Mark Matousek – Sanctuary of Truth 2022

“You don’t need skill in writing to partake; all that’s required is the longing to awaken your heart.”

Mark is a masterful and loving guide. His wisdom teachings and brilliantly conceived questions will enable you to dissolve the coverings and open to life-changing truth. You don’t need skill in writing to partake; all that’s required is the longing to awaken your heart.
— Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge

During this heart-opening 7 modules, you’ll:

• Learn how to step out of illusion and into your truth
• Understand that when you identify the lies you tell yourself, you release pent up energy and heal your pain
• Become a juicier and more dynamic being — when you come to see that your weakness and losses are often strengths and gains in disguise, your inner radiance will shine
• Discover how you sacrifice essential parts of yourself in order to belong
• Learn that boredom and apathy often point to where you’re withholding — and receive new ways to address these points of stagnation
• Learn how clinging to your past is detrimental to your life — and how regret, sentimentality, and nostalgia stifles creativity and growth
• Release your story from the past and increase your power and happiness
• Receive writing prompts to help you access and share your genius — your greatest offering — with the world
• Claim the powers of transformation as a never-ending process in how you live your life
• Heal from some of your most challenging past circumstances and wounds
• Experience enhanced authenticity, joy, and freedom through the deepening of emotional expression

In this first session, you’ll explore the parts of your story that are inauthentic, unclear, or dishonest. Identifying the obstacles to authenticity that are “baked” into your personal narrative makes way for insight and imagination. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “I want to unfold, I don’t want to stay folded anywhere. For where I am folded, there I am a lie.”

When you discover the lies you tell yourself on a regular basis, you reveal the truth of who you are. When you realize that you are the storyteller, not the story, and that what you’ve believed is a fixed identity is actually changeable, fluid, and open to interpretation… it imbues your life with greater meaning and frees you to live more happily.

This process is like removing blocks from a flowing current… once the obstacles to authenticity are removed, you increase power and potential. Exposing your inauthentic parts also invites you to explore the psychological shadow, where deeper truths remain concealed.

In this session, you’ll:

• Discover that everybody’s personal story is a mixture of both truth and falsehoods
• Come to appreciate that stories are survival tools that help us navigate a challenging, confusing world
• Understand that when you identify the lies you tell yourself, you release pent up energy and heal your pain
• Realize there is no shame in uncovering lies; it’s an act of self-care that increases self-knowledge
• Invite more self-acceptance into your life by training the light of attention on your myths and losing your fear of the shadow

In this session, we consider the psychological shadow, that off-limits part of yourself where you hide both your pain and your gifts.

In exploring your stories, you come to realize that your narrative includes missing pieces that you keep out of sight. Only by acknowledging and investigating these shadow parts can you move toward a narrative of wholeness and self-integration.

Identifying the holes in your story helps you retrieve unique, irreplaceable aspects of your originality that you’ve pushed away, judged, and overlooked. You’ll notice how fears, doubts, and stress decrease when you explore the shadow with acceptance and care, making way for insight and imagination. You’ll also notice that perceived limitations and weaknesses are actually strengths in disguise, integral parts of your unique being.

You’ll see the ways in which you have compromised unnecessarily, and learn to pay attention to how the ego weaponizes shame and guilt to keep you small, safe, and a fraction of who you can be.

In this session, you’ll:

• Discover that your shadow contains both pain AND gifts
• Learn how the ego weaponizes shame and guilt to keep you small
• Understand how fear, doubt, and stress decrease when you allow yourself to explore your shadow
• Come to appreciate how originality calls for integration of the daytime self and the nighttime self
• Become a juicier and more dynamic being — when you come to see that your weakness and losses are often strengths and gains in disguise, your inner radiance will shine

How do you shrink to fit your narrative into what’s acceptable to your family, society, profession, relationships, religion, or political party? What do you fear losing if you change these stories? When is compromise useful, and when is it self-sabotaging?

In this class, you’ll look at where you’ve compromised unnecessarily in your life, creating an incomplete story. You’ll see how your desire to please others, fit in, and play small has diminished your enthusiasm, passion, and power. Whenever you compromise the truth of who you are in order to belong, you remain stuck in the middle of the road, where you’ll feel both safe and stagnant.

You’ll experience a writing practice that will help reveal when compromise becomes evasion. This awareness will trigger your desire to be free, take positive risks, and stop interfering with your personal growth.

How and why do you tame your own wildness? What would you do if you were free?

