Hands down, my favorite movie of all time, came out in 1980 when I was 4 years old. 

It still brings me joy after all these years.


It is the film The Blues Brothers. 


Dan Aykroyd, the late John Belushi, the high priestess Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles bring all of my favorite elements together in a story that reflects some deep and joyful truths. 


If you want to skip my musings on the meanings of life, healing, and The Blues Brothers and just get some basic updates, they are 


Updates on My Charlotte and Caribbean happenings as well as our April 10th Free Workshop here in CO:


1. Our retreat in Charlotte is totally sold out at this point. To get on a waitlist in the event of cancellations email me here. We are planning on a Thursday night meditation and community healing event on May 9th. We will open registration for that in the next few days. 


2. I added 1 extra day of one-on-one sessions. These are a minimum of 1 hour, preferably 2 hours. You can schedule those here (pick the hour session option and see what is available). 


3. I am hosting a FREE live workshop on April 10th @ 6:30pm here at our office at 829 Main Street Longmont on the science of Intergenerational Trauma and how we help people break patterns in their bodies and lives that did not start with them. Many of the physical, emotional, and mental challenges can be DIRECTLY linked to the stress we had in the womb and the stress and trauma our parents had. The scientific research clearly states that trauma can transmit 3 to 5 generations down the line creating measurable changes in genetics and our responses to stress. This workshop will be fun, and empowering, and you'll also see real-time how I work with clients to reset the body from trauma, EVEN if it didn't start with you. 


4. I am moving our retreats, for the foreseeable future, from Jamaica to St. Kitts and Nevis for several reasons, which I will share more about at another time. Lynn, Miranda, and I will be leading a DEEP immersive experience on the absolutely incredible and Eden-like island of Nevis in November 2024. The venue is at the base of a beautiful mountain with one of the only growing rainforests in the western hemisphere, with a view of the turquoise Caribbean Sea. The hotel options are EPIC. It is peaceful, pulsating with life force, and very safe. Dates are being formalized, but will likely be the week BEFORE Thanksgiving. Stay tuned. 


Really, I think what we are doing is creating a container so you can cut away the noise and get down to what is Really Important and Essential. You can't see your reflection in turbulent water or a rushing river. You can only see it in the stillness of calm water. These intentional times of retreat, healing, and reboot give us that respite on our journey so we can see ourselves, and things, as they are. When this happens we re-align. We can set a new course with a new strategy, coming from a place of deep inner stillness and wholeness. 


Now, onto The Blues Brothers. 


The bottom line is that it is a hero's journey story about redemption, family, music (creativity), going all in after you've been knocked down, facing rejection, and making your life about something greater than yourself.


It's about what can happen when our life breaks, and how those broken pieces can be put back together with the Golden Glue.


When big stuff in our life breaks, life will never be the same. Wish as we may, some things Can't be undone or put back together the way they once were. This can be a heart-wrenching experience. 


If we choose, however, it can become a great work of art. 


When we choose to pick up the pieces and put them back together in ways we never would have imagined, we are forever changed for the better. Not perfect, but changed.


One of my favorite scenes in the Blues Brothers is when Jake (played by Belushi) has his "awakening" inside a gospel church led by no other than James Brown as they sing one of my favorite spirituals of all time: Old Landmark. While it's meant to be a total comedy - after his dark night of the soul in jail, he is awakened to a higher purpose. Here is the clip. 


And in that change, an alignment is unleashed that sets in motion what I would call destiny. It's the most amazing joyful journey you could imagine, as hard AF as it may be. Your joy has never been in comfort or the protection of your feelings. Your joy is in playing full out. Your release is in laying it all on the field, as it were. 


Jake in the Blues Brothers finds his destiny to serve kids in need after his stint in Jail, and after coming back together with "the band". 


Destiny is what unfolds when we are in the flow of life and when we are in service to our highest values. Fate is what happens when we are in reactive and unconscious patterns. 


My conviction is that you have a unique purpose to bring forth in this life. This assumption is rooted in a perennial wisdom teaching that YOU MATTER.


What you perceive as your brokenness or failure are actually the colored components of a mosaic that can, actually, form an intensely beautiful work of art. 


In Japan, there is this amazing art of making what was broken beautiful. It is called Kintsugi. The art of taking what is irrevocably broken and making it, actually, more beautiful than it was at its inception. 


