The Soul Alchemist - Matt's new online course now open for enrollment

The Soul Alchemist: Trusting Your Inner Experience

My new six-week live online course is now open for registration. We’ll be getting started on September 18.

>>Learn more/ register for The Soul Alchemist online group here 

There has always been something unique about the autumn season for me, personally, a particular doorway and transition into a felt sense of the center; the center of who and what we are as well as into the center of Reality itself.

This time for me has often involved a real awakening of the feeling-body, a certain attunement which includes both spirit and matter.

The golden colors, the changing light, the falling away of the old - these are all expressions of the alchemical process of yellowing, a vital aspect of the transformational path - inviting us into a new way of being with ourselves and the world - an inner recycling and reorganization which mirrors processes occurring in outer nature.

In honoring the transformative potential of this time of the year, I want to offer a dynamic relational field and holding environment in which we can gather this autumn, rest our nervous systems together, ground and awaken our bodies, and open into the mysteries of healing and somatic presence.

This new live course - The Soul Alchemist: Trusting Your Inner Guidance - will include meditation and experiential practice, guidance about the embodied transformative process (from both psychological and spiritual perspectives), and conversation where you can share your experience and ask any questions you might have.

As open, sensitive human beings, we’re deeply affected by unlived psychic and somatic experience, as well as the speed and frenetic-nature of the times we’re living in. This effect is often subtle and can generate a deep restlessness and exhaustion.

Through embodied re-attunement, centering, and shifting our psychic center of gravity, we can be here for ourselves and others in more wise, skillful, and compassionate ways, revealing a freedom, spontaneity, and creativity that is always, already here.

Wired to love and be loved

So many feel shame about their trauma and wounding, as if it is evidence that they’ve failed, it’s their fault, and that they should be able to “get over” it and heal on their own.

Even if we “know” this isn’t accurate, these schemas live implicitly in our sensitive bodies and nervous systems, where they color our perception from within the somatic unconscious.

These heartbreaking lenses of perception are reflected back to us by an increasingly disembodied and left-brain dominant culture, giving rise to the contemporary fantasy that I “should” be able to do it all on my own.

The tribe has broken down, replaced by the device and the slow cortisol drip of a sympathetically aroused collective. And we wonder why it’s all falling apart.

The emotional pain is tragic in and of itself, but underneath it is the underlying shame and deep sense of being alone, which is really at the root of trauma.

As relational mammals, we are wired to co-regulate. We are not meant to “do it all on our own” and it is not an indication that something is “wrong” with us if we cannot always contain our own wounding.

It is evidence that we are alive, with an open, sensitive, and majestic human nervous system. And a heart that longs to know Unity consciousness, that felt oneness with others, with Gaia, with the cosmos, with the Divine.

We can do so much for one another, to help hold and transmute transgenerational, biographical, and collective trauma. To take a few moments, with compassionate presence, and really listen to another and be with them in a way where they feel felt and understood.

Our world so desperately this needs right now.

If you want to help someone in your life, help them to feel safe.

Instead of “I am alone” with this fear, pain, confusion, and grief, “We are here together, and healing is possible.” I’ll stay near as the shattered unfolds itself into new levels of cohesion. Together, we’ll see through the eyes of Spirit and take the chaos as path.

And then, together, bear witness as we’re crafted as transparent vessels in which this embodied realization may incarnate into the forests, the moon, the oceans, and the stars.

FREE live webinar with Matt - Grounded Body, Clear Mind: Finding Your Center in Times of Uncertainty - register at no cost here - September 4 at 9am U.S. Pacific/ 5pm in London 

Matt's new LIVE 6-week online group - The Soul Alchemist: Trusting Your Inner Guidance - will start in mid-September. Please check back here or sign up to Matt's mailing list to receive information about the course and how to join. 

Falling apart and trusting the process

At some point along the way, we may discover that the inner process of restructuring and falling apart isn’t the expression of some cosmic error or mistake, but of a certain kind of grace.

