Mark Matousek

Building Bridges With Our Past: On Recovery:

What others feel about Mark and his workshops:
Mark's strengths in teaching are many. His ability to swiftly discern "the hidden agendas" of people is remarkable. He is able to respond in subtle ways to their different needs (either through group work, or during discussions), finding ways to challenge that individual – not in a negative or punitive fashion – but simply to encourage him or her to think through a challenge or problem. It is my privilege to recommend him! Our weeklong workshop was undoubtedly the most interesting and beneficial week I have experienced in a long time.

— Marcia Lippman, Photographer

What can you expect from this workshop? Listen to this audio preview (Opens in a new window)

Read and download the transcripts

What is Recovery? (taken from Mark's audio workshop preview)

"Recovery isn't recovering from something, it's recovering a quality of mind and a quality of balance, a quality of well-being, a sense of clarity, a depth of wisdom. To me, recovery is really about moving to the natural state of being and that happens through spiritual work, it happens through physical balancing and during the weekend, we'll be using writing as a way of moving toward the truth and moving toward the core of who we are with an emphasis on building bridges to our past. And what I mean by that is a sense of recovering our wholeness and moving through fear and trauma and loss and pain and things that block us from our own memory and our sense of wholeness within ourselves with all of our existence, including the not so great things that may have happened to us. So, for me, recovery is really moving to a natural state of being and moving to a clarity of purpose and a clarity of vision and a sense of creative potential. I want this to be about recovering a feeling of power and creative potential for the people who come to the weekend.

It's more like uncovering. The wisdom is there, the piece of mind is there, the vision is there, but we need to clear away a lot of the unnecessary resistance, a lot of our fears, our misperceptions of things that have happened to us, the ways that the story we've told ourselves has actually covered up strengths that we have and natural inclinations that we have. So it really is a sort of uncovering. I love Michelangelo's talking about the figure being in the stone and all you have to do is keep banging away until the figure emerges. I think the figure of our own original wisdom and the figure of our own original mind is already – is in us. And what we're going to be doing over the weekend is paring away a lot of the unnecessary stories and the misperception that we have about our lives and who we are so that we can step more fully into our authentic and creative brilliant selves. I really do have a sense that we all have an inherent genius and that genius has many different faces and many different voices, but we do have something that's utterly unique and original to us. And so I'm interested in using the weekend to help people uncover, recover what that original and unique particular strength and passion are so that we can bring it into our lives. This is a very practical workshop. It's not about ascending into the ethers. It's much more about descending into the depths of ourselves and getting comfortable there and looking around there. Taking the flashlight of insight and poking around to see what's there, what's blocking us and what we may not know yet so that we can grow, build and move forward with more joy and more wisdom in our lives."

During this retreat you will learn how to:

• Construct a new life.
• Build bridges with the past.
• Expand as your life circumstances bring surprising changes.
• Know and enumerate your own wound(s) as they impact your behavior in a renewed life.

This weekend is dedicated to recovery. We explore what it means -- and does NOT mean. We look into where recovery would lead us and the baggage we need to drop to get there. We take more than twelve steps to get where we're going: central to the work we do together is the awareness that no two people are alike and every recovery is completely different. We do not live in recovery boxes: we recover in order to be free. We are getting to know one another and the level of bustedness is rising. This is a very good thing. Being witnessed is golden, our best remedy for being lost in our own minds. We meet in deep communion and spend time in a zone we rarely visit. The tender, darker, untouched places that daily life blurs over. Being there is a healing renewal.

About Mark Matousek:

Author. Teacher. Mentor. Speaker. My work is devoted to showing you how to achieve creative and spiritual freedom through self-inquiry. By learning to tell the whole truth about things, you will awaken to a whole new life. Truth... Story... Transformation.

Mark was born in Los Angeles on February 5, 1957, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979, and received a fellowship to Worcester College, Oxford, the following year, with an M.A. in English Literature from the UCLA in 1981.

After graduation, he moved to New York, where he worked as a stringer for Reuters, International, then in Newsweek Magazine's letter department, before being hired as a proofreader at Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine. He was the magazine's first staff writer, and became senior editor the following year, conducting hundreds of interviews with figures well known in film, television, books, fine art, politics, design and science. In 1985, he quit his job and spent most of following decade as an itinerant dharma bum and freelance journalist, traveling between Europe, India, and the United States. Shifting professional gears from pop culture to psychology, philosophy and religion, he was a contributing editor to Common Boundary Magazine, where his back page column, "The Naked Eye," appeared from 1994-1999. He received a National Magazine Award nomination for "America's Darkest Secret" (about the epidemic of incest in the U.S.) and published essays in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, Details, O: The Oprah Magazine, Tricycle, The Utne Reader, AARP Magazine, Out, Good Housekeeping, and Harper's Bazaar.

After working with Sogyal Rimpoche on The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, he collaborated with religious writer Andrew Harvey on Dialogues With A Modern Mystic (interviewing Harvey for Britain's Channel One documentary of the same name). His first book, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story (1996) became an international bestseller published in ten countries and nominated for two Books for a Better Life Awards. Having served as co-editor on Ram Dass's book, Still Here, he published his second memoir in 2000, The Boy He Left Behind: A Man's Search for His Lost Father (Los Angeles Times Discovery Book, Randy Shilts Award, excerpted in the Sunday supplement of the London Guardian). He has taught creative non-fiction writing at Manhattanville College and published essays in numerous anthologies, including Wrestling With the Angel, Voices of the Millenium, A Memory, A Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer, Oprah's Best Life. He is also a contributing editor to O: The Oprah Magazine, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and a frequent blogger for The Huffington Post. His most recent book is When You're Falling, Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living (2008). Also, he is collaborating with Eve Ensler as the Creative Director of V-Men (the male arm of VDay, Ensler's organization for ending violence against women and girls) and to curate their online essay series (Vday.org). Currently, he is at work on a performance piece called "Ten Ways To Be a Man," which will serve as V-Men’s artistic vehicle and will premier in September, 2011.

For more information on Mark Matousek, visit:
www.markmatousek.com