In 2019 and 2020 I had to make massive decisions in my life, and a lot of them hurt. In 2020 I left a "community" I was part of for years. In another blog, I will share more, but suffice it to say I had to listen to my heart, my intuition, and my own moral compass and leave what, to me, felt like a toxic culture. A day after that break-up, I ended up in Israel, a place that is very special to me. I hired a tour guide who drove me to a monastery.


In this monastery, they took broken pieces of pottery and tiles and made the most incredible mosaics. It was their spiritual practice and had been going on for about 1,000 years. As I looked at the mosaics, I realized that I was, in fact, the broken pieces. I also made a choice that no matter what I would let myself be put back together into something more beautiful. 


Let's get real: you, at some point, might break. I know I did. Or, something really important in your life might break. And the truth is it can't always be put back together the way we want it to. If this is you, and for sure it was me, how that you are not alone. 


When we sweep the pieces up we can be met by that deep sense of loss, grief, regret, and a sense that things will never be the same again. The truth is, they won't be the same. Ever. That is sobriety - a realization that when something breaks it likely can't return to its original form and that we have some work to do.


It's a razor edge: if we succumb to discouragement we can fall off a cliff into a life of regret and an icy cynical heart. If we open to the possibility and live fully in the NOW we realize that we can live into the mystery and into the questions without needing actual answers. Life can become a wild adventure of creativity. It won't take away the vicissitudes of our emotions, but it will connect us to a source of Rocket Fuel that can break us past the gravity of what holds us back. 


If we go all in to do whatever it takes, well then those broken pieces are destined to become a mandala of love.


Like the characters in The Wizard of Oz, you'll realize that what you were seeking was actually with you all along and that your journey was simply a process of remembering. You can make that journey take as long as you want, but you can come to it right now. You don't need to wait. My Grandmother always used to tell me, "Don't postpone joy". Wise words. 


My direct experience is that IS the process of becoming whole as we live a life of full alignment.


All I can share is my own experience, but my experience is unequivocally this: the broken parts of your life, through a unique combination of grace and grit, can be re-sealed with Gold in a way that makes your life dramatically more whole and beautiful than it ever was when you were safe and contained and looked like every other dish in the cupboard.


Your destiny is woven together with Gold and your purpose, when that happens, is to go help others do the same. At least that is my experience. Destiny. 


Fate, on the other hand, is the result of a life where we live in a reactive stress posture and in passive and unconscious compliance to agendas and voices that have NOTHING to do with Who We Are, or What we are here to actualize. It is defined by the emotions of fear, guarding, protection, and avoidance.


Naturally, our lives, health, and relationships will reflect exactly what we put into them. When we are driven by a hundred forces and reactive patterns we can't see, we contort into an endless array of inauthenticity trying so hard to get love and be somebody. The harder we try the more twisted we get. It takes so much energy to maintain that contortion of inauthenticity. 


The great poet David Whyte's words resound in my soul like a GONG of truth: 


"The dark will be your home
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you." ~ David Whyte. 


Just know in etc dark, if you will trust your seeing beyond your eyes, you will find a way. There is a whole circle of us waiting to join you in our walk home. 


My final favorite scene in the Blue Brothers is their final concert. Watch this scene and watch what happens when you show up and play full out with passion and love - you condition the space around you into love. Keep in mind, the Illinois police are there to arrest them, the crowd is pissed they were late, and yet, they play full out. Watch what happens in the crowd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHV0zs0kVGg


An easy long stress-free life may be appealing to smaller parts of you, but the fact is that our life goes by so quickly - "like the whip of a horse tale" as Lao Tsu said. There is a bigger narrative at play - join me on the journey of going all in, laying it all on the line, and playing full out. Let your pain and brokenness become the art and energy that uplifts the world around you. Play right into your destiny. Don't hold back.


I am always haunted by Martin Luther King's speech where he prophetically stated he knew he wouldn't make it to see the end of racism. But he knew his destiny and he showed up for it, even in his last speech holding nothing back. Watch and take in. 


All my love, 


Matt

​

In my 20 years of clinical practice I have known that trauma affects us. Deeply.
Healing trauma has several layers. The hardest part is getting the brain to fundamentally change and heal. When that happens, and only when that happens, can we truly be free and maximize our health.
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Various models within psychotherapy, pharmacology, and manual medicine offer hope, but for many of us the results are partial, incomplete, ineffective, expensive, re-traumataizing, or require the use of strong medicine (legal or illegal), to facilitate a sort of catharsis.

