Holiday invocation

Wishing you all a joyous, safe, and reflective holiday time. Thank you for sharing your hearts and journeys with me this year – your suffering, your chaos, your courage, and your love. 

This time of the year can be difficult for many, opening a portal into feelings and memories of deep loneliness, shame, sadness, and rage, activating wounds held in our families of origin as well touching into the intergenerational transmission of trauma and pain. 

We may also have some positive associations with the holidays – joy, connection, play, and belonging – a childlike innocence as to what the holidays symbolize to us. 

And, for many of us, it can be a complicated, unresolvable mix. 

Let us take a moment to tend it all with one another, including the joy and the grief, the loneliness and the connection, the sweetness and the ache. 

And open together into the archetypal mysteries of birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, transfiguration and transmutation, each an essential portal into the depths of the soul. 

We’ve been through so much this year and lost many of our familiar reference points, unsure where to look for refuge and meaning, with the rug pulled out from underneath us. Not only external, but internal quarantine, asked to turn toward the shattered and the unlived within us.

To take a moment to touch and to shepherd this – not only the loss of health and life, but of the dream of the way we thought it was all going to turn out. 

Rebirth is tied intimately to our willingness and capacity to grieve, a holy activity not always honored in our world. But here we are, the misfits of despair, ecstasy, sorrow, and wonder, knowing the aliveness we long for will only be found in embodied attunement to the full spectrum. 

The process of “falling apart” is not some great cosmic error or mistake we need to correct or repair, but an emissary of wholeness, a way shower of what will emerge from the ashes of reorganization.

It is love, of course, that will guide the reorganization. But it is love, too, that is the substance of the ashes, and also the tears… 

See you all in 2021  

Photo: Lapland light c/o Andreas

The mystery of relationship, part 2

In any close relationship (where we take the risk of allowing another to matter) we open ourselves to the two archetypal energies of abandonment and fusion. At some deep level there may always be some hesitancy in stepping all the way in, which is valid and worthy of our exploration.

We come into relationship with an activated template of past relational experiences – will it be safe? Can I be fully as I am? What about all of my eccentricities, sensitivities, and historic core vulnerabilities? Can I truly trust them? Will they turn from me? Will I lose myself? Is this all going to be worth it?

Inevitably, ruptures will occur within the relational field, in that tender intersection between ourselves and another. But that rupture is natural, organic, and quantum.

A healthy relationship is not one in which there is never any conflict, but one in which rupture is repaired, by way of empathic linkage, shared resonance, and a simultaneous honoring of our own separateness and integrity. Embodiment to the cycle of rupture and repair allows the relationship to unfold, deepen, and disclose its secret essence.

Each of us arrives into the space between ourselves and the other with biographical, cultural, and archetypal patterning, scripts, and worlds of imagination. Our images and fantasies intermingle and interpenetrate to weave the relational field, along with the mysterious Other, the third who also appears… the Great Weaver of the in-between places.

It is through this intersubjective dance of illuminating, articulating, and making sense of our experience with the other that the templates become ripe for revisioning. But in the core of that ripening it is tender, sensitive, and at times will burn with mysteries of separation and union.

This is why, in part, close personal relationships can be so achingly painful, on the one hand… while being the most unique and transmutative temple on the other.

Photo by Mandy Naleli

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You

My online community - Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times

Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed:

with Tami Simon of Sounds True on Insights at the Edge

with David Newell of the Inner Truth podcast 

The mystery of relationship

In close personal relationships, it is important to emphasize a secure attachment bond and the co-regulation of challenging emotional states. To practice kindness toward our lovers and friends, listen to the way they are making sense of their experience, attune to what they are feeling, and hold them during difficult times.

It is also essential to be on the lookout for unhealthy fusion, honoring the reality that we are not only connected, but also separate. Any secure attachment must include healthy differentiation, where at times the most skillful activity will be to establish firm boundaries, assert our independence, privilege our own personal integrity, and allow the other to struggle with feelings of aloneness, uncertainty, and confusion.

At times we will disappoint those we love, and this will activate our historic core vulnerabilities… and theirs. For many of us, disappointing another is just not safe, and we will do whatever possible to ensure they do not come face to face with the surging material of their unlived life. But allowing them to meet the reality of their own heart is an act of profound mercy and compassion.

While transpersonally we can speak about unity and oneness, within the relative we are also distinct, with our own histories and ways of organizing our experience. Each with our own fate and relationship with the divine, our own paths to travel; our own unique ways entering the mystery. To dissolve these differences into some homogenized spiritual middle does not honor the sacredness of form.

