Into the Autumn we go...

As we cross the threshold into Autumn, nature offers us her ancient teaching: the leaves blaze and then release, the air cools, and something in us too begins to loosen its grip.

We may sense a quiet surrender inside, as though certain inner companions, once so close, cannot journey with us into what is next. This shedding can feel like a relief, but it can also stir a trembling, the rawness of groundlessness.

In the language of alchemy, this is not the yellowing but the season of smoke and ember - a stage where the vessel warms, the old form dissolves, and unseen elements are released into the air. It is a process of transmutation, not failure.

Autumn has always felt like the most tender season for me, as if a door opens into the deeper strata of grief and longing. The landscape of soul takes on a hue of blue-grey, carrying not just sadness for what is lost, but an aching fullness, a heart heavy with beauty too vast to hold.

This is not the flat sadness of something missing, but a saturation of feeling - a melancholy that ripens rather than withers. It is the soul’s way of reminding us that aliveness and sorrow are woven of the same threads.

Around us, the world mirrors this truth: the scarlet maple, the gold ash, the damp moss and wood darkening with rain. Each image is both a dying and a becoming, an invitation to bow to the mystery.

When we allow our inner sight to polish itself in this season, the outlines of who we thought we were begin to blur. The “solid” arrangements of relationship, work, health, and meaning may not appear so certain. This is the soul’s composting, the scattering of the old into fertile ground.

It is natural to resist, to want the familiar to endure. But perhaps what is falling away is making space for something unimagined, some form of life and love not yet visible.

In these passages we are asked to be faithful to grief, to stay present with what ends, and to receive the wisdom carried by the broken pieces. Birth and rebirth are never tidy; they are both wondrous and bewildering, filled with contradiction.

And yet, even in the disorientation, this too is love - the wild, reorganizing current of love that holds both what we gain and what we lose, what delights and what dissolves.

 An invitation

If you’d like, take a few quiet moments this week to step outside with the leaves. Hold one in your hand. Feel its texture, its fragility. As you breathe, ask yourself gently: What is ready to be released in me? What longs to return to the soil, to become nourishment for what is to come?

Notice what arises in your body, without rushing to answer. Let the season speak to you.

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Reclaiming the Self: 6-Week Autumn Online Immersion with Matt Licata

Reclaiming the Self:

A 6-Week Autumn Immersion into the Power, Resiliency, and Wildness of the Soul

with Psychotherapist, Author, and Spiritual Guide Matt Licata, PhD

In these liminal times – when the old forms no longer carry the vitality they once did, and the new has yet to fully emerge – something deep within us begins to stir.

Not a call to quick answers or fixing ourselves, but a quieter whisper. A longing to remember.
To slow down. To return.

To return not to who we were before it all fell apart, but to the deeper, wilder center of our being – where our grief and our joy, our tenderness and our strength, are held within the great mystery of what it means to be human.

I’ve created this course, Reclaiming the Self, as a sanctuary space, a six-week soul vessel where we can gather together to explore the deeper terrain of our inner lives – not through striving or self-improvement, but through reverent listening and embodied presence.

>>Learn more/ register for Reclaiming the Self here 

It’s an immersion into the wild field of the psyche and the sacred intelligence of the nervous system, guided by the alchemical wisdom that healing isn’t about becoming someone else… but remembering who we are.

So many of us – helpers, seekers, teachers, healers – have been living at the edge of exhaustion, caught between caring deeply and not knowing how to continue carrying it all. We long to feel again the poetry of life moving through us. To reconnect with the beauty in the broken places, and to discover a kind of wholeness that includes even the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to hide.

Throughout our time together, we’ll move through the great themes of descent and return, trauma and soul-remembrance, shadow and imagination – not as abstract concepts, but as living energies within the heart, the body, and our relationships.

If you’re longing for renewal – not the surface kind, but the kind that emerges when we tend to the roots – this course may be a place for you to land.

As the leaves in outer nature fall and disintegrate into their essence, the soul yellows, creating the fertile conditions for new life.

It would be a gift to walk with you during this season of descent, beauty, and inner repair.

Free live webinar with Matt Licata - Wed. September 10

EMPTYING THE CUP: AN INVITATION TO BEGIN AGAIN

Clearing Space for Soul, Stillness, and New Life to Emerge

A Free Live Online Gathering with Matt Licata

Wednesday, September 10 at 9am Pacific/ 5pm in London

>>Learn more/ register here at no cost 

As the days grow shorter and the golden light of autumn begins to settle in, a quiet invitation arises – to slow down, to listen, and to reimagine what we’re doing here.

What if the weariness you feel isn’t something to fix, but a call to pause? A message from the Ally within – an Inner Guide whispering for rest, for stillness, for renewal… for aliveness?

What if the shakiness, the melancholy, the longing, the uncertainty – are not signs of something gone wrong, but the Soul in motion, reaching toward you? Not to be solved, but to be met with compassion, so it can share its wildness, its beauty, its grace.

In this free live webinar, I’ll offer a soulful, grounded space to reflect and reconnect with the deeper rhythms of your being. Drawing from the alchemical imagination, depth psychology, and somatic healing, we’ll explore the sacred process of emptying the cup – not as collapse or bypass, but as an intentional act of devotion and inner preparation.

Through seasonal wisdom, mythic imagery, and clinical insight, we’ll descend gently into the inner temple – where grief, longing, and raw aliveness are honored as emissaries of transformation. As the leaves fall outside, you’re invited to shed what no longer serves within, creating space for something mysterious and luminous to take root.

During our time together, we’ll explore:

• The deeper meaning of emotional exhaustion and inner shakiness – and how these may be signs of initiation, not pathology
• How unprocessed grief and forgotten parts of self are held in the nervous system – and how presence and attunement support their release
• The alchemical process of yellowing and descent – as it appears in relationships, identity, and meaning-making
• Why emptiness is not absence, but threshold – and how the “blue places” in the psyche carry seeds of renewal
• The shadow’s longing to return home – and how dissociated parts of soul can be re-integrated through tenderness and embodied imagination
• A guided reflection to help you sense what’s falling away in your own life… and what may be quietly coming alive

>>Learn more/ register here at no cost 

More information soon on Matt's 6-Week Autumn Online Immersion - Reclaiming the Self

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