Matthew Ashdown: Unlock Your Nature

Ross Tayler: Today I'm happy to welcome Matthew Ashdown to Sacred Sundays. Matthew is a guide, teacher, and catalyst for deep transformation. Through his work with Gene Keys, mythic imagination, and archetypes, he helps individuals shed societal conditioning and realign with their unique gifts and life purpose. With one-on-one sessions, group courses, and immersive retreats, he supports [?] people in moving from force and scarcity into flow, abundance and embodied joy. As he says, when you understand your true nature, everything, work, relationships, service, becomes more graceful, resonant and alive. In addition to his own business, he works with the Gene Keys organization as the community engagement manager. Welcome, Matthew.

Matthew Ashdown: Hi Ross, thank you for having me. Very much looking forward to our conversation together today.

Ross Tayler: As am I. We've only had the opportunity to talk in passing, and we both have this crossover with human design and Gene Keys and a passion for both. We're quite aligned, I think, in the work that we do. I'm sure that we show up quite differently in that work, but I'm just so excited to have a longer conversation that doesn't have the pressure of time and having to be doing things, like where we were, if that makes sense.

Matthew Ashdown: Yeah, passing in the night.

Ross Tayler: Matthew is going to begin by sharing an attunement with us. Over to you, Matthew.

Matthew Ashdown: Thank you, Ross. As Ross mentioned, a lot of my work is with this foundational body of work called the Gene Keys, which is a contemplative path. Ross works with human design. The Gene Keys has its roots in the I Ching, in the same way that human design does, and has some human design within it too. We're going to enter into this with a bit of a pause, actually a bit of an attunement to the work of the Gene Keys, this contemplative path.

My invitation at this moment, as long as you're not driving anywhere and you're listening in a place where you can be still, is to close your eyes, drop in, and begin to turn your attention inward. This contemplation of who we are is something that takes place on the inside of our being. It's irrespective of what's going on in the world around us. Let's turn our attention to our breath. With each breath that we take, we can move deeper into presence, deeper into awareness of what's going on inside of ourselves. We slow down. We step away from the busyness of the world, the noise of the world, the conditioning of the world. We begin to attune to that still, quiet voice within, our intuition. We make space to hear our deeper presence. With each deep breath in and out, with each exhale, with each inhale, we're moving deeper into this presence, into this present moment.

As we work with the Gene Keys, we might come across these numbers and these keys. At first it can seem like there's a complexity to it. There is a complexity. But here we begin with the simple. It can be very simple to contemplate. Sometimes contemplation is understood as something of the mind. This is a full presence that we bring to our physical, our emotional, our mental being.

As you're in this space of pause, sitting here in the quiet, notice what's going on inside your body at this moment. Are you feeling light and relaxed? Are you feeling tension? If you're feeling tension, where do you feel that in the body? What happens when you simply bring awareness to it, not with any intention to change anything or make anything better, just to bring attention to it? Breathe into that tension, into that constriction within your being. Notice how your feet are planted on the floor. Notice where your hands are. Notice how your shoulders are. Become aware of your physical being. Our body sometimes talks to us the loudest, but sometimes we have to allow ourselves the pause. We have to allow ourselves to slow down and listen to what's going on.

Now, as we listen, as we feel into our body, maybe you've had experiences in this day that have caused a heightened emotion of some kind. Perhaps you've been feeling overwhelmed. Perhaps you've been feeling sadness. Perhaps you've been feeling joy. In these moments of pause, we can bring our attention mindfully to those states, those feelings, those experiences. Again, we might notice where they reside within our body. If we're feeling anxious or fearful, where does that show up in the body? If you're feeling lightness and joy and gratitude, how do you experience that? Sometimes in the busyness of the day, it can be really valuable to take those little pauses. We don't need to always be seated in this way. We could be moving through a grocery store. We could be walking through a busy street. We could be on our way to work. These pauses don't necessarily mean that we stop moving. We just pause internally.

In those pauses, we might also begin to notice the thoughts that are rising in this moment. Are they thoughts of this present moment? Are they thoughts about aspects of your life, challenges in your life? Are you making space for thoughts that allow you to break free of some of the conditioning of the world? As you tune in, perhaps you get to hear that ever-present voice of your intuition. Just be for a few moments here in silence. If thoughts arise, we simply thank them. If they're disruptive thoughts or they feel like distractions, we simply thank them.