It’s not easy to embrace this, to see the dissolution, putrefaction, and the alchemical yellowing as the activity of intelligence, of the infinite creativity of Spirit as it unfolds and incarnates itself through matter, body, mind, and soul.

Of course, we prefer our initiatory experiences to come by way of the soft, gentle, and nurturing activity of the Divine Mother, which we can honor and be grateful for when they arise in that way.

In ways the conscious mind isn’t always able to understand, we can also be held by the darkness. There’s a benevolence in the not-knowing and in the disassembling itself. It’s a more wrathful, reorganizing, wild, untamed form of grace, but grace nonetheless.

This level of mercy doesn’t have the maintenance of the status quo as its aim or keeping alive the fantasy that we’re in control of the process of healing and awakening. The fantasy of control is turned to dust.

It’s a grace that is unbounded, undomesticated, and operating outside our own hopes and fears. It’s not part of the intergenerational matrix of trauma and trance, and is never going to conform to how we thought it was all supposed to turn out.

Its role is to cleanse our perception and polish our hearts, which it does with the substance of love.

It can ache and burn as we tend to the unwanted, marginalized, and orphaned aspects of our embodied vulnerability, and to illuminate, liberate, and release the crystallized pieces of soul who have wandered off course and are longing to return home.

The wandering ones – who take up residence deep in the somatic unconscious – are also held, at times, in underground storage, in the shadow, along with the guides of the underworld - Persephone, Hermes, Sophia, and the others, whose role it is to guide us through liminal and transitional times, through the in-between places and into the luminous heart.

FREE live webinar with Matt - Grounded Body, Clear Mind: Finding Your Center in Times of Uncertainty - register at no cost here - September 4 at 9am U.S. Pacific/ 5pm in London 

Slowing down each day (plus FREE live webinar)

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.” C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, Volume 13 of the Collected Works 

This was Jung’s invitation at the very essence of psychological integration and also spiritual illumination.

It’s not easy. It can ache and burn to turn back toward the abandoned, marginalized, forsaken aspects of ourselves, and of the ancestors, culture, and collective: all of the lost children, scattered orphans of psyche and soma.

All healing, all transmutation is embodied, requiring a new relationship with the feeling-body, the subtle pathways, channels, underground storage areas, and the alchemical vessel that the body and extended nervous system are.

A few times each day to shift our awareness into our immediate, embodied experience; to come out of the spin of the collective matrix, and into the belly, the heart, the throat, holding and dialoguing with the soul-figures who have been carrying all of the dissociated material on our behalf.

The activity of love. How is it that the Totality, the great Beloved, is seeking to find expression, to incarnate into this world by way of this body-vessel?

Stepping back from our experience and reflecting upon it, making sense of it, exploring its meaning is also a vital aspect of the path individuation. That reflection is going to be a lot more sensitive, alive, compassionate, and fresh, if we start first in the body, and prepare the vessel for a new unfolding.

Right, left. Bottom-up, top down. Lunar, solar. Red king, white queen. The opposites are dancing within the inner body, longing to be held in union.

Otherwise, there’s a way our reflection becomes a mere repetition of unresolved traumatic organization and the disowned shadow of family, culture, and transgenerational misperception and untended relational wounding.

Inside that fire in our bellies, the emptiness in our hearts, the constriction in our throats; inside the arousal in our nervous systems, personified as the figures who come to us in dream and in fantasy, the Ally appears, the Beloved beckons, as emissaries of wholeness.

Photo: into the ripe field of the mandala of Crested Butte

FREE live webinar with Matt - Grounded Body, Clear Mind: Finding Your Center in Times of Uncertainty - register at no cost here - September 4 at 9am U.S. Pacific/ 5pm in London 

LIVE, six-week online journey/ course starting in September - The Soul Alchemist: Trusting Your Inner Guidance. Stay tuned for additional information and how to register. 

Access Matt's YouTube channel here