Service to Life Mentoring
Counselling, Mentoring, Therapy
“The health of the land is reflected in the balance of the people.” – Hawaiian saying
Hello. My name is Matt McKinney RTC.
I’m a Therapeutic Counsellor and Deep Nature Connection Mentor offering mental and emotional health support in these times of great change and uncertainty.
I help people to find honour, beauty, and purposefulness living within the complex realities of our time.
Do you find yourself struggling with belonging, your sense of self and your purpose through it all?
Do you feel a lack of connection to family, community, to the the Earth, and to your own life path amidst these times?
Do you oscillate between wanting to focus on being of service to the greater whole, and falling prey to the demands of your personal challenges, finding it difficult to tend yourself and others in a balanced way?
Do you find yourself experiencing grief, a lack of belonging or a feeling of outsider-hood?
Are you trying to nurse yourself, but finding you fall too deep into addictions and can’t keep the balance?
Do you believe in living peacefully in your relationships, yet some inter-personal conflicts plague your resolve as you find it difficult to navigate the needed tending of peace between you and others?
Do you struggle with finding self-love, putting others above yourself, asking too much of yourself, struggling with anxiety, shame, hopelessness, depressive feelings, and an inability to communicate?
Do you have a deep sensibility for living with integrity, but your actions never seem enough? Do you feel alone in it all?
Therapy that nurtures self in connection with nature, culture, and community.
I work cooperatively with you to support your healing journey, utilizing therapeutic counselling, connection-based mentoring and facilitation, and experiential learning. Finding our place in the ecology of our life is a natural process. To engage that process requires space and mentoring. As a Therapist, I hold space to support you to discover your own answers to challenges while providing skillful feedback, questions and suggestions within a healing container.
Anchored in Lineage. Grounded in Wildness.
Important work you can trust in.
Therapeutic counselling and MEntoring, Deep Nature Connection and Cultural Repair, Experiential Education geared towards healing.
Providing a wholistic framework for healing through relationship. I am working with families, couples, and individuals of all ages.
“Offering a decade and a half of experience working with individuals and groups of all ages in experiential educational settings oriented towards the deep healing journey of relationship with oneself, others, and the natural world. Matt takes his rich experience and connection to a lineage of nature-connection practice and cultural mentoring and blends it with a fresh and creative perspective on therapeutic counselling. Matt collaborates with his clients to create a container of support based on restoring and reorienting to the relationships in a client’s life for greater health, happiness, and a deeper sense of fulfillment.”
Testimonials:
“Matt McKinney’s grounded presence is a nourishing balm to the heart. His counselling gifts, methods and skills have anchored me back to my connection to self-worth and belonging. From the moment you arrive into his caring space, there is a deep land-based wisdom present in the room, in the field. His steadfast commitment to ever-growing his own connection to self, to teachings, to his teachers, to the Earth can be felt immediately. I was able to rest around the hearth-fire he creates as a counsellor, to be witnessed and held up inside my own innate resiliency and capacity, rewoven back to my own understanding of what it is to belong as human on this earth. I recommend sitting with Matt to anyone seeking deeper connection to themselves, to anyone seeking gentle but potent guidance on the journey of becoming whole.”- Client MM
“Matt is a skillful, compassionate therapist. I worked with Matt during a very difficult time in my life. In our sessions, I felt deeply seen, supported, listened to, and
safe to be honest with Matt and myself. Matt helped me tremendously to understand myself better and to move forward in positive directions. Thank you, Matt!” -L.G.
“During my series of regular bi-weekly counselling sessions with Matt McKinney, over a few months that felt extremely productive for me, we explored together every worry, concern or uncertainty that I brought forth as I faced what felt like an uncertain future.
Matt guided me into a level of clarity and empowerment I had never dreamed possible. He is a discerning listener. During our sessions I always felt perfectly safe, very well heard, and surprisingly well-understood, gaining insights and a level of self-confidence that I’d only imagined possible for myself.” – Client DL
“Matt is an excellent listener, through our sessions he provided deep reflections that helped me to let go and forgive myself and others. His work is rooted in compassion and I highly recommend his services.”- Client LM
Needing therapy is not shameful. It is normal and natural to seek help from others. When we get the help we need, we become more available to be the help others need. Healing is our natural state, when we are unobstructed.
Service to life mentoring is offering a unique format anchored in ancient lineages of healing applied in modern times. This format that has developed can be understood as a component to a larger map of cultural repair. Mentoring is both a part of our neurobiology and cultural inheritance. We are hardwired to be mentored and to mentor others.
