A Healing Space... reflections on love, meaning, and the aliveness of immediate experience

>>Resting Your Nervous System online course/ special pricing

Friday, December 13, 2024

HOLIDAY OFFER/ PRICING: Resting Your Nervous System online course

This weekend (Friday through Sunday, December 13-15) I’ll be offering my Resting Your Nervous System online course (over 20 hours of video-based content) at a special price of $167.

In the self-guided home study course, we’ll explore the nature of an embodied, trauma-sensitive spirituality, one that integrates somatic and depth psychotherapies, relational neuroscience, and the clinical application of mindfulness and self-compassion practices.

Over 12, 90+ minute sessions, there will be exercises and guided meditations, talks from me, and responses to frequently asked questions.

Topics include – Resting Your Nervous System: Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety; Into the Heart of Trauma and the Nature of Relational Wounding: Going Slow, Staying Safe, and Honoring the Intelligence of the Body; Compassion, Hope, and the Possibility of True Healing: The Journey of Safety, Coming Home to the Body, and the Reorganization of the Nervous System; Self-Compassion, Embodied Attunement, and What Works For You: Toning and Tuning Your Unique Nervous System.

You can learn more about the course and the special pricing here:

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Trauma and the journey home

Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through questioning and reorganizing patterns of thinking.

We can’t think our way out of trauma, attachment, and narcissistic violation.

When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, unmetabolized pieces of soul are held subcortically and in cellular circuitry, unreachable by thinking which is a layer removed from the fires of the alchemical body.

Instead, they seek refuge in the belly, heart, and throat, and in underground shadow storage regions. Thought is too dense to reach them here. From here, they burn and ache and long for safety and shelter, for permission to be.

Encouragement to “just get over it, it’s just your ego, just be in the present, it isn’t who you really are” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as the activity of empathic failure, aggression, and psychic violence.

It’s like a neural form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of relational wounding and implicit memory, and only contributes to the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

In addition to shattering and unendurable experience – which is painful and terrifying enough – there is a profound sense of aloneness that goes with this, the disorganizing reality of the missing Friend, and no accompaniment into the dark night. “I am alone in this.”

This is devastating to the soul.

When the lost orphans of psyche and soma come surging in a moment of activation, they express their longing to return home.

To come out of their frozen, crystallized state, and into the warmth of the inner temple.
Where they can dream a new dream, play again, and become an alive, joyful vessel through which the Divine can live and move and breathe.

Matt's Summer 2025 in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster)

Matt's 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community

Matt's Summer 2025 in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster)

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

A rebirth that is whole

In each moment the sacred process of death and rebirth is playing out within us. With each breath, something in us is dying: some aspect of who we think we are or what we’re doing here, the death an old dream, a relationship we were sure would last forever, an idea about how it was all going to turn out.

In the face of this dissolution, the question isn’t so much how can we be reborn, but will we participate in death, fully, and with an open heart, paving the way for new forms to emerge, trusting that rebirth will take place according to a timeline originating far away in the stars.

In times of transition, our tendency is to rush to rebirth, quickly back into the known, in an urgent attempt to cure, maintain, or heal that which is dying, that which longs to transform. It is so natural to resist falling apart in our need to put it all back together.

But it is only from the core of the womb of death - a death tended to consciously - that re-birth can come into being.

The invitation, which we can at times hear clearly, during the dark of night, in the slowness and the depths, during time with the moon and as we move in and out of states of sleep and dream, is to not abandon death in our rush to be re-born.

To not short circuit the intelligence and creativity that death is, and to remember that rebirth is not possible without the creativity of dissolution, without the alchemical putrefaction.

Allow the death some time to unfold, to share its poetry and its fragrances, which are not partial, but of a light that is whole. In those times in our lives when things are being rearranged and reorganized inside and around us, we can attune to what is truly being asked, whether it is to cure death and reassemble the known, or to allow the forms of love safe passage to continue their journey.

To honor the forms of love as they come into our lives and touch us and share with us their beauty. But equally allow them to dissolve so that new forms may emerge and enchant this place.

