The grief, the tears, the joy - all of it - 2024

As another year comes to a close, I want to thank you for sharing some of your heart and world with me this year, in all its chaos and glory – the grief, the tears, the joy, the longing, all of it.

It’s not easy to make this journey on our own. As open, sensitive relational human beings, we’re wired to connect, to love and to be loved, and to support one another as we open into the mysteries.

Perhaps in other worlds there are other types of nervous systems. But here, on this star, we have this one – which is so precious.

Whether our primary interest is in tending the wounds around love – attachment, trauma, narcissism, betrayal in soul – or in exploring within the transpersonal band (communion, union, Oneness, Unity with the divine ground), we do so by way of an unknown and mysterious relational field, through the dance and play of love in form.

Whether we’ve met in person or through one of my courses, my ongoing online community, on retreat, in individual work, or within the inner space of the heart, thank you for being here. I’m honored and grateful to be surrounded by so many kind-hearted friends and fellow travelers.

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, confronting feelings of groundlessness and uncertainty.

In so many ways, we’ve been asked to turn toward the unlived within us. To provide a temple where the shattered pieces of the heart can come to reassemble.

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…

Wishing you a deeply meaningful, joyful, and wildly creative and alive 2025. See you next year. 

To remember on this Christmas day...

Sending love to my friends everywhere on this Christmas day.

Thank you for sharing your sacred stories, pain, and joy with me in 2024 and for reminding me of the courage, bravery, and majesty of the human heart.

In a world that at times can forget so easily, we learn to pretend there is something more that matters. Thank you for helping me remember what is most important.

To take a risk in allowing another to matter, to allow this life to truly matter. To care more, not less and to somehow make use of the broken and the tender as passageways into the heart of the world. To no longer stay on the sidelines, but to fully participate in the bounty that has been placed inside and around us.

May we pause today in awe, take a break from the holiday madness, and remember the gift of life. To behold the utter majesty of what it really means to have been given a human body, the chance to touch the earth, listen to the birds, see the miracle in a snowflake, and explore the mystery with our fellow travelers.

On this new day, let us share the most profound gift of our presence, listening carefully to others and what is most alive in their hearts. To care deeply about how they are making meaning of their experience and what brings their hearts alive. To remember that just like us they only want to be safe, happy, and free.

To speak words of kindness, to touch and hold them and do what we can so that they feel felt. To validate their emotional worlds and provide safe haven for their essence to unfold in the field between. To bear witness to the majesty of pure spirit as it comes into this miracle world of time and space.

And to remember that in the end, when we are passing from this world, there may be only one thing that truly matters: how well did I love when I was here.

Thank you again for sharing some of your world with me this year. See you in 2025 <3

Relational healing and the shattered heart

As relational mammals with the sort of nervous system that we've been crafted with and the kind of heart that we've been provided with, the experience of abandonment and aloneness is really the greatest type of suffering we can experience.

It goes to the very core of who and what we are as beings wired to connect, to love and be loved, to hold and be held, and to rest, thrive, play, and heal in the arms of another, metaphorically and also physically, emotionally, neurophysiologically, as well as spiritually.

At times, we need another to help us to feel glued together, where two hearts, two sets of mirror neurons, and ripe relational neurocircuitries can come into linkage – one and two, two into One, the dance of Unity and Multiplicity, Oneness and Differentiation.

The activity of love in manifestation.

Upward, ascending into Unity, solar cycles; downward, descending into the alive brilliance of multiplicity, lunar embodiment and incarnation. Each an equally valid arrow in the quiver of the beloved as she unfolds herself into form, pours her body out of itself to seed the world of time and space.

No matter how much inner work we do, how healed, or transformed, or enlightened, or awakened we become, or fantasize ourselves to have become, we don't ever really transcend our relational nature. We don't rise above hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

We don't need to apologize for this or pretend it's otherwise or shame ourselves for having this relationally configured nervous system.

We don't need to apologize for the fact that we really are relationally crafted. But fall to the ground in awe at the mystery of one and two. The aching, the burning, the chaos, and the glory of the whole thing.

