Monday, March 18, 2024

The heart knows


The specific forms that love take in our lives arise and pass in time, for this is the way of form. Time is the great dissolver. But love itself is that which never comes and goes.

We never know what form love will choose to take in the future, for there is no love in the future. Love is only now. But it can take a cleansing of perception to see through the veil, behind the scenes where love is always at work… giving birth to one of its forms, one of its children, while recycling and dissolving another.

If we become too fused with a specific form we believe we need love to take—a particular person or way of finding purpose and meaning—our heart will inevitably break when love obliterates that form for something new, which it always will. This shattering is the great gift of form, evidence not of error and mistake, but of wholeness and profound compassion.

This dissolution and reorganization is a special kind of grace that the conventional mind struggles to know. But the heart knows. The body knows.

May we be grateful for the forms of love while they appear, standing in awe at the ways the beloved takes expression within this chaotic, messy, and glorious sanctuary of time and space. While simultaneously allowing the forms to make their own journey, to depart this place and move into another realm.

While we may have a bias for unity, union, and oneness, the Beloved will manifest itself equally as multiplicity and differentiation. Each of these are equal ornaments of its presence as it unfolds and incarnates into the world of time and space, finding its way into the secret chamber within the human heart.

Conscious, embodied, devoted engagement with multiplicity and differentiation is just as holy and sacred as attunement to oneness; each are pieces of the divine body.

Monday, March 11, 2024

VIDEO: Safety on the Spiritual Path, Relational Trauma, and Tending to the Lost Orphans of Psyche and Soma


We can’t ask the spiritual path to always feel safe, at a feeling level, as it is oriented in the archetype of death and rebirth. When it comes to trauma, however, safety is everything.

It’s vital that our relationship with spirituality and healing not remain generalized and abstract, but concrete and embodied; we can’t open our hearts to a concept, to an abstraction.

But we can ask psyche to image itself, to appear as a figure and to enter into relationship with that figure, hold them, and help them to return home.

We can’t stay on the sidelines in a safe position of “witnessing” our deepest unresolved experience; those interior ones carrying that experience have no interest in our clear witnessing, but only in our embodied, ensouled presence.

>>Access a free webinar from Matt - Turning the Light: The Mystery of Presence and Attuning the Creative Unknown 

Saturday, March 9, 2024

An element of the mystery


The path of the heart is not only one of transcendence – ascending and rising above – but also one of descent: into underworld, earth, and shadow, and into relationship with the figures who we find there.

As our personal and collective ancestors, they have something to share with us, that needs to be incarnated, indwelled, and embodied in this time, an element of the mystery that has been forgotten in a world that has grown weary.

The lunar way isn’t as clear as its heroic or solar counterpart. It is unclothed: of fixed concept, a precise map, and knowing how it’s all going to turn out. It has a way not of confirming but of dismantling the spiritual persona.

The gates inside the mandala, that once used to be visible, are now hidden. They can no longer be see with the eyes, but only with the heart.

These gates cannot be revealed if we already know what is “real” and what is “true,” or if we’ve mistaken the map for the territory.

Inside the temple are the holy images of our broken dreams, disappointments, hopes, and fears – the entirety of our unlived life; the grief of the ancestors, the lamentation of the earth, and the sensitivities of the soma. Along with the lost joy, wonder, beauty, and awe.

Here, in the center, the wound is opened and no longer bandaged, which is what allows the tincture to enter. The wound need not be cured, transformed, or even healed but allowed to reveal.

The feast is laid out before us, sprinkled throughout the inner and outer oceans, stars, forests, and beams of moonlight; and all through the eyes of the one in front of us. 


Photo by Erik Mclean