A purifying ally

At times, a broken heart will appear as a hidden wisdom-guide, and you will be asked to place the shattered pieces on the altar in front of you.

The invitation of the broken is rarely sweet and peaceful, but always reorganizing and whole. “The freedom you are longing for is found inside me,” it says, “not in sending me away.”

An ancient companion has arrived as a purifying ally from beyond, seeking just a moment of your care, your listening, interest, and holding.

It has come to walk with you on a blessed journey. With something to disclose, to offer, that is not accessible during times when everything is resolved and put together.

Befriending Yourself - you are invited to join me and my friend Jeff Foster at our new online membership site at the intersection of spirituality, meditation, and depth psychology. Video-based teachings, live meditations, question-and-answer videos, and a moderated online support community. 

The next retreat - The Deep Rest Retreat: Slowing Down and Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times - September 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado - registration open 

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

Strands of holding

The image of “holding” is such an evocative one as it calls up not only early personal experience, but also archetypal material that expresses this same psychic patterning throughout culture and time, and the ways we human beings have found solace in “being held” by transpersonal figures, energies, and by the natural world itself.

When we are able to “hold” our experience as well as allow ourselves to “be held” by something larger, we are able to trust life in a new way. We become more spontaneous and creative, more emotionally flexible, and better able to respond to the challenges that life will inevitably provide.

Even if our experience is difficult, heartbreaking, confusing, or uncertain, we come to discover that it is taking place within a vast context or space, one that may be a lot more purposive and intelligent than it appears.

Over time, as we illuminate and befriend our experience at deeper levels, we invite its wisdom, creativity, and love to disclose itself. We become more and more familiar with the space or alchemical container in which it appears. We are the material within the vas and we are also the alchemist looking in. We are the vas itself and in the most primordial way the space in which the entire display has appeared.

Through this discovery, our center of gravity begins to shift into the experiential realization that we are always, already held. In this way, holding is not something we need to manufacture, create, deserve, or “earn” by way of completing some heroic project of self-improvement or enlightenment.

These hearts, these bodies, these psyches, these souls are woven with strands of holding. We share this with the mountains, the stars, the moon, and the sea. 

Photo by RitaE – Deutschland via Pixabay

Befriending Yourself - you are invited to join me and my friend Jeff Foster at our new online membership site at the intersection of spirituality, meditation, and depth psychology. Video-based teachings, live meditations, question-and-answer videos, and a moderated online support community. 

The next retreat - The Deep Rest Retreat: Slowing Down and Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times - September 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado - registration open 

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

Light in the darkness

In speaking recently with a friend, I was reminded of the great bias in our culture toward the light and away from the darkness. When we meet with someone who is down, feeling hopeless, empty, or otherwise not beaming and joyful, we can become quickly convinced that something is wrong, that they are “broken,” and that we must act urgently to “fix” them. We scramble to put them back together, to remind them of all the gifts in their life, impart spiritual techniques and philosophies to them, suggesting that they just “focus on the positive,” letting them know that everything will be better soon, and that it will all turn out okay.

It is so natural to want to help another and to lessen their suffering and pain. There is nothing wrong with this intention and with employing whatever skillful means we have to help, to bring relief. But we might also see the subtle aggression in this, this insistence that they come out of their immediate experience and into the one we believe they should be having instead. We can start to see how much of this “fixing” activity arises out of the disconnection with that which remains unmetabolized within us.

It is possible the kindest thing we can offer our suffering friend is to sit in the darkness with them – holding their hand and staying so close – removing the burden that they change, transform, feel better, or heal in order for us to stay near. As we turn to embrace our own unmet sadness, grief, and despair, we remove the projection of our unlived lives from them. We lift the weight that they take care of our unresolved anxiety for us.

As we learn to trust and to rest in the wisdom-field of our present, embodied experience, we see that love is a movement of the totality. It is whole, never partial, and is raging and alive even in the darkness. In the core of the fire, the sadness, the grief, and the despair is something very real, breaking through the dream of partiality. But what this is may never support our cultural and spiritual fantasies of a life of invulnerability. Here, you are being shown that the wild, untamed, creative movement of love will never conform to your hopes and fears, and that things are unlikely to ever turn out the way you thought they would. This is not evidence that something has gone wrong, but of how alive and unprecedented you are.

From the perspective of this radical sort of wholeness, every experience is beheld as utterly valid, totally workable, and an expression of the path itself. Here there is no obstacle. From the center of your being, it is seen that life is not only the joy and the sweetness, but at times will arrive raging as the darkness, in order to reorder your world and to remind you or something you have lost contact with. In this surging of your inner family, the true nature of your experience will be revealed, and the portals to presence will be shown as they are... as infinite.

May you stay close to your suffering and the suffering of others, careful not to cut it too quickly, curious and available to the wisdom as it unfolds in unexpected ways. Open your heart to the golden, full-spectrum nature of love and the jewels hidden in the dark before you discard them, and finally see what it is that they have to say.