Matt's Summer 2025 in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster)

Matt's 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community

Matt's YouTube page

HOLIDAY OFFER/ PRICING: Resting Your Nervous System online course

This weekend (Friday through Sunday, December 13-15) I’ll be offering my Resting Your Nervous System online course (over 20 hours of video-based content) at a special price of $167.

In the self-guided home study course, we’ll explore the nature of an embodied, trauma-sensitive spirituality, one that integrates somatic and depth psychotherapies, relational neuroscience, and the clinical application of mindfulness and self-compassion practices.

Over 12, 90+ minute sessions, there will be exercises and guided meditations, talks from me, and responses to frequently asked questions.

Topics include – Resting Your Nervous System: Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety; Into the Heart of Trauma and the Nature of Relational Wounding: Going Slow, Staying Safe, and Honoring the Intelligence of the Body; Compassion, Hope, and the Possibility of True Healing: The Journey of Safety, Coming Home to the Body, and the Reorganization of the Nervous System; Self-Compassion, Embodied Attunement, and What Works For You: Toning and Tuning Your Unique Nervous System.

You can learn more about the course and the special pricing here:

>>Resting Your Nervous System online course/ special pricing 

Trauma and the journey home

Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through questioning and reorganizing patterns of thinking.

We can’t think our way out of trauma, attachment, and narcissistic violation.

When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, unmetabolized pieces of soul are held subcortically and in cellular circuitry, unreachable by thinking which is a layer removed from the fires of the alchemical body.

Instead, they seek refuge in the belly, heart, and throat, and in underground shadow storage regions. Thought is too dense to reach them here. From here, they burn and ache and long for safety and shelter, for permission to be.

Encouragement to “just get over it, it’s just your ego, just be in the present, it isn’t who you really are” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as the activity of empathic failure, aggression, and psychic violence.

It’s like a neural form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of relational wounding and implicit memory, and only contributes to the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

In addition to shattering and unendurable experience – which is painful and terrifying enough – there is a profound sense of aloneness that goes with this, the disorganizing reality of the missing Friend, and no accompaniment into the dark night. “I am alone in this.”

This is devastating to the soul.

When the lost orphans of psyche and soma come surging in a moment of activation, they express their longing to return home.

To come out of their frozen, crystallized state, and into the warmth of the inner temple.
Where they can dream a new dream, play again, and become an alive, joyful vessel through which the Divine can live and move and breathe.

Matt's Summer 2025 in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster)

Matt's 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community

Matt's YouTube page

A rebirth that is whole

In each moment the sacred process of death and rebirth is playing out within us. With each breath, something in us is dying: some aspect of who we think we are or what we’re doing here, the death an old dream, a relationship we were sure would last forever, an idea about how it was all going to turn out.

In the face of this dissolution, the question isn’t so much how can we be reborn, but will we participate in death, fully, and with an open heart, paving the way for new forms to emerge, trusting that rebirth will take place according to a timeline originating far away in the stars.

In times of transition, our tendency is to rush to rebirth, quickly back into the known, in an urgent attempt to cure, maintain, or heal that which is dying, that which longs to transform. It is so natural to resist falling apart in our need to put it all back together.

But it is only from the core of the womb of death - a death tended to consciously - that re-birth can come into being.

The invitation, which we can at times hear clearly, during the dark of night, in the slowness and the depths, during time with the moon and as we move in and out of states of sleep and dream, is to not abandon death in our rush to be re-born.

To not short circuit the intelligence and creativity that death is, and to remember that rebirth is not possible without the creativity of dissolution, without the alchemical putrefaction.

Allow the death some time to unfold, to share its poetry and its fragrances, which are not partial, but of a light that is whole. In those times in our lives when things are being rearranged and reorganized inside and around us, we can attune to what is truly being asked, whether it is to cure death and reassemble the known, or to allow the forms of love safe passage to continue their journey.

To honor the forms of love as they come into our lives and touch us and share with us their beauty. But equally allow them to dissolve so that new forms may emerge and enchant this place.

To give them permission to dance and play and participate fully in the sacred return.

Matt's Summer 2025 in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster)

Matt's YouTube page