To remember on this Christmas day...

Sending love to my friends everywhere on this Christmas day.

Thank you for sharing your sacred stories, pain, and joy with me in 2024 and for reminding me of the courage, bravery, and majesty of the human heart.

In a world that at times can forget so easily, we learn to pretend there is something more that matters. Thank you for helping me remember what is most important.

To take a risk in allowing another to matter, to allow this life to truly matter. To care more, not less and to somehow make use of the broken and the tender as passageways into the heart of the world. To no longer stay on the sidelines, but to fully participate in the bounty that has been placed inside and around us.

May we pause today in awe, take a break from the holiday madness, and remember the gift of life. To behold the utter majesty of what it really means to have been given a human body, the chance to touch the earth, listen to the birds, see the miracle in a snowflake, and explore the mystery with our fellow travelers.

On this new day, let us share the most profound gift of our presence, listening carefully to others and what is most alive in their hearts. To care deeply about how they are making meaning of their experience and what brings their hearts alive. To remember that just like us they only want to be safe, happy, and free.

To speak words of kindness, to touch and hold them and do what we can so that they feel felt. To validate their emotional worlds and provide safe haven for their essence to unfold in the field between. To bear witness to the majesty of pure spirit as it comes into this miracle world of time and space.

And to remember that in the end, when we are passing from this world, there may be only one thing that truly matters: how well did I love when I was here.

Thank you again for sharing some of your world with me this year. See you in 2025 <3

Relational healing and the shattered heart

As relational mammals with the sort of nervous system that we've been crafted with and the kind of heart that we've been provided with, the experience of abandonment and aloneness is really the greatest type of suffering we can experience.

It goes to the very core of who and what we are as beings wired to connect, to love and be loved, to hold and be held, and to rest, thrive, play, and heal in the arms of another, metaphorically and also physically, emotionally, neurophysiologically, as well as spiritually.

At times, we need another to help us to feel glued together, where two hearts, two sets of mirror neurons, and ripe relational neurocircuitries can come into linkage – one and two, two into One, the dance of Unity and Multiplicity, Oneness and Differentiation.

The activity of love in manifestation.

Upward, ascending into Unity, solar cycles; downward, descending into the alive brilliance of multiplicity, lunar embodiment and incarnation. Each an equally valid arrow in the quiver of the beloved as she unfolds herself into form, pours her body out of itself to seed the world of time and space.

No matter how much inner work we do, how healed, or transformed, or enlightened, or awakened we become, or fantasize ourselves to have become, we don't ever really transcend our relational nature. We don't rise above hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

We don't need to apologize for this or pretend it's otherwise or shame ourselves for having this relationally configured nervous system.

We don't need to apologize for the fact that we really are relationally crafted. But fall to the ground in awe at the mystery of one and two. The aching, the burning, the chaos, and the glory of the whole thing.

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

Matt's 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community

Matt's YouTube page

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:

>>Resting Your Nervous System online course/ special pricing