If we do not consciously explore the reality of our separateness, it will inevitably manifest in less than conscious ways, unleashing unmetabolized shadow into the relational field. Like all work of depth, this art form evolves slowly, as it marinates in the alchemical vessel of the body.

May we be kind to our partners as we navigate this territory – especially during these challenging times – honoring the vehicle of intimacy as one of the most provocative, sacred, and holy that we have in our modern world.

Photo by Yousef Espanioly

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You

My online community - Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times

Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed:

with Tami Simon of Sounds True on Insights at the Edge

with David Newell of the Inner Truth podcast 

On therapy

I’ve been asked recently how I work with a person in therapy. Of course, each situation is unique and in large part a matter of (al)chemical interaction and our intersecting worlds of emotional, somatic, and imaginal experience.

If someone is struggling with trauma, drowning or flooded by unbearable feeling, together we discover and craft resource in the nervous system, bottom-up by way of metabolizing sensation in the body. Tracking micro-moments of moving outside window of tolerance, together we come back into safety and connection.

Slow. I’m here with you. So that you feel felt and understood. The timeline for this unfolding is written inside you and we will listen and attune to that, together.

With borderline or narcissistic organization, we build structure in the sense of self, where there has been consistent empathic failure, a seemingly infinite number of relational ruptures with little or no repair. The patchy self is mended by the substances of empathy, presence, and a mercy that enters into that space between.

In these situations, we would not lead with transpersonal work such as active imagination, uncovering shadow, or resting in and exploring open awareness, but first build the requisite safety or structure, and repair the pathways of relational misattunement.

Safety first, exploration second, in a dance and dialogue and dialectic that will be unique for each of us. Safe, but not too safe. Exploration, but from a secure base. Crafting a save haven from which to enter into the tender places.

Where there is enough safety, ego-strength, and capacity for containment, we would explore the existential and transpersonal bands, opening into relationship with the lost pieces and figures of the psyche and the soul. To discover experientially the necessity for certain symptoms, their coherence, and the schemas and complexes which give rise to unwanted behavior, moods, thoughts, and somatics.

And then into meditative experience, if that is of interest and curiosity and passion... shifting one's psychic center of gravity into the embodied experience of open awareness… touching and bearing witness to the luminosity of form, its radiance and warmth.

But underneath it all, it’s clear I know little about the soul, how it heals and unfolds. The person in front of me is vast and majestic and I can only stand in awe at the power and beauty of one human heart as it longs to return home. To attune to and be a companion within that level of benevolence and grace.

In the end, in my experience, it’s not techniques that heal. It’s love that heals. Techniques are fine, but it is the relationship between two nervous systems and the love that infuses that middle territory between which allows the techniques to come alive, if and when they do. Love first, techniques second.

The nature of what this love is must be discovered moment to moment as it emerges in that vessel where we dwell together and is the neural and spiritual scaffolding that opens a light into the darkness.

Photo by David Mark 

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You

My online community - Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times

Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed:

with Tami Simon of Sounds True on Insights at the Edge

with David Newell of the Inner Truth podcast 

Free giveaway and upcoming book club with Matt Licata

Dear friend,

I wanted to let you know that my new book, A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times, has been selected as the Sounds True Book Club pick for January.

We are kicking things off with a chance to win a free copy of the book—you can enter to win here. I believe 25 copies will be given away and I hope one of them goes to you. In order to participate, you’ll need to enter by Monday, December 14th.

From there, I'll be joining the Sounds True Book Club Facebook Group for an exclusive Facebook Live on Thursday, January 21st, at 11am Pacific/ 7pm in London, with the Book Club community.

There is no cost to participate in the Book Club or to attend the live event.

I hope to see you there online next month, and that you have a safe, joyful, and blessed holiday time.

Warmly,

Matt 

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You

My online community - Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times

Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed:

with Tami Simon of Sounds True on Insights at the Edge

with David Newell of the Inner Truth podcast 

Sitting with a friend

At times, you may be asked to sit with another who has been touched by the darkness. To allow them to fall apart in your arms, unravel, be without hope, and feel lost. You may sense there is some sort of wisdom unfolding, but it is chaotic, uncertain, and not easy to stay with.

