All therapy is grief therapy

Sometimes I wonder if all therapy isn’t grief therapy when all is said and done. The original Greek therapeia referred to attending, caring for, sending breath into. Not “curing,” “fixing” or even “healing,” not these heavy clinical words. But by way of our own tenderness, to infuse with life. To surround with warmth, to take the risk that this holding will always ask of us.

To be a midwife for psychic and somatic reorganization, to bear witness to the birth of a new heart, one which will inevitably ache and long and break and shatter and open and crumble in the face of it all. For that is the nature of this human form, which is crafted of particles of mystery, of mercy, of grace.

Things tend to not turn out the way we thought they would, for they are too alive, too magical, too majestic. This “not turning out the way we thought” is not evidence of mistake or that we’ve failed or done life wrong, but of the beloved and her activity here. And her outrageous care for form.

To fall to the ground, to stand back up again, to fail well, to be lost, to be found, realizing that love will assume any of these forms, shifting shapes as it spirals out of the stars and makes its way into this miracle world of time and space.

To grieve the crumbling and ending of one world, the death of a dream that has finished its time here. To allow that dissolution and provide sanctuary and safe passage for these forms to continue their journey into the other world.

The grief of knowing on some deep level that all form must reorganize, for it is its nature to do so: The people in our lives, what we have come to think we are, what has previously provided meaning, our bodies, our own worlds of experience, with even our greatest revelations ground into dust and sent back into the galaxies from which they came.

To turn toward the broken and grieve consciously, to honor the uncertainty, collecting the shards and the ashes and shepherding them. To dare to see the dissolution not as error but as holy, painfully and preciously whole, and to stand in awe as the pieces reassemble.

Photo by Jung Ho Park

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read editorial reviews at Amazon or via other retailers here. 

Free live talk with Matt tomorrow, Saturday - August 29

Dear friends, 

I’ll be live on Facebook tomorrow at 11am PT/ 7pm UK with my friend Jeff Foster to connect with everyone for a free, short talk on True Safety in Uncertain Times. You can join via Jeff’s Facebook page or also through Zoom. 

Please take care of yourselves. 

Lots of love,

Matt

The visitor of anger

At times, the visitor of blazing rage will push its way into conscious awareness. An ancient companion from an earlier time, a valid and sane response to abuse, neglect, and boundary violation... the natural reaction to narcissistic injury and a deeply misattuned world. A piece of the soul aching to return home.

Receive the visitor. Touch it with your presence. Provide sanctuary for it to incarnate, as emotion in the body and image in the mind.

Speak with the angry one, listen to them. Feel what they are feeling, see what they are seeing.

We know the tragic effects of disavowing our rage. Sending it into the underworld does not purge or heal, but only allows it to gather energy like a psychic tornado, where it will eventually surge, in ways that lead to further suffering and prevent us from assimilating the clarity at its core.

Separate a bit so you do not unconsciously merge. Intimacy without fusion. “I will enter relationship but will not drown. I am listening. Feeling. I will no longer deny, but nor will I be flooded. I will meet you in the center.”

Deep in the somatic vessel, anger is not a toxin we must expunge from what we are, but a wrathful guide, an organic part of the psyche that longs to be provided its rightful home. It is life itself, wanting to be known, here to serve a vital function, but it must be integrated in order for its clarifying wisdom-nature to flow.

With the ally of the breath, descend into your belly, open a portal to your heart, discover a passageway to your throat. Find the anger lodged in somatic being, hiding and pleading for reunion, buried in the organizing narratives and in the unfelt emotions.

Here, anger will be revealed to be what it is, a secret wisdom-guide and bridge into the universal heart, a messenger of power, clarity, and fierce compassion that wants you as its midwife.

In ways that seem contradictory, befriending this anger opens a portal into connection with others—others external to us as well as lost pieces of soul within—so that we may live and move and breathe with them in ways that are skillful, wise, sensitive, and compassionate.

Image of the Tibetan feminine protector, Palden Lhamo

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. Learn more about the book (including a full list of online retailers) and early editorial reviews and endorsements here. 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - is available at Amazon. 

We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here. 

New Befriending Videos: Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness

Dear friend,

I hope this email/ post finds you healthy and safe in these times of transition. I wanted to share with you a free mini-video series as part of the reopening of our online community, Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest In Difficult Times.

You can watch the first video here where Jeff Foster and I introduce our next module on Transforming Shame and the Core Wound of Unworthiness, which will be the focus of Befriending Yourself during the months of September, October, and November.

Join us here to sign up for the free 3-part video series:

→ New Befriending Video Series: Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness

In the video we speak about this “core wound” that so many of us have struggled with - the sense that there is something wrong with us, that we’re not okay, that we are faulty on some basic level, and that we are unlovable as we are - and how this pain has a way of being activated during uncertain and transitional times… such as the ones we are in now.

Often we are unaware of this wound as it can be subtle, shaping and distorting the lenses through which we engage ourselves, the world, our relationships, our bodies, and even our healing and spiritual practices.

Over the next week or so, we will be sending two additional short videos in the series - one on the beauty of our shadow and one on the radical truths of self-realization - themes that we will be exploring later in the year and into 2021.

When you sign up for the free series, you will receive access to all three of our videos over the next handful of days and additional information about the community if you are interested.

Please take care of yourselves, hope to see you online soon.

