Sunday, May 31, 2020

The purity of the wound


Many of us interested in spirituality, creativity, and healing have been wounded in our lives, whether physically, emotionally, or at a soul level: within the context of our relational histories, as the byproduct of intergenerational trauma, and through personal and archetypal betrayals as open and sensitive human beings.

In the face of this wounding, we experience discontent and dis-ease in relation to a world that has lost connection with the sacredness of the body, the sanctity of the emotions, the mysteries of nature, and our place in the stars. A soul loss that at times can manifest in certain forms of depression and dark night. This response is not pathology, but an emanation of wisdom.

While the grief can be overwhelming, some are starting to sense the immense power and high-voltage intelligence within the wound, sensing the alchemical silver and gold buried inside.

It is an act of mercy to tend to the wounded one, providing sanctuary and safe passage for them to come into this world, where they are so needed. To offer a home where this one can seed this place with their unique light.

It is not an easy life, that of the wounded healer – one that we do not choose consciously – but is the honorable inheritance of many who are called to the path. It requires that we walk in this world against the grain and remain open to further wounding and revelation of shadow.

For some, initiation occurs only by way of transition, illness, and loss… through an embodied confrontation with uncertainty, groundlessness, and psychic dismemberment. These are not signs of error or mistake, but a call to depth. For some of us, deeper healing will take form as more subtle unfolding of the wound in psyche and the body.

In the end, the goal is not to eliminate our woundedness, for this would sever our connection with life and annex the gifts of soul from this world. Not even to “heal” in any sort of conventional sense, but to uncover new myths, images, and metaphors through which we are able to touch, integrate, dance, and play within the love that has been given.

Not only for ourselves, but for others, for this planet, this star… for all sentient life.




My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. 


We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here

Sunday, May 24, 2020

If a child were to appear...


If a child were to appear at your door – cold, frightened, alone, and tired from a long journey…

If he or she were anxious, heartbroken, raging, and confused… unsure of why they have come here, where God is, whether or not they have been forsaken…

Would you refuse entry to the little one? Would you first demand that his fear dissolve, her anxiety be healed, his confusion clarify, or her heart be mended?

In your most authoritative spiritual voice, would you urge the little one to first "get over it,” accept everything the way it is, urgently forgive those who have harmed them, or quickly “raise their vibration?”

Or would you provide sanctuary and safe passage from a long voyage? A warm, safe, contained temple in which the stories, the feelings, and the images of this one ragingly alive nervous system can be illuminated and held, articulated and metabolized in an environment of open, tender interest, curiosity, and love?

Inside this majestic human body the beloved is at work, spinning out worlds of experience which are soaked with intelligence, sacred data, and saturated with both sweet and fierce grace. Things are rarely what they seem here… doorways and portals opening and closing by way of the breath of the divine as it makes its way into form…

… as it finds its way into this rare world of time and space… with you as its vessel.




My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. 


We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here

Monday, May 18, 2020

Free live webinar with Matt Licata on Wednesday


Dear friend,

As part of my upcoming The Path of Wounded Healer: A Five-Week Online Course to Open Your Heart, Tend to Old Wounds, and Find Meaning in Your Life, I want to invite you to a free webinar happening this week.

You can get the details and join me here:

→ Click here to register now: Working with the Wounded Healer Archetype for Healing and Transformation

We have all been wounded in our lives and the path of seeing our wounds as initiation and a call from the deeper Self has been explored since the earliest recorded history by shamans, yogis, alchemists, and mystics. To see our wounding not as an obstacle to our path, but the very path itself opens us to deeper layers of transformation and healing.

During the session we will explore:
  • The archetype and mandala of the wounded healer and why it is essential not only for “professional healers”
  • The various types of wounding and how the wound can be a form of initiation and calling
  • Three core practices of deep inner soul work
  • Shadow work and tending to the wound
  • The fruits of this work - an embodied sense of spontaneity, creativity, aliveness, and compassion for self and others 
It is my intention for the webinar to be a reminder of what is most important to you, and to bring about some newfound curiosity, confidence, and trust in your experience and your life. I hope you’ll join me here:

→ Click here to register now: Working with the Wounded Healer Archetype for Healing and Transformation→

I look forward to connecting with many of you on the call!

Warmly,

Matt


Sunday, May 17, 2020

Inside the wound, a spiral


It is not an error
that you have been born
a sensitive human being,
with a tender nervous system
and a heart that is sometimes
broken.

Inside the wound, a spiral.

The tenderness there,
the shakiness, the grief…
not an error
to be remedied
or cured…

But a doorway to essence,
a portal to life.



Photo by Matt Bluejay



My new online course - The Path of the Wounded Healer - starts on May 19 

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. 


