Lisa Meuser

The wisdom of Presence is inherent in all of us- is what we are- and yet sometimes we have lived experiences which create barriers to this knowing. Receiving unconditional guidance has been an integral part of my sacred journey of waking up, and it is a joy to share that gift with others.

About me…

A full-time student of being fully human, I am passionate about supporting people in discovering deeper, richer and more fulfilling lives. In becoming cognitively and somatically conscious as to how the oppressive dominant narrative matrix separates us from truly living, we are able consciously choose to move into, discover and remember the matrix of Love.

Connecting and inter-relating, as we play and navigate in the world, is one of my biggest passions and I consider myself quite fortunate that I spend my days exploring and journeying with people. In my experience, because we are often wounded in our early unhealthy relationships, it is through safe, grounded, and healthy relationships that we can heal.

I gently, uniquely and safely journey with people using a variety of approaches, including using a modality I created called Matrix Integration. With over 25 years experience with addiction, trauma, and somatic work, we will explore together – locating and integrating emotional and/or physical blockages and ailments, energetic contractions, limiting beliefs, compulsions/addictions, unhealed wounds/trauma, false identities, and anything that is having a powerful influence on your life that you would like to explore. I am committed to following your lead and providing services that support your unique path.

I am a Living Inquiries Facilitator, Co-creator, and Trainer. I also have a Masters of Social Work, an undergraduate degree in Psychology, Philosophy, and Humanities, am a level 3 Reiki Master, an Access BARS practitioner, and have studied Myofacial Release, Shamanic Healing, Tantric Kundalini, Death and Dying/Hospice Counseling, Right Relations, Attachment Theory, DID, Harm Reduction, Implicit Bias, Relational Cultural Therapy, and Couples Therapy with Terrance Real. I engaged in a year long study of Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands, am a 3rd year student in Somatic Abolitionism, and am student of Hermeticism and Metaphysicas through The ReMember Institute, and sit on their board of directors.

I have been through various diversity and racial justice trainings, and am educated in ancestral trauma, trauma as related to marginalized communities (including sex laborers) and sexual, emotional, psychological, narcissistic and ritual assault/abuse.

I am a neurodivergent human, deeply respectful of all, regardless of gender, race, nationality, religion, criminal history, drug use, sexual orientation. You are important, and appreciated, whoever you are.

A little about more about me…

I was still in graduate school when I realized that what I was being taught wasn’t bringing about enough change with my clients. I was working in a treatment/detox center at the time, on the heels of working at a homeless shelter. The same clients keep coming through the doors. Whatever they were receiving wasn’t enough.

Based on a hunch, I did some research and found that other practices did indeed exist. These other approaches were almost always experiential in nature, focusing on an individuals’ relationship with life and others, and were successful in reducing drug use and increasing individual well-being. I was excited, and then disappointed as I discovered that they were expensive and not widely available- in other words, extremely under utilized.

I wanted to contribute to change, but I just wasn’t seeing it with the services that were being offered in my area. I changed my focus and started to explore the bigger, wider picture. As I went outside the micro, and found a large world of macro, I studied policies, program planning, advocacy, evaluation, community organizing, social justice, and cultural theory which helped me get a sense of the systems holding dysfunction and oppression in place.

As I was learning about the macro, I was experientially learning about my micro. I was living in a small ashram, engaged in a practice that was chakra and energy based. It was here that I learned about the intimate relationship between body, mind, and spirit.

Years later, out of the ashram, I kept being called by others to return to interpersonal work. I always said no, as I already knew that what was out there wasn’t working. But then I started to get curious about what might be possible.

Through divine inspiration, I created a modality called Matrix Integration. I took the things I’d learned in graduate school, combined them with what I’d learned in the ashram, and brought in what I then called a “matrix perspective”. It had become clear to me that a person’s whole somatic and psychic web- including their traumas- was relevant in their road to well being, and I started to practice with that wisdom as a base.

I shortly found out that there was a word for what I was doing: Embodiment.  (Read more about embodiment below, in a piece I wrote a couple years ago originally titled “Enlighten What?” for Non-dual Therapists)

The word was somewhat new back then, but something in me recognized its greatness, and still does today.

Including More… into the Present

It dawned on me years ago that the matrix journeying I was initially doing with clients, looking into their lifelong webs and travelling back in time to generational lineages, was short sighted. I was “progressive” in my field, but not progressive enough as I hadn’t seen that the matrix of the individual was directly related to the matrix of culture. Transformative wisdom teaches us that history is important- I had seen this from a micro lens, and, had excluded the crucial macro lens.

