Free live webinar with Matt on January 25 - Turning the Light

Dear friends, 

I'll be presenting a free live webinar on January 25 at 9am PT/ 5pm in London, on "Turning the Light: The Mystery of Presence and Attuning to the Creative Unknown."

>>Register here at no cost for Matt's upcoming free live webinar 

It’s so easy to lose contact with the experience of mystery and aliveness, where we’re spending time each day in play with reality, and in those nourishing organic embodied states of imagination, awe, wonder, and the joy of Being itself.

Things have gotten so speedy, shaky, and uncertain in the collective. It’s as if there’s a slow drip of cortisol or adrenaline coming out of the matrix and into our sensitive bodies and nervous systems.

It’s vital that we take time each day to slow down, to shift our awareness out of the collective trance and the urgency of the spin, and into the body, the heart, and the imaginal world, where we can truly listen to the Soul and the guidance it has for us.

During our time together, I’ll speak about:

• Stepping out of the matrix of the collective and attuning to the wisdom of the body and the imagination
• Creating an inner holding environment for ourselves and the scattered pieces of soul in times of transition, liminality, and stress
• The mysterious link between relational trauma, a broken heart, and the sacred; the wounded healer and the path of initiation
• Trusting in the soul and the ways it relentlessly and wildly pulls us toward wholeness, including by way of our sensitivities and “symptoms”

I look forward to spending some time with everyone on Thursday, January 25. 

Warmly, 

Matt

Early relational wounding and trauma

Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through the questioning and reorganization of patterns of thinking. In other words, we can’t think our way out of trauma, attachment, and narcissistic injury.

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

Encouragement to “just get over it, it’s just your ego, just let it be, 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 to be held, they’re not all that interested in our crystal-clear analysis, detached witnessing and fantasies of “mastery,” or powerful spiritual insights.

They’re longing for something else… for you, for your heart, for your holding. To know that you will stay near, that you will not abandon or shame them, that you will do your best to provide sanctuary and safe passage for them to come Home, to be helped out of that frozen, crystallized state and to live once again.

Trauma, dissociation, and relinking psyche and soma

Healing from trauma and any form of relational wounding involves a relinking of that which has become unlinked. In this way, trauma is the experience of unlinking.

To re-associate that which has become dis-associated.

To re-embody to what which has become dis-embodied.

Or, to speak more alchemically, the word dis-aster involves an unlinking from the stars, from our own stars, from the sparks of light that form the human soul.

To reconnect with the stars which have been scattered will ask everything of us, and more.

Dissociation is natural to the psyche and serves a vital adaptive function, keeping us out of states of profound, unworkable, unendurable fragmentation, terror, and an annihilatory sense of panic.

To re-associate and to re-link soma and psyche occurs by way of relationship. In this way all healing is relational in its essence.

But the nature of what this relationship is, is of the Mystery. Relationship unfolds inside the psyche as previously dissociated pieces of soul are brought back together; and interpersonally though a safe, attuned, empathic relational field.

And also transpersonally, a re-association with the Divine, with our essential Being, with that part of ourselves that was never wounded and was always Whole.

Somehow, reunion with the missing companion, with the lost Friend, whether inside, outside, or in between, for the great union and re-linking to occur.

To bear witness to this dissociation and re-linking and to offer a safe, holding, and dynamic vessel and inner Temple, where the other can feel felt and understood, can take us to the ground.

As we weep and lament together, somehow in that, in the purity of those tears, the stars are returned, the splitting is healed, the rupture is repaired, and the dissociated pieces of soma and psyche are reunited.

It’s only love that can foster that sort of reunion, a love that belongs not to a “healer” or a “patient,” but to the field itself; all we can do is allow our perception to be cleansed and our heart to be polished so that we can perceive it and be a vehicle for its embodiment and incarnation.

Learn more about Matt's online group and community

View Matt's YouTube channel here