Online monthly community with Matt Licata - Befriending Yourself

Temporarily reopening enrollment to Befriending Yourself, my monthly online community with Jeff Foster.

Weekly teaching videos, guided meditations, and interactive live sessions exploring a contemporary, emotionally-sensitive, shadow-aware approach to psychological exploration, emotional healing, and spiritual discovery.

It is not necessary to participate live (many are not able due to their busy schedules) and membership has been designed so that you can access the material on your own time, from the comfort, safety, and convenience of your own home. After each session, you will receive access to a video replay, downloadable mp3 audio, and written transcript so that you may engage with teachings in a way that is most resonant for you.

Over time you will build a library of supportive content that you can access at any time to guide you in your own journey. It is my intention that this material helps you to discover a trust and confidence in the wisdom of your own direct experience, which is sacred and holy.

Love to have you join us!

Held by something vast

The next time you find yourself looping in repetitive thinking, spiraling within shame circuits, and drowning in a cascading waterfall of overwhelm, slow down and cut into the momentum with the warmth of your own awareness.

Slow the situation down. Feel your feet on the earth. Breathe deeply from the lower belly. Things are not always as they seem.

Come out of the seductive, sticky storyline and shift your center of gravity into the center of the raw life that is surging to be held. One microsecond at a time. Underneath the circulating heat, spin, and claustrophobia is a tender soft core that is longing for just one moment of you exactly as you are.

Stay close. Be a friend to yourself. Provide sanctuary and safe passage for the visitor to be illuminated and held. While the habitual groove is out of the shaky center, just this once step off the battlefield and turn home. Your body is aglow with sacred data illuminating the way ahead.

Slow, curious, warm. Open to a new way as you ask: What is it that I need right now? What have I abandoned in myself? What is being asked to be tended to, right here and right now, with a storm of lovingkindness? Can I breathe into and with what has come, not as an enemy to transcend or overcome, but an ally of the depths? Why have you come, I am listening, I will not forsake you.

In this, seeds of empathy are planted in your nervous system and scattered within the cells of your heart, watered and soothed with new forms of self-care as compassion pathways are grooved and brought alive. Suddenly there is so much space. Breath where none was to be found. You are already held by something vast.

Through this aspiration to no longer abandon yourself, you come back into your power, grounded and embodied in the reality and perception of the warrior, a warrior of love, come here not only to heal yourself but as a vessel of presence and transmutation for all beings.

Photo by Heidelbergerin/ Christel

My online community, co-facilitated with Jeff Foster - Befriending Yourself: Meditative, Nondual, and Depth Psychological Perspectives - is currently closed to new members but will re-open later this month. To be on the mailing list to learn about the program, please visit the site here. 

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

The endlessness of the heart

Emotionally-sensitive, somatically-grounded inner work is unique to each person. We must discover for ourselves the most skillful, effective, and compassionate ways to open and enter the body, psyche, and heart. It is a journey which requires attunement to first-ordered, primary experience.

The way of direct revelation is not the easy way. It is not the path of prefabricated steps, a map given by another, or a series of magical new techniques to learn and “master.” It is chaotic, wild, messy, and alive, written into the cells of your heart by way of a language that only you can understand.

If we will look and listen – with our physical as well as our inner senses – we will discover the guidance that is all around and inside us, stepping into the experiential realization that the path is in fact everywhere.

Wherever you are on your journey, you can ask a guide to bear witness as you move into unknown territory, allowing yourself to be held and to move at a pace that is provocative, but not overwhelming.

Find a therapist, lover, mentor, or friend; a tree, a bird, a mountain, or dog; the sky, the sun, the stars, or the mud. A color, a fragrance, a flower, an image. A God or Goddess, wise inner figure, or being of light.

A lion, a lioness, emerging out of the imaginal and into this world, opening a portal through which you might remember the majesty that you are.

Allow your symptoms to merge into these protectors and enter into dialogue, into pure relationship, separate and connected, practicing intimacy with the inner material, while simultaneously not fusing with it.

It is unlikely we’ll ever fully understand or resolve the mystery of self and other, separation and union, sun and moon. But we can remain in awe at the mystery together, dancing and playing and penetrating inside it, and by it, as we turn into the immensity and the endlessness of the heart. 