While it is natural to want to do whatever you can to help them feel better, listen carefully to what it is they are truly asking for. Extend to them a calm, regulated nervous system where their experience can be validated and held, exactly as it is. Ensure them – with words and with your presence – that they need not "get over it," "accept everything as it is," shift into a "higher vibration," "stay in the present," be cured, transformed, or "healed" in order for you to stay close.

To provide such an environment for another, you must first offer safe passage for the unmetabolized in yourself: the unmet sadness, abandoned shame, discarded grief, disavowed hopelessness, and deserted aloneness. If not, you may find yourself rushing to talk the other out of their experience, urgently spinning to relieve them of their feelings as a way to cut into your own anxiety and discomfort. All the while subtly and unconsciously disavowing the raging intelligence buried within the dark.

Together with them, make the commitment to not pathologize their experience. Pain is not pathology. Hopelessness is not pathology. Grief is not pathology. Shame and rage are not pathology. They are path. Seed this wisdom into the relational field and watch in awe as a new world unfolds.

As you attune to the "other" in front of you – as well as to the alchemical "other" within – feel the creative flow of love as it fills the space between, crafting you both as vessels of sanctuary for the pieces of the broken world, for the shards of confusion, and for the crumbled hopes and dreams that have dissolved in front of your eyes. Honor the holy truth that the forms that love take will always fall apart – for this is their nature – in order that they may come back together in more integrated and cohesive ways.

Within the aliveness of the relational field – despite the pain of the present, the traumas of the past, and the broken dreams of the future – you may see that it was only love after all, taking whatever form it must so that it may unfold itself into this world, in ways the mind may never understand.

Please do whatever you can to help others in whatever way you are able: attune to their emotional experience such that they feel felt, listen carefully to what they are saying, and how they are making meaning of their lives.

Slow way down, bracket your favorite psychological and spiritual jargon and theories, and allow yourself to be curious about how they are making sense of their experience. Feed them, hold them, speak kindly to them, provide sanctuary and safe passage for soul to disclose its mysteries. And remind them that love is here and is alive.

Photo by Tim Hill 

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You

My online community - Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times

Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed:

with Tami Simon of Sounds True on Insights at the Edge

with David Newell of the Inner Truth podcast 

Listen to Matt's conversation with Tami Simon of Sounds True on Insights at the Edge

Dear friends,

I recently had a conversation with my dear friend Tami Simon of Sounds True as part of her Insights at the Edge podcast, where we spoke about the alchemy of befriending ourselves in difficult times and my new book, A Healing Space. 

>>> Listen to my conversation with Tami

Also, a reminder that my new teaching module on working with the shadow and the lost pieces of the soul starts on December 3rd. You can learn more about that here. 

I hope you're well and staying safe. 

Warmly,

Matt

Listen to Matt's conversation with David Newell on the Inner Truth podcast

Dear friend,

I wanted to share with you a recent conversation I had with David Newell as part of the Inner Truth podcast, where we speak about the mysteries of healing, integration, and the alchemical imagination, and about my new book A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times.

>>> Listen to my conversation with David here 

I hope you're all doing well and staying safe. 

With love,

Matt

Working with the shadow and the lost pieces of the soul

Dear friends, 

We've just opened enrollment for our new teaching module on working with the shadow and the lost pieces of the soul. Exploring an embodied, trauma-sensitive approach to spirituality and healing. Learn more about this module and our Befriending Yourself online community. 

As open, sensitive human beings, we’re all going to be met with unwanted and difficult experience at times - things like disappointment, sadness, uncertainty, and grief. These and other related states - melancholy, deflation, heartbreak, and longing - are often dismissed on the spiritual path or seen as evidence that we have failed or done life “wrong.”

We all learned to turn away from parts of ourselves and experiences that didn’t always fit in. In order to protect ourselves and stay safe, we sent these parts away, into the underworld of the psyche, or what is often referred to as “the shadow.” 

The shadow contains not only the so-called “negative” aspects of our experience – that which we want to get rid of – but also “positive” experiences such as joy, intimacy, connection, and a sense of feeling alive. In ways that might seem paradoxical, these too can be disowned and can fall out of reach. 

While it was intelligent, creative, and adaptive to disembody and locate certain experiences outside our conscious awareness, these very human, valid, and essential parts of ourselves continue to look for us, and leak out in our bodies, dreams, relationships, moods, and thoughts. The process of integration or wholeness asks that we turn back toward these ones and provide a home or sanctuary in which they can return to the larger ecology of what we are, warmed at the fire of our own presence, mercy, and kindness. 

