Mark Matousek
Disentangle yourself from stories of the past so you can imagine a fresh new story that has you flourishing and embracing your true potential.
Have you struggled to release the tether of your past — holding on to an old narrative about your life that you know is holding you back?
Do you feel — deep in your heart — that there is more to life — and have a deep desire to live it to its fullest?
When you change your story, you’re able to transform your life. Surrendering the narrative of the past wakes you up to your true nature, far deeper than the personality you present to the world...
... and provides the ultimate opportunity for healing, so you can pursue your dreams and purpose in life.
When you excavate your truth — and start speaking and living IN your truth — your whole narrative changes. You start to admit dreams you haven’t allowed yourself to express out loud, drop bad habits, address addictions, leave unhealthy relationships or jobs, and finally...
... feel free.
With his unique and transformative practice of expressive writing for the self, author, journalist, and teacher Mark Matousek helps you gain self-awareness and precious insight that can encourage you to let go of the narrative that has run your life — and arrive at deep personal truths.
With awareness, courage, and love, you can find the strength to admit your truth and access the power trapped inside your outdated story — because stories are, in fact, survival tools that help you navigate a challenging, confusing world.
Expressive writing serves as a direct path to self awareness — and it is available to everyone.
Mark began his practice of writing to process some early losses and traumas in his own life. While it started as his personal survival mechanism, it eventually became clear he could turn it into a gift for others.
He now has more than three decades of experience journeying into the dark, shadowy past with others… and guiding them as they find the healing and nourishment that comes from the exploration of self through expressing the truth through the written word.
During these seven modules, you'll take a journey that allows you to explore the unknown depths within to help free you from old limitations, stories, traumas, and fears.
Wounds are part of the human condition. Not only do we all have wounds, but we also have aspects of our narratives that live under the darkness of the shadow. And yet, these forbidden parts contain essential elements of our true nature. They hold wisdom, energy, creativity, and power — and they need to be brought into the light so we can be free and whole.
How do you make this journey into your personal wounds, secrets, and shadows feel safe?
And how do you not get stuck in the same old stories or loops so you can set yourself free with a new story?
A practice of deep, transformative writing is one of THE most powerful ways to release and surrender your past and reimagine a new future.
This experience creates a safe, respectful, accepting, and loving space in which you’ll be invited to express yourself — wild, raw, uncensored, and free, in a space of total confidentiality.
You’ll explore all areas of your life — gazing deeply into yourself, your past, your relationships, your work, and the world. You’ll move past the substories and overarching narrative that’s kept you locked up and caged within.
The process of deconditioning asks you to dig into who you would be without your stories. It encourages you to approach life differently — and find new ways of moving forward.
With Mark’s loving course, you’ll have the time and space to fully open to your sacred depths and develop a powerful, transformative writing practice that expands your mind, heals your heart, deepens your relationships — and frees your soul.
You’ll learn to open to your raw and unfiltered truth, speak your dreams and passions into existence, admit things you’ve never allowed to see the light of day, and heal past hurts. You’ll access deeper and more trusting intimacy, enhanced creativity, and more powerful manifestation in the world.
When you start to see your writing as a sacred tool for enlightenment — and understand the reasons your stories have held you back — is when you can truly set yourself free.
When you know yourself fully, you become more authentic, insightful, truthful, generous, and creative. You’re not imprisoned by your past — and you can catapult yourself into a future that truly sets your spirit free.
By the end of the 7-module journey, you’ll be able to access and share your genius — your greatest gift — with the world.
During this course, you’ll learn how to use writing to safely unearth and work through the parts of your history (and the present moments) that bring you the most pain — freeing yourself from these inner wounds and allowing yourself to embrace life with greater joy and gratitude.
Mark is a brilliant writer, profound teacher, and humble friend who delights in sharing this approach to profound healing — and who has practiced it himself successfully for decades. If you’re ready to dive into transforming the stories of your past into blessings for a future that ignites your soul, this 7-module course from Mark is the perfect experiential program for you.
During this experiential course, 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
What You’ll Discover in These 7 Modules
In this 7-part transformational intensive, Mark guides you through the fundamental spiritual skills and competencies that you’ll need to successfully navigate your past and mine old stories for your journey of healing through writing — which will, in turn, help transform the quality of your life.
The Beauty of On-Demand
This course features step-by-step teachings and experiential practices from Mark. Each session builds harmoniously upon the previous ones, so you’ll develop a complete holistic understanding of the practices, tools, and principles you’ll need to successfully let go of your old story as you reimagine a new one — freeing you from the past to embrace a life with greater joy and purpose. Your purchase includes 24/7 ongoing access to your course content, allowing you time to review the materials at your own pace and integration.