New Therapy Packages!
Alongside continuing to offer ongoing therapy sessions, I have put together these package options. Therapy can feel expensive for some, and yet it often requires consistency to be most effective. Committing to 3-5 session packages, to be completed within 2 months, allows for the settling into the container of that time frame. I have found that this commitment to consistency, and the container of the package, allows for lasting transformation in a shorter time frame for specific issues, making it a good option for those on a budget but seeking effective support.
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Conflict Resolution and Peacemaking
Are you struggling with a conflict in your family, your partnership, or at work that is creating an uncomfortable tension in your life? Do you believe in the possibility of resolution but functionally are at a loss of how to get there? Are you suspicious that your own judgements and resentments are obstacles to turning the page on this conflict, but you struggle to see what you could do differently or how to let go? Do you struggle with communicating, and you need support and mentoring in approaching a conflict? Would you like to find a place of forgiveness but you’re not sure if you can, or if it’s correct to forgive, and yet this conflict is draining your energy and negatively impacting your life? Do you and your conflicted other need professional and skilled mediation that can help hold space compassionately for all sides of the story, to find a path forward towards healing?
Over the last 15 years, I have been mentored by an Elder peacemaker alongside a nature-based lineage of peacemaking. Also, I have worked and continue to work with international leaders in the Non-violent communication movement. I have helped couples, parents and children, community members at odds, and individuals to heal through addressing the conflicts that plague their peace and zap their life-force.
Addictions
Do you struggle with compulsive and addictive behaviours that haunt you, negatively impact your relationships or your sense of self, and are fraught with failed attempts to shift the patterns? Do you find yourself in an endless cycle of ups and downs with your addictions, sometimes in control, and others maddeningly out of control, feeling like you carry a ball and chain to your addiction? Do you struggle with shame and low self-esteem that you cannot break the addictive patterns, and are at a loss of what to do?
I come from a family culture that had normalized addictions, watching many friends and family members fall sometimes tragically victim to addictions. I have wrestled in myself to get free of my own compulsions and associated often underlying trauma, and now, I help people find compassion for themselves and effectively shift the deeper patterns that keep them stuck in their addiction cycles. I help clients rediscover their sense of self and identity outside of their addictions and drastically transform their relationship with their compulsion for greater ease and control in navigating the shifts in life-style they seek.
Self-Love
Do you struggle with shame, self-deprecating thoughts, low self-esteem, lack of purpose, or a feeling of self-loathing? Do you feel you have greatness within you, but you’re at a loss of how to access it or bring it forward into the world, leaving you feeling a lack of purpose ? Do you struggle with patterns of behavior or beliefs about yourself which you wish could just “go away”? Do you wish you could find a safe space to recover from hurtful thoughts, feelings, and actions from others that have shaped your negative self image? Do you struggle with feeling “not good enough?”
I help people access their innate giftedness, holding a space of trust and belief in the client until they are able to believe in themselves. I help a client heal underlying emotional injuries that trap vitality, while helping them to discover and rediscover their authentic personal power and beauty.
Youth and Family in Nature
Is your child struggling with adult level stresses and you are concerned that they are witnessing too much of the harshness of the world too young, and it is affecting their worldview and emotional and mental health? Do you find home life is too tense, serious, lacking play and love with the stresses of life? Do you seek more quality and playful, loving time with your family or for your child in a world that demands so much?
I have been working with youth, adults, and families in natural settings utilizing deep nature connection techniques for over 15 years. I help families and children break the spells of the stressful adult world and rediscover play, connection to bring more love and vitality into the family dynamics.
* Note: Youth and Family in Nature sessions can be 1-2.5 hours as many of the families who come to see me for this travel a longer distance. A longer session in nature allows for more capacity to drop into the nervous-system regulating capacities of the natural world. These packages are often customized for each clients needs.
Service to Life Mentoring also provides many experiential mentoring-based programs:
*NOT categorized as Registered Therapy!
Explore the 9 month Deep Immersion into Nature Connection, Community, and Cultural Repair I co-lead with Wisdom of the Earth School on Salt Spring Island, BC.
Contact me
Our wounds, our challenges, and our greatest sensitivities can point us toward that which we are uniquely gifted to affect positive change in our life and the lives of others. Therapy and mentoring help us to turn our challenges, our griefs, and our traumas into Gold.
Living a fulfilling life requires us to become unblocked by finding our way through. At times, help is required. This is natural.
You are worth it and your gifts are needed in this world.