Service to Life Mentoring
Counselling, Mentoring, Therapy
“The health of the land is reflected in the balance of the people.” – Hawaiian saying
Matthew McKinney RTC
A Counselling Therapist, Depth Mentor and Earth-Based Facilitator
From cultural alienation to rooted belonging through therapeutic counselling, immersion programs, workshops, music, and storytelling.
I offer depth-oriented, trauma-informed therapy rooted in nature connection, relational repair, and embodied transformation.
For those in a crisis of belonging.
My approach weaves therapeutic training with over 16 years of experience in land-based healing, community mentoring, and systemic work. It’s unconventional — grounded in relationship, informed by ancestral wisdom, and shaped by years of holding people through deep change.
I support individuals, couples, and families through trauma, grief, addiction, conflict, neurodivergence, and life transitions — not just to find stability, but to uncover and expand the context of the pain, and to find the deep calling within the longing.
Therapy that nurtures self in connection with nature, culture, and community.
🌱 I work with people who feel culturally homeless—alienated, disillusioned, grief-stricken about the world, unsure where they belong, or simply suffering in what feels like a world that doesn’t support them.
Do you suspect your wound and longing might secretly be a doorway to a deeper calling? Are you experiencing a crisis of belonging?
My work is grounded in a simple understanding:
-Nature and culture are inseparable.
-Nature reconnects us to what is, to principles of relationship, to our place in the web of life.
-Healthy culture provides an epistemological anchor—a way of knowing who we are in relationship to others, to history, to the future we want to create.
When we reconnect to nature and repair our relationship with culture, we move through a natural developmental arc:
🏝 Island A — Cultural Homelessness
-Alienation
-Disillusionment
-Grief about the world
-A sense of not fitting
-Wounds that seem meaningless and without purpose
🏝 Island B — Rooted Belonging
-Nervous system regulation
-Self-trust
-Relational coherence
-A lived sense of belonging
-Capacity to stand inside one’s context without collapsing or rebelling unconsciously
Begin with a free 20-minute consultation
Schedule a free consult or therapy session below.
Multiple expressions. One thread.
In many Earth-based cultures worldwide, a counsellor is also a storyteller and musician.
This is because healing is not mechanical.
It’s not rational.
Healing requires an attunement to timing, to rhythm, to pressure, to the same dynamic creative tension and release found in inspiring music and storytelling.
A good counsellor as well as a good storyteller has the capacity to follow the creative spark of transformation, helping it to land, integrate, and stabilize into lasting change.
Anchored in lineage. Grounded in wildness. Important work you can trust in.
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
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 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. Help is cultural, relational, and natural.We each play our part.
You are worth it and your gifts are needed in this world.