Return to the Center

You might imagine yourself in the very center of a circle, enclosed within a sacred space, an inner courtyard, with all of the aspects of your life circumambulating around the center, pointing inward.

And in the very center with you, you may find a guide or an inner ally, or just a sense of centering, in the Heart.

Deepening into the felt sense of this center, and how this inner guidance, the Self, is always, already here – and always communicating, disclosing – as an ordering principle within you, pointing toward wholeness.

This inner center was never and could never be tainted by anything that has happened to you - relational trauma, emotional wounding, unrepaired attachment circuitries, betrayals in soul; none of that is able to truly affect your essential Nature, which is primordially pure.

It is possible, with attention and devotion, to familiarize ourselves with this centering function, where we live with the Self as an inner partner, who is always here, as our true Spiritual Director, the conductor of the orchestra of the soul.

You can turn to this inner Friend and Guide in times when you feel out of center. And in dialogue and relationship with this One, you may see that even those unwanted, confusing, uncomfortable emotions, are somehow attempts at self-healing, self-realization, guiding you back into that centering, and into a natural wholeness and completion.

This is the reality and invitation into the mandala of the wounded healer, a dynamic and emerging archetypal experience that is alive in somatic, psychic, and collective networks.

A natural ordering within the soul, where each emotion, feeling, sensation, dream image, and piece of psyche, has a purposive quality to it, where each aspect of our lives are circulating around and pointing towards the center.

A peering behind the veil and into the mandala principle.

Learn more about Matt's ongoing Spirituality & Healing online group and community

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Learn more about Matt's summer in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster) 

Turning toward them - and holding them in love

At times, pieces of soul will become frozen or crystallized, and fall out of reach, only to call out to us, through strange feelings or moods, images and dreams, and through a variety of what we often refer to as “symptoms.”

These lost orphans of psyche and soma are personifications of our “unlived lives,” aspects of experience which we’ve lost contact with: unfelt grief, unmetabolized sadness, abandoned joy, disavowed anger and shame, dissociated states of connection and Unity.

Recontacting the unlived life, and the figures who carry these experiences on our behalf, is the activity of mercy, compassion, and intelligence, a vital process on the path of embodied healing, individuation, and spiritual renewal.

Whether due to unresolved trauma, stress, environmental or social factors, disorganization in attachment, or effects of a narcissistic or borderline early holding environment, these ones become sequestered into underground storage, into the shadow and somatic unconscious.

From here, they live and move and breathe, spin and twirl, in their longing to return home.

Especially in uncertain, transitional, and other in-between periods of time, it’s easy to lose contact with the figures who inhabit these more subtle regions of the spectrum of consciousness.

As a result of this splitting, dissociation, and rupture in relationship, we can feel tired, weighed down, depleted, and exhausted, not only physically, but at a deeper soul level.

Turning away from the unlived within us – personally, culturally, collectively, ancestrally – is something we all do as a way to protect ourselves, from fragmentation, a survival-level anxiety, and an annihilatory sense of panic. This is not neurotic, “unevolved,” or “unspiritual,” but intelligent and adaptive, early forms of self-compassion.

It was the best way we knew to take care of ourselves and keep us out of an immediate, overwhelming, unbearable, naked confrontation with our historic core vulnerabilities and sensitivities, all of which have a way of surging in times of uncertainty and transition.

Recontacting the achy, burning, longing, shaky, tender pieces of soul – turning toward them and holding them in love – is one of the essence-alchemies of our time.

Learn more about Matt's ongoing Spirituality & Healing online group and community

Matt's YouTube page

Learn more about Matt's summer in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster) 

A vessel for love to find its way here...

It can be an act of love (and revolution) to take a few moments each day to pause and interrupt the density of the collective right now, the trance-loops of disembodiment, and the pull up into sympathetic arousal, restlessness, and stress.

It can seem as if there were a slow descent of cortisol or adrenaline dripping down into organ, muscle, and cell tissue; into throat, heart, belly, and into the air and soil around us. Infusing the space around and inside.

It’s seductive out there, and so easy to find ourselves on autopilot, tangled in spirals of repetitive, unfresh thinking, disconnected from our senses, our bodies, and especially from what we’re feeling.

But the unlived life, the untended grief, the unmetabolized shame, fear, apathy, wild joy, and rage – and the figures carrying these experiences – are circling and longing for a home in which they can be held, and from which they can share their voice, body, and mercy-essence.

There is a spin in the collective matrix that requires our presence, our care, fidelity, and devotion to move behind the veil, even if for just a moment. To call forth the wisdom-guides to help us to see, and to feel.

What is emerging now, in my body, belly, heart, and throat; in the imaginal field; what is it that is alive in the somatic unconscious that is needed at this time?

What am I experiencing right now, in my body and in my vision, without any interpretation or commentary; without referring back to what I already know and what this world is telling me? Just for a moment. It will all be there waiting for us when we return.

Just a few moments of raw immediate, embodied knowing, right-brain attunement, image, feeling, sensation, senses open.

Even if a few times a day we can return into the crystalline, transparent vessel, perhaps love can find its way through into this world, with us as its vehicle. To find some sort of open portal though which it can incarnate into a world that so needs it right now.