To give them permission to dance and play and participate fully in the sacred return.

Matt's Summer 2025 in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster)

Thursday, November 28, 2024

Into the Thanksgiving field

On this new Thanksgiving Day, it is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come – that another opportunity will be given to witness a sunrise, spend a moment with someone we love, or be astonished at the crystals in the newly fallen snow.

But another part knows it is so fragile here, precarious, shaky, outrageously precious and at times so shattering, that this opening into life will not be here for much longer. One moment, we will turn toward it, and it will be gone.

May we give thanks on this new day by no longer postponing our time here, not waiting any longer, not forgetting.

By remembering what's most important and what truly matters. By doing whatever we can to help others, using our words wisely and with kindness, listening to others so that they feel felt and understood, holding them in moments when they need a lamp in the darkness.

At the end of this life, it is unlikely we'll be caught up in whether we accomplished all the tasks on our to-do lists, manifested all the things we fantasized we wanted, played it safe, or completed some endless self-improvement project.

At that moment, there may be only one question that remains: how well did I love?

Did I pause each day to slow down and truly behold the beauty of this place? Was I willing to take a risk, feel more, allow this life and others to truly matter to me, and experience what is already here, what has already been given? To fully participate in that overflow.

The sound of the birds, the sunset, an emotion all the way through, to truly experience a color, a tree, the sky, the miracle of this human body and heart, and the wild, undomesticated chaos and glory of the whole thing.

Ending the trance of postponement and dissolving the dream that there is some breath, some beauty, some love coming tomorrow. Tomorrow is a dream that may not arrive. Love is now.

The bounty and harvest of thanksgiving is upon us, waiting to be seen, felt, tasted, and heard, in the trees and the snow, in the imagination and in the heart.

In the very center of our holy mirror neurons as they light up when we attune to one another and bear witness to their subjectivity, to how they’re making sense of this crazy world, what keeps them awake at night, what is truly meaningful to them, what scares them and brings their heart alive.

To peer behind the veil for just a moment and into the background majesty of the sacred world, as it unfolds itself, as the Beloved pours herself out of herself, weaving the world of form, of time and space.

Needing us, these bodies and these hearts, as an increasingly translucent vessel in which she can finally come alive here, in the incarnational journey from pure Spirit into wild manifestation.

I hope I make it all the way through this Thanksgiving Day, but if for some reason I do not, this would have been enough. I have been given so much more than enough.

Learn more about Matt's upcoming 2025 online group and community

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Summer in-person retreat with Matt Licata and Jeff Foster

Dear friends,

I'm happy to announce my first in-person retreat since 2019, with my friend Jeff Foster, June 3-8, at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado.

Tickets for A Sanctuary of the Heart will go on sale on January 1st.

>>Learn more about the retreat here

I’m looking forward to being together with everyone - seems like it’s been so long

The heart is quivering, but alive

The contradictory feelings of hope and hopelessness, connection and collapse, anxiety and rest. The shakiness in the belly. The tightness in the throat. The shattering emptiness inside the heart. Glimpses of true joy that in the next moment are gone.

All the techniques, teachings, and advice; the new beliefs to take on, the worn-out ideas about how to respond, how to make sense of the senseless, how to find relief. These are all dissolved, and only a burning remains.

This burning is the doorway, the portal, and the lifeline. In ways the mind can’t always understand, there is refuge in the burning, in the core of the broken pieces.

It can feel as if we’re inside the bardo between one moment and the next. We know that we can’t go back to the way it was, but what’s next has yet to appear. It’s being heated and cooked in the vessel. There is creativity in the liminal, but it requires a relinquishing of the known for it to be revealed.

We are asked to marinate in the womb of now, tend to the groundlessness, and find refuge in the unknown: to be midwife to the darkened illumination. To shepherd the wandering orphans of psyche and soma.

There are signs, symbols, synchronicities, and guidance all around and inside us, but our perception must be cleansed to receive that high-voltage communication.