Befriending Yourself - you are invited to join me and my friend Jeff Foster at our new online membership site at the intersection of spirituality, meditation, and depth psychology. Video-based teachings, live meditations, question-and-answer videos, and a moderated online support community. 

The next retreat - The Deep Rest Retreat: Slowing Down and Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times - September 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado - registration open 

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

A visitor of melancholy

As we wander through the day, as dusk approaches, there is always the possibility that the visitor of melancholy may join us, coloring our experience, infusing the interactional field with a longing, a broken-openness, just feeling raw about the whole thing. About this precious, devastatingly, relentlessly alive human experience.

Not the mind’s version of sadness where we enact the primordial trance that something is missing, that we’re not okay as we are, that we must become something new or someone different. Instead, it is an emissary of the tender, a reflection of how open it truly is here and how it will never really turn out the way we thought.

Inside this body is the sun and the moon, the stars, the oceans, and the entirety of the seen and unseen places. Joy is here, as is loneliness, confusion, heartbreak, and bliss – each a unique portal through which to enter into intimacy with all things.

No longer having a bias for union over separation – or for oneness over multiplicity – free to fully engage here and to no longer postpone the offering that you are. Committed to whatever appears, ready to hold and transmute it for the benefit of self and other. In awe at the spirit buried inside matter and the richness of the sensual world.

From inside the center, it is no longer possible to weave the narrative that the broken, the vulnerable, and the melancholic are obstacles on the path. Rather, they are the path itself, illumined from within by pure awareness. While at times this awareness may appear empty and of the void, it is filled with outrageous qualities of luminosity, warmth, and compassion.

Photo by Ganossi

Befriending Yourself - you are invited to join me and my friend Jeff Foster at our new online membership site at the intersection of spirituality, meditation, and depth psychology. Video-based teachings, live meditations, question-and-answer videos, and a moderated online support community. 

The next retreat - The Deep Rest Retreat: Slowing Down and Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times - September 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado - registration open 

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

The new Befriending Yourself online course and community

Dear friend,

Thank you for all your kind emails and messages regarding my new monthly online course Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times. I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you a bit more about the community and why I’ve decided to offer it.

As many of you know, I’ve been teaching retreats and seeing people in psychotherapy over the years, bringing together both meditative and depth psychological approaches to transformation and healing.

After many years as a devoted spiritual seeker, I began to see how my practices were not able to get at the root of a lot of my emotional and developmental wounding, especially in the more “messy” areas of intimate relationships, family, work and career, body and sexuality, and unwanted, "darker" areas of the spectrum such as uncertainty, heartbreak, loneliness, anxiety, and fear.

Things began to change for me when I started to integrate other modes of practice, including a sensitivity to shadow, somatic psychotherapy, relational work, and embodied psychological inquiry.

The reality in our busy, modern, finance-driven world is that not everyone can spend time on retreat or in long-term psychotherapy, or are not able for whatever reason to connect with a supportive, non-dogmatic, yet provocative and inspiring community of like-minded fellow travelers.

Over the last few years, I’ve received a lot of inquiries about how to work closer together, as my therapy practice was always booked and I could only manage to present two or three public programs each year. I knew there must be some other way, one that was affordable and easily accessible within the context of our ordinary lives.

It was also important to me that the offering included perspectives, teachings, viewpoints, and practices from spiritual, meditative, and contemplative traditions, as well as those from depth and somatic psychologies, including work with the body, shadow, emotions, intimate relationships, and trauma.

A new way to work with me online
In envisioning how this might work, in speaking with my dear friend Jeff Foster, a new idea started to emerge. Over the last seven or eight years, Jeff and I have been having a conversation surrounding a shared vision to rehumanize spirituality and to offer a contemporary, alive, spontaneous, creative, even artistic approach to the spiritual and healing journey. It was from this dialogue - and also through tending to our own pain, trauma, depression, and difficult relational experiences – that the Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times ongoing online course emerged.

What Jeff and I would like to do is to share with you what we’ve discovered, month by month, a teaching oriented in deepening awareness, insight, clarity, and clear seeing, but perhaps more importantly in the outrageousness, wildness, and creativity of the human heart… really, more than anything, it’s a teaching of love. But what that “love” is we must each discover for ourselves in the fire of our own direct experience.

Helping each of us to illuminate this in our own lives is really the intention behind Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times. Not for Jeff or I to tell you what that is for you– for that is beyond our pay grade – but to guide and support you so that you might have a direct meeting and integration with that love that you already are, but may have forgotten along the way.

With this new online format, we are able to share this work and this journey with you wherever you are, at a time that is convenient for you, from the comfort of your own home. No need to travel across the world to come to one of our retreats or sign up for one of our seldomly-available private sessions or undertake the financial investment in either of these options. We will come to you, energetically and with our hearts, each month, drop into your living room with you for a few hours and open together into the great mystery.