Contemplation is of the body, of the emotions, and of the mind. As we contemplate in the moments of challenge in our life and in the moments of quiet in our life, we might receive insights on the mental plane. As those mental insights move through us, they open up the potential for emotional breakthroughs in our lives. Some, as we allow them within our being, become fully embodied epiphanies. This work with the Gene Keys opens us up to the potential for insight, breakthroughs and epiphanies on the mental, the emotional and the physical levels of our being.

With openness and curiosity today, perhaps you have your own question that you want to bring to our space. Perhaps it might be answered through words spoken by myself or Ross, or perhaps the answer will arise in your own being, just by tuning into the field. I invite you now to bring your full awareness back to your physical being in this here and now, with your feet firmly planted on the floor, beginning to wiggle your fingers and your toes, and becoming curious as to what this time together might bring for you, as Ross and I show up here now in conversation to serve you and to serve this body of work known as the Gene Keys. Whenever you're ready, Ross included, you can open your eyes and we can begin to converse.

Ross Tayler: Thanks, Matthew, for that attunement. For me, I actually have a lot of joy in this moment. I feel really reminded of The Art of Contemplation, which is the little book you can read as you enter the Gene Keys work. I'm just really grateful for that waking up in me again, even though it's something I do quite often.

Matthew Ashdown: You're welcome. A lot of people, when they hear about the Gene Keys, hear of these numbers, and it can feel like a complexity. Richard Rudd is the creator of the Gene Keys, and one of his little books, as you mentioned, I think it is his smallest book, is The Art of Contemplation, but it's just the fundamental ground of this whole body of work. Even if the numbers go over our heads, the art of contemplation is something any one of us can practice in any moment. So I love hearing that it's causing some joy to bubble forth for you.

Ross Tayler: That actually leads into my first question. In society we're looking for answers, and we tend to be oriented to the outside of ourselves. The contemplative path, which you mentioned at the beginning, is very different than that. It's not reactive at all. Perhaps you could say a little more about the contemplative path, because I actually believe it's one of the unique things about the Gene Keys. The Gene Keys is not a quick solution to anything. It's very much different than that, and that is also what makes it so special, I believe.

Matthew Ashdown: Yeah, absolutely. If you're coming to the Gene Keys body of work for the quick fix, it might disappoint you. It's something that we steep with for some time, and it continuously unravels, and that is part of the joy of the experience. When somebody comes to the Gene Keys, you go to the website and you can generate your own free profile, your unique blueprint of Gene Keys based upon the day and the time and the place that you were born. It can look like, man, we're entering into this and there's so much certainty in what's being shared. It could so easily be a trap for us to look at it as our authority, telling us who we are and what we're about and what we're here to do in life. Some people have used it in that way. I'm sure I used it that way in the beginning too. I'm sure I came to it with a sense of, I need some certainty here, this looks like it's got a system that can offer me that. Then, when we enter into it, we recognize that we have to allow it to birth in its own way and its own time through us.

After all these years of working with it, it's still a gift that keeps on giving. I work less and less with my profile than I used to. There are 64 Gene Keys altogether, the same as there are 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, and they offer so much room for contemplation. However we're approaching it, we've got this map, and it is a map, but we don't want to give our power to that map outside of ourselves. It is that turning inwards toward what's arising inside of ourselves. Very often we'll work with people with the Gene Keys, and they'll start or commit to a retreat, and the Gene Keys offers a lot of these ongoing retreats. People will start them, and then life will move them in some direction, and it seems to be pulling them away from the time they can give to the retreat and to the Gene Keys. We almost smile at that, because this is about what life brings your way. The Gene Keys can be these guideposts that we return to from time to time, or often, depending on how much of a passion and love we have for it. But it is ultimately us who gives our attention to it in our space of contemplation, that we pause and open ourselves up to curiosity. Two people might have identical profiles. I have a twin brother and sister, born a minute apart, with identical Gene Keys profiles. Absolutely not identical people, but they can see themselves in these archetypes. Each of these Gene Keys is an archetypal journey that offers guideposts for us. Two people might have the same Gene Key in the same place in their profile and yet come to experience it in a very different way, because it's ultimately, okay, this is occurring for me in life at this time. There's a particular incident that's taking place, and what is that for me in this here and now?

One of the greatest gifts for me that came out of the Gene Keys came at a time in my life when I was contemplating the nature of shadow a lot, and yet it felt like something I could only wallow in and stay stuck in. One of the reframes that came from this body of work, which was so supportive and resonated for me, was the notion that every shadow contains a gift. I could contemplate these shadows, these parts of myself that I had run from or hidden or hadn't even been aware of inside myself, and bring attention to them, trusting and knowing that somewhere throughout this body of work I could make some connections and contemplate and find my way through. The Gene Keys would offer some guidance around it, but the ultimate truth came from within. My ultimate understanding, my ultimate awareness, came from taking this into the pauses, into those moments when I was experiencing constriction and challenges and pain, and being able to bring full presence and awareness. That's what we've cultivated, a contemplative community. This isn't a community where we offer therapeutic advice to people. This is a community where we create space for contemplation. It's the foundation of all this work with the Gene Keys. If we enter from that space, remembering that it's not about accumulating knowledge, because you could find lots of books written by Richard Rudd about the Gene Keys and accrue lots of knowledge, but something he'll say again and again, and something that is drawn out of us by going into deep contemplation, is that it's a wisdom transmission. It's about connecting into the innate wisdom inside our own being, as we attune to our own inner authority.

Ross Tayler: I love that. At the beginning, before we pressed record, I was sharing with you that I was having my own little journey with a particular Gene Key, and that it culminated in some awareness this morning. It really speaks to what you're saying, so I think I will share it. I think I was first introduced to the Gene Keys when I was working at a treatment center back in 2020. One of the clients was deeply immersed in the Gene Keys, and asked me for my birthdate, and shared with me the four keys of my activation sequence. I didn't know that at the time. I remember thinking, wow, this is super cool, lots of great information, and at the same time it was too much for me in that moment. Later on I got into human design, and then of course the Gene Keys tends to show up, because there are so many similarities between the two. I bounced back and forth through the two.

What I really wanted to share is that my Gene Key of purpose, which is part of the activation sequence and also part of the, oh my gosh...

Matthew Ashdown: Venus.

Ross Tayler: The Venus sequence, thank you. Gene Key 25 is my Gene Key of purpose, and the shadow of that is constriction. I've literally been bouncing in and out of it, or not trying, but working with layer after layer after layer of that constriction. This morning, I feel like I got to the core element of that shadow that has been holding me back, and also got ready to birth the gift, as you mentioned. What you really spoke to is how we're all different in that experience. My version and my story of constriction is going to be different from someone else's, because we're all going to have a different story of what that plays out as. I find that so fascinating, and so different from a lot of the tools that are supporting our growth and our spirituality out there, because I had to get there on my own, on my own terms, even though the universe was pushing me in that direction and creating a pressure that I had to look at it. Very quickly this morning, of course, I was like, oh, I need to go back to Gene Key 25 and read that, which again, like human design, it's a similarity. So anything that arises for you, Matthew?

Matthew Ashdown: Well, the 25th Gene Key, for anybody wondering, with each Gene Key there are three words, a frequency band of words. One is the shadow, one is what's known as the gift, and the other is what's known as the Siddhi. You can think of the Siddhi as the pure essence of the Gene Key, free from any fear or conditioning. It's always present, it's always here. It's just whether we are able to recognize it or attune to it. The gift is, in many ways, the Siddhi in action in the world. It's our gift to the world. We come to this and want to know what our gifts are, and a lot of the world can get trapped in, these are my gifts, and then we're proud of our gifts and carry that pride out. But the Gene Keys is saying, no, no, we find our gifts so we can give them away. The shadow is the root of that. The shadow is a part of ourselves that we've not understood from a mental level. It's a part of ourselves that might not have been understood by the world. It might even be condemned by us or the world. When we enter into it and allow ourselves to fully embrace it, it opens us up to the gift. We release the gift through fully embracing the shadow.