As we bear witness to a new day, the breath is here. The heart is quivering, but alive. The birdsong, the trees, the vast blue sky. The miracle of the senses. The sun has come up again. The moon is hiding nearby waiting for her turn to bless. For just one moment, the veil parts and we are provided with a glimpse behind the scenes.

Perhaps today was never going to be the day when we figured it all out, resolved all the contradictions, or integrated the wild undomesticated activity of love. We can’t integrate love, but we can bear witness as it integrates us.

Today may not be the day for answers, but to let your heart break open to the vastness of the question. To fall to the ground as a humble lover of the mystery. And listen once again.

Photo: attuning to the heart beat, Lappohja Beach

Learn more about my new 2025 Spirituality and Healing online group and community

A Sanctuary of the Heart: live, in-person retreat with me and Jeff Foster - June 3-8, 2025 in Loveland, Colorado - stay tuned for more information

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Revealing an open door

We’ve all been given experience in this life that we haven’t been able to process consciously. For whatever reason, it was just too much. Overflow in the vessel.

To turn toward it directly was a portal into overwhelm, shut down, collapse, and fragmentation. It was intelligent to protect a sensitive psyche and nervous system.

Emotional experience that is unable to be felt, articulated, made sense of, and integrated becomes sequestered into underground storage, into neural networks and shadow regions, held in our bellies, hearts, and throats; frozen and crystallized into our muscles, organs, and cell tissue.

From here, it colors our perception and capacity to imagine and play in reality.

Unlived, undigested psychic material becomes personified as the figures who come to visit us during the dream time as well as our dayworld fantasies. Not to harm or take us down. Not as an obstacle to our path, but as an emissary of the path itself. A representative of a future wholeness; an ally of integration, though in an unrecognized, sometimes wrathful form.

There are moments in my therapy practice when I’ll be sitting with someone who is really struggling. But there’s a way that they can’t actually feel what’s happening, they can’t contact the felt quality of the open wound. It’s just not safe enough. And by this “someone,” I of course include myself.

There is no healing without the wound being open first, weeping and seeping its essence, for a closed wound cannot receive the tincture. In a way that the mind has a difficult time understanding, inside the wound the medicine is already active.

In the very center of the physical and subtle tears, the lost orphans of psyche and soma reside, awaiting the nectar that will unfreeze and de-crystallize them, and reveal an open door.

It’s possible to slow down now, lay on the Earth, go into the forest, into inner and outer nature and unveil a portal to these ones, and communicate our intention, desire, care, and devotion to know and hold them, and to help them find their way home.

This isn’t something we do only for ourselves, but for all of life: including the ancestors and the ones who have yet to arrive here, circling until conditions are ripe.

Art credit: The Path is Everywhere by Krista Marlena

Learn more about my new 2025 Spirituality and Healing online group and community

A Sanctuary of the Heart: live, in-person retreat with me and Jeff Foster - June 3-8, 2025 in Loveland, Colorado - stay tuned for more information

Friday, November 8, 2024

In times when the center is lost

There are times in our lives when the rug gets pulled out from underneath us - the death of an old dream and how it was all supposed to turn out. What was once so clear becomes incinerated and taken to dust.

The center is lost.

The (very human) tendency is to get out of the death aspect of the archetypal cycle, and as quickly as possible into rebirth. This is so understandable; it hurts to turn toward the dying element.

But there is wisdom, mercy, and grace within the dying itself that we short-circuit if we leave prematurely, before the grief, rage, and despair have been tended. There is a shepherding, a midwifing that is needed, a holding environment for aching and burning to be embodied and known.

Death is always an invitation into a grieving process, where we’re asked to gather the shattered pieces and place them on an altar in front of us. To assemble the broken shards into a special container and enter with them into a portal of mourning.

It’s an act of kindness to slow down, turn off the electronics, unplug for just a bit, touch the earth and ask her (and other seen and unseen ones) for help; and take the time and space and devotion to feel what we’re feeling so that it can be digested and metabolized.

Otherwise, the shattered orphans are sequestered into underground storage, held in the somatic unconscious and nervous system, in our muscles and cell tissue, in a frozen, half-processed, unassimilated form.

