Thursday, November 6, 2025

Perhaps all therapy is grief therapy in the end



THE CIRCLING AND SPIRALING OF GRIEF

Perhaps in the end, all therapy is grief therapy.

Not only grief for that which we have lost, but for everything that has remained unlived.

For the love we needed but never received.
For the words we never learned to speak.
For the instincts we had to bury.
For the creativity that was shamed or forgotten.
For the joy we could not trust.

And also the grief that moves through wider, ancestral and collective fields — the unlived life of our culture, the losses our lineages never wept, the ruptures our world has not yet metabolized, the grief of the Earth herself, aching in our bones and breath.

Grief lives in the soma — in the belly, heart, throat, and nervous system. It takes up residence as tears, as numbness, compression, exhaustion, emptiness, as wild undomesticated rage.

As a figure in a dream, a wave of longing, a homesickness that has no map. Its timeline is not found in psychiatric manual or insurance panels, nor is it found in disembodied therapies and spiritual techniques.

The heart is endless and grief may be a companion for the duration of a life. It is not so much a process as a non-linear, unfolding partner. It moves not by way of straight line, but by circle and spiral.

It is an invitation into relationship, one that is alive with the activity of death and rebirth, washing us out from the inside and preparing the field for new life.

Grief is not an obstacle to the path. It is the path.




Tuesday, October 28, 2025

The Winter Passage starts Nov. 6 - a 3-month mentorship with Matt Licata



The Winter Passage:
A Season of Soul Descent and Renewal


A 3-Month Mentorship | Begins November 6
Learn More → mattlicataphd.com/spirituality-healing

As the outer world cools and darkens, a corresponding movement begins within us. The energies that once flowed outward turn toward their roots. The soul, like the trees, draws its life inward—to rest, digest, and remember.

This turning inward is not a collapse or regression. It is a sacred rhythm, an alchemical invitation. What was once exiled—old feelings, forgotten images, unfinished gestures—returns to be felt again, not to overwhelm us but to re-enter the great conversation of the psyche.

In our culture of constant productivity and light, we often forget that descent is an equal partner to awakening. We speak easily of transformation, yet true transformation requires contact: with the body, with feeling, with the unlived life.

The Winter Passage is a three-month immersion designed to honor this season of descent. Through trauma-informed practice, somatic attunement, and a contemplative spirituality rooted in the living body, we’ll explore how to meet experience directly—without pathologizing or rushing it to resolution.

Together we’ll slow down enough to listen:

  • to the places in us that have not yet been welcomed,
  • to the subtle intelligence of the nervous system,
  • to the imaginal figures and archetypal patterns seeking expression,
  • and to the quiet presence that holds it all.

Our time together will not be so much a matter of engaging with the (seemingly endless) project of self-improvement, but an invitation into soul remembrance—the gentle art of returning to what is most real.

If you feel the call to enter the winter months with others who value depth, presence, and genuine transformation, I invite you to join us for The Winter Passage.

Learn More → mattlicataphd.com/spirituality-healing




Friday, October 10, 2025

The body will reorganize when it feels safe


We’ve all been given experience that we’ve been unable to process consciously. This is one of the basic characteristics of trauma, unendurable emotional pain that hasn’t been able to find a relational home in which it can be held.

There are times in my clinical work when I’ll meet with someone who is really suffering, but they can’t actually feel that pain. They’re not able to make contact with the felt quality of the open wound.

Instead, there’s a protective numbing, a dissociative shut down and collapse into the somatic unconscious. From here, the lost orphans of psyche and soma burn, ache, and long for holding.

This response is coherent and makes sense based on what happened earlier in their lives, and was an adaptive response in the face of survival-level anxiety and annihilatory panic, to the very real threat of psychic disintegration.

Trauma is the experience of de-linking – left and right, top and bottom, limbic and cortical, body and mind – and linkage occurs through the felt sense of safety.

Where we find a way, guided by mercy and grace, to touch that experience, hold it in love, make sense of it, and integrate it into a new cohesive narrative.

Slow and safe. I’m with you, and you’re safe. I’m with you and you’re safe. You’re no longer alone. And you’re safe.

While insight and clarity can be supportive, it is right-brain immersion in fields of safety which fosters cellular restructuring.

The psyche will reassemble when it feels safe.

The body will reorganize when it feels safe.