Holiday invocation - and 2023

Dear friends, 

I'm wishing you all a joyous, safe, and reflective holiday time. Thank you for sharing your hearts and journeys with me this year – your suffering, your chaos, your courage, and your love. 

This time of the year can be difficult for many, opening a portal into feelings and memories of deep loneliness, shame, sadness, and rage, activating wounds held in our families of origin as well touching into the intergenerational transmission of trauma and pain. 

We may also have some positive associations with the holidays – joy, connection, play, and belonging – a childlike innocence as to what the holidays symbolize to us. 

And, for many of us, it can be a complicated, unresolvable mix. 

Let us take a moment to tend it all with one another, including the joy and the grief, the loneliness and the connection, the sweetness and the ache. 

And open together into the archetypal mysteries of birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, transfiguration and transmutation, each an essential portal into the depths of the soul. 

I know many have been through so much this year and lost many of their familiar reference points, unsure where to look for refuge and meaning, with the rug pulled out from underneath. In so many ways, we’ve been asked to turn toward the shattered and the unlived within us.

To take a moment to touch and to shepherd this – the myriad of losses, betrayals, and transitions, but of the dream of the way we thought it was all going to turn out. Me and my life, and how it was all supposed to look and feel. 

Rebirth is tied intimately to our willingness and capacity to grieve, a holy activity not always honored in our world. But here we are, the misfits of despair, ecstasy, sorrow, and wonder, knowing the aliveness we long for will only be found in embodied attunement to the full spectrum. 

The process of “falling apart” is not some great cosmic error or mistake we need to correct or repair, but an emissary of wholeness, a way shower of what will emerge from the ashes of reorganization.

It is love, of course, that will guide the reorganization. But it is love, too, that is the substance of the ashes, and also the tears… 

I've heard from some of you asking about 2023 and if I'll be offering an ongoing group (online) where we'll continue this exploration of an embodied spirituality, that weaves together the wisdom, insights, and practices from the fields of depth and somatic psychotherapies, relational neuroscience and trauma studies, and the meditative discoveries of the yogis, mystics, and alchemists. 

I am happy to (pre) announce that the new training and immersion group will start in February, where we'll meet (live online) three times each month, for practice, teachings, and interaction. Please stay tuned for information starting in January and you can also sign up for my mailing list if you're not already on it, to ensure you receive all the details. 

Please take care of yourself and I look forward to connecting with you next year. 

With love and appreciation,

Matt