Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Matt's Spirituality & Healing group re-opening in August



A Healing Space – Companionship on the Healing Path

Explore a contemporary path of embodied spirituality and healing with psychotherapist and author Matt Licata this Fall, starting in August.

Quarterly enrollment – 9 live sessions including guided therapeutic and contemplative practice, conversations about healing and spiritual realization, and time for questions and connection.

>>Learn more about the group and community here

It’s no secret that we are living in unprecedented times. It can feel as if the center has fallen away, as the pace of life accelerates beyond what our nervous systems were ever designed to bear.

For many of us, it’s as though a slow, steady drip of collective stress – cortisol, adrenaline, ambient grief – is entering our tender bodies and hearts, leaving us raw, anxious, or just overwhelmed and unsure about the future.

The high levels of arousal moving through the collective right now are not just “out there” – they take up residence in psyche and soma, and especially in our relationships with one another. There’s a longing that many are feeling: for connection, for safety, for solid ground beneath our feet.

For a healing and spiritual path that honors the role of the body and our emotional lives, our relationships, and the importance of shadow and psychotherapeutic work.

As open, sensitive human beings, we are wired to connect, to love and be loved, to heal and make the journey together.

I want to welcome you to A Healing Space, a unique group and community – and supportive holding environment – for inner work and spiritual companionship. A sanctuary for the heart to be held and unfold.

If you feel drawn to join us in the exploration of an embodied, relational path of healing and spiritual inquiry – that honors the wisdom streams of depth psychotherapy and the world’s great contemplative traditions – I invite you and welcome you here.




Wednesday, July 2, 2025

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:


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




Monday, June 23, 2025

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.