Sending love,

Matt 

P.S. Thank you for your notes and comments regarding my new book, A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times. It is now available for pre-order through online retailers (e.g. Amazon, Sounds True, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and Book Depository). To learn more about the book and read Editorial Reviews, please visit here. 

A temple for the tired children

If a child were to appear at your door: uncertain, afraid, and exhausted from a long journey…

If he or she were anxious, in despair, full of rage, or confused…

Would you refuse entry to the little one? Would you tell him to come back once he dissolved his fear, replaced his anger with gratitude, and clarified his confusion? When she healed her anxiety, mended her broken heart, and transformed her deep feeling of unworthiness?

When they first completed some self-improvement project, healed all their past wounds, or completed some mythical journey of awakening?

Would you require these things before you allowed the little one in, held him, and provided shelter for her raw vulnerability to rest from an ancient voyage of becoming?

In your most authoritative spiritual voice, would you urge the little one to "get over it,” scramble to accept everything the way it is, return immediately to the present moment, urgently forgive those who have harmed him, quickly rid herself of her “ego,” or manifest a “higher vibration?”

Or would you offer sanctuary and safe passage from a long passage? A warm home in which the stories, the emotions, the grief, and somatic trauma of the little one can be illuminated, contained, and held in a tender womb of care and loving kindness? A place of respite for the little one to find some new meaning in a world that has forgotten and let them down.

As you provide a temple of refuge for the tired children of the heart to dwell, the gates to the mandala open and you will see just how relentless love is. It will never stop sending its emissaries here to find you, as the ultimate act of mercy and grace, to remind you of your innocence and your vast, majestic wholeness.

Photographer unknown

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. Learn more about the book (including a full list of online retailers) and early editorial reviews and endorsements here. 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - is available at Amazon. 

We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here. 

The invitation of disappointment

In any close relationship, we will inevitably disappoint the other and let them down. This can be incredibly activating, especially if privileging another’s wellbeing over our own was the primary way we received mirroring, love, and attention.

In a field of narcissistic organization, we are not seen as a subject in our own right, but as an object in the perceptual field of another. Our sense of worth is derived by how well we can regulate and care for the emotional needs of that other. Especially at a young age, this is a very tenuous situation to be placed in.

Deep in our cell tissue, this early template has a way of leaking into our adult relationships. We will do anything to not disappoint, for to do so opens the doorway to unbearable shame, anxiety, and unfelt rage.

What is it like for you to disappoint someone? To let them down? To fail at living up to their expectations, no matter how hard you try?

What feeling state will you do just about anything to avoid? What are the core beliefs that arise in response to this feeling? What are the behaviors you engage to either repress or urgently seek to purge this feeling from your experience?

What do you imagine the consequences will be if you are not able to “make them happy,” or remove their anxiety, emptiness, and the pain of their unlived life?

Will you be abandoned if you disappoint them? The target of rage and attack? Will you be shamed? Unsafe? Loaded up with guilt? Should you just go ahead and try to make them feel better at all costs, even if detrimental to your own integrity?

To what degree have you come to organize your life around the unconscious belief that your role is to urgently heal, fix, and cure the other when they are upset, struggling, and suffering?

And for those who identify as healers of any kind, what does it mean about us if we are not healing, but disappointing?

It’s some very rich territory that we can explore, as archeologists of soul; a whole fountain of sacred data we can mine and fill with light. It is an act of mercy and compassion to take some time and explore this, for both ourselves and others.

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. Learn more about the book (including a full list of online retailers) and early editorial reviews and endorsements here. 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - is available at Amazon. 

We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here. 

Relational yoga

In close personal relationships, it is important to emphasize a secure attachment bond and the co-regulation of challenging emotional states. To practice kindness toward our lovers and friends, listen to the way they are making sense of their experience, attune to what they are feeling, and hold them during difficult times.

It is also essential to be on the lookout for unhealthy fusion, honoring the reality that we are not only connected, but also separate. Any secure attachment must include healthy differentiation, where at times the most skillful activity will be to establish firm boundaries, assert our independence, privilege our own personal integrity, and allow the other to struggle with feelings of aloneness, uncertainty, and confusion.

At times we will disappoint those we love, and this will activate our historic core vulnerabilities… and theirs. For many of us, disappointing another is just not safe, and we will do whatever possible to ensure they do not come face to face with the surging material of their unlived life. But allowing them to meet the reality of their own heart is an act of profound mercy and compassion.

While transpersonally we can speak about unity and oneness, within the relative we are also distinct, with our own histories and ways of organizing our experience. Each with our own fate and relationship with the divine, our own paths to travel; our own unique ways entering the mystery. To dissolve these differences into some homogenized spiritual middle does not honor the sacredness of form.

If we do not consciously explore the reality of our separateness, it will inevitably manifest in less than conscious ways, unleashing unmetabolized shadow into the relational field. Like all work of depth, this art form evolves slowly, as it marinates in the alchemical vessel of the body.

May we be kind to our partners as we navigate this territory – especially during these challenging times – honoring the vehicle of intimacy as one of the most provocative, sacred, and holy that we have in our modern world.

Art by Krista Marleena – the archetypal couple, sol and luna, owl friends and fellow travelers into the other worlds

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. Learn more about the book (including a full list of online retailers) and early editorial reviews and endorsements here. 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - is available at Amazon. 

We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here.