Module 1 Overcome Obstacles to Manifest Authenticity
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
Module 2 The Shadow Knows
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
Module 3 Compromise Only When Necessary
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?
This week, 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
Module 4 Your Freedom Story
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.
This week, 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
Module 5 The Past Can’t Control You
How do you cling to the past to your own detriment? How do you define yourself more through the past than the present? This week, 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
Module 6 The Treasure Within You
Every single one of us was born with a unique genius that no one else possesses. This week, 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”
Module 7 Writing Your Future Story
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.
Writing for these seven weeks 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
SPECIAL BONUS OFFER
In addition to Mark’s transformative 7-module course, you’ll receive this special bonus offering to complement the course and take your understanding and practice to an even deeper level.
Original Blessing: Return to the Source
Audio Narrative With PDF Transcript From Mark Matousek
In this 30-minute talk, Mark explores the radical philosophy of “original blessing” as a counterbalance to our current global catastrophes. He also shares how the belief in “original sin” has distorted our understanding of human nature and our relationship to the planet. You can reclaim the goodness, truth, and beauty of who you are when you emphasize self-blessing over punishment, and you focus on healing, renewal, imagination, and play over the need for salvation.
Becoming Yourself: Originality in the Age of Impostors
Audio Narrative With PDF Transcript From Mark Matousek
In this thought-provoking 30-minute program, Mark explores originality in the virtual age and the epidemic of impostor syndrome. Our “first thoughts” and instinctive knowledge are our most dependable guides — yet, in a world where duplicity, disempowerment, and public pretense prevail, we often disregard the “still, small voice within,” and the spirit with which we were born. These are some of the questions Mark answers, “How can we be fully ourselves despite widespread pressure to become someone else?” “How do you ignore your personal genius in the process of fitting in?” “How would your life be different if you allowed yourself to be authentic?”
Right Relationship: How the Heart Can Also Be Wise
Audio Dialogue With Mark Matousek and Dr. Amir Levine With PDF Transcript
In this audio dialogue, Mark interviews Dr. Amir Levine, one of the world’s leading experts in the art and science of interpersonal relationships. A New York Times bestselling author and faculty member of Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry, Levine talks to Mark about his seminal book, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love. Discover why it’s so important to understand your “attachment style” when bonding intimately with others.
What People Are Saying About Mark Matousek…
Author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge
Kaneohe, Hawaii
Jersey, Channel Islands
Santa Rosa, California
Guatemala
Italy
Here’s What You’ll Receive
Seven Pre-Recorded 90-Minute Sessions
Experience a unique opportunity to learn from bestselling author, teacher, and V-Men co-founder, Mark Matousek, creator of “Writing to Awaken” — from the comfort of your own home. Each session includes a streaming video and guides you to discover specific skills and abilities to untangle from your past and imagine a fresh new story.
Seven Transcripts of Sessions
In addition to the high-quality videos and MP3 audios, you’ll also receive session transcriptions. You can then review, print, and highlight the most important insights and practices you were given.
Exercises and Questions for Each Lesson
Between sessions, you’ll have the option of completing related exercises, practicing new tools, and answering questions to accelerate your learning and integrate each lesson.
An Unprecedented Opportunity to Join the Online Course, The Sanctuary of Truth
Your Satisfaction Is 100% Guaranteed!
If you don’t absolutely LOVE The Sanctuary of Truth — or don’t feel that it meets your needs — please submit your refund request form 14 days from your date of purchase and we’ll happily issue qualifying customers a refund.
More Praise for Mark Matousek
Whakatane, New Zealand
Clinical professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and New York Times bestselling author
Author of Ten Ways to Change the World in Your Twenties
Associate professor at Fordham University
President of Solid Threads
Portland, Oregon
About Mark Matousek
Mark Matousek, MA, is an award-winning memoirist, teacher, and speaker whose work focuses on transformative writing for personal, professional, and spiritual development.
He is the founder of The Seekers Forum, an online community for writing and self-inquiry, as well as the author of eight books including How Emerson Can Change Your Life: Lessons From an American Stoic... Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story… When You’re Falling, Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living… and Writing To Awaken: A Journey of Truth, Transformation, and Self-Discovery.
A featured blogger for PsychologyToday.com, he collaborated with Ram Dass on his book Still Here, assisted Sogyal Rinpoche on The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and has contributed to numerous anthologies and publications, including the New Yorker, Details, Harper’s Bazaar, The Chicago Tribune, and O: The Oprah Magazine.
A MacDowell Fellow and graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Mark is a founding member of V-Men (with Eve Ensler), an organization devoted to ending violence against women and girls, and is on the faculty of numerous learning institutions around the world.
He offers workshops in self-inquiry and personal development internationally, using his “Writing to Awaken” method, which has helped thousands of people around the globe