This was pretty “radical” wake up back then. Social justice groups weren’t very interested in their own individual dominant narrative (I’ve written about the dominant narrative here and here), and still often aren’t. Spiritual and psychological groups weren’t so interested in culture’s dominant narrative, and still often aren’t. But here we are- in a time when it’s clear that the micro and the macro are inseparable, and it is becoming crystal clear that as social justice advocates, we must be connected to what is going on internally, and as healers and somatic practitioners, we must be connected to what is going on with culture. As forerunners of change, we are invited to go deeper into the relationship of all things so that true change and transformation can occur.

We are co-creating and co-existing within a matrix. We learn to live internally as we’ve been taught externally. We learn to treat ourselves as we’ve been treated by others. For example, when we live in a culture that is run by a dominant oppressive narrative, and most of us do, we will embody that narrative within ourselves, and most of us do. Luckily we are creatures who can learn, and who can change: when we co-create and live within cultures of transformative well being, rooted in compassion and connection, we learn to embody compassionate and connective narratives within ourselves. The impact is exponential.

The life learning I’ve had over the last 25 years as a change agent has given me a birds eye view into the intricate matrix of a human being from a micro and macro level. On the micro level: journeying with hundreds of clients 1:1, group work, training groups, deepening courses and personal inner work- all with the purpose of opening up to the sacred realms of personal traumas/oppression, dark night of the souls, awakenings, and transformative wisdom. On the macro level: being involved in social justice and activism, studying systems change, community organizing, and advocacy, and lastly, studying the inter-relationship between the dominant/oppressive narrative, it’s role in creating personal and cultural trauma, and what happens when transformative wisdom and Love is tapped into.

Enlighten what? In Comes Embodiment…

In a way, my journey of embodiment started with Facebook. One click led to another, and all of a sudden, I discovered a word I had never come across: “enlightenment.”  In spiritual and nondual Facebook groups, I met people who claimed to be enlightened, talking about “oneness” and “no self.” I could relate to their descriptions, as I too had had many awakenings (later what I’d call “head awakenings”), leaving me with experiences of clarity and expanded perspectives.

It sounded good and all, this enlightenment, but it was confusing. The people in these groups were often competitive, mean-hearted, and fragmented from life itself. Some of them talked about love, light, and positivity, and yet they too were caught in very dysfunctional lives. While my own life was markedly “better” with each awakening, some of my emotionally-patterned behaviors were not changing. I still suffered from suicidal ideation and deep despair a few times a year. My interpersonal relationships were often unsatisfactory, and I struggled in my relationship with my daughter.

I wondered what wasn’t included here, in this enlightenment journey and this enlightened community. It dawned on me in seeking “enlightenment,” there was usually an unnamed seeking or desire to feel good. In this seeking of enlightenment and feeling good, almost all of us were avoiding our bodies, and with that, our bodies’ lived experiences. When I mentioned this, others met me with resistance, slinging retorts like:

 

“There is no past.”

“Talking about the negative brings only more negative!”

“Whose body?”

“That’s psychological mumbo jumbo!” 

 

The nonduality groups fixated upon the absolute of “oneness,” often denying their relative existence, as they were leading miserable lives in the relative.

I came to see the dysfunction in those groups, as well as my mounting dysfunction in trying to fit in. I knew there had to be more to “enlightenment” and that it had to include, not disavow, our bodies and our experiences, as well as our hearts and our hurts.

I started to get curious about what might be possible. Long story short, I created my own modality called matrix integration ([1]), which took things I’d learned in graduate school, combined them with what I’d learned in my ten years at a small ashram, and included the existence and experience of trauma ([2]). It had become clear to me that a person’s whole web was relevant in their road to well-being, and my modality held that wisdom as its base. I had stumbled into embodiment work.

 

Fully Including my Humanity

Many years later, embodiment continues to be my passion, my life’s work.  Moreover, it **is** a life’s work, which is both good news and bad news.

This truth, that embodiment is a life’s work, is good news for those who already have a sense that life is always creating, changing, reformulating, and so on. It becomes self-evident that there is no end to the journey when one watches nature and never finds “finality.”  It is good news when, despite awareness of the brain’s effort to convince us of permanence and solidity, one can still meet life beyond their habitual patterning. It is good news when one is on friendly, even loving terms, with one’s physiology, brain patterning, and emotional body, as well as one’s personality.