Often research is really "me-search." I myself was looking for a deep and powerful way to truly heal some trauma I went though as an adult (and child) that was occluding my ability to fully express my whole self. I also KNEW that there was a LOT of intergenerational trauma. After reading the book "It Didn't Start with You", I know the science was there to prove that we carry trauma genetically for generations, but after years of therapy, meditation, and various healing modalities, it still was alive in. I knew I had to find a way.

Additionally, it was affecting my emotional and physical health. For me, finding the best support and healing was urgent.

Not only do I love my practice and feel the call to embody what I teach, I also was called to undo patterns of generational trauma so that I could raise my children in the healthiest environment possible, and ensure my marriage remains connected and passionate.

I also wanted to feel good again, and the truth is, I didn't. I was muscling through everything as I felt this invisible heaviness. That's what trauma does. It becomes an invisible gravity that presses down. It oppresses. It burdens the creative expression.

I had heard about Quantum Neurological Reset Therapy about 1.5 years ago from two separate friends and colleagues who both said it was "life changing." I blew it off. I had seen so many approaches and technqiues AND the last thing I wanted was yet another rabbit hole to go down.

Life has a way of getting through. I decided to not only sign up for the 6 day in depth certification program I had heard about, but I also became a client of the work with its founder, Dr. John Turner.

The process has been nothing short of miraculous for me. And, I am so grateful to be the only provider in Colroado delivering this work locally where I reside in Longmont. I am so inspired to to share it with you.

At this workshop I will teach for 20-30 minutes on the basics of trauma, how it has a life of its own in our body, how it travels through generations, and how it affects our health. Then, we'll dive in and you can witness me 'live' work with 1-2 people real time in helping reset their brain and nervous system, thereby unraveling deep layers of trauma.

Please join us for this hour long workshop. Its 100% free, but seats are very limited due to our space and the intimate nature of the event. We'll have book gift giveaways, healthy food, and a great healing atmospohere.

First, a big hello, high 5 and a hug. I trust you are well and your journey is on point.

What follows is a short blog on creativity. Below 👇 that are the details on my Charlotte retreats in May and my 1-1 client sessions there. Also, an exciting update about Jamaica. 

Regardless, if you read no further, just know you are loved and inside you is infinite creativity. Onto the blog. 

Health, on every level, is simply creativity. Biological Creativity. Energetic Creativity. Neurological creativity. Spiritual creativity. Our ability to be fully present with life, as it IS, while growing and evolving through impossible and challenging situations IS health.

Each moment, how we proceed as based on creativity. Can we "see" and "feel" other options beyond what our five senses tell us? Do our cells have the biological creativity to fend off a virus and to detox a toxic chemical? Does our brain have the creativity to find a new pathway beyond our reflexive stress reactions and into our frontal cortex? Does our vagus nerve have the creativity to easily shift out of fight or flight and into resilience and connection? Creativity is the juice, and creativity requires a higher octave of energy that whatever it is "facing". 

A virus requires biological creativity from all the systems in our body. It was creativity that evolved much of our immune system directly from viruses and bacteria. THAT is creativity. 

What was the "disease" at one point is now the encoded medicine in our body engendering a creative response.

Marriage and relationships can, sometimes, feel like an impossible situation, yet through the creativity of the heart, will, and spirit, we can move deeper and deeper into connection, wholeness, love, and healing. 

The chasm between you and the version of life you want to experience is bribed by creativity. 

As I dive deeper and deeper into the world of helping people transform emotional and physical trauma, what I realize is that are simply discover and transforming patterns of belief and energy that are fragmented and frozen so that their Innate creativity can do what it does effortlessly - grow, heal and evolve....through the dynamic life force of creativity. 

I'd love for you o follow my page on Instagram where I will be sharing stories of healing and resilience through power of creativity! The first story is a story about Lynn - and the incredible force of intergenerational trauma and HOW that intergenerational pain has been transformed by Lynn and my daughter Sienna into CREATIVITY. 

If I can serve you in anyway, just reach out. 

I've made it a daily practice to pray for all clients I have ever seen, do see and will see. So just know, whenever our minds join in that intent - in Love - creativity is the result and we are ALL better for it. 

The world does feel a little unhinged these days - but our Essence - Who We Really Are beneath all the masks - is steady, solid, amazing, and ready to find, creatively,  A WAY THROUGH ANYTHING. Just know, when we look at history, humanity has felt unhinged many times. It is kind of what the world does.

Time after time, these times of chaos can often be the birthplace of incredible ingenuity - technologically, spiritually, and economically. Keep tapping into the Real within and in your micro communities. It goes without saying, but never give up. And never let the negative voices of those who don't hear the music keep you from dancing. ​