Into the Autumn glory - communion, union, Unity

In times of liminality and transition, there is a unique invitation delivered to each of us, from the inner Friend, to slow down and open to what it might truly feel like to play and imagine once again.

To explore from that place of beginner’s mind, re-opening to those natural states of awe, wonder, and the simple joy inherent in a few moments of just Being, Being who and what we already are, without having to turn our lives into some unending self-improvement project.

While we can hold an intention to improve our lives, relationships, and sense of self, which is intelligent, and kind, simultaneously to spend some time each day in these less-structured experiences, ones that aren’t oriented in improvement, in getting to a different experience.

Maybe for us that’s being out in nature (perhaps without our electronic devices) or writing down our dreams or doing some type of yoga or meditation or prayer or whatever that might be: Writing, dancing, putting our hands in some clay or sand.

Tending to the wild undomesticated aliveness of the sensual world. An invitation into kenosis, of being emptied-out, of the known, the frozen, and the crystallized, that we hear about from the Christian mystics.

Taking time each day to interrupt the trance of the collective, the pull into a survival-level restlessness, return into our bodies, and provide an inner temple in which we can feel, where that which has remained unlived can come into embodied reality and disclose its wisdom.

To attune to that emerging, right-brain flow of image, feeling, sensation, and those states of communion, Union, and Unity.

This emptying out, into Fullness isn’t something we do only for ourselves (of course, were included in its embrace) but is for all of life - for others, human and animal, for Gaia, for the ancestors, and for the ones yet to arrive here, waiting for conditions to be ripe.

These “ones yet to arrive here” include others as well as those aspects of ourselves and pieces of soul - the entirety of the lost orphans of psyche and soma - who are longing to come into Being now, future parts that carry a profound creativity, wholeness, wisdom, and compassion - all qualities that our world so badly needs right now.

Photo: fall glory at the Dallas Divide near Telluride, photographer unknown

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.

Visit Matt's YouTube channel

Join Matt's mailing list

Learn more about Matt and his work 

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.