The journey of healing and spiritual realization will by its nature feel lonely at times. Even though we’re interconnected with others and with all of life, there is a solitary aspect to the path. No one can truly know what it’s like for us – for our hearts to break, what keeps us up at night, what is meaningful for us, what it feels like, for us, to fall in and out of love; or to be sad, ashamed, scared, or joyful. It’s not easy to make this journey on our own. As open, sensitive relational human beings, we’re wired to connect, to love and to be loved, and to support one another as we open into the mysteries.Whether our primary interest is in tending the wounds around love – attachment, trauma, narcissism, betrayal in soul – or in exploring within the experiential depths of the transpersonal (communion, union, Oneness, Unity with the divine ground), we do so by way of an unknown and mysterious relational field, through the dance and play of love in form.I know many have been through so much this year and lost many of their familiar reference points, unsure where to look for refuge and meaning, confronting feelings of groundlessness and uncertainty. In so many ways, we’ve been asked to turn toward the unlived within us. To provide a temple where the shattered pieces of the heart can come to reassemble.Rebirth is tied intimately to our willingness and capacity to grieve, a holy activity not always honored in our world. But here we are, the misfits of despair, ecstasy, sorrow, and wonder, knowing the aliveness we long for will only be found in embodied attunement to the full spectrum.The process of “falling apart” is not some great cosmic error or mistake we need to correct or repair, but an emissary of wholeness, a way shower of what will emerge from the ashes of reorganization.It is love, of course, that will guide the reorganization. But it is love, too, that is the substance of the ashes, and also the tears. There’s a certain longing that appears in the middle of the process of death and rebirth, but the object of that longing is not always clear and is of the mystery. The vastness of the Other looms in personal and collective networks. All the old reference points are washed away, dissolved, and made to dust. A cleansing deep in the subtle body. Emptied out, with nothing yet to take its place. Just a shimmering, and a periodic glimpse of the scintilla, the pieces of light.And so it goes on the path of the heart…Of course, it’s natural to want to escape the shakiness, claustrophobia, and not-knowing. It aches there, as it is the ground of the unlived life.At the same time, another potential pathway appears: to stay with the uncertainty, turn all the way into the tenderness, attune to the imaginal, and to the wisdom of the feeling body. There is data and information here that is only available in times when the psychic quo is being tenderized and dismantled.A door swings open that is usually closed or hidden behind the veil. There are letters and engravings on that door that can only be deciphered by you. It’s not a collective door, but one that has emerged unique to your own soul print. The script on that door is written in the letters of grief.The passing of an old dream – me and my life and how it was all going to turn out, supposed to turn out.There is no rebirth without an embodied tending to the unlived, the ancestral, and the figures of grief who dance and spin and twirl within us, come not to harm or take us down – not as an obstacle on our path, but as the very path itself.When we meet with someone who is feeling melancholic, empty, restless, or down, we can quickly become convinced that something is wrong, and that our role is to act urgently to fix them.And to engage in techniques, theories, and ideas to help them replace the actuality of their experience with what we believe they should be having instead.It’s totally natural to want relief for those we care about and we want to do whatever we can to help; we don’t need to pretend this isn’t the case. We can hold that larger intention that they feel better, while simultaneously staying open to a call emerging in the field between us into deeper territory.Perhaps it is something more subtle, more nuanced, more meaningful than relief that they are most longing for. For the Friend, for a companion who will go with them into the dimly lit, endarkened landscape of the soul.From an alchemical perspective, there is wisdom and guidance in the images, emotions, and somatic data arising into the relational field between you, vital communication from the soul serving an initiatory function beyond what we can perceive.We don’t want to short-circuit that, especially as a result of our own anxiety and discomfort.If we slow down and reflect, we might discover how much of our “fixing” activity, the movement toward relief, arises not from true compassion but from an unresolved relationship with our own darkness, with our own historic core vulnerabilities and untended complexes, and from the spinning and twirling of the ghosts of our own unlived lives.It is possible that the most skillful and kind thing we can offer our friend is to sit in the charged energy with them, bearing witness to pure feeling together, in that claustrophobic or restless space, and stay near; to remove the burden that they come out of their experience, “feel better,” or heal in order for us to stay close.Perhaps they don’t need to be healed, but to be held, to be heard, and to feel felt and understood, for someone to companion them as the hidden wisdom unfolds.Where, together, we weave a safe home, a sanctuary, a wholeness-temple where the shards of a broken world can reassemble.Please take care of yourself and I look forward to staying in touch over the weeks and months to come. P.S. There are still some places left on the summer retreat with myself and Jeff Foster. Learn more here. Learn more about Matt’s ongoing Spirituality & Healing online group and communityMatt’s YouTube pageLearn more about Matt’s summer in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster)