Matthew Myro, MA, CPT, RMT, RYT-200

From my nourishing roots in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio to the life I now enjoy exploring this beautiful country of ours; every decision, every lesson and every experience has paved the path for this journey toward my life's true calling. I'm here to guide, to teach, to re-enchant, and to coach as many people as possible into living this precious human life to its absolute fullest. 

“We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe: can we not take the leap?"

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thirst for wisdom

At age 15 I was introduced to a group of writers known as the Transcendentalists. My young, idealistic mind devoured the works of Emerson and Thoreau and delighted in the poetry of Whitman. Their ideas opened me up to a world of wonder and possibility. I was hooked and needed more. Thankfully, college was only two years away and at Cleveland State University I was able to design my own major entitled The Human Experience: Cultural Anthropology, the Philosophy of Religion and Cultural Arts.

Here, shamanism shared a semester with Plato, Zen Buddhism jammed with the history of Jazz, ancient civilizations were enlivened by the Tao of Physics. This unique course of study inevitably lead me to graduate school. In 2003, I moved across the country to San Francisco where I earned a Master's Degree in philosophy, cosmology and consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). At CIIS, I learned how to learn. I was introduced to an endless sea of great thinkers, teachers and masters from both Eastern and Western traditions.  

This thirst took me to Brazil in order to participate in plant medicine ceremonies, to Greece in order to study philosophy in its birthplace and to Thailand to meditate with Buddhist monks. It is my life's goal to never fully quench this thirst, to spend the rest of my days learning, growing and sharing the acquired wisdom with all those whose path I may cross.

Movement

Running concurrently to these academic pursuits was a consistent thread of fitness and health. When I was in middle school, my mother was in graduate school earning a double Master's in exercise physiology and sports medicine. I became her guinea pig. She'd hook me up to crazy machines at the university to test how my body functioned and sent me to the gym to start a weight training program with my father and his buddies. The whole family became vegetarians and I was the weirdo in the school lunchroom eating a veggie burger and grazing on a baggie full of alfalfa sprouts. While it seemed strange at the time, I'm eternally grateful for the foundation it laid. Over the last 25 years I've continued to seek out the latest, most cutting edge techniques in exercise and nutrition.

high performance

In 2014 I hit rock bottom. The previous year, all of my heart and life's savings went into a romantic relationship and entrepreneurial venture. These new adventures took me hundreds of miles away from Northern California, where I'd made my home for over a decade. After a year of my best efforts, both the business and relationship proved to be an utter disaster. With no place to live, no job and LESS than no money I was left with very few options. But I knew that this broken spirit wasn’t going to fix itself, that I desperately needed someplace to heal for a while. So I got creative…

I found my way to the most healing place I knew of, the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. There, perched high above the mighty Pacific and the dramatic cliffs on the western edge of America, Esalen gave me the opportunity to trade work for room and board. I worked in the kitchen washing dishes for the hundreds of staff and seminarians that ate there every day. More importantly, it gave me a place to do some serious soul searching within a community of fellow searchers, healers, artists and cultural misfits. 

Those few months living at that heavenly retreat center revealed what I had known deep down all along…that I was born to teach and be a guide. I’d already spent the first 30 years of my life studying and acquiring all the experiences necessary to coach folks toward their highest self, I just needed a practical way to apply these lessons.

It’s true what they say, rock bottom can be a blessing. There’s nowhere to go but up. My rock bottom blessed me with the perpetual gift of High Performance. After Esalen, I found my way back to Northern California. Tucked away in a secluded country home, leading a monk’s life and training as if my life depended on it, I became an obsessive human guinea pig. I put myself through every bio hack and high performance trick I could uncover, honing my skill sets in performance nutrition, fitness, and psychology. Over the next three years, I put the rubber to the road. Not only did I forge a new physique and bulletproof mindset for myself, but also took on dozens of students and clients in order to put these new techniques and systems to the test. 

The world is sound

I was one of those lucky kids in Cleveland, Ohio whose parents pushed him toward learning to play music.  The question wasn’t whether or not I wanted to play an instrument, it was which instrument I’d play and when I would start.  At the age of 7, I carried the heavy case which housed my father’s Martin acoustic guitar with two small and nervous hands to my first music lesson.  The next week I had an appropriately sized, nylon stringed classical and spent the next 10 years studying classical guitar at the Cleveland Institute of Music.  I could have practiced more, I could have been more passionate, but music was everywhere and I was easily distracted.  I loved the old jazz standards that my father would play and sing on the piano Sunday mornings.  I loved the Paul Simon and Cat Stevens I’d hear on car rides.  I loved Yo! MTV Raps, classic rock, soul, funk, classical, bebop and pop.  But I didn’t just hear music through speakers, I felt it in my soul. What else could I do but grab a pen and my guitar and try to make sense of it all? 

Whether writing a new tune, banging away on my guitar, singing my heart out, DJing a wild party, or choosing just the right soundtrack for any occasion, music is monstrously important to everything I do.

The great Sufi Master Hazrat Inayat Khan once said that “The whole of life in all its aspects is one music, and to tune one’s self to the harmony of this perfect music is the real spiritual attainment.”  May we dance and sing together as we harmonize that perfect music within ourselves to that of the entire cosmos.

Listen to my debut album Suspended Liberation