A temple for the lost pieces of soul

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. A more tactile, sensual tincture is required.

When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, shards of unmetabolized experience (pieces of soul) are relocated into underground storage and held in subcortical and somatic circuitry.

From here, these figures long to come out of their crystallized state and return home.

Encouragement to “just get over it, you can’t really believe that, you know that’s not true, come back to the present moment, that’s just your story,” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as profoundly misattuned, even as the activity of violence and aggression.

The orphans retreat, and go deeper into the subtle body.

This “advice” is experienced as an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of trauma and the workings of implicit memory.

In addition to the terrifying and shattering emotional pain, on top of that is a profound sense of aloneness. No one can understand; no companionship into the dark night. No relational temple in which to rest, breathe, and tend to the orphaned ones of psyche and soma.

The ally is nearby, but hidden behind the veil. A cleaning of perception and polishing of the heart is needed to see and to feel it. In ways that are counter-instinctual to that part of us needing to know ahead of time, the ally has located itself inside the wound.

Only an open wound can be healed. Otherwise, the tincture is unable to enter, reveal, and transmute. It’s within a sensitive vessel that the physical and subtle tears can weep freely, and wash us from the inside out.

It is the flowing of these tears that allows for the grieving to unfold, the mourning of the unlived life… the beginning of a new world.

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The Soul Alchemist - Matt's new online course now open for enrollment

The Soul Alchemist: Trusting Your Inner Experience

My new six-week live online course is now open for registration. We’ll be getting started on September 18.

>>Learn more/ register for The Soul Alchemist online group here 

There has always been something unique about the autumn season for me, personally, a particular doorway and transition into a felt sense of the center; the center of who and what we are as well as into the center of Reality itself.

This time for me has often involved a real awakening of the feeling-body, a certain attunement which includes both spirit and matter.

The golden colors, the changing light, the falling away of the old - these are all expressions of the alchemical process of yellowing, a vital aspect of the transformational path - inviting us into a new way of being with ourselves and the world - an inner recycling and reorganization which mirrors processes occurring in outer nature.

In honoring the transformative potential of this time of the year, I want to offer a dynamic relational field and holding environment in which we can gather this autumn, rest our nervous systems together, ground and awaken our bodies, and open into the mysteries of healing and somatic presence.

This new live course - The Soul Alchemist: Trusting Your Inner Guidance - will include meditation and experiential practice, guidance about the embodied transformative process (from both psychological and spiritual perspectives), and conversation where you can share your experience and ask any questions you might have.

As open, sensitive human beings, we’re deeply affected by unlived psychic and somatic experience, as well as the speed and frenetic-nature of the times we’re living in. This effect is often subtle and can generate a deep restlessness and exhaustion.

Through embodied re-attunement, centering, and shifting our psychic center of gravity, we can be here for ourselves and others in more wise, skillful, and compassionate ways, revealing a freedom, spontaneity, and creativity that is always, already here.

Wired to love and be loved

So many feel shame about their trauma and wounding, as if it is evidence that they’ve failed, it’s their fault, and that they should be able to “get over” it and heal on their own.

Even if we “know” this isn’t accurate, these schemas live implicitly in our sensitive bodies and nervous systems, where they color our perception from within the somatic unconscious.

These heartbreaking lenses of perception are reflected back to us by an increasingly disembodied and left-brain dominant culture, giving rise to the contemporary fantasy that I “should” be able to do it all on my own.

The tribe has broken down, replaced by the device and the slow cortisol drip of a sympathetically aroused collective. And we wonder why it’s all falling apart.

The emotional pain is tragic in and of itself, but underneath it is the underlying shame and deep sense of being alone, which is really at the root of trauma.

As relational mammals, we are wired to co-regulate. We are not meant to “do it all on our own” and it is not an indication that something is “wrong” with us if we cannot always contain our own wounding.

It is evidence that we are alive, with an open, sensitive, and majestic human nervous system. And a heart that longs to know Unity consciousness, that felt oneness with others, with Gaia, with the cosmos, with the Divine.

We can do so much for one another, to help hold and transmute transgenerational, biographical, and collective trauma. To take a few moments, with compassionate presence, and really listen to another and be with them in a way where they feel felt and understood.

Our world so desperately this needs right now.

If you want to help someone in your life, help them to feel safe.

Instead of “I am alone” with this fear, pain, confusion, and grief, “We are here together, and healing is possible.” I’ll stay near as the shattered unfolds itself into new levels of cohesion. Together, we’ll see through the eyes of Spirit and take the chaos as path.

And then, together, bear witness as we’re crafted as transparent vessels in which this embodied realization may incarnate into the forests, the moon, the oceans, and the stars.

FREE live webinar with Matt - Grounded Body, Clear Mind: Finding Your Center in Times of Uncertainty - register at no cost here - September 4 at 9am U.S. Pacific/ 5pm in London 

Matt's new LIVE 6-week online group - The Soul Alchemist: Trusting Your Inner Guidance - will start in mid-September. Please check back here or sign up to Matt's mailing list to receive information about the course and how to join.