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.

Anxiety and the Alchemy of Integration

 

When we speak of anxiety, we often mean a restless unease — the shakiness, a racing mind, a panicky belly, the sense that something unnamed is just slightly off. At this level, anxiety can be a messenger from the body, a signal that something in our life longs for safety, movement, or rest. This anxiety has more of an existential essence than a medical one.

There are also more clinical forms — those with biological or hereditary roots, where the chemistry of the brain and body conspire to generate waves of fear and agitation seemingly independent of outer circumstance. These can be supported through the healing arts of relational therapy, the conscious use of medication, and somatic regulation.

Beneath these surface layers, there exists another form — one that feels less like a symptom and more like an initiation. It’s what Heinz Kohut called disintegration anxiety, though in the language of alchemy, we might call it a nigredo — the dark ferment where the old structures of identity begin to dissolve.

When this level of anxiety arises, it can feel as though the self might come apart, that we might dissolve into chaos and never return. It is not merely the fear of death or failure, but the trembling of the ground of being itself — what Winnicott so hauntingly called the fear of “falling forever.”

I’ve sat with many courageous people in this place, and it asks everything of both of us. To remain in that vessel together — without rushing to fix, to interpret, or to soothe — is its own act of devotion. We must, for a time, set aside the understandable human longing for relief, and open instead to the underlying intelligence that shimmers beneath the chaos.

This kind of anxiety is not a mistake in the system. It signals that something buried, something vital, is beginning to stir. Often, this energy lives in the subcortical depths of the body — the belly, the throat, the solar plexus — where it was stored long ago, unheld and unspoken.

In those moments, I often imagine that we are descending together into the mythic underworld — where Persephone and Hermes tend the threshold, and where even the gods know the trembling of rebirth.

To meet this kind of anxiety requires not analysis but companionship, breath, and slowness. It asks for faith that what feels like disintegration may in time reveal itself as reorganization — that the chaos we fear may be the psyche’s way of reassembling around a deeper center of gravity.

The energy that once held the self together through contraction can become the very energy of aliveness. In this way, anxiety — even the most terrifying kind — is not the enemy of healing, but the guardian of the threshold, the trembling before new life.

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