doubt walks in

There are two of them.

The first is quick and curious.

Like a hostess at a chain restaurant, annoyingly affectionate.

But she also checks my tone, my posture, and my why without really listening.

She’s the little kid asking twenty questions during the PG-13 movie.

She keeps me supple, alert, and honest.

She invites irritation that burns away pretense.

She’s the wobble that keeps balance possible,

the tremor that makes sure the ballerina is still alive.

She relieves the certainty of spiritual bypassing for a non-forced faith and living spiritual ecology.

She can sit with the everything everywhere all at once, but she doesn’t go anywhere.

She trains my intellect. Doesn’t do much for my instinct.

Little doubt.

Then there’s big Doubt.

She’s heavy. Ancient. She wears a lead cape.

She doesn’t question a sentence; she questions my right to speak at all.

She’s the frozen weight of the ancestors.

The loyalty that spookily whispers, “It’s not safe, Girlie!”

They never got to move.

She’s the one that knows women were property up until about yesterday,

and perhaps again tomorrow.

Her intent is protection. Her impact is paralysis.

When it’s little doubt, while I used to treat her like an unwanted guest, I make her tea now.

She can sample my perfume. Take a quarter or two from my piggybank.

I let her ask her questions.

I let her edit and tease.

She can poke holes in my performance. Not my substance.

She turns my absolutisms into a gentle maybe or tender perhaps.

She turns my I must do and have this by then and there into

I would like this by then and I leave room for life to offer something more.

I thank her when she’s done, close the notebook, and take one deliberate step forward.

She is passenger, not driver.

When it’s big Doubt, I don’t debate her. Reason has no use.

I stop. I breathe. I sit back and down. I acknowledge. I bow.

I see you. I see what you sacrificed. Thank you.

I take the vigil and leave your vigilance with you.

Sometimes she nods. Sometimes she doesn’t. Regardless, my bow restores order.

My body can move again.

Little doubt wants attention. Big Doubt wants recognition.

One I meet with a cocked head.

The other, I meet with a lowered one.

You both belong.

a field large enough

I am here because of my mother.
And my father.
And my older brother.
And our ancestors

They came first.
Their weight, their contradictions, their unfinished stories. These are the soil of my being.
I stand in that soil now.

Others may come close, but I do not confuse nearness with origin.
Or I loosen my depth.

My belonging is already given.
My energy flows. Through them.
From this orientation, I meet the world and the moment.

This friction, the one born in family, has always drawn me toward the wider systems we inherit and replicate. What begins as a personal tension becomes a philosophical, political, and cultural inquiry.

There is a tension in this course I’m offering. I offer this course as a counter-generative to conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom that prizes cold intelligence over warm intelligence. Mind over soul. Conventional wisdom that says institutional credentials are king. That systemic capitulation is safety and ease. That democracy and racial injustice can coexist.*

We need extra-institutional learning now because the crises we face (ecological, political, relational) cannot be solved by the same systems that created them. The academy can confer credentials, but it does not teach soulful congruence. True learning must happen in living fields, through embodied contact, reciprocity, and practice meeting the moment as it is, again and again.

“To be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society is no indicator of health.” -Krishnamurti

Despite having played the people-pleasing good girl for a while, doing the conventional world things, earning the degrees, following the rules, it’s always been in a bed of desire to clear the rot to my rerooted rebellion.

During my professional coach training in Italy in 2013, an Italo-German coach introduced me to the concept of constellations. I was in awe. I didn’t know it would become so central in my life.

In 2018, after a bad breakup, I learned how to grieve in constellations workshops where I represented many Others. I experienced the avoidant sister as an anxious sister. The predator while being prey. The men of NYC. The unacknowledged and ungrieved dead. So many of those. And I’m getting even more from those representations right now as I recollect them in the here and now.

I saw my maternal grandmother take my brother in her arms. I saw my mother turned half-toward and half-away. I felt everyone’s fear of my father. I wept unashamed. I lost my false innocence. And there were many witnesses.

What began as family became field. The interrupted movements I witnessed in my lineage were the same ones that pulse through communities and nations.

I learned the invisible choreography of systems, how power and fear, distance and desire, belonging and exile all move through the collective body. Letting the body become instrument and witness taught me that transformation doesn’t come from identifying with a role, but from allowing it to move through for ongoing balance and emergent order.