However, this can seem like bad news for people who are desperately searching for “a forever state” of being, as I had been.

For a long time, my silent (or not-so-silent) prayer was, “I want to be here—in the ‘now.’” Yeah, not too original, but that’s what I wanted: to be fully in the present.  As my journey continued, life answered these prayers, and I started to step more fully into the present state of this human body and all it had to offer.  I then realized that I didn’t want to be “here and now” at all, that the embodiment I was now experiencing was not what I had imagined presence to be. Rather, I had wanted an escape from pain, dis-ease, and challenging experiences.

Hidden within my prayer was a belief I hadn’t yet identified: “If I were fully in the present, I’d always be happy and peaceful.” Always. That was what I was really after, unconsciously. Sound familiar? I’ve met many who, like me, were seeking this permanent state of being, not realizing what an oxymoron it is. ([3])

 

Escaping humanity

The spiritual and non-dual Facebook groups were filled with people seeking this same permanence. These were people who, like me, were suffering amidst this seeking. I started to learn more and more about myself, about spiritual seekers, and about the teachers who took them on.

I discovered that the peaceful state many teachers were speaking of included the following tenets: forgetting about the body; turning away from the world; setting aside preferences, distinctions, wants and needs (often the entire personality); and dissociating from the full variety of emotions (as well as one’s past). Said another way, there was a subtle or overt denying of being human, of one’s humanity. Instead, connecting with “oneness” was chased, at any expense—monetarily, physically and emotionally.

In this way, spiritual seeking had become an addiction in and of itself for many. The irony, or perhaps the tragedy, is that this often reinforced and mirrored traumas experienced earlier in people’s lives. 

 

What a relief, to find another way

As I started to safely connect with my body and embodiment started to happen, I slowly started to realize how much I had bypassed aspects of myself in favor of the “perpetual experience of oneness” to which various brands of spirituality often pointed. I realized that, underneath the hope of permanent peace, there was pain and self-loathing of my very self. It was this pain and self-loathing that caused me to bypass.

Although it was a rude awakening, I was lucky because, as I was studying embodiment deeply in myself with the help of embodied guides, I saw the very same bypassing in my private practice. I knew what they were going through, and for the first time in their life, they were being listened to, believed, and supported in their spiritual and life challenges.

Many of the people I was working with were denying their very humanity, and it was obvious how violent this was. I kept seeing how I’d been doing the same. In denying aspects of my humanness, I was keeping aspects of myself in the dark, in the shadows. Those aspects were powerfully influential. While my deficiency stories lived outside of my attention, they unconsciously dictated many beliefs and behaviors. It was no wonder that after my head awakenings, I still had plenty of emotional dysfunction.

An interesting thing happened when I started to shine the light on those beliefs and thoughts: lots of other shadows started to pop up. Although acknowledging these shadows was not always pleasant, studying them caused them to lose their power. Bringing these previously avoided aspects of myself into the light, allowing them to be seen,  initiates their release. This process was all very counterintuitive to me.

The same started to happen with my clients. Together, we gently explored the behaviors and stories that had once been laden with shame and pain, and in their wake was compassion, forgiveness, and spaciousness. The more that happened, the more empowered clients started to feel.

I think back to one of my earliest clients. Without sharing too many details, they spent their childhood in a war-torn country. As an adult, their oldest child died. Trauma was stacked upon trauma. This client did not want to be alive anymore. Every day they wanted to die. You can only imagine the inner conflict as they tried to stay engaged in life for the sake of their other children.

This person had covered their trauma with positive mantras, positive psychology, and non-dual prescriptions; however, we can only trick ourselves for so long. When there is pain under the surface, it will eventually knock at our door. The death of their child rendered otherwise useful strategies powerless, and the shadows of their past childhood traumas surfaced as they grieved their child’s loss.

All was allowed in our sessions together, including wanting to die.  We were both committed to being with this very difficult and painful territory. Healing takes both courage and time. Eventually, suicidal ideation fell away, and their sense of lack went with it. Years later, they shared that any sense of lack continued to be absent from their life.

To have such an opportunity early in my career was such a gift, as it taught me so much about allowance and the interweavings of the psyche.

It also taught me the true power of embodiment work.

 

Creating, learning, exploring!

Being an embodied human isn’t what I thought it was, that’s for sure. With that said, I’m immensely grateful for what it’s brought me.

