Teresa Pasquale Mateus
Teresa is a trauma therapist, a contemplative practice and yoga teacher, and contemplative actioner. She is author of two books on trauma, spirituality and healing, Mending Broken: A Journey Through the Stages of Trauma & Recovery and Sacred Wounds: A Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma. She is a graduate of The Living School at the Center for Action and Contemplation, Sivananda Yoga Teacher Training, and New York University’s School of Social Work. Teresa is currently working on her third book on spiritual pilgrimage and speaks, teaches, preaches, and offers workshops and retreat on issues of spirituality, addiction, trauma, woundedness, professional burnout, healing, reconciliation, and contemplative activism. She is co-curator of Mystic Action Camp and is Content Curator of Spirituality, Healing & Recovery Programming for the Wild Goose Festival.
Going Naked: The Art of Letting Go on the Pilgrimage of Life
Our life is made up of seasons and when a new season blows in it often requires the dying away of one thing for the next season to begin. This can feel like birth and in that way can feel like being stripped down to nothing, to begin again, something like the experinece of going naked. In this workshop Teresa will offer practices for letting go as life changes and we are called to go naked — spiritually and emotionally — as we transition through the painful, the beautiful, the disruptive, to explore new seasons of life becoming and us becoming what we are called to be through processes of life transformation. She will use the metaphor of the Camino de Santiago & literal pilgrimage [which she participated in last summer] as a way to explore the themes of pilgrimage, change and letting go. These concepts she will be exploring are part of her next book project.
Adoption Panel: Truth, Story, Healing, Commonwealth
In this panel, Teresa Pasquale Mateus, Craig A. Steffen, Mike Morrell, and AnaYelsi Velasco Sanchez share a candid look at what it’s like to deal with parental and sibling loss while being raised by parents who were not biologically related to them. Being separated from our biological tribe — either physically or emotionally — can have a profound affect on our view of our world, authority, ourselves and even how we think of God. Sharing reflections from childhood to adulthood, the panel discusses loss, grief, joy, birth family, adoptive family, chosen family, and a pursuit of healing and wholeness. Together, they explore how all that happens in our lives provides the material for finding meaning as we live into our unique authentic stories.
The Metaphor & Morality of the Walking Dead: A Discussion on Scarcity, Hope & Waking Up To Our Calling as People of Faith
In a world in which megalomaniacs gain power by bigotry and hatred, where cruelty is given priority more often than it should, and where so many of us find ourselves overwhelmed by the pain in the world to the point of checking out, we are in a moment in our culture and history in which we have the danger of becoming our own “walking dead” and where we have to fight our own fear and malaise to stay alive, awake, and daringly conscious in a world that can feel like it’s on the brink of a real-time zombie apocalypse. In this talk we will explore the themes of “The Walking Dead,” the metaphors inherent in the series which relate to our own human condition, and the ways in which we fight to stay alive and work for our own faithful conscience about the value of ourselves and all people in our own life, faith and culture.