We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

The Path of the Wounded Healer online course with Matt Licata



Dear friends, 

I wanted to let you know that my new online course, The Path of the Wounded Healer: A Five-Week Online Course to Open Your Heart, Tend to Old Wounds, and Find Meaning in Your Life, is now open for enrollment.

Please note that this course is not only for "professional" healers, but for all of us who feel called to a life of purpose, healing, and spiritual transformation. To begin to see our wounding, eccentricities, and sensitivities as portals into meaning and depth ties each of us into the archetype and myth of the wounded healer.

There is a lot more information about the course at the registration page here. If you have any questions, please reply to this email and the support team will be back in touch with you soon. We'll be starting on May 26th with the first live session.

I'd be honored to have you join me as I know many of you are wanting to make use of this time in a way that is meaningful and helpful for yourself and others. And to (re)commit to your own path of transformation and healing, which is going to be wildly unique and unprecedented, just as the depth and endlessness of your own heart.

Warmly,
Matt





Sunday, May 10, 2020

Embracing the shadow


It is very challenging to work with shadow on our own as it is difficult to perceive. If we’re able to see it clearly, it is not shadow, but something else.

Usually, the Other is required to reflect it back to us, but just what this “Other” is is a mystery and must be revealed to us in the fire of our own direct experience. Another person, an image, an inner figure, a color, the moon, the sea, an animal-friend. The Other is all around, dancing and playing and never giving up on its quest to reach us, to remind us, to open a portal within soul.

Even though “shadow work” is talked about periodically, the actual work itself is not very popular, which is understandable. It is difficult, painful, and humbling, and requires a requisite level of ego-strength to approach, a base-level of resourcing in one’s neural net to engage in uncovering, otherwise it will overwhelm a fragile structure.

But more than that requires the willingness to enter into our own unacknowledged narcissism, unmet grief, undigested pain, unmetabolized self-absorption, and the entirety of our unlived lives. To let go of the fantasy that we “don’t have a shadow” or that we’ve “completed” some mythical journey where the unconscious is no longer operative.

Those hidden parts of ourselves, emotions, impulses, and beliefs that we’re not able to access, articulate, and integrate don’t just go away because they’ve fallen out of awareness. They will find their way back, especially in relationship with those that we’ve allowed to matter to us.

We find this shadowed material in another person or out in the world, evoking it in them, projecting it onto them, enacting it within the relational field… locating it outside ourselves so that we can be in relationship with it at a safe distance. We long for reunion with these soul parts and pieces, but not in such a direct way… otherwise the house of cards could tumble.

Tending to this material with curiosity, consciousness, and compassion is the activity of love, work that we do not just for ourselves, but for all life, everywhere. For the ancestors and the ones yet to come. For the stars, the trees, the oceans, and for the earth herself.




Art by Enrique Lopez Garre


My new online course - The Path of the Wounded Healer - starts on May 19 


My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. 


We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here


Sunday, May 3, 2020

Caring for yourself in a new way


The next time you notice that you’re attacking yourself, caught in a looping storyline about how you’ve failed, how you’ll never get it right, how there is something just fundamentally wrong with you …

When you’ve become lost in a repetitive narrative about how someone has misunderstood you, how you are not being seen in the way you’d like, or when find yourself complaining about your life or another person …

Slow way down. Ground into the earth.

Before you abandon yourself and leave your immediate experience, parachuting into the unstable waters of rumination, shame, and blame, slow way down. For this is no ordinary moment. You are being asked to care for yourself in a new way, to cleanse your perception with space, with kindness, with compassion – to pause and to encode a new pathway.

With the ally of the breath, shift your awareness out of the overwhelming narrative, for it is no longer safe there. It is not serving you to travel down the conditioned rabbit hole of unworthiness and self-abandonment any longer. These are the leftover grooves of an earlier time, and ache to be reorganized by way of empathy, attunement, and embodied presence.

Conserve your precious life energy, remove it from that which is no longer working in your best interest, and direct into your belly, your heart, your throat. And ask: what feeling is wanting to be met now? In what way am I being asked to care for the vulnerable, the tender, and the shaky within me, to no longer project it outward in the movement of self-abandonment and self-aggression? How am I being asked to tend to myself in a new way? To touch the erupting, raw, achy life that is surging now for holding.

Look carefully, with curiosity, patience, kindness, and compassion and see the ways you leave the embodied world of pure feeling, bailing on your vulnerability as you escape back into the conditioned narrative of complaint, resentment, shame, blame, and self-attack. Return home.

While it may seem you are longing for something outside you, in these moments you are only longing for your own presence. For you need yourself now more than ever. This world needs you now more than ever.




My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. 


We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here