I began my formal training the day after Bert Hellinger, the founder of this work, died in September 2019.Our training ended during the first weekend of lockdown, and then another level of training began, grieving ten people in four years, beginning with the most tragic one.

The personal and the collective kept dissolving into one another. What I was learning about grief, lineage, and loss in my own life was inseparable from what was happening in the world: the reckonings, the ruptures, the unfinished mourning.

My teacher Suzi Tucker said on that first day, “This work provides a large enough landing strip for all of your gifts to be held in.” I remember looking across the room at a cohort peer who mirrored my amazement at that notion.

The language, the movement, the permission to feel systems as living fields felt so natural. I accessed a well of infinite curiosity that I was relieved could not be fully quenched in this lifetime. I sensed a field large enough to hold all of me and my gifts, a field wider than the sociopolitical and psycho-industrial complex we often mistake for all of reality.

The constant quandary and inquiry of what’s mine, what’s yours, and what’s ours has defined my life’s work TO LEARN. The hyper-vigilance that once kept me safe as a child has evolved into a capacity to read a field, to sense imbalance and disorder before words appear or when truth begins to move again.

Through contact with the basic truths of my personal story, my ancestral field, and the greater collective soul, I’ve lost and regained my essential dignity many times. That cyclical restoration, the iterative contribution of returning to wholeness and offering it back to life, is the foundation of my teaching.

And now, I offer this course back home, in Vermont.
The state’s motto, Freedom and Unity, is a wonderful invocation for constellations work - the dance between individuality and belonging, autonomy and interdependence.

Yet Vermont also carries its own hidden field: the performative denial that can accompany small-scale progressivism, the myth of purity that conceals deeper roots of exclusion. We’re so great but everyone I know is so lonely. We’re so not racist but all people of color here I know share experiences of racial harm. To teach here means to stay in contact with both: the aspiration and the amnesia, the beauty and the blind spots.

Vermont’s rhythm and scale make it possible to learn in a way that is still human and local. Vermont insists that nothing is achieved quickly or hubristically, but through slow presence, through belonging that can bear contradiction.

*inspired by Nikole Hannah Jones, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2fpQqXi2rA

MEETING THE MOMENT

Family & Systemic Constellations Facilitator Course
Eight weekends of in-person, soul-centric education in Burlington, Vermont

Meeting the Moment invites participants into a rigorous, embodied exploration of systemic constellations and soul-centric leadership.

Over eight weekends we’ll study and practice the principles that allow us to face reality, hold complexity, and facilitate transformation.

The course is designed for facilitators, educators, therapists, organizers, and anyone drawn to this work as a path of healing—for themselves, their families, and the wider systems they belong to. Together we’ll practice staying present with what is, to move toward greater individuation and belonging.

Five percent of proceeds will be donated to the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, in recognition that systemic healing must include the social, ancestral, and political fields we inhabit together.

letting the enemy rest (part two)

Recently, in ReRooted Rebelles, we used representative figures from our surroundings to acknowledge what is, bringing warmth to unfelt and unseen parts within us.

Loyalty to others’ pain arose in our shared field.
We collectively exhaled when it surfaced,
as if naming it was already an act of setting it down…

and returning more fully to ourselves (as part of our endeavor to repair self-betrayal through self-regenerating constellations!).

When we give back what is not ours to carry,
we return respect and dignity to the true bearer of the burden.

We are dignified when we take responsibility for what is ours.

We are strengthened in our own gifts
when we carry what is ours
and stay in steady, same-plane accompaniment to the burdens of others.

In part one of letting the enemy rest,
we acknowledged the larger field of the victim–perpetrator dynamic,
including bystanders, loyalists, and witnesses as well.

-

part two

Feeling, listening, looking…
staying in contact with what is
until the field can exhale.

Constellations are radical empathy:
walking through every role in the system,
even those we fear or despise,
until none are excluded.

The enemy isn’t only those we oppose. It's also where we refuse to enter, where we dare, not even in imagination, inhabit. Where we fear proximity might ruin us or undo the story of our being innocent and complete.

But a system cannot find peace
until every role rests and grows up and out of eternal innocence.

People once possessed by positions
become aware
and consciously choose place.

The bystander rests when no longer frozen in distance:

I acknowledge the cost of not acting.
I return to my place in life.
I do it differently. Visibly.