Art by Krista Marleena - lion of the dark and of the light

My online community, co-facilitated with Jeff Foster - Befriending Yourself: Meditative, Nondual, and Depth Psychological Perspectives - is currently closed to new members but will re-open later this month. To be on the mailing list to learn about the program, please visit the site here. 

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

Into dust

A relationship has ended. An old dream has died; recycled, sent to the other world. All that is left is a burning, a longing, but for what? Should we move into the next relationship or stay alone?

There is no answer to this question, only an invitation into its unresolvable core.

It is natural to want to return to familiar ground, land in some safe place of refuge, and work it all out ahead of time. But, alas, the beloved has no interest in that.

Are we moving toward a new person to avoid some part of ourselves, some ancient feeling that we just don’t want to feel? Probably. I mean, if we’re human, anyway. Is there some part that senses a new possibility, a way of doing it differently? Probably, if we’re human, anyway.

We want a decision that is fully aligned with how we feel. But in the realm of the beloved, there will always be contradictory feelings. I want you. I’m repelled by you. I want to connect. I want to be separate. I want to be seen. I want to hide. We dance inside the opposites of abandonment and fusion, unsure where to turn.

Either path requires that we open into the unique cast of inner figures, feelings, somatic eruptions, and lost pieces of soul that accompany those choices. A compassionate confrontation with the fragmented shards of our unlived life.

Getting tangled up in “what decision should I make” is so very human, and for many of us also a way to defend against the inevitable loss, disappointment, and grief that will come regardless of what choice we make.

Whether you choose to stay alone or go back into relationship, you will inevitably meet soul-parts that you may have lost contact with, erupting feelings and sensations that are alive, achy, filled with wisdom-essence.

Unfortunately, there is no “third” option where we get to avoid our vulnerability and the tender, reorganizing touch of the beloved.

There is no answer to this conundrum, which is evidence of the beloved already, who is not interested in resolution, least of all in our fantasies of becoming a “master” at love and relationships.

He or she will turn the master into dust, which was precisely their role all along. How tragic. What grace.

Photo by rawpixel

My online community, co-facilitated with Jeff Foster - Befriending Yourself: Meditative, Nondual, and Depth Psychological Perspectives - is currently closed to new members but will re-open later this month. To be on the mailing list to learn about the program, please visit the site here. 

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

Relationship as path

It is no secret that, for many, intimate relationship is one of the great amplifiers of the unlived life. We can count on our partners to relentlessly illuminate everything that remains unresolved within us. Not because they have some agenda to do so, but simply by the nature of the vessel that forms when we allow another to truly matter.

We come to relationship with an already-existing patterning that formed long ago, crafted of both personal and collective experience. While this template can be updated and itself longs for reorganization into more integrated forms, until reconfiguration it has a way of looming over us and coloring perception. It functions by way of a time machine where, when activated, it is as if we have left the “here and now” and found ourselves back in the “there and then.”

There is nothing like a close relationship to illuminate the orphaned emotions, beliefs, and vulnerable parts of ourselves that have lost their way in the tangle of somatic and psychic pathways. It can be a revelation to see how we attract and are attracted to those aspects and qualities in the other that we have disowned in ourselves.

It can feel a bit achy and agonizing to realize that the beloved, in whatever form he or she may take, seems to have extraordinary powers to open the raw, tender, and naked dimensions of our being. But it is a sacred ache, oriented to the mystery.

May we be kind to our partners in response to the inevitable disturbance that will arise as we make this journey together. Learning how to transmute the energy of conflict by way of skillful means and an open heart is essential and a secret doorway into the evolutionary potential that relationship offers.

The practice of rupture and repair is a lost art in our world. Through the reparation of neural pathways and planting seeds of wisdom and compassion, it reveals that relationships of vast depth and meaning are not free of conflict, but those where working through conflict is embraced as path, as unique and powerful temples of purification, love, and healing.

My online community, co-facilitated with Jeff Foster - Befriending Yourself: Meditative, Nondual, and Depth Psychological Perspectives - is currently closed to new members but will re-open later this month. To be on the mailing list to learn about the program, please visit the site here. 

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020.