I still find that it’s pretty hard to talk about what embodiment is beyond saying it is being in this body, fully and inclusively, in the present. Maybe this difficulty in describing embodiment facilitates its misunderstanding and contributes to all the spiritual seeking going on.

 

Overall, it’s much easier to say what it’s not.

  1. It’s not a state of permanence. This point is really important because I come across people all the time who seem to think there is one abiding state of being. That belief inherently has an immense amount of suffering as part of it. Humans are always in a state of creating, learning, exploring, connecting and relating. Embodiment happens as we are being with and in the world, not separating or escapting from it. One of my favorite realizations: embodiment allows us to be in the world, while at the same time be of Love.
  2. Embodiment is not a state that can be achieved or measured. Yes, I’m reiterating my first point, because that’s how important and how deep these beliefs go. Embodiment isn’t fixed. It’s not static. It’s not something that you accomplish, once and for all, nor can it be measured. Ignoring this point could entangle a spiritual seeker forever.
  3. It’s not a state of being. Embodiment doesn’t have one flavor—it’s not a state of “being happy” or “being at peace” or “being surrendered.” It’s ever-changing. it’s inclusive, not exclusive. There is no right way to be a human being. The possibilities are vast, and “oneness” contains all of them.
  4. Embodiment is not about feeling a particular way or acting in a certain way. Continue to think outside the box. I have had people tell me that I’m not spiritual because I get angry or use certain kinds of vulgar language at times. You can spot spiritual seekers (looking for a quick fix from current suffering) a mile away when typical aspects of being a human being are considered bad—anger, sexuality, eating habits, dress, and so on are easy targets used to “measure” spirituality.
  5. It’s not identifying yourself as a body or focusing only on the body. Likewise, embodiment is not identifying yourself as “not a body” or avoiding the body. In the embodiment journey, we discover that we are constantly in relationship. Likewise, we are never not in relationship. It is liberating to become conscious of how this is always happening, in the multitude of ways it does.
  6. Embodiment is not about fixing or getting rid of anything. I’ll say it again—it is not about getting rid of anything. Phew, that’s a hard one for most of us in this culture. I often think of embodiment as the opposite—it is about including more, rather than excluding anything. We often don’t realize that we’re excluding the bounty of life due to the strategies we’ve been using our whole life, so it can be helpful to work with an embodied guide to help one see what they’ve not been able to see (so to speak).
  7. It’s not easy. Almost every aspect of our society teaches us that being here is avoidable and that our lives will be a lot more enjoyable if we do whatever it takes to avoid our actual experience. Said another way, our culture emphasizes avoiding our actual experience, so there is a lot of force luring us away from being here.
  8. Embodiment is not as hard as you think. A little bit of inquiry can go a long way. Meanwhile, support from embodied guides can go an even longer way. In my experience, this embodied support is crucial as we explore challenging territory. I see it as a display of self-love to get kind and loving support on this human journey. Send me an email if you’d like to learn more about how/why this was a crucial part of my journey, or how you can find support.
  9. It’s not easy to talk about. It’s like throwing rocks at the pink elephant in the middle of the room, which keeps disappearing only to reappear when you’re least expecting it, now as a pink hermit crab. My motto: learn, try, fail, learn, try, fail, learn. It’s humbling, and immensely liberating, to know that I will always be on this very mysterious journey.
  10. It’s never “done.” If you come across anyone, including a teacher or a therapist, who tells you that they’ve “been there and done that,” smile big and keep on walking.

 

 

There is so much more to say. To read some practical aspects of embodiment, check out this blog post I wrote a few months ago, or check out my blog, where I write exclusively about embodiment.

I’d love it if you would list some of your own observations about what embodiment is not (or even what it is!). Please feel free email me.   Let’s journey and wake up together!

 

([1]) This is still the work I do today, although I don’t often use this label.

([2]) This was in a time before people were talking about the ACES (adverse childhood experiences) or trauma. Intuitively, I knew that it was imperative to include the events in our matrix (including ancestral) that were bringing a sense of separation and suffering. Today, we often name these events as “trauma.”

([3]) Yeah, I admit I’d bought the bill of goods many spiritual teachers were selling, which is presence as a blissed-out state of being. I don’t just mean selling as a metaphor; rather, people were paying lots of money in hopes of learning how to finally get there and stay there, and teachers would claim to help students accomplish this. Enlightenment was, and still is, big business. Who, in the midst of an insufferable life, wouldn’t want permanent peace and happiness?