Join Matt for The Winter Passage: A 3-Month Online Journey Starting November 5

As we move toward the winter months, I've been reflecting on the different seasons of the inner life, and how not everything within us unfolds according to the same rhythm.

There are times when something in us longs to become a little quieter, to listen more closely, and to make room for what has been waiting beneath the surface of our ordinary lives.

I've come to feel that healing has something of this same seasonal quality. There are movements within us that cannot be hurried, experiences that don't necessarily need another explanation or technique, but perhaps a different kind of attention. A place where we can begin to meet what is here, without so much pressure to change it into something else.

This November, I'll be opening The Winter Passage, a three-month online gathering held within our ongoing Mystery School community.

From November through January, we'll come together for nine live gatherings, exploring the inner life through contemplative teaching, experiential practice, and companionship.

We'll make room for the body and the heart, for grief and tenderness, for uncertainty and wonder, and for those parts of ourselves we may not yet fully know how to meet.

One of the things I've come to appreciate most about this work is what becomes possible when we gather together over time. When we discover that we don't have to carry everything alone, and that something within us may begin to soften through being met, listened to, and accompanied.

The Winter Passage is complete in itself. You can simply come spend these three months with us, without needing to make a longer commitment.

We begin Thursday, November 5.

If something in you recognizes this invitation, I'd love to welcome you.

Learn more about The Winter Passage and join us here.

With warmth,
Matt

Sometimes the path will disturb us

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.

Learn more about Matt and his work 

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