From there, they burn, cry, rage, erupt, longing to return home.

If we move too quickly past our grief and onto the next thing, we run the risk of abandoning the grieving one, the heartbroken one, and the enraged one to wander alone in an empty forest. They freeze there, crystallize, and contract in the time machine that is the very essence of relational trauma and wounding. And they reach out to us from inside that soul-place, from that frozen state, in whatever way they can, which we all know at times can be in highly dysregulated, anxious, and panicky ways; for that is the only way they know.

These ones, the longing orphans of psyche and soma, are not obstacles to the path, but are the very path itself. The invitation is to offer ourselves permission, by way of a dispensation deep in the body, cultivating a well-sealed vessel or sanctuary in which the broken pieces can go through the alchemical cycle.

And, in this, we can ask the heart if what it truly wants at this time is to be mended, or if its deepest longing is for something else, cracks in its armor where a certain light can come in and illuminate the broken pieces.

The darker light of the rays of the black sun can only flow when the tears are flowing, when the wound is open and seeping, weeping with its essence.

This grief, heartbreak, shattering, isn’t in need of healing, as it’s not un-whole. It’s perfectly valid and pure on its own, as it is, as a radiant manifestation of a Whole Heart. It’s not waiting to be mended or put back together, but to finally be allowed to share its gifts, its fragrances, its mercy, in new and creative ways.

To speak kindness, to embody compassion, to remember what’s most important to us, and to love this world in ways that haven’t been possible until now.

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.

P.S. We will be reopening the yearlong spirituality and healing group and community in February 2025. You can learn more and place your name on the waitlist here.

Also, please look out for updates here or via my social media pages regarding a live, in-person retreat in Loveland, Colorado in June 2025.

Friday, October 25, 2024

Pulling back the veil so that we can see

In alchemy, things coming apart and falling away are essential stages of the work, evidence of the transmutation and the emergence of the red stone: something/ someone in my life, or some way of being-perceiving, begins to yellow; dissolve, disintegrate, reorganize; seeking our blessing to move along.

It can be a challenging and uncertain time, shaky, groundless, restless - and has a way of aching in the body, burning in the heart: an emptiness, a longing, and simultaneously, somehow, a sense that things are pregnant, open, naked, and alive.

That aching, burning, longing – reflected in the words of Rumi, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila – we might open to the possibility that these experiences are evidence of the Ally, of the emissaries of Wholeness, foreshadowing a coming rebirth.

But of course, it doesn’t always feel like that in the moment. Being ground to dust.

Maybe it’s Hermes who is beginning to appear, pulling back the veil so that we can see, cleansing our perception, polishing our hearts, washing our cell tissue from the inside-out. Hermes, being one of many trickster figures, whose role it is to link the various figures and wisdom-centers in psyche.

And also, to link the individual self with Ultimate Reality; to reveal that Unity as our perception is reorganized in and as a single, unified whole.

Mythologically, Hermes connected the Gods to one another, who would ordinarily stay in their own realms; the connection-maker who links together differentiated and dissociated parts in a system, in this case the system of the human heart.

A reconnecting and relinking of orphaned aspects of ourselves and pieces of soul who have become scattered due to trauma and other forms of emotional wounding, those core wounds around love.

Simultaneously connecting the individual heart with the Divine Ground, linking spirit and matter, linking Self with the unus mundus, with the one world prior to the emergence of the opposites.

It’s Hermes, as connection-maker, who plays in this in-between space, where at times he may appear and reveal his Presence, dancing inside those sore places, into the very center of the weeping wound, and provide the missing tincture.

Monday, October 21, 2024

VIDEO - Attunement to Soma, the Subtle, and the Feeling Body

Attunement to Soma, the Subtle, and the Feeling Body

Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through questioning and reorganizing patterns of thinking. We can’t think our way out of trauma. A more tactile, sensual tincture is required.

When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, shards of unmetabolized experience (pieces of soul) are relocated into underground storage and held in subcortical and somatic circuitry.

