6-week Shadow Work course: The Parts of You Awakening Didn’t Touch

There are parts of us that can remain untouched even after years of healing, therapy, spiritual practice, and self-understanding.

Not because we have failed to heal them.

Not because we haven’t found the right insight or practice.

But because some of what we carry was formed in places that understanding alone cannot always reach.

In the body. In relationship. In the early adaptations we made in order to preserve attachment and belonging. In the feelings, needs, longings, and instinctual energies that at some point became too difficult, too dangerous, or too costly to fully inhabit.

These are some of the places we’ll be exploring together this fall in a new six-week live online course:

Shadow Work: The Parts of You Awakening Didn’t Touch
A Compassionate Path into the Unfinished Work of Healing

We’ll begin next Tuesday, September 22, and gather for six consecutive Tuesdays through October 27.

I’m interested in approaching shadow not as something dark or pathological within us that needs to be conquered, but as a name for those dimensions of our experience that have been exiled from conscious life—often for very intelligent and necessary reasons.

Over our six weeks together, we’ll explore some of the deeper mysteries of healing: the exile that can occur in the service of attachment, the difference between insight and integration, the ways the shadow enters our relationships, the grief that can live beneath shame, and what it might mean to understand integration not as final resolution, but as discovering a new relationship with what remains unfinished.

There will be teaching, guided practices, experiential work, and time for questions and reflection.

Mostly, though, I hope we can create a space together where we don’t have to approach ourselves as another project to complete.

A space where we can slow down and listen.

Where we can become curious about what has been left behind.

And where the parts of us that have been waiting outside the familiar stories of healing might begin to find their way home.

Shadow Work begins September 22.

Learn more and join us here.

If you weren’t able to join yesterday’s live gathering, A Different Way of Understanding Healing, the replay is also available. The webinar offers an introduction to many of the themes we’ll be exploring together in Shadow Work.

Watch the free webinar replay here.

With warmth,

Matt

Free Live Gathering with Matt - Tuesday, September 15

There is a particular kind of bewilderment that can arise after we have been on a path of healing for some time.

We understand so much.

We can see where the patterns came from. We recognize the old strategies of protection, the places where we learned to abandon ourselves in order to maintain connection, the ways shame and fear took shape in the body.

We have meditated, prayed, gone to therapy, attended retreats, read the books, and done our best to bring awareness to our lives.

And still, there are moments when something in us reacts as though none of that understanding has ever happened.

The same fear. The same contraction. The same relationship pattern. The same ancient feeling of being too much or not enough. The same impulse to leave ourselves just when we most need our own presence.

It can be tempting to interpret these moments as evidence that something has gone wrong.

That we haven't healed enough. That we need another insight, another method, another breakthrough. That there is some final piece of understanding which, if only we could locate it, would release us once and for all.

But I wonder if these places are asking something else of us.

Not more insight or clarity, necessarily, and not more engagement with a seemingly unending project of fixing, changing, and even “healing” ourselves.

But for something more sensual, wilder, less domesticated, more alive.

More unknown. More mysterious.

A new kind of relationship.

Perhaps some of what we carry cannot be resolved through understanding alone because it was never created at the level of understanding.

It was formed in relationship. In the body. In those early places where we learned what could and could not safely be felt, expressed, needed, grieved, or loved.

And perhaps it is there—in relationship, in the body, in the presence of another—that something new becomes possible.

Not overcoming these parts of ourselves.

Not finally getting rid of them.

But learning how to accompany them.

This is some of the territory I'd like to explore in a free live gathering next week:

A Different Way of Understanding Healing
Why insight, self-awareness, and spiritual practice don't always create lasting change

We'll gather live on Tuesday, September 15, at 9:00 AM Pacific / 12:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM London.

Together we'll explore why healing often unfolds more slowly than understanding, why certain wounds continue asking for our attention long after we've recognized where they came from, and what becomes possible when we begin meeting ourselves with greater compassion, curiosity, and care.

The gathering is free, and I'd love to have you with us.

[Reserve your free place here]

For those who feel called to continue afterward, this gathering will also open into Shadow Work: A Compassionate Path into the Unfinished Work of Healing, a six-week live course beginning September 22.

But there is no need to join the course in order to attend the webinar. Come simply as you are, with whatever questions, tenderness, weariness, or curiosity you might be carrying.

We'll begin there.

With warmth,

Matt

Regulation and being disturbed on the healing path

Sometimes life comes not to soothe us, but to overturn the world we have made. Something arrives—death, a new lover, shattering grief, the end of a dream, an encounter we cannot explain—and the spiritual house of cards begins to fall.

The beloved has appeared, in one of her fierce or more wrathful forms, carrying the power to undo the familiar arrangement of who we have taken ourselves to be.

This is part of what makes healing and awakening so disagreeable at times. We imagine they will make us feel better, safer, more certain, perhaps even more whole. And sometimes they do.

But initiation has another movement. It contradicts the persona. It disturbs the world it has so carefully arranged. It brings us into contact with a life that may bear little resemblance to the one we were certain we were going to live.

Something unexpected enters the room and pulls the rug out from underneath us.

There is a mercurial intelligence in the psyche that does not seem particularly interested in preserving who we think we are. It disturbs what has become fixed, opens what has become closed, and returns movement to places that have crystallized around certainty.

Perhaps this is one of the deeper purposes of regulation: not to become increasingly undisturbable, but to develop enough ground that we can allow ourselves to be genuinely moved.

To be touched by beauty. Undone by love. Rearranged by grief. Astonished by what we cannot explain.

Not every disturbance is a sign that we have lost our way. Sometimes the path itself comes to disturb us.

If you'd like to continue the conversation, you're warmly invited to receive Return to Your Center, a complimentary introductory teaching, or join my mailing list.

Or visit my YouTube page.