The loyalist rests when they no longer fight to prove worth:

I honor the dead without following them. With my systemic awareness and my own gifts, I create.

The perpetrator rests when their humanity is seen beside the harm:

I see what I did here. I take responsibility for forces that move through me. I have impact.

The victim rests when their suffering is witnessed without weapon:

I acknowledge the fullness of my pain and allow myself to be accompanied in it. I let life flow imperfectly through me.

And the witness, too, must rest,
step down from the mountain lookout,
let the wind die down:

I step into the mess of the everyday.

Nothing is left out.
Even the enemy is folded back in,
rest itself
becomes a transformative act

until the next resistance-growth edge.

We bow.

Unbound,

yet prismatically woven in,

in honor of the dead.

towards the mossy real

I’ve had to learn, again and again, how to lean into water.

It was in my first Family Constellation workshop seven years ago where I finally found access to my weeping.

I felt unashamed in my grief.

I felt no pressure to explain or interpret it.

No one came to my rescue. No one pitied me. Thank goddess.

I could exist, in my experience of reality, uninterrupted. Compassionately witnessed.

When we aim to move just enough to regain a durable momentum, the weight of water: the grief, fatigue, and sorrow doesn’t have to pull us down into a deluge.

Water can be a plush rooting. A sober reckoning with the agony and ecstasy of reality.

I chose moss as our metaphor this Sunday.

Moss carries a quiet balance of earth, water, and air.
(And the place I am never lacks for an underlying fire!)

What is parched longs to be softened, held, restored.

Moss keeps water.
It shelters.
It creates soil, root, regeneration.

Metaphor is real for humans.
It’s where word and image unite.
Renewing our self-family, self-culture, self-other image perception.

Changed perception, opened perspective…these change how we see the world and navigate life.

When we’re aware of the field of others, the personal becomes universal and the universal becomes personal.

Before you know it, we are united. In pluriversality.

Moss is where exuberant green emerges with adorable insistence.

The shaded corners and broken places become sites where something soft and connected takes root.

So on Sunday, we will lean into the soft, damp, living ground beneath fracture and fatigue.
To soften.
To return.
To practice another rep in returning to our strength.
Another rep of dignity, restored.

Constellation spaces help us reroot, elementally. The places where the unwelcome and unfelt got stuck turn into places of rich composting for a richer emergent future.

letting the enemy rest (part one)

If only we could give place to all the parts of conflict.

Every role lives somewhere inside us…flickering in and out across time and space, waiting for its season to surface.

“If I am a human being, nothing that is human can be alien to me.” - Terence

A bystander stands between victims and perpetrators, peripherally aware, yet far enough away to avoid direct impact. They are neither directly harmed nor directly harming, but remain part of the same field, often unconsciously aligned with one side.

This in-between position can be a refuge (and later, guilt) or a trap that mirrors the moralistic bypassing found in both victims and perpetrators. It offers safety from direct exposure, but often at the cost of vitality, movement, clarity, and soul weight.

A loyalist fights for one side no matter the cost to themselves, often summoning the same strength it would take to move forward and put their own gifts into the world.

Unable to fix the broken bonds in their family, they employ chronic outrage as a way to fix the world. They are stuck in the innocence of righteousness and the exhaustive fire of chronic sympathetic activation. Unable to hold the enormity of their grief, rage, and unreconciled experiences, they burn their outrage beyond its useful catalyst.

A witness turns toward the truth. With humility and self-respect, they know their limits and so aim to sustainably increase their capacity over time. They let themselves be impacted without enmeshing, staying immersed without losing the boundary of self. They look fully, acknowledging what is, without collapsing into the victim–perpetrator stalemate or freezing in the status quo of the bystander. Their loyalty is to the emergent living versus past systemic loyalties or reactive back-and-forth of zealotry. They speak simply about what they see when they turn toward.

Outrage and zealotry have their place, too. As states. As temporary touchpoints. But not as a ground to remain on.

Victims, perpetrators, loyalists, and bystanders lack the humility required to fully meet the moment.

Cost. In constellation work, we see that every role carries a cost. Even the witness. The witness is lonely, living outside the raw, messy, dirty reality.
Part of intimacy and belonging is lust, projection, and pain.

To let the enemy rest is to honor each role’s reality, even the one that harmed us. It is to give the fight back to the comforting arms of the ancestors, to recognize its cost on every side. It is a discipline of looking, of staying in contact with what is, until everyone is seen and warmed. And the field can exhale.

In this way, constellation workshops become an act of radical empathy. A balancing. A restorative justice that emerges iteratively instead of where the living lay down with the dead. Where we include even those we fear and despise.

When no one is left outside, the enemy can finally rest. And so can we.

walking away while weaving it in

I don’t remember the details of what happened, but I remember feeling awful. I was five, and my brother was nine. My emergently-abled brother was being bullied on the school bus. I couldn’t speak up about what really mattered to me back then but I could speak up about this. That was good. And a deeper vow rooted itself quietly beneath it…

“I will never leave anyone behind. Ever. No matter what it costs me.”

And it did.
It has.

Invisible vows like that don’t stay abstract. The “no matter” materializes. They take shape in our bodies, our choices, our patterns, especially when they stood in for what we needed and never got.

The good news is that we can learn to walk away and weave it in.

Not to sever the thread but to include the girl on the bus, who witnessed what was. So she isn’t left behind either. Maybe her devotion can be honored without obeying the vow. Maybe she can rest.

Maybe we can walk away in a way that weaves everyone in, leaving in a way that includes all parties, even as we go. Not to sever the thread, but to acknowledge it. To let everyone have their place, even in the parting.

If you’ve had a tendency to keep everyone:
Even the ones who flatten you.
Even the ones who don’t see you.
Don’t feel you.
Even when staying meant disappearing yourself.

If you’ve said,

“I am good if I include. Bad if I exclude.”

Consider:

Sometimes life moves through you as a “no,”
not because you are judging, or unforgiving,
but because life is moving in a fresh, new direction.

Sometimes staying in relationship creates impasse and conflict,
for you, and inevitably for them, too.

Staying in guilt isn’t respectful.
It doesn’t honor them.
It doesn’t honor the dignity of your interdependent sovereign places.

Staying where we are weakened thwarts our emergent movement.
It keeps us entangled with what’s not ours to carry.

Of course, leaving has its costs too. Which take time, space and other interstitial forces to reconcile.

Before turning away, turn toward.

Look with your whole soul at their whole soul.

Acknowledge what is.

Feel the tension.

See what’s yours, too.

Until the tension gives way to presence. To mutual strength. To the dignity of a completed agreement.

“I see your place, while I stay in mine.

You are entitled to your life.

I am entitled to mine.

I leave in order to live.

I carry only what is mine.”

rerooted rebelles

I learned early on to lean away from myself in order to belong. To soften my edges and tuck away my grief. To hold it in, keep the peace, tend to the invisible wounds in the room, and carry unnamed burdens.

To belong is to survive.

It happened in the small, quiet betrayals — saying “yes” when my body said “no,” suppressing my tears so others wouldn’t have to feel theirs, turning my wildness into wildly useful so I could keep a seat at the table.

It’s OK, I don’t need anything.

The visceral realizations of this self-abandonment has come in iterative waves. Soft and hard cellular moments. Sometimes sabotaging emergent movement, sometimes actually disrupting the pattern of self-betrayal.

When I stayed with my body during the instability of moving five times in two months, a deep disruption of self-betrayal occurred. A rerooting happened. The rootlets, radicles, root hairs, and other little mycelial tendrils of the deepest entanglements and loyalties softened.

The old root rot fully fermented, loosened and fizzled up and out. For the root of me. The “I am.” To take over.

To be a rebelle is to give up your position and claim your place in the larger living field, with tender humility and fierce truth.

To know: I got enough. I am enough. I’m doing it differently. I have agency in what I carry.

Family Constellations and other deep listening containers let us step into a third place, into a field of human and more-than-human resources ready to hold the truth of the exclusion, unsaid, grief, rage, and other marginalizations and culturally disavowed states.

In Rerooted Rebelles, we won’t yank anything out by force. We will warm and coax and court the soil. We will compost the inherited scripts and renew our agreements with life.

In our 90-day circuit, we’ll build momentum for those renewed images to take deeper hold, in the body. With witnesses.