From here, these figures long to come out of their crystallized state and return home.

Encouragement to “just get over it, you can’t really believe that, you know that’s not true, come back to the present moment, that’s just your story,” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as profoundly misattuned, even as the activity of violence and aggression.

The orphans retreat, and go deeper into the subtle body.

This “advice” is experienced as an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of trauma and the workings of implicit memory.

In addition to the terrifying and shattering emotional pain, on top of that is a profound sense of aloneness. No one can understand; no companionship into the dark night. No relational temple in which to rest, breathe, and tend to the orphaned ones of psyche and soma.

The ally is nearby, but hidden behind the veil. A cleaning of perception and polishing of the heart is needed to see and to feel it. In ways that are counter-instinctual to that part of us needing to know ahead of time, the ally has located itself inside the wound.

It is the flowing of these tears that allows for the grieving to unfold, the mourning of the unlived life… the beginning of a new world.

Sunday, October 20, 2024

Breathtaking, achy, tenderizing, pure joy

In the Autumn, there’s a way that things illuminate, break open, and reveal some previously undisclosed doorways into reality. Things are tenderized, in inner and outer nature.

Unprotected, unguarded, unable to hide from the shimmering alive nature of reality, as it is, which is rarely going to conform to my own hopes and fears, or the fantasies I have about who I am, what this world is, what love is, what the Divine is.

It’s just too wild and naked for all that. We can’t pin Reality down, wrap it up and resolve it into some nice tidy package, including through our great spiritual realizations; the Beloved is just too undomesticated for that, and just isn’t interested.

There’s a certain sort of shakiness that can go with this, an atmospheric coloring of melancholy or sadness, but not a sadness where something is missing or in need of healing or transformation. It emerges somatically in response to some experience of overflow: this life and heart and the sensual world, the outpouring, it’s all just overflowing.

It can burn at times, in the belly, heart, throat, the eyes, in the subtle body. A blazing aliveness and raging sort of awe at the whole thing.

All expressions of the “blue ones,” a particular group of inner travelers, pieces of soma and soul who reside in the blue regions of the spectrum of consciousness; internal figures who carry tenderness, melancholy, shakiness, and grief.

Where the heart is on the outside of the skin and not safely tucked away inside the rib cage. Fully exposed, naked, unguarded, its flesh just right there.

A “sadness” that’s also quite full at the same time; somehow the emptiness and fullness come together, as One; not in response to something missing or lost that needs to be recovered, cured, or healed. But if you really gave yourself to that that it will take you to the ground, turn you to dust, with the moon looking down upon you.

It seems this burning, this achy openness, this overflow, this being “turned to dust” is the direct response of the Beloved, the way she pours herself out of herself and into this world; they are her portals. Breathtaking, achy, tenderizing, pure joy.

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Into the Autumn glory - communion, union, Unity

In times of liminality and transition, there is a unique invitation delivered to each of us, from the inner Friend, to slow down and open to what it might truly feel like to play and imagine once again.

To explore from that place of beginner’s mind, re-opening to those natural states of awe, wonder, and the simple joy inherent in a few moments of just Being, Being who and what we already are, without having to turn our lives into some unending self-improvement project.

While we can hold an intention to improve our lives, relationships, and sense of self, which is intelligent, and kind, simultaneously to spend some time each day in these less-structured experiences, ones that aren’t oriented in improvement, in getting to a different experience.

Maybe for us that’s being out in nature (perhaps without our electronic devices) or writing down our dreams or doing some type of yoga or meditation or prayer or whatever that might be: Writing, dancing, putting our hands in some clay or sand.

Tending to the wild undomesticated aliveness of the sensual world. An invitation into kenosis, of being emptied-out, of the known, the frozen, and the crystallized, that we hear about from the Christian mystics.

Taking time each day to interrupt the trance of the collective, the pull into a survival-level restlessness, return into our bodies, and provide an inner temple in which we can feel, where that which has remained unlived can come into embodied reality and disclose its wisdom.

To attune to that emerging, right-brain flow of image, feeling, sensation, and those states of communion, Union, and Unity.

This emptying out, into Fullness isn’t something we do only for ourselves (of course, were included in its embrace) but is for all of life - for others, human and animal, for Gaia, for the ancestors, and for the ones yet to arrive here, waiting for conditions to be ripe.

These “ones yet to arrive here” include others as well as those aspects of ourselves and pieces of soul - the entirety of the lost orphans of psyche and soma - who are longing to come into Being now, future parts that carry a profound creativity, wholeness, wisdom, and compassion - all qualities that our world so badly needs right now.

Photo: fall glory at the Dallas Divide near Telluride, photographer unknown

Saturday, September 28, 2024

A temple for the lost pieces of soul

From here, these figures long to come out of their crystallized state and return home.

The orphans retreat, and go deeper into the subtle body.

This “advice” is experienced as an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of trauma and the workings of implicit memory.

Only an open wound can be healed. Otherwise, the tincture is unable to enter, reveal, and transmute. It’s within a sensitive vessel that the physical and subtle tears can weep freely, and wash us from the inside out.

It is the flowing of these tears that allows for the grieving to unfold, the mourning of the unlived life… the beginning of a new world.

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Sunday, August 25, 2024

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.

Tuesday, August 20, 2024

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.

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

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

Wednesday, August 7, 2024

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

Monday, July 22, 2024

Gold in the shadow

As long as we have a body, there will be shadow. The goal isn’t to “get rid of” the shadow or even to “fully integrate” it, as its emanations are ever-emerging by way of psychic creativity.

Rather, to illuminate and engage it more consciously, as partner, emissary, lover, and friend. At times emphasizing our union while at other times privileging our separateness and personal integrity.

Here, multiplicity is as holy as unity; differentiation as sacred as oneness.

It is only through cultivating a conscious, embodied relationship with the unfelt, marginalized, and the unlived that we will come to know the light held within the black sun, a region of the heart that contains the opposites of shadow and light.

The shadow is not some worthless, neurotic repository of unenlightened thoughts, feelings, and impulses, but hidden expressions of wisdom, creativity, and soul, awaiting redemption and a sanctuary in which it can unfold and disclose.

That which falls into the shadow will inevitably be evoked, enacted, or somatized, for that is its nature.

It does so not to harm or take us down, not as an obstacle to the path but as the path itself, as a wrathful emissary of it. It, too, longs to return to its rightful place in the larger ecology of what we are.

The purpose of shadow work is not to eliminate shadow, but to open space in which it can reveal.

My next live online course will start in September - The Soul Alchemist: Trusting Your Inner Guidance. To receive information about the course, which will be sent out later in the summer, please sign up for my mailing list below.

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

The Soul Alchemist: A New Online Journey

The Soul Alchemist: Trusting Your Inner Experience

Save the Date: my new six-week live online course will launch in September.

Additional information available soon.

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.

Sunday, July 7, 2024

Pieces of the unlived life

Inside the body the lost ones travel, carrying our dissociated experience and unfelt feeling, taking up temporary residence in our muscles, cell tissue, organs, and breath.

Scattered pieces of soul gather in our eyes, shoulders, and bellies, and in the secret places within our hearts.

They’ve become frozen and crystallized there, and display their longing to come Home by way of our dreams, bodily-felt emotions, and the variety of symptoms we experience.

If we’re unable to access them, to feel what they feel and tend to their tears, they will make their way deeper into the underworld and into the soma, awaiting a future moment when conditions are ripe.

Even if our primary interest is in spiritual transformation, we can’t separate out any unresolved relational trauma, attachment wounding, and narcissistic injury we may have experienced.

This unheld and unmetabolized material shapes our perception and forms a psychic template through which we’re able to imagine ourselves, others, and our world. But this happens outside our conscious awareness, from within the depths of shadow.

As we’re invited to “just be in the present moment,” we have to remember that in the present moment the ancestors are there with us.

They not only take up residence in our bodies, our hearts, and deep in the soul, but they are our bodies, hearts, and souls. Psyche is multiple and polytheistic.