The 25th Gene Key is a beautiful example. It's kind of fundamental for anybody entering into this work, because it speaks to this core wound that each of us has, where we feel this constriction and this tightness. Even as we were doing the breathing exercise at the beginning, somebody might have felt tightness or a constriction in the body somewhere. That's what we're bringing this presence and awareness to, because there are so many possibilities for what's underneath that. Like you said, three people might have the purpose of the 25th Gene Key, and it could mean something different to each of them. The reason I like this 25th Gene Key is that the shadow is constriction, the gift is acceptance, and the Siddhi is universal love. Acceptance is the universal elixir for all of the keys, whatever keys you have in your profile. We have this little mantra in the Gene Keys: allow, accept, embrace. Allow means I might look at a shadow in a Gene Key, constriction, intolerance, and my mind might say, hmm, I don't think that's me. That's coming from the intellect, and we invite this curiosity. The Gene Keys works best with curiosity, and the allowing is like, allow for the possibility. This might be something I haven't yet seen within myself. Allow myself to feel it. Rather than run away from the constriction of the 25th, I'm actually going to presence it. I'm going to bring my attention to it, not from a place of needing to resolve it or fix it or change it. What about approaching it from a place of acceptance? Any of our shadows, we first allow. We allow ourselves to notice it, to experience it, to go there. I might see my shadow of reaction or intolerance, and then I might think, I don't like that too much, so I'm not there in the acceptance. But as I learn to accept, as I come to accept, that's what begins to transmute that shadow and release the gift. As we transmute the constriction, we begin to feel the gift of acceptance. If you're somebody with the 25th Gene Key in your profile, chances are you get lots of opportunities in life to practice acceptance, and you can bring that to any shadow. Another Gene Key, let me choose a random one, Ross, choose a number from 1 to 64.

Ross Tayler: Let's go with 59.

Matthew Ashdown: 59. This moves from the shadow of dishonesty to the gift of intimacy, and it's the Siddhi of transparency. Somebody with the 59th Gene Key in their profile might be somebody who really values honesty and depth and transparency, and all they can see is the dishonesty of the world. The first place to come into is, what has caused me to have such a reaction to the dishonesty of the world? If I bring my attention inward, where have I been dishonest in my own life with myself? That dishonesty doesn't have to be at the level of deception and dishonesty we might witness in, say, politics. It could be something like telling everybody I'm fine when I'm not, when I'm actually feeling a lot of pain and grief in my life. As we open up to that, as we recognize where we might actually have a fear of intimacy in our life, as we allow that, and allow ourselves the possibility, it's almost like, I want to see where I'm dishonest so I can see what gift is wanting to emerge from here. People find with this work that they become keen to meet the shadow, not to stay there, not to wallow in it, and not necessarily to go looking for it. We practice acceptance, and as we become a source of love for people, returning non-love with love in our world, any aspects of our shadow we naturally meet. So: allow, accept, embrace. Allow myself to notice where I might be dishonest with myself in my life, even if it's in subtle ways. Inside of that, I open up to accepting this, and in that acceptance I become more accepting of others and more intimate and allowing of intimacy with others.

We can take the teachings of the 25th Gene Key, which is your purpose, and move on into so many of these different Gene Keys that we work with. Suddenly it doesn't seem like I'm having to learn all of this knowledge. It's, can I bring that into this? We might hear the word dishonesty, and the mind might say, this dishonesty means this, this and this, but as we allow dishonesty to fully unravel itself, it becomes about so much more than we would have imagined. The intimacy takes on another layer of meaning. These Gene Keys have these keywords, and they're like portals. My mind might have a preconceived notion of what it means, but as I allow myself to approach it with curiosity and allow it to unwind, I can have whole other kinds of experiences that I would never have imagined. This is the beauty and wonder of it. Even Richard Rudd, who created the Gene Keys, has recorded audios for every single Gene Key, all 64, and this 59th Gene Key is the only one he's had to record three times, because it keeps unraveling something new and deeper for him. Who knows, he might not be done sharing it yet. Hopefully that gives you a bit of a taste. When you've got this universal Gene Key, universal love, literally, and this is your purpose, purpose is about what we're here to be. It's not about what we're here to do. How many of us have had a sense of anxiety in our life because we didn't know what we're here to do? Maybe you're here to be. A question for you: when you felt the constriction earlier and moved through it, what did you notice inside your being as that awareness dawned for you?

Ross Tayler: I'll name the constriction. My version of the constriction is needing to be saved. I'm still in process with it, but maybe I'll give a little history. I was born a month premature. I spent my first month in an incubator. So I've always been reaching out to the world for something, and this story of being able to be saved would feed that in some way. It's also creating constriction in terms of being able to source my own power, my own strength. My acceptance of that, the releasing and opening of that constriction, is where I'm at in this moment. From that, so much can flow in both directions. The funny part, of course, is that three or four days ago I was in a guided meditation and the question was posed, why are you here? Which is very much a purpose question. Without missing a beat, the answer was, to embody universal love. That's what started this revisitation of this particular Gene Key. It was already in motion.

