. Come back.
Reading nowVoices Worth Hearing
Resist Without Demonizing
On holding a hard line without turning the person on the other side of it into a monster.
watch →
Elif Shafak
When Faith and Doubt Hold Hands
On sitting with belief and uncertainty at once, and why the space between them is where most of real life happens.
watch →
David Whyte
A Seeming Stillness
On the quiet thresholds we mistake for standing still, and how much movement is happening just beneath the calm.
watch →
Anis Mojgani
Equal Parts Science and Magic
A poet’s case for wonder and precision needing each other, and for holding both without picking a side.
watch →
Resist Without Demonizing
On holding a hard line without turning the person on the other side of it into a monster.
watch →
Elif Shafak
When Faith and Doubt Hold Hands
On sitting with belief and uncertainty at once, and why the space between them is where most of real life happens.
watch →
David Whyte
A Seeming Stillness
On the quiet thresholds we mistake for standing still, and how much movement is happening just beneath the calm.
watch →
Anis Mojgani
Equal Parts Science and Magic
A poet’s case for wonder and precision needing each other, and for holding both without picking a side.
watch →Hover to pause · Talks and conversations worth returning to
Words That Live in Me
View as spreadsheet ↓Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
We humans are evolution made conscious; hence, our choices for and in the world shape the future of the world.
How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability, but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives. Seek to be such a person.
Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.
If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. But if we overestimate him, we promote him to what he really can be. So we have to be idealists, in a way — because then we wind up as the true, the real realists.
To me it seems important to believe people to be good even if they tend to be bad, because your own joy and happiness in life is increased that way, and the pleasures of the belief outweigh the occasional disappointments. To be a cynic about people works just the other way around and makes you incapable of enjoying the good things.
We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.
Aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency, and bitterness over lost opportunities. Only those who are still intellectually, emotionally, spiritually growing inherit the richness of aging.
The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.
Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?
There are more fake gurus and false teachers in this world than the number of stars in the visible universe. Don’t confuse power-driven, self-centered people with true mentors. A genuine spiritual master will not direct your attention to himself or herself and will not expect absolute obedience or utter admiration from you, but instead will help you to appreciate and admire your inner self. True mentors are as transparent as glass. They let the Light of God pass through them.
You have to break a lot of eggs to make an award-winning omelet.
You are exactly what God had in mind when He made you.
Paradise is not a place that awaits our arrival but a present we arrive at.
Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel.
We settle for the look of holiness rather than the likes of it.
The discovery that awaits us is that paradise is contained in the here and now.
How can someone take my advantage when I’m giving it?
Guilt, of course, is feeling bad about one’s actions, but shame is feeling bad about oneself.
Sometimes, it only seems that the hurt wins.
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
We humans are evolution made conscious; hence, our choices for and in the world shape the future of the world.
How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability, but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives. Seek to be such a person.
The Forty Rules of Love
Elif Shafak
How we see God is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. If God brings to mind mostly fear and blame, it means there is too much fear and blame welled inside us. If we see God as full of love and compassion, so are we.
The path to the Truth is a labour of the heart, not of the head. Make your heart your primary guide. Not your mind. Meet, challenge and ultimately prevail over your nafs with your heart. Knowing your ego will lead you to the knowledge of God.
You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue, or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for him: in the heart of a true lover.
Intellect and love are made of different materials. Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, ‘Beware too much ecstasy’, whereas love says, ‘Oh, never mind! Take the plunge!’ A broken heart hides treasures.
Most problems of the world stem from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.
Loneliness and solitude are two different things. Solitude is better for us, as it means being alone without feeling lonely. But eventually, it is best to find a person who will be your mirror. Only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you.
Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful not only for what you have been given, but also for all that you have been denied.
Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to look at the end of a process. To look at the thorn and see the rose. To look at the night and see the dawn. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.
East, west, south, or north makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole wide world and beyond.
Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected in pain. For a new self to be born, hardship is necessary.
The quest for love changes us. There is no seeker among those who search for love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for love, you start to change within and without.
A genuine spiritual master will not direct your attention to himself and will not expect absolute obedience or utter admiration from you, but instead will help you to appreciate and admire your inner self. True mentors are as transparent as glass. They let the light of God pass through them.
Try not to resist the changes which come your way. Instead, let life live through you. Do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?
Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed.
Real faith is the one inside. There is only one type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure water, and that is the stain of hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify your heart.
If you want to change the ways others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Once you achieve that stage, be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses.
Fret not where the road will take you. Instead, concentrate on the first step. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Don’t go with the flow. Be the flow.
No two people are alike. No hearts beat to the same rhythm. If God had wanted everyone to be the same, He would have made it so. Disrespecting differences and imposing your thoughts on others amounts to disrespecting God’s holy scheme.
The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practice compassion. One man’s pain will hurt us all. One man’s joy will make everyone smile.
The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.
It is never too late to ask yourself, ‘Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within?’ At every moment and with each new breath, one should be renewed and renewed again. There is only one way to be born into a new life: to die before death.
A life without love is of no account. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire! The universe turns differently when fire loves water.
Is a River Alive?
Robert Macfarlane
A small ‘self’ suffers and causes suffering, while a love of the living world lets single identities and selfhoods expand and encompass other beings, entities and whole landscapes, such that the self becomes a spacious thing.