In this session, you’ll:

• Explore how compromise can deprive you of authenticity
• Discover how you sacrifice essential parts of yourself in order to belong
• Learn that boredom and apathy often point to where you’re withholding — and receive new ways to address these points of stagnation
• Bring more vitality and joy for life when you uncover how you bridle your passion with compromise
• Learn how to say no when that’s your truth

To be free is to lose attachment to that which is inessential in you, and to accept your impermanence and the transitory nature of your story — which scares the ego to death.

Although we imagine that we want to be free, freedom can also be frightening.

In this class, you’ll look at the obstacles to freedom in your life. You’ll explore the ways in which you entrap yourself — and stay imprisoned — by resisting the call to freedom. Is it easier to stay in your cage than to fly out the open door? What myths do you use to deceive yourself into thinking you’re free when you’re really not?

Freedom is a spiritual opportunity and is fundamentally an “inside job.” You can be free in the midst of adversity, and imprisoned in the lap of luxury, depending on how you tell your story.

As you go within and tell your story, you come to face your shame — the shame of wanting to be free — and overcome the impulse to curtail, restrict, and keep yourself collared.

In this session, you’ll:

• Discover that freedom means letting go of imaginary obstacles by facing your fear of freedom and shedding your desire to remain in comfort and familiarity
• Step out of illusion into your truth
• Gain the confidence to start your freedom story now — by coming to terms with the concept that it doesn’t mean changing external circumstances
• Find ways to release the shame that surrounds your innate desire to be free

How do you cling to the past to your own detriment? How do you define yourself more through the past than the present? In this class, you’ll explore how your story is controlled by the past and how you define yourself through your biography. The spiritual realization that you are not what has happened to you is a quantum leap in self-awareness.

Aside from mating trout, you don’t find fish swimming backward. Like fish, our natural way of being is in the present, in the flow of life… not living in or holding on to the past.

When you claim the power to be fully present, and drop the obsession with looking back or judging yourself through that backward lens, your story can remain fresh, relevant, flexible, and open. Writing from this fresh perspective is key to changing your story, healing your life, and realizing your true gifts.

In this session, you’ll:

• Come to understand that you are not your biography, and the past does not define you
• Receive a deeper wisdom that writing brings you into the present and helps you untangle yourself from the past
• Learn how clinging to your past is detrimental to your life — and how regret, sentimentality, and nostalgia stifles creativity and growth
• Discover that your narratives of failure, loss, and trauma need not shape your future
• Release your story from the past and increase your power and happiness

Every single one of us was born with a unique genius that no one else possesses. In this class, you’ll explore the nature of your true gifts and their impact on your authentic story.

Overcoming false modesty is an important step to awakening. Can you apply your genius to the challenges of your life and bring imagination to adversity? Can you drop the stories that compromise your ability to bring forth what is within you? When you see that your geniusis a gift, you realize the only appropriate response is gratitude.

Exploring your treasure is bound to bring up the voice of the inner critic. Yet, when you counter these voices in writing, you come to trust your enthusiasm and the richness of what you have to give.

You are one of a kind. There is no other being like you on this planet.

In this session, you’ll:

• Learn that genius — your offering — can be practical or artistic, visionary or down to earth, noticeable or invisible to the outside world
• Explore ways to overcome false modesty so you can enjoy the riches you’ve been given
• Silence the voices of internal critics by writing about your treasure
• Realize how acknowledging your gifts enriches your story
• Receive writing prompts that’ll help you give voice to your particular genius and instill joy
• Experience a sense of flow and joy in what makes you feel most “yourself”

In this final module, you’ll explore the theme of intention and the link between desire and imagination when you compose a narrative that helps you flourish.

You’ve come to understand that you’re not your past and that your story is always changing. Freedom no longer scares you — instead you see it as an invitation, a promising open door to the unknown.

Expressing your inner self through the written word during these seven modules has helped you understand your shadow, which has freed repressed power and your true intentions for the future.

Writing has helped you focus your heart and mind, training you in present-moment awareness and the forward flow of your existence. You now understand that you can compose your life moment to moment without writing your story in stone. This frees you to live with fewer regrets and more opportunities for transformation.

In this session, you’ll:

• Discover how intention helps you compose a story that helps you flourish
• Experience freedom as an invitation to shift according to what is true for you
• Learn that your story need not be written in stone
• Explore the truth that narrative can never contain you, though you use stories to understand your life
• Claim the powers of transformation as a never-ending process in how you live your life