Matthew Ashdown: I love that. You shared your process with this, and it isn't an immediate thing. It's not like, I've noticed my constriction and poof, it's gone. It's the process, which I love to hear. In that, could you feel even a slight softening of the constriction just in that awareness? Could you feel your body relaxing at all?

Ross Tayler: Not immediately, because immediately I wanted to go grab the Gene Keys book. I wanted to go find answers. Then the next thing that came was, no, stop, go into the forest. Once I went into the forest and slowed down and met the energy of the forest, that's when I started to feel it. I started to feel the beauty of it, really, because I don't need to think my way through it. I just need to be with it. I really resonated with what you said about people coming to the Gene Keys and seeing these very potent and powerful words. I think acceptance is one of those. I probably grabbed onto the word before I grabbed onto what needed to be transformed underneath. On the other side of that, I shared Gene Key 59 as a point to talk about, and of course it's in my profile. As you were talking about bringing honesty in terms of the shadow, it hit me with a wave of clarity, because I got stuck on the word dishonesty. I don't consider myself to be dishonest, and that was keeping me stuck there. But the way you said it, part of my gift is to bring truth, to speak the truth, to speak about the things in the world that aren't in alignment for me and possibly for others. I just got this wave. It's hard to put into words what the Gene Keys can give us. Again, this shared foundation of the I Ching between these two bodies of work, I experience it in human design as much as I experience it in the Gene Keys. So you wanted to say something about Gene Key 25 or purpose?

Matthew Ashdown: Well, purpose, yeah. A lot of people come into the work of the Gene Keys and look at their profile, and at the bottom of the profile there's this word purpose, with a Gene Key associated with it. So many of us have been searching for that thing we're here to do, because the world says we must do something, and we feel that pressure and don't want to miss out. It's actually driven, deep down, by the recognition that we have this life and it's not forever, that at some point we're going to meet the end of this life. One of the Gene Keys speaks to this: the 28th Gene Key moves from the shadow of purposelessness to the gift of totality, and the Siddhi is immortality. Funny that it pops in, I was just looking at John Candy's Gene Keys profile the other day. He has this Gene Key three times in his profile.

Ross Tayler: Wow.

Matthew Ashdown: Three times. That sense of purposelessness is a word we might look at, and we can resonate with that feeling of lacking a purpose. But what we find when we explore the 28th Gene Key is that it's asking us to look deeply into our fear of death. We meet this fear of death that is driving so much of the Western world, especially. We seek this sense of purpose, we want to achieve something. When we return to this body of work, this is about our being. There is doing, we do things in our world, and other parts of our Gene Keys profile speak to that. But when we look at the very foundation, the purpose sphere, because they all sit within these spheres in our profile, at the bottom of the chart, it's the root, it's the foundation, and it's about this state of being. It's not that Ross has to do acceptance. Ross is accepting. This is his being. Can we bring that into all that we do? For myself, mine is the fourth Gene Key, which moves from the shadow of intolerance, which is why I mentioned tolerance earlier, to the gift of understanding and the Siddhi of forgiveness. I remember about five or six years ago, I was on a property I was living on, helping the owner out, mucking out the stables. I was actually enjoying myself, because I was connecting with the horses and really contemplating, wow, even this is part of my purpose in this moment. The more we can appreciate that, the more it's the art of the subtle for me. Sometimes when we think of our purpose, we think of it in terms of doing. But if we can begin our tuning to the subtle, we can attune to this quality of the gift that we bring into the world. You mentioned the 59th Gene Key. You're somebody who brings honesty to the world, so you might meet the shadow of dishonesty in the world. If we carry this gift into the world, we meet the shadow, and it appears to be outside of ourselves and in others. What that does is usually strengthen the desire of somebody with that 59th gift to be that. Rather than waiting on the world to become honest, you become that for the world. You become that vulnerable. We just heard that in what you were sharing about your experience with constriction. You were not holding back on what you were feeling and experiencing, the pain and the questioning. That's a big part of this. A lot of times people can look at their purpose sphere, and you go and talk to most of your friends, and they'll probably have different purpose spheres. Isn't that cool, knowing that this is a part of what you're bringing to the world just by showing up? Even if you're not speaking, this is the frequency of light that you're sharing with the world just by being there, being who you are. People become drawn to purpose, and I'll share that people get disappointed when we don't tell them what they're here to do.