Ideas move in space and time. They swim like fish. They drift like pollen. They migrate like birds. Sometimes their movement carries them right around the world, and they find new niches in which to flourish.
Meaning, as well as water, can be impounded: can still and settle behind dam walls of thought. We have become increasingly waterproofed: conceptually sealed against subtle and various relations with rivers, even as they continue to irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs and stories. Rivers run through people as surely as they run through places.
Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.
If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. But if we overestimate him, we promote him to what he really can be. So we have to be idealists, in a way — because then we wind up as the true, the real realists.
To me it seems important to believe people to be good even if they tend to be bad, because your own joy and happiness in life is increased that way, and the pleasures of the belief outweigh the occasional disappointments. To be a cynic about people works just the other way around and makes you incapable of enjoying the good things.
We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.
Aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency, and bitterness over lost opportunities. Only those who are still intellectually, emotionally, spiritually growing inherit the richness of aging.
The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.
Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?
There are more fake gurus and false teachers in this world than the number of stars in the visible universe. Don’t confuse power-driven, self-centered people with true mentors. A genuine spiritual master will not direct your attention to himself or herself and will not expect absolute obedience or utter admiration from you, but instead will help you to appreciate and admire your inner self. True mentors are as transparent as glass. They let the Light of God pass through them.
You have to break a lot of eggs to make an award-winning omelet.
You are exactly what God had in mind when He made you.
Paradise is not a place that awaits our arrival but a present we arrive at.
Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel.
We settle for the look of holiness rather than the likes of it.
The discovery that awaits us is that paradise is contained in the here and now.
How can someone take my advantage when I’m giving it?
Guilt, of course, is feeling bad about one’s actions, but shame is feeling bad about oneself.
Sometimes, it only seems that the hurt wins.
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.
If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were.
Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
The Forty Rules of Love
Elif Shafak
How we see God is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. If God brings to mind mostly fear and blame, it means there is too much fear and blame welled inside us. If we see God as full of love and compassion, so are we.
The path to the Truth is a labour of the heart, not of the head. Make your heart your primary guide. Not your mind. Meet, challenge and ultimately prevail over your nafs with your heart. Knowing your ego will lead you to the knowledge of God.
You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue, or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for him: in the heart of a true lover.
Intellect and love are made of different materials. Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, ‘Beware too much ecstasy’, whereas love says, ‘Oh, never mind! Take the plunge!’ A broken heart hides treasures.
Most problems of the world stem from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.
Loneliness and solitude are two different things. Solitude is better for us, as it means being alone without feeling lonely. But eventually, it is best to find a person who will be your mirror. Only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you.
Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful not only for what you have been given, but also for all that you have been denied.
Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to look at the end of a process. To look at the thorn and see the rose. To look at the night and see the dawn. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.
East, west, south, or north makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole wide world and beyond.
Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected in pain. For a new self to be born, hardship is necessary.
The quest for love changes us. There is no seeker among those who search for love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for love, you start to change within and without.
A genuine spiritual master will not direct your attention to himself and will not expect absolute obedience or utter admiration from you, but instead will help you to appreciate and admire your inner self. True mentors are as transparent as glass. They let the light of God pass through them.
Try not to resist the changes which come your way. Instead, let life live through you. Do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?
Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed.
Real faith is the one inside. There is only one type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure water, and that is the stain of hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify your heart.
If you want to change the ways others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Once you achieve that stage, be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses.
Fret not where the road will take you. Instead, concentrate on the first step. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Don’t go with the flow. Be the flow.
No two people are alike. No hearts beat to the same rhythm. If God had wanted everyone to be the same, He would have made it so. Disrespecting differences and imposing your thoughts on others amounts to disrespecting God’s holy scheme.
The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practice compassion. One man’s pain will hurt us all. One man’s joy will make everyone smile.
The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.
It is never too late to ask yourself, ‘Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within?’ At every moment and with each new breath, one should be renewed and renewed again. There is only one way to be born into a new life: to die before death.
A life without love is of no account. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire! The universe turns differently when fire loves water.
Is a River Alive?
Robert Macfarlane
A small ‘self’ suffers and causes suffering, while a love of the living world lets single identities and selfhoods expand and encompass other beings, entities and whole landscapes, such that the self becomes a spacious thing.
Ideas move in space and time. They swim like fish. They drift like pollen. They migrate like birds. Sometimes their movement carries them right around the world, and they find new niches in which to flourish.
Meaning, as well as water, can be impounded: can still and settle behind dam walls of thought. We have become increasingly waterproofed: conceptually sealed against subtle and various relations with rivers, even as they continue to irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs and stories. Rivers run through people as surely as they run through places.
Hover to pause
Poetry is how I learned that the unnameable is worth naming anyway. Click any poet to open their poems.
Drafts in progress. More to come as they take shape.
Prose pieces underway. Check back soon.
The people who shaped how I think, feel, and show up. I carry them into every room I enter. Click any card to read their quotes and find their work.
A short list of places worth pointing to.
Masculinities Discourse
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I work with men, communities, and organizations on the conditions that make wholeness possible. I study what it means for men to belong, to matter, to be seen as whole.
Assistant Professor · UNC Charlotte · Charlotte, NC
