We were lucky to catch up with Matthew Reynolds recently and have shared our conversation below.
Matthew, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
I believe most people would call it a “risk”, but I call it living life. There have been several major risks that I have taken, and since the past is our education, I have chosen to learn from each and everyone of them. Passion one, theater and dance. I started out at the University of Minnesota as a Mathematician and Aeronautical engineer. I was really good at numbers, math, and equations, but it didn’t bring me any joy. Plus all the people around me telling me I should go into these fields could only tell me that I would be making a lot of money, and nothing about being happy. That Spring I took my first University level theater class and changed my major. Passion two. I decided, after a New Years eve trip to Amsterdam, that I was done living in the USA and was going to move there, so I came home to Seattle, told everyone my plan, put together two more major performances with my dance company, gave everything away, and moved in October 1997 with a backpack, sleeping bag, and a tent. I lived in the Netherlands for three years, before my father, who was very ill at the time, asked me to move back closer to home. Passion three. I was performing in a giant puppet mask and mummery troupe, and was having a conversation with a teenager who I had pulled along in a little red wagon when they were just a baby, at this music festival in Oregon, when I had an epiphany to become a high school drama teacher. Six months later I was accepted into the Masters of Arts in Teaching program at SOU and started my 15 year journey in public education. I resigned in 2019. Passion four. Matthew Reynolds Consulting, LLC. My current purpose is to help folx heal from the trauma, gas lighting, and internalized racial oppressions of colonization. My offering is called Crating Your Equity Lens. I reached six figures in June of this year, exactly three years after idea, beta group, and now over 1000 people who have crafted there lens. You can find much of this journey’s details in my book, BIGGEST FULLEST BRIGHTEST-Shifting the Consciousness of Humanity.
Matthew, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Having lived in a variety of communities, countries, and demographics, I have thoroughly honed my communication skills and paired them with an innate generosity toward the perspectives of others. With over 15 years as a teacher in secondary education, I am passionate about disseminating knowledge. A focus on the performing arts has tuned my ability to reach minds and change hearts through multiple avenues of learning and processing. I was named Top 5 finalist for Oregon Teacher of the Year in 2018 and received an honorable mention for the Excellence in Theater Education Award, presented by the Tony Awards and Carnegie Mellon University. I was voted Teacher of the Year at Crater Renaissance Academy in 2009 and was awarded “Volunteer and Educator” of the year from Southern Oregon Queer Resource Center. SOU, 2006.
I have over 35 years of experience as a performer and instructor in the Theater Arts and Dance. I helped create the Crater Renaissance Academy of Arts and Sciences in Southern Oregon right out of my Masters of Arts Teaching program. I spent 12 years in the classroom where I built equity in my program, with my students, guided by the mission of “Creating Community through the Arts.” I now finds myself advocating for equity within the arts, education spaces, and the world. I am always looking forward to helping others craft their equity lens so that they may live their biggest, fullest, and brightest lives.
One of my biggest struggles was allowing myself to show up as my biggest and brightest self. What held me back was the situations that I faced growing up that made me feel a loss of love and connection with my fellow human. These situations caused me to create thoughts and feelings that took me to a place of darkness and that formed a shadow that seeped into my thoughts and caused me to shrink back from my brilliance. I became angry at many misunderstandings, mistreatments and the disregard that I faced. There were moments of miscommunication and misunderstanding that formed a larger wedge between me and a neighbor or fellow human. I began to live my day to day in survival mode and I tried my best not to believe the status quo and the ideas it had of me. I tried my best not to be indoctrinated in that way of thinking. I had to go through my own process of discovering love, building belonging and then helping others to build belonging as well. I began this work through crafting my own equity lens and helping others do the same.
We are here to live our truth and love our lives. The truth is that our journey to being our brightest selves may not have always been supportive, loving or engaging. We may have faced situations that brought out our shadows and disbeliefs in humanity and love. We created thoughts and lived a life that caused us to shrink back or lash out in anger or misunderstanding. We grew up wondering why we faced so many moments of misunderstandings with people who we really liked, enjoyed spending time with or wanted to get to know better. This made us feel separated from our neighbor and even ourselves.
I am crafting a world of love and belonging by standing fully in my truth as a builder, active listener, servant of humanity, supporter of youth; by modeling accountability, integrity, respect, responsibility, and unconditional love, so that we all might help humanity be its biggest, fullest, and brightest.
About Matthew Reynolds Consulting, LLC
Matthew Reynolds Consulting, LLC offers a range of services designed to enhance community relations, improve intra-organizational communications and awareness, and enrich lives through engagement, education, workshops, and presentations. Previous partnerships include Culturally Responsive Teaching with Professors at Southern Oregon University, Equity Building with Live Arts theater, and Building Equity through Community with Southern Oregon Education Support District.
Crafting Your Equity Lens is a tool that, when utilized consistently, grows into being a person’s “truth vision.” It has integrity, accountability, authenticity, vulnerability, self worth, and unconditional love at its core. It is Building Belonging. It is a Call to Action.
As people continue to heed the call to action and begin to build belonging, equity and justice will lead us into the new normal. A world that has our own ideas of community and belonging in it – helping each other to grow, experience joy, celebrate each other’s humanity – and allows each person to know for themselves what living their biggest, fullest, and brightest means. This is the world I am creating, and I welcome you to be a part of this process moving forward.
Contact our team ([email protected]) to learn more about our workshops and services for people and organizations!
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
It is true, many of us have had traumatic experiences that continue to shape who we are, what we think and how we show up in life. A question that comes to mind for me is what do we want to do with this trauma?