Ross Tayler: Ha ha.

Matthew Ashdown: It's like, what do you mean? You said you could. I'm like, well, we've got these guideposts for your purpose. And like you said, Ross, this isn't something that gives us immediate answers straight away. But after so many years of working with this, and I've done thousands of profiles in the last ten years, when I read their profiles to them and they can resonate with them, if there are some surface-level things that resonate, just imagine what's deeper down that they haven't unpacked yet.

Ross Tayler: That's so true, because five years ago I read about this particular Gene Key, and now I see how my whole life has been synchronistically giving me experiences to deepen my experience of it. I can see it now. It makes so much sense. Now I'm at a place of gratitude for all the constriction and all the struggle, because finally it makes sense.

Matthew Ashdown: What a place to get to, and we can appreciate it. Wow. Thank you, constriction. Thank you, intolerance, for showing me how much I value understanding, how much I value acceptance, how much I value intimacy. Absolutely.

Ross Tayler: Totally. All right, let's abruptly shift gears a little. Thank you, because we could easily keep going down that conversation, and I think you've given a taste. I want to give you a few minutes, and I laugh, to speak about your connection to the mythic and archetypal energies. If you had to give a taste of that, what would you want to say about the work that you do? I know it's important to you.

Matthew Ashdown: It is. Mythology came to me in my life initially in meditations, when I wasn't even really interested in mythology anymore, or at least I thought I wasn't on a conscious level. This was long before the Gene Keys came in. As I began working with the Gene Keys, we recognized that each of these 64 Gene Keys is an archetype, and mythology is full of archetypes. There are different characters in different cultures around the world, and some of these archetypes cross into different cultures. Although they take on different forms, we can recognize them. In these times we're in at the moment, we're in a time of deep change. There are lots of crises, and there's so much we could be overwhelmed by. For me, this is what myth is about: how we can meet these times with a mythic imagination. When we start to recognize that the characters we meet in life, the people we meet, be they the trickster or the magician or the priestess or the empress, these different mythical characters, show up in different forms in our lives. The magician doesn't necessarily wave a wand with a pointy hat. They might be sitting behind a desk at Google creating algorithms for future technologies of the world. There's a timelessness to myth. So often the word myth is associated with not true. Talk about dishonesty, right?

Ross Tayler: Ha ha.

Matthew Ashdown: It's associated with this idea of not true, and yet on some level there is a deep truth to this, and a deep connection to the mythic that helps us see that we are all playing out these roles in life. Not that we can pin it down and everyone looks the same, but if we attune to those myths, if we pay attention to them, they can offer us something to contemplate for our times. One of my favorites is the Grail mythologies, and I loved it when I came across the Gene Keys, because it's baked in there. One of the sequences is called the Pearl Sequence, and in the Pearl Sequence we meet the Fisher King of the Grail mysteries. The Fisher King is a character who rules over a wasteland, but he's been wounded at a creative level. He's been speared in the groin, and so he's lost this vitality and this creativity. This becomes a metaphor for every one of us as we work with our Gene Keys profile and look at our core wound and our calling, our vocation in the world. Going through this transmutation, this image of the Fisher King becomes an archetypal character that many of us can recognize within ourselves. As the Grail King is healed, what was once a wasteland is now restored. It is regenerated because of the presence of the Grail. Mythologies like this offer something so rich to us in these times of transformation. They don't tell us what's going to happen, but they show us how these archetypal beings have played out over time. We see almost an evolutionary spirit within them, how a character depicted in myths 2,000 years ago might show up differently in different eras. The essence of them, the archetypal journey within them, might span thousands of years, but we can recognize those archetypal journeys.

The mythical imagination can invite us into communion with some of these archetypes, not in a way that we identify with them. There can be a real challenge in identifying ourselves with a single archetype rather than recognizing that we're working with the energies of them in our life. It's the same with the Gene Keys. I wouldn't say, oh, Ross is the 25th Gene Key. No, Ross is Ross. Even Ross is a label on something that cannot be defined. We don't say, you're a 25th Gene Key, I'm a fourth Gene Key, identifying with a number and an archetype. Just in the same way, when we work with mythology, we're inviting these archetypes into our life to work with us, to transform us. We have to do that with reverence. We have to invoke a spirit of ritual and communion with them, and we can only do it with a presence within, like a deep listening. For the world as we're in right now, Michael Meade is a great mythologist, and there's one story he shares about the words of somebody who wrote 2,000 years ago, and everything he was writing could have been written for the crises we're going through today. We get to witness, through mythology and these archetypal characters, the cyclical nature of the human journey and our relation to the world around us. That's probably as short as I can get with it today.

