Free online gathering with Matt - Beyond the Matrix - July 24

Dear friends, 

I'll be presenting a free webinar on Thursday, July 24, at 9am US Pacific/ 5pm in London.

Beyond the Matrix: Reclaiming Aliveness Through the Wisdom of the Body and the Practice of Presence 

Learn more/ register at no cost here:

>> Beyond the Matrix webinar with Matt Licata

In a world moving at the speed of disembodiment, to slow down, feel, and remember is a radical act of love. We live in a kind of cultural matrix – a collective trance of speed, overwhelm, and disconnection – where orphaned parts of the soul, body, and psyche wait patiently in the shadows to be seen and known.

In this live gathering, we’ll explore what it means to interrupt that trance and step out of the unconscious inheritance of nervous system reactivity, spiritual bypassing, and the pathologizing of our own tenderness. Through the lenses of alchemy, depth psychology, trauma healing, and the lunar way of descent, we’ll return to the forgotten temple of the body, where presence is the medicine and where the unlived life awaits its sanctuary.

Together, we’ll open to areas behind the veil of ordinary perception – not to escape, but to descend more fully into relationship with the imaginal, with the orphans of psyche and soma, and with the subtle intelligence of the nervous system when held in love.

During our time together, we’ll explore: 

-- How to recognize and interrupt the trance of the collective nervous system – the matrix of urgency, restlessness, and disembodiment

-- The physiology of presence: why true healing requires more than insight, and why the body must be part of the conversation

-- The relationship between trauma, soul loss, and the descent into the underworld

-- The power of turning toward grief, shame, fear, and ancestral sorrow as holy visitors carrying forgotten medicine

-- How unmetabolized experience lives in the shadow and soma – and what allows the “tincture” to enter

I look forward to see you and spending some time together on the 24th. Until then please take care. 

Warmly,

Matt

Grief and the open blue door

After meeting with people over the years, I wonder if all therapy is a form of grief therapy in the end. No matter what particular issue or complex we’re working on, the ally of grief is nearby.

The blue ones circle the field, longing for a sanctuary to be felt and heard, so that they may disclose their wisdom-essence.

Their primordial home is in the deep soma, and from there emerge as figures in our dreams, burning in the belly, emptiness in the heart, and a certain sort of homesickness in psyche.

Grief is the ultimate shapeshifter and will appear in infinite forms as it seeks a location in which it might incarnate and indwell itself here, washing us out from the inside, and preparing the ground for new life.

Though it may appear otherwise – especially in a world that has forgotten this dimension of soul – grief is not an obstacle to our path… but a radiant manifestation of it, as an emissary of wholeness.

In providing safe passage for grief to be illuminated, articulated, symbolized, and metabolized, a bridge begins to form piece by piece connecting us with others and with all of life.

We do not create or design this bridge by way of ordinary conceptual process, but bear witness to its qualities as they unfold autonomously… by way of our fidelity and devotion, as the alchemist holds and loves the material in the vessel.

This bridge – the open blue door – will look and feel differently for each of us, displaying unique color, fragrance, dimensions, and engraved symbolic expression. It is by way of embodied resonance that we will be able to see and sense the bridge and passage.

When we take the risk of allowing another person and allowing this life to truly matter to us, we open ourselves to be a location, or a vehicle for the purifying ally of grief to find its way into this world.

And to bring with it a firestorm of compassionate activity for the benefit of all beings.

Learn more about Matt's ongoing Spirituality & Healing online group and community

Matt's YouTube page

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One sliver of hope

One way to speak about trauma is a state of psychic unbearability. Where thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images begin to loop, cascade, and waterfall upon us.

We cannot contain, tolerate, or hold it. We’re on the edge of utter fragmentation, drowning in a black pool, slipping underneath the quicksand.

To have another person, with a soothed empathic nervous system, near us, resonating right-brain to right-brain, to help us to collect the pieces into a sealed container, can appear as a momentary miracle.

Even if the intensity does not lessen, somehow we sense at a very primordial level that we will not go down. We will make it. There is a sliver of hope. A small piece of light.

To help another in this process of metabolization - to provide a home for that level of overwhelm, terror, and dysregulation - to digest it together and offer it back to them in more manageable bits, is an act of love.

Like a mother bird who eats and partially digests a worm for her sweet little babies before spitting it back into their mouths.

No, we cannot always provide this function and we must be honest with ourselves about our real-time capacities and our agreements with others, at times helping in other ways, including establishing clear boundaries in order to protect our own integrity. To not shame ourselves for what we are able to provide in a given moment.

To offer our listening presence, a blessing, some warmth, a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on; to pray that this one be guided, held, and not forsaken. To set aside our need for them to heal, shift, or transform, “get over” what they are experiencing, or go through it in a way that prevents confrontation with our own unfelt emotional world.

To seed the interactional field with hope, mercy, and kindness... the activity of intergenerational reorganization.

To breathe with them, listen carefully, say even a few simple words, anything so that they feel felt in that moment, that they are not alone.

Never underestimate the power of love and the devastating truth that so many of our dear fellow travelers have never really received this, a safe container in which to tend to overwhelming thoughts, feelings, and memories.

May we do whatever we can to help this world, to bear witness to the wildness of the human heart and nervous system to reorganize, and to the soul shining out of all sentient life.

Learn more about Matt's ongoing Spirituality & Healing online group and community

Matt's YouTube page