In my own lived experience, I have worked to heal my trauma and begin to build a world that is truly accepting and supportive of humanity — yes, all of humanity.
Before I share more, I want to say this is my opinion in thinking about how we can heal, do better and see humanity in others.
If you have experienced traumatic experiences and need support in this area, I encourage you to connect with and work with a trusted counselor.
Trauma is systemic, hereditary and cyclical in nature, if we do not heal our hearts, bodies and souls of traumatic situations we have experienced, we may continue the cycle of trauma. We have seen this in how some people treat others. This truth comes up for me as we see racism, homophobia and sexism – these phobias and isms to me stem from people’s indoctrination and lived traumatic experiences. Many of these indoctrinations need to be unlearned, and trauma’s need to be healed.
I believe our collective capacities are rooted in old ideology, an ideology I do not subscribe to any longer.
There is a new movement that needs to be born. A movement that focuses on a strategy to build engagement and growth anew. A movement that creates a practice of building community and humanity as our primary goals. We can build something new if we stop, take stock and truly see what we all want to innately achieve for the good of us all (love, belonging and hope for a better future).
The new movement brings me back to thinking about the importance of this moment and how we can shift this moment to create something new for our future generations.
Lately, I have been thinking about the journey of getting to my TRUTH vision. It has been a journey and a deep journey to me learning and beginning to live my life in such a way that honors who I am.
My journey did not start out this way though, I had to give myself grace and I navigated systems of oppression, indoctrination and feeling a need to find my community and belong in a place where humanity was the center of engagement.
To make it through this process with better answers, I had to ask myself, “what lies am I subscribing to?” and “how much of my thinking is really my thinking?” Once I was able to answer these questions, I was able to begin to look for something other than… something new and different that would allow me to begin the journey to finding what I deeply needed – love for and the support of humanity.
What was it that allowed me to find this and then to find my TRUTH vision? First I had to get to the place of believing that I was worthy of love and had a place to belong and then I had to begin to accept myself for who I was and work on my own personal Work, my inner healing. Once I gave myself grace, began to practice this grace, I then focused on my TRUTH vision: an ever changing and evolving, working document, that holds me accountable to not only myself, the planet, and humanity; it also helps me stay accountable to seven generations ago, and to come.
I am so grateful for this inner discovery and I believe it is the most powerful thing we each can embark on as we get closer to deeply seeing, honoring and supporting true humanity.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Tell me, what does a world full of love and belonging look like to you?
Do you know you can build that world!
Taking the steps to create a new perspective while understanding how your new perspective impacts others can help you begin to build a world of love and belonging.
Today I am creating a world of belonging by helping people see the power they are born with while openly sharing from a place truly rooted in the value of human connection. This is what I call Equity. As a consultant and founder of the Crafting an Equity Lens Tool, I guide people towards crafting their own Equity Lens.
This work came out of a deep realization that our perceptions have been indoctrinated with what society views as successful or “normal.” I saw this way of living driving us closer to the end of expression, the end of life and humanity as we know it. Being able to be and live as our true selves while growing in joy and beautiful lived experiences is essential to the existence and evolution of humanity. From my own lived experiences, I felt the deep need to move beyond the end…to move beyond the death of our lived experiences to creating a life that is full and bright.
Today I am living my biggest, fullest, and brightest life by building belonging. I use my skills to help others craft their own equity lens.
An Equity Lens is a tool that when used grows into being a person’s “truth vision.” It has integrity, accountability, authenticity, vulnerability, self worth, and unconditional love at its core. It IS building belonging. It is a call to action.
In this day and time, I think we all need to craft our equity lens and create a new perspective, a new way of seeing the world. This new mission statement will help us build a world with others that allows us all to create life and belonging and, yes, life and belonging for generations to come.
When you craft your equity lens, you also act upon your truth and shift the way we all engage with and see humanity
When we shift the way we see the world and each other, allow ourselves to grow into our full expression, our brightest selves, we ultimately create a world of love and belonging where each person in the community understands that they are worthy, NOW. You learn that you are humanity, and your humanity and the humanity of those around you will begin to grow.
In this, we grow with a true sense of compassion, empathy, grace, integrity, accountability, and unconditional love. You will see, through your Equity Lens, someone’s humanity first and foremost, thus allowing you to love them as they deserve to be loved.
If we all began to look at the world, leading with humanity, we would begin to see our worth in each other. If we see our worth in each other we begin to make decisions about the world around us that help motivate us towards building belonging. Building a world that seven generations from now will see that the shifting of the consciousness of humanity started with us, right now, in this moment; humanity becoming its biggest, fullest, and brightest. That’s what an Equity Lens means for the world.
As people continue to heed the call to action and begin building belonging, justice will lead us into the new normal. A world that has our own ideas of belonging in it, helping each other grow, experience joy, celebrate each other’s humanity – and that allows each person to know for themselves what living their biggest, fullest, and brightest means. This is the world I am creating. Will you join me?
It starts with you.
If you said yes to my question above, then you are ready for the next step. I am offering you an opportunity to join me for my three day equity lens workshop.
This workshop will bolster and sustain you on the journey of accountability, authenticity, vulnerability, and respect for everyone in your community and our world.
I am deeply grateful for you and this time as it gives me an opportunity to aid you in the deep process of crafting your own personal equity lens. Register today and let’s create a world full of humanity. https://www.mrrconsulting.org/store
Educate your mind, feed your soul.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mrrconsulting.org
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/matthewreynoldsconsulting
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShiftingHumanity
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/matthew-reynolds-consulting-llc
- Twitter: @MRRConsulting
- Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/mrr_consulting