What will you receive as part of the course?
As a member of Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, you will receive access to a growing library of teaching videos – on a wide-variety of topics such as meditation and awakening, healing from shame and unworthiness, the power of our brokenness and vulnerability, working with difficult emotions, navigating times of loss and transition, working with the shadow, cultivating self-compassion and self-love, and remembering what is most important in your life.

Additionally, Jeff and I will each create videos every month responding to your questions, from both psychological and spiritual perspectives.

Each month, Jeff and I will each offer a live meditation, which will allow us to come together and integrate the teachings we’ve been working with, to connect with one another, and with that field of love that holds us all. Whether you’re able to make these sessions live or not, you can watch a replay of the meditations and participate at your convenience, at a time and in a place that works for you.

Finally, there is a support/ discussion group where you can connect with friends and fellow travelers around the world who are also exploring these teachings and practices, and who are committed to their own unique paths of healing and transformation. Jeff and I will join the group periodically with new writing and sharing from our experience.

We’ve tried to keep the monthly membership affordable, including the creation of an annual option that offers a pretty significant savings.

I hope this email helps explain a little more about what the course and membership is and I really appreciate you taking the time to read this letter. I'd love to see you online and step into this work more deeply together.

If you’re interested in hearing more or signing up, please visit www.befriendingyourself.com. The first live meditation for the community will be on June 13th, with Jeff. I'll be offering the second meditation on June 27.

And, for any reason you choose not to join the course, I’ll still be posting my writing and sharing on Facebook, Instagram, and through my blog - and we can stay in touch that way.

Thank you again for your time and for your commitment to the path of transformation, healing, and love, however that looks for you.

With gratitude,
Matt

P.S. If you would like to access the replay of mine and Jeff’s recent webinar on Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, it will be available for a few more weeks at http://www.befriendingyourself.com/replay.

Joy and the shadow

Usually when we talk about parts of ourselves that we have disowned and placed into the shadow, we're referring to less desirable material such as fear, rage, shame, and selfishness. The shadow is often conceived of as the dark repository for our unacknowledged narcissism, spiritual greed, unconscious materialism, unmet inflation, and hidden self-absorption.

But placing these figures into the shadow does not get rid of, heal, or transform them. It only sets up the causes and conditions for their ripening and expression in less-than-conscious ways that usually create additional suffering for ourselves and others.

If we are not in conscious contact with these qualities, we will be sure to evoke and locate them in others and in the world and enact them within the relational field. Until we are able to enter relationship with these ones within us, we will find them in the Other, whether that other be another person, a group of people, a culture, or even in the natural world.

But it is not only negative material that we split off and dissociate from. Many of us have lost the capacity to access, embody, and express more “positive” experiences such as contentment, pleasure, creativity, sexuality, intimacy, and connectedness.

While it is a bit harder to wrap our minds around, some of us have disconnected from the simple experience of joy, a spontaneous sense of elation at being alive. A basic sense of awe at having a human form and human senses and a human heart that is often broken and whole.

Developmentally, for example, if the very natural, raw, human experience of causeless joy and aliveness activated anxiety in Mom, rage in Dad, or caused others to judge or shame or pull away from us – we learned quite quickly that joy is not okay, and even potentially dangerous. This reality can be very confusing as we come to associate the experience of joy with being unsafe.

As a little one, with an emerging little brain and nervous system, we learn to disavow or dissociate from any state of experience which has the potential to disrupt the tie to critical attachment figures. This capacity of repression was intelligent and creative, an early form of self-care, and in many ways saved our lives, keeping us out of unworkable states of panic, overwhelm, and abandonment. But many of us long to know joy again, to feel alive, to fully participate here. We are coming to see that we may no longer need to be protected in the way that was once so necessary.

To re-train ourselves to feel and stay embodied to joy and awe is not an easy path as we will have to step back through the anxiety, panic, and sense of annihilation that the repression of joy has served to protect us from. But it may be a path well worth exploring. To allow ourselves, as part of our inquiry, to see the ways we have placed not only “negative” material into the unconscious shadow, but how we have split off from the positive as well.

To just open to the possibility and see. How have I come to associate simple joy and contentment and deep rest with something not quite safe, even evidence that I’m doing something wrong?

It is an act of love to do this work and is never, ever for ourselves alone. It is honorable and ethical and perhaps even moral. To include the ancestors and the ones yet to come. For they too are here with us as we remember. 

Photo by Efes Kitap

Befriending Yourself - you are invited to join me and my friend Jeff Foster at our new online membership site at the intersection of spirituality, meditation, and depth psychology. Video-based teachings, live meditations, question-and-answer videos, and a moderated online support community. 

The next retreat - The Deep Rest Retreat: Slowing Down and Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times - September 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado - registration open 

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020.