They arrive invited or otherwise, along with the lost, crystallized orphans of psyche and soma, the spinning figures of our unlived lives, and the rich landscape of our implicit memory.

We’re not alone in that “present moment.”

What does the Other have to say about us and our meditation practice? Have we asked them and listened carefully to their response, with devotion and care?

Have we lamented their tears and grieved their pain?

To what degree have we met them, and accepted them with love? And sought their wisdom on the nature of past, present, and future.

Photo: Lappohja Beach, Southern Finland - heartbeat

Monday, July 1, 2024

The alchemy of self and other

Usually when we speak about “others” in our lives, we are referring to those on the outside we are in relationship with, that we care about and matter to us.

It’s important to attune to them and how they’re making sense of their experience, what keeps them up at night, brings them alive and touches their hearts.

While we each bring our own unlived life into the in-between space where our subjectivities intersect, there is also a third thing, the field itself. It has its own autonomy and intelligence, and is an equal partner in the relationship.

This is the realm of Hermes, guiding the alchemist in her work, which is one of pure devotion – love of the materials in the vessel, and of the vessel itself.

In addition to the external other, there is also an “other” who is moving inside us, a misplaced piece of soul who has become split off from the totality. Just like external others, these ones also long to be known, held, and loved.

They are shape-shifters and will manifest in an infinite number of forms – as vivid emotions, dream images, somatic tenderness, and an aching for union, as they seek us as a vessel in which they can incarnate and come alive.

Relational alchemy unfolds not only with an external other but simultaneously with the dissociated figures of psyche and soma, who are linked in mysterious ways.

It is to the degree we are able to empathically attune, listen to, feel, and hold the emerging inner Other that we will be able to truly accompany those in our lives.

If we’re unable to attend with devotion to the inner darkness, chaos, and contradiction, we will never be able to practice intimacy with these same qualities as they are inevitably evoked by those we allow to matter to us.

Perhaps this evocation is the true role of the Beloved, to re-introduce us to the vastness, majesty, and the unshakeable wholeness of the tender human heart.

Thursday, June 27, 2024

All therapy is grief therapy

After meeting with people for all these years, it seems to me that all therapy is grief therapy when all is said and done. No matter what particular issue or complex that we’re working on, the ally of grief is nearby.

Its primordial home is in the deep soma, and from there emerges as the figures in our dreams, a burning in the heart, an emptiness in the belly, and as certain sort of homesickness and longing for union.

Grief is the ultimate shape-shifter and will appear in infinite forms as it seeks a vessel in which it might incarnate and indwell itself here, which it does by way of our bodies and nervous systems.

Not as an obstacle to our path, but as a radiant manifestation of the path itself.

In providing sanctuary and safe passage for the metabolization of grief, a bridge begins to form piece by piece which connects us with others and with all of life everywhere. We do not create or design this bridge but only bear witness to its qualities.

This bridge – or the open doorway – will look and feel differently for each of us, displaying unique color, fragrance, dimensions, and engraved symbolic expression. It is by way of embodied attunement that we will be able to see and sense the bridge and passage.

When we take the risk of allowing another person and allowing this life to truly matter to us, we open ourselves to be a location, or a vehicle for the purifying ally of grief to find its way into this world.

And to bring with it a firestorm of compassionate activity for the benefit of all beings.

Monday, June 17, 2024

Holding the figures of the unlived life

At times, the ground will fall away from underneath us and we’re unable to find the center. It’s the death of an old dream, of me and my life and how I was so sure it was supposed to turn out.

In these moments, we’re asked to place the entirety of our unlived life on an altar in front of us, and help the shattered soul-pieces to find their way into the next world.

Despite the temptation to prematurely transform, transcend, or rise above the material in the vessel, the invitation is by way of descent – into the body temple, to provide sanctuary and safe passage in which the grief can be alchemized, felt, and integrated.

This grieving unveils a process that the alchemists called the solutio, symbolized by salt and the flowing of tears – physical tears in the eyes and also tears of the subtle body, an aching, burning, and longing deep within the soul, weeping for union.

