Wishing you a joyous, safe, and reflective holiday time

Dear friend

I wanted to take a moment to wish you a joyous, safe, and reflective holiday time. Thank you for sharing your hearts and journeys with me this year – your suffering, your chaos, your courage, and your love. 

This time of the year can be difficult for many, opening a portal into feelings and memories of deep loneliness, shame, sadness, and rage, activating wounds held in our families of origin as well touching into the intergenerational transmission of trauma and pain. 

We may also have some positive associations with the holidays – joy, connection, play, and belonging – a childlike innocence as to what the holidays symbolize to us. 

And, for many of us, it can be a complicated, unresolvable mix. 

Let us take a moment to tend it all with one another, including the joy and the grief, the loneliness and the connection, the sweetness and the ache. 

And open together into the archetypal mysteries of birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, transfiguration and transmutation, each an essential portal into the depths of the soul. 

I know many have been through so much this year and lost many of their familiar reference points, unsure where to look for refuge and meaning, with the rug pulled out from underneath. In so many ways, we’ve been asked to turn toward the shattered and the unlived within us.

To take a moment to touch and to shepherd this – the myriad of losses, betrayals, and transitions, but of the dream of the way we thought it was all going to turn out. Me and my life, and how it was all supposed to look and feel. 

Rebirth is tied intimately to our willingness and capacity to grieve, a holy activity not always honored in our world. But here we are, the misfits of despair, ecstasy, sorrow, and wonder, knowing the aliveness we long for will only be found in embodied attunement to the full spectrum. 

The process of “falling apart” is not some great cosmic error or mistake we need to correct or repair, but an emissary of wholeness, a way shower of what will emerge from the ashes of reorganization.

It is love, of course, that will guide the reorganization. But it is love, too, that is the substance of the ashes, and also the tears, 

I look forward to staying in touch over the weeks and months to come. Please look out for an announcement about my new yearlong group, The Mystery School for Embodied Spirituality & Healing, in the new year, where we’ll gather together as a community to explore a contemporary, relational, trauma-sensitive, soulful path of transformation and self-realization. 

Please take care of yourself and I look forward to connecting with you next year. 

With love and appreciation,

Matt

The wound and the medicine are one

 

Dear friends,

The wounded healer is not a profession. It’s not a meme. It’s not a career choice. It’s not a “choice” at all.

It’s a hidden region within the psyche of every human being — a chamber where a unique initiatory path is unfolding. You don’t have to be a therapist or a healer to live — or to be breathed by — this archetype.

It moves through all who have been touched by pain and are learning to keep their hearts open anyway; all who have been invited, through loss or rupture, into a deeper encounter with what is most real.

As the light wanes and winter nears, this archetype stirs. The natural world turns inward; roots descend into darkness; the unseen begins its slow work of renewal. The psyche, too, longs to rest from the glare of constant becoming — to turn toward what has been left behind, what still aches for tending.

To live this path is not to fix others or perfect oneself, but to be slowly reshaped by what has broken us open. It is to let experience carve empathy into the heart, to allow heartbreak to become an organ of perception.

Rumi wrote:

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

But he might also have said: the wound is the place where the Earth enters you. Where incarnation becomes intimate. Where the holy work of embodiment begins.

The wounded healer moves through those who can stand, however tremblingly, in the soul’s invitation that the path is everywhere — even in the places that ache, even in the moments that shatter the story of who we thought we were.

This winter, you might let yourself be initiated once again — not upward toward transcendence, but downward, into intimacy with the dark. Into the fertile soil of your own aliveness. Into the part of you that still remembers how to listen.

The wound and the medicine are not separate. They are the same mystery, seen from different sides of love.

With warmth in the turning of the year,
Matt

P.S. To help you enter more fully into the descent and quiet beauty of this winter passage, I’ve opened a free video teaching and eBook, Return to the Center. It’s a meditation on stillness, the heart, and the alchemy of renewal — a small lantern for the darker season. You can receive it here → Return to the Center

How well did I love while I was here?

On this new Thanksgiving Day, it is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come – that another opportunity will be given to witness a sunrise, spend a moment with someone we love, or be astonished at the crystals in the newly fallen snow.

But another part knows it is so fragile here, precarious, shaky, outrageously precious and at times so shattering, that this opening into life will not be here for much longer. One moment, we will turn toward it, and it will be gone.

May we give thanks on this new day by no longer postponing our time here, not waiting any longer, not forgetting.

By remembering what's most important and what truly matters. By doing whatever we can to help others, using our words wisely and with kindness, listening to others so that they feel felt and understood, holding them in moments when they need a lamp in the darkness.

At the end of this life, it is unlikely we'll be caught up in whether we accomplished all the tasks on our to-do lists, manifested all the things we fantasized we wanted, played it safe, or completed some endless self-improvement project.

At that moment, there may be only one question that remains: how well did I love?

Did I pause each day to slow down and truly behold the beauty of this place? Was I willing to take a risk, feel more, allow this life and others to truly matter to me, and experience what is already here, what has already been given? To fully participate in that overflow.

The sound of the birds, the sunset, an emotion all the way through, to truly experience a color, a tree, the sky, the miracle of this human body and heart, and the wild, undomesticated chaos and glory of the whole thing.

Ending the trance of postponement and dissolving the dream that there is some breath, some beauty, some love coming tomorrow. Tomorrow is a dream that may not arrive. Love is now.

The bounty and harvest of thanksgiving is upon us, waiting to be seen, felt, tasted, and heard, in the trees and the snow, in the imagination and in the heart.

In the very center of our holy mirror neurons as they light up when we attune to one another and bear witness to their subjectivity, to how they’re making sense of this crazy world, what keeps them awake at night, what is truly meaningful to them, what scares them and brings their heart alive.

To peer behind the veil for just a moment and into the background majesty of the sacred world, as it unfolds itself, as the Beloved pours herself out of herself, weaving the world of form, of time and space.

Needing us, these bodies and these hearts, as an increasingly translucent vessel in which she can finally come alive here, in the incarnational journey from pure Spirit into wild manifestation.

I hope I make it all the way through this Thanksgiving Day, but if for some reason I do not, this would have been enough. I have been given so much more than enough.