REROOTED REBELLES
A 90-Day Constellation Journey for Self-Regeneration

Begins Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 | Live on Zoom

✮ 10 sessions over 3 months
✮ Family & Systemic Constellations
✮ Writing & Art Prompts
✮ Somatic Holding Practices

Themes We’ll Move Through

July: Acknowledgement & Accompaniment
We make room for all that’s been unfelt — grief, rupture, frozen instincts. We say: “Me too.”

August: Balance, Order, Weight & Size
We take up our right size. We practice leaving others with what is theirs. We say: “I take what is mine and leave you with yours.”

September: Belonging & Individuation
We root into the freedom to belong to ourselves — and to life. We say: “I belong to myself and still to the world.”

Who It’s For

Field-based guides, therapists, artists, parents, activists, healers — those ready to release self-betrayal and be accountable to self-regeneration. For those carrying grief that hasn’t been properly witnessed.

Structure & Flow

• 10 Live Zoom Sessions on Tuesdays, 7–8:30pm EST

• Dates: July 8, 15, 22 | August 5, 12, 19 | September 2, 9, 16 | Final Session: September 30

• Google Classroom for sharing art and questions

• Sliding Scale: $150–$350/month (no questions asked)
  Total range: $450–$950. Median: $700

• Add-on private sessions at student rate

Part Requiem.

Part Amphitheater.

Part Campfire.

90 days of rerooting and dancing toward place, dignity, and enoughness.

It’s not about staying endlessly strong.
It’s about rooting in strength so that we can keep rising.

To join, email mattie@thelostwildness.com or book a vibe check call here.

first love, first everything

One day during the summer before college, I left your house. Driving down your white gravel driveway, I felt a punch to the gut.

I didn’t want to be away from you.

You liked me. I liked you. You liked me, liked me. I just wanted to be friends. At least until then.

I didn’t know how to begin. I was paralyzed by how exposed I felt.

We were riding in the back seat together returning home from the Great Escape. There was a weighted hush in the air, like before a summer storm. I knew then that I needed to write you a letter.

You read it and asked with a grin, “And now what?”

“I’ll come over tomorrow before work.”

My hair was…disheveled and my mascara was all over my face when your mom came home unexpectedly.

I’m turning red and covering my eyes writing this…not from shame, but from bashful delight.

Your parents were the chill ones. 

You were the chill one. 

Mine and me were a little…crazed. 

We loved one another so damn much. We got one another through some real intense stuff. It was codependent as hell but whatever, it was still love.

I can hear us now reassuring one another, sorting it all out together. You held my grief. I held your rage. Your nuance. My clarity. When we got it right, we’d meet in the tender middle.

I was there when you… You were there when I… A lot of our relationship was a big hot mess. And it was also. Revelatory.

After more good than bad times, we broke up, and went different ways. We’d touch base once every couple years and chuckle about how I became more like you and you more like me. More than once one of us would say, “God, I was awful, I’m so sorry.” And the other would reply, “What? No! It was me. I was nuts!” Then we’d wish one another well and go on our separate ways again.

You always had a melancholy. I know now that I didn’t know the scale and magnitude. I guess none of us ever truly heard or understood.

Four and a half years ago you died by suicide. 

It’s been so hard.

I spent a little time on the mountain

Spent a little time on the hill

Things went down, we don't understand

But I think in time we will

Though it’s grown me up quite a lot, this grief’s got a shape so big and amorphous, I can’t get my arms all the way around it. Maybe it’s something like the despair you were trying to live with.

Now, I don't know, but I been told

If the horse don't pull you got to carry the load

I don't know whose back's that strong

Maybe find out before too long

Thinking about how I was among what added to the impossible pain in your life has brought me to my knees many times. 

I wish I had held you more gently more often. I still feel the weight of all that passed between us, soul to soul, the things you trusted me to hold.

And I hold close the moments I did get it right. When you felt able to tell me everything.

I write this under the same summer solstice sun, on the same line of earth that welcomed you. And still does.

With quiet awe, I met your wife and your son—your love moving forward through them.

You really wanted me to like the Grateful Dead but I really only ever liked Jerry’s New Speedway Boogie which is one of my favorite songs. I get it all more now.

Thank you, Sam.

Now, I don't know but I was told

In the heat of the sun a man died of cold

Keep on coming or stand and wait

With the sun so dark and the hour so late

I spent a little time on the mountain

I spent a little time on the hill

I saw things getting out of hand

I guess they always will

One way or another

One way or another

One way or another

This darkness got to give