It’s so easy to conclude in these moments that something has gone wrong, that we’re not okay, and that we’ve been forsaken. This psychic groove is the legacy of familial, cultural, and intergenerational networks of trauma and wounding in attachment, held in in the somatic unconscious.

In moments when the figures of the unlived and unfelt arise within us, the neural network opens, is supple, porous, and becomes translucent and permeable, evidence of its own yearning to be re-encoded.

It is love that is the great re-encoder.

In order to break through the density of habitual consciousness and tangles in the soma, the subtle body, the soul must at times upset and dissolve the psychic status quo.

By turning inside out the dreams and fantasies of me and the life I thought I was living, we are taken into an open field where for just a moment we might be given a glimpse behind the veil, at what’s truly happening here and the intelligence which is orchestrating it.

Photo: catching the light, Southern Finland

Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Solar and lunar cycles on the path of embodied transformation

In the cycle of death and rebirth – the archetypal basis of all healing and spiritual transformation – there are two aspects to that sequence, each being an equal portal on the journey of an embodied wholeness.

There’s the aspect of death, where a part of ourselves is no longer able to accompany us and must fall away: the putrefying of an old dream, of me and my life and how it was all supposed to turn out.

At the other pole is rebirth, renewal, and the emergence of new life.

It’s understandable that the rebirth aspect is the one we most welcome and are drawn to: healing, union, the coming back together of what which has fallen apart.

To embrace dissolution as path, as initiation, as a manifestation of the ally will feel contradictory and counter-instinctual. It will ache in the heart.

However, in many alchemical and mystical streams, dissolution and the death of the material (the known) is the very essence of the path and required for our perception (and subtle body) to be cleansed.

Rebirth is not possible without full participation in the process of death. There is no doorway in and through without embodiment to the cycles of grief. There is no union unless and until something has first been separated.

We see this experiential discovery for example in the writings of Rumi, St. John of the Cross, in Teresa of Avila’s vision of the interior castle.

This energetic movement of putrefaction, or of reorganization, is the Kali aspect of love, the body of a figure like Vajrakilaya in Tibet, or Mercurius in alchemy, the shadow side of God and the transpersonal Self.

This activity and specific manifestation of the Divine Ground plays a vital role in our individuation and awakening, but is not easy to be in relationship with. There’s no real reference point for that, including in a lot of our contemporary traditions, which remain oriented exclusively to the upward, clear, and ascending currents.

In addition are the currents of the divine descent, the illuminated black sun, the lunar cycles that unfold within the somatic unconscious as well as the soil in the deep earth, extending down into the shadowlands and underworld, with Persephone and others.

Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Into the holding environment

Many are familiar with the term “holding environment” as elucidated by Winnicott, an evocative and poetic description of relational experience rooted in embodied, empathic attunement and right-brain to right-brain resonance.

As the matrix of secure attachment, it provides the fertile, creative neural and psychic foundation from which we can explore reality, play within the imaginal world, and rest in unstructured states of being - wonder, awe, and the mysteries of Pure Being.

From within this centering, we’re able to venture out into the unknown, know experientially the full spectrum of the feeling body, and explore relationship with both inner and outer others.

Not having to hold it all together by way of our own effort, we relax into a holding which is always, already here; a holding which is so vast that it naturally contains momentary states of disintegration and “falling apart.” These states are no longer viewed as pathology, but as path.

Intimacy without fusion, closeness without engulfing, healthy attachment without impinging. This is the psychic soil from which a baby’s little brain and heart emerge into being. What a miracle. Real magic.

Holding manifests within psyche and soma, as interior pieces of soul companion one another; interpersonally through relationships where we take the risk to allow another to matter; as also transpersonally through containment by the Totality and Divine Ground.

In this way, the holding environment is wired into who and what we are. At times appearing inside, and at other times outside us, just like the Beloved itself, it will take any form – outrageous, wild, untamed – so that it may embody and incarnate itself through us as its vessel.