Revealing an open door

We’ve all been given experience in this life that we haven’t been able to process consciously. For whatever reason, it was just too much. Overflow in the vessel.

To turn toward it directly was a portal into overwhelm, shut down, collapse, and fragmentation. It was intelligent to protect a sensitive psyche and nervous system.

Emotional experience that is unable to be felt, articulated, made sense of, and integrated becomes sequestered into underground storage, into neural networks and shadow regions, held in our bellies, hearts, and throats; frozen and crystallized into our muscles, organs, and cell tissue.

From here, it colors our perception and capacity to imagine and play in reality.

Unlived, undigested psychic material becomes personified as the figures who come to visit us during the dream time as well as our dayworld fantasies. Not to harm or take us down. Not as an obstacle to our path, but as an emissary of the path itself. A representative of a future wholeness; an ally of integration, though in an unrecognized, sometimes wrathful form.

There are moments in my therapy practice when I’ll be sitting with someone who is really struggling. But there’s a way that they can’t actually feel what’s happening, they can’t contact the felt quality of the open wound. It’s just not safe enough. And by this “someone,” I of course include myself.

There is no healing without the wound being open first, weeping and seeping its essence, for a closed wound cannot receive the tincture. In a way that the mind has a difficult time understanding, inside the wound the medicine is already active.

In the very center of the physical and subtle tears, the lost orphans of psyche and soma reside, awaiting the nectar that will unfreeze and de-crystallize them, and reveal an open door.

It’s possible to slow down now, lay on the Earth, go into the forest, into inner and outer nature and unveil a portal to these ones, and communicate our intention, desire, care, and devotion to know and hold them, and to help them find their way home.

This isn’t something we do only for ourselves, but for all of life: including the ancestors and the ones who have yet to arrive here, circling until conditions are ripe.

Art credit: The Path is Everywhere by Krista Marlena

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In times when the center is lost

There are times in our lives when the rug gets pulled out from underneath us - the death of an old dream and how it was all supposed to turn out. What was once so clear becomes incinerated and taken to dust.

The center is lost.

The (very human) tendency is to get out of the death aspect of the archetypal cycle, and as quickly as possible into rebirth. This is so understandable; it hurts to turn toward the dying element.

But there is wisdom, mercy, and grace within the dying itself that we short-circuit if we leave prematurely, before the grief, rage, and despair have been tended. There is a shepherding, a midwifing that is needed, a holding environment for aching and burning to be embodied and known.

Death is always an invitation into a grieving process, where we’re asked to gather the shattered pieces and place them on an altar in front of us. To assemble the broken shards into a special container and enter with them into a portal of mourning.

It’s an act of kindness to slow down, turn off the electronics, unplug for just a bit, touch the earth and ask her (and other seen and unseen ones) for help; and take the time and space and devotion to feel what we’re feeling so that it can be digested and metabolized.

Otherwise, the shattered orphans are sequestered into underground storage, held in the somatic unconscious and nervous system, in our muscles and cell tissue, in a frozen, half-processed, unassimilated form.

From there, they burn, cry, rage, erupt, longing to return home.

If we move too quickly past our grief and onto the next thing, we run the risk of abandoning the grieving one, the heartbroken one, and the enraged one to wander alone in an empty forest. They freeze there, crystallize, and contract in the time machine that is the very essence of relational trauma and wounding. And they reach out to us from inside that soul-place, from that frozen state, in whatever way they can, which we all know at times can be in highly dysregulated, anxious, and panicky ways; for that is the only way they know.

These ones, the longing orphans of psyche and soma, are not obstacles to the path, but are the very path itself. The invitation is to offer ourselves permission, by way of a dispensation deep in the body, cultivating a well-sealed vessel or sanctuary in which the broken pieces can go through the alchemical cycle.

And, in this, we can ask the heart if what it truly wants at this time is to be mended, or if its deepest longing is for something else, cracks in its armor where a certain light can come in and illuminate the broken pieces.

The darker light of the rays of the black sun can only flow when the tears are flowing, when the wound is open and seeping, weeping with its essence.