Ross Tayler: I love it, because for me anyway it conjured all sorts of images and ideas and thoughts, and I could relate to things, and I think that speaks to what you're sharing. One of the things I was gifted when I worked at the treatment center was this idea of sharing a mythical story and asking clients to find themselves in the story. Where do you see yourself? What hooks you? It's one of the things I love to do the most, and it's one of the things the clients loved to experience. That's the body of work you're speaking to, because we can more easily see ourselves in a story than we can in our life. But we don't necessarily connect the dots that I am the story that's playing out in my life right now, that there's this mirroring.

Matthew Ashdown: Yeah. I really listen for the synchronicities, and as you start to recognize these archetypes, a few years ago I was like, oh my gosh, we're in The Wizard of Oz here. We've got Oz, we've got this over here. In fact, I was hosting a call with a group of people where we were talking about this, and one of the guys said, I'm sorry, I have to leave, there's a tornado coming. I said, okay, Dorothy, you come back later.

Ross Tayler: Wow. There's no place like home.

Matthew Ashdown: No place like home. Yeah. It's what you said there. When I read a story to myself or aloud, that same story could be heard by 13 different people and something different about the story resonates for each. It's the same with the Gene Keys. When you read one of the Gene Keys in the book, three people might read the same thing and come away with something quite different. This is my love of it, that we allow the symbols to unravel for us. I have teachers that I work with in Celtic mythology and symbolism, and they don't tell me what a sword means in mythology. They don't tell me what a spear means. They invite it as a symbol into our lives, and we unravel the meaning for ourselves. It's beautiful for me. I love stories. I love storytelling, and I love seeing people responding to stories. So I loved hearing what you shared there, that you've worked with people in that way, because that's what I find too.

Ross Tayler: They loved it. All right, thank you, Matthew. I knew that this moment was going to be a hard one, bringing this conversation to a close, but that's okay, because I have this memory of someone saying to me, the highest compliment is more, please. I'm imagining folks on the edge of their chair wanting more, and I think that's the perfect place to pause and bring our conversation to a close. I'll do that by asking you the question: what's one simple way someone could connect with the sacred today?

Matthew Ashdown: Pause. Whenever you find yourself moving and getting caught up in the chores and the tasks from a place of a busy mind, just take a pause. Put the broom down, or whatever you're doing, and just pause, just breathe, just center within. In that pause you provide a moment for a pivot, for a change in consciousness, for an experience of the sacred. Watch how your experience of washing dishes changes, how the mundane changes. How can you bring that sacred into your daily moments, so that you're not having to go off to some mountain or an ashram in India, but you can bring that pause and that sacredness into this moment, this here and now?

Ross Tayler: Beautiful. Thank you. For anybody who wants to stay connected with your work, where's the best place for them to find you?

Matthew Ashdown: You can find me on my website, and on Facebook and Instagram as well. Those are some of the best places. You can sign up for my newsletter on my website, and that way you'll find out about upcoming events. I do them locally here on Vancouver Island, and I do online events as well. Those are some of the best ways to keep a tab on what's up and where I am.

Ross Tayler: Excellent, and we'll share those links in the show notes.

Matthew Ashdown: Awesome, thank you.

Ross Tayler: Matthew, I just want to say that I feel a warmth around having this conversation with you, and I feel like it was very synchronistic. I'm so glad that I got to share my experience as part of the conversation. I just love the work that you do and the alignment between the work that I do, and I'm so grateful for the depth that you brought to this conversation and for sharing your gifts with us.

Matthew Ashdown: Thank you, and thank you for being open to that depth as well. There's that 59th Gene Key gift of yours, but I could feel there's a real welcoming to allow ourselves to go that far with it. This can be very deep and profound work when we allow it. So thank you so much for your invitation to come on today, and I would gladly come back again at some point in the future.

Ross Tayler: I would love to have you again, if that flows, for sure.

Matthew Ashdown: Absolutely. That's a yes.

Ross Tayler: And to everyone listening, thank you for tuning in. Until next time, take good care.