This grief, heartbreak, shattering, isn’t in need of healing, as it’s not un-whole. It’s perfectly valid and pure on its own, as it is, as a radiant manifestation of a Whole Heart. It’s not waiting to be mended or put back together, but to finally be allowed to share its gifts, its fragrances, its mercy, in new and creative ways.

To speak kindness, to embody compassion, to remember what’s most important to us, and to love this world in ways that haven’t been possible until now.

At some point along the way, we may discover that the inner process of restructuring and falling apart isn’t the expression of some cosmic error or mistake, but of a certain kind of grace.

It’s not easy to embrace this, to see the dissolution, putrefaction, and the alchemical yellowing as the activity of intelligence, of the infinite creativity of Spirit as it unfolds and incarnates itself through matter, body, mind, and soul.

Of course, we prefer our initiatory experiences to come by way of the soft, gentle, and nurturing activity of the Divine Mother, which we can honor and be grateful for when they arise in that way.

In ways the conscious mind isn’t always able to understand, we can also be held by the darkness. There’s a benevolence in the not-knowing and in the disassembling itself. It’s a more wrathful, reorganizing, wild, untamed form of grace, but grace nonetheless.

This level of mercy doesn’t have the maintenance of the status quo as its aim or keeping alive the fantasy that we’re in control of the process of healing and awakening. The fantasy of control is turned to dust.

It’s a grace that is unbounded, undomesticated, and operating outside our own hopes and fears. It’s not part of the intergenerational matrix of trauma and trance, and is never going to conform to how we thought it was all supposed to turn out.

Its role is to cleanse our perception and polish our hearts, which it does with the substance of love.

It can ache and burn as we tend to the unwanted, marginalized, and orphaned aspects of our embodied vulnerability, and to illuminate, liberate, and release the crystallized pieces of soul who have wandered off course and are longing to return home.

The wandering ones – who take up residence deep in the somatic unconscious – are also held, at times, in underground storage, in the shadow, along with the guides of the underworld - Persephone, Hermes, Sophia, and the others, whose role it is to guide us through liminal and transitional times, through the in-between places and into the luminous heart.

P.S. We will be reopening the yearlong spirituality and healing group and community in February 2025. You can learn more and place your name on the waitlist here. 

Also, please look out for updates here or via my social media pages regarding a live, in-person retreat in Loveland, Colorado in June 2025. 

Pulling back the veil so that we can see

In alchemy, things coming apart and falling away are essential stages of the work, evidence of the transmutation and the emergence of the red stone: something/ someone in my life, or some way of being-perceiving, begins to yellow; dissolve, disintegrate, reorganize; seeking our blessing to move along.

It can be a challenging and uncertain time, shaky, groundless, restless - and has a way of aching in the body, burning in the heart: an emptiness, a longing, and simultaneously, somehow, a sense that things are pregnant, open, naked, and alive.

That aching, burning, longing – reflected in the words of Rumi, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila – we might open to the possibility that these experiences are evidence of the Ally, of the emissaries of Wholeness, foreshadowing a coming rebirth.

But of course, it doesn’t always feel like that in the moment. Being ground to dust.

Maybe it’s Hermes who is beginning to appear, pulling back the veil so that we can see, cleansing our perception, polishing our hearts, washing our cell tissue from the inside-out. Hermes, being one of many trickster figures, whose role it is to link the various figures and wisdom-centers in psyche.

And also, to link the individual self with Ultimate Reality; to reveal that Unity as our perception is reorganized in and as a single, unified whole.

Mythologically, Hermes connected the Gods to one another, who would ordinarily stay in their own realms; the connection-maker who links together differentiated and dissociated parts in a system, in this case the system of the human heart.

A reconnecting and relinking of orphaned aspects of ourselves and pieces of soul who have become scattered due to trauma and other forms of emotional wounding, those core wounds around love.

Simultaneously connecting the individual heart with the Divine Ground, linking spirit and matter, linking Self with the unus mundus, with the one world prior to the emergence of the opposites.

It’s Hermes, as connection-maker, who plays in this in-between space, where at times he may appear and reveal his Presence, dancing inside those sore places, into the very center of the weeping wound, and provide the missing tincture.

Learn more about Matt's upcoming 2025 online group and community