There is sacred information contained within the shadow and the lost pieces, and they can in fact be powerful doorways to deeper self-awareness, compassion, connection, and aliveness. But how do we mine the gold in the darkness? 

Through meditation, healing inquiry, and an embodied, trauma-sensitive approach where we “start exactly where we are,” we will navigate this full-spectrum territory together, and open to the healing potential in embracing the shadow. 

There’s a lot of talk out there about what shadow work is and what it isn’t - and what it actually means in our embodied, lived experience. We are offering this module - which will include psychological, existential, neurobiological, poetic, and spiritual perspectives - as a way for all of us to come together to explore this very important - and often neglected - area of spirituality and healing. 

Over the next three months, we’ll explore: 

- The healing potential within difficult experience such as grief, disappointment, heartbreak, and loss 

- The power of our vulnerability and how it can be a portal to a deeper experience of aliveness and connection 

- Unraveling the cultural (and spiritual) trance of “being happy all the time” and the wisdom in our native melancholy and sensitivity 

- The poetic beauty of “not-knowing” and seeing through the fantasy that we’re always supposed to know what to do with our lives 

- The tenderness of a broken heart and its deepest longing not to be “healed,” but to be held 

Especially as we head into the winter months (for most of us, anyway) it seems an appropriate time to gather together, in a way that is both safe and challenging, to explore the beauty and mercy in the darkness, as it unfolds within the natural world as well as within our bodies, hearts, and souls. And to discover, together, the light that is found only there.

We look forward to getting started with our first live session on Thursday, December 3rd and would love to have you join us. 

Image by Yakup Ipek 

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available at Amazon, Sounds True, and wherever you buy books. You can read a sample and editorial reviews at Amazon. 

Matt Licata's new book - A Healing Space - now available

Dear friends, 

My new book is now available through Amazon, Sounds True, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, and Bookshop. (You can find the audio book via Audible). 

While writing A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times, I had no idea where we were headed and how deeply our lives would be touched over the months to come.

Many of us are experiencing a deep restlessness and uncertainty, not knowing what’s coming next or how to best navigate during this transitional period. But it is precisely in times such as these that unique doorways to deep healing and transformation open, often in unexpected ways.

It’s so important right now to rest our nervous systems, to spend time each day in activities that ground, center, and guide us gently back into the experience of safety and connection.

There are so many ideas about what “healing” is, however many of them are outdated and misattuned to our actual lived experience. In moments of fierce grace, when the rug is pulled out from underneath us, our lenses of perception become ripe for revisioning.

There is an inevitable reorganization that occurs as part of the healing process. While it is so very human to “skip over” this essential phase and get to the promised rebirth, doing so prematurely prevents us from accessing the wisdom within the restructuring itself.

The alchemists, yogis, and mystics knew the importance of dissolution and experienced it as initiatory. It is the crumbling of an old dream – my life and the way I was so sure it was going to turn out – that can often provide the rich soil for creative, embodied transformation.

In order to be initiated in this way, we must slow down – and with a passionate, alive, and earthy compassion – attune to what is unfolding and being illuminated right now. To take some time to mourn the reassembling of our world and to grieve all that we will inevitably lose as we heal and awaken.

It is an act of kindness to remember that the transformational process by its very nature is messy, glorious, and full spectrum… not only an act of creation, but one of destruction as well.

I wrote A Healing Space as an invitation into the temple of your own body, as a pathway back into the depths of your own soul, using the images and metaphors from rich and diverse traditions such as neuroscience, alchemy, contemplative practice, and the poetic imagination.

 

It was written to be a loving companion to walk with you into the mysteries of your own heart. In the end, perhaps it is really only love that matters now. But just what that is must be discovered in the fire of your own immediate experience, where there is unseen wisdom and guidance for the way ahead.

I hope you enjoy the book and find it to be a true friend accompanying you into the majesty that you are.

Warmly,

Matt

A reclaiming of joy

Usually when we speak about the shadow, we're referring to less desirable experience such as unmet jealousy, rage, selfishness, and shame. Usually, the shadowy underworld is seen as the dark repository for “negative” aspects of ourselves, i.e. our terror of intimacy, unacknowledged narcissism, and unmetabolized anger and deep sadness.

But it is not only negative aspects of self that we disavow, split off from, and project. Many of us have lost the capacity to access and embody more “positive” experiences such as contentment, pleasure, creativity, empathy, and connectedness. Even the very natural, organic life-giving capacity to rest in more unstructured states of being and play can come to be associated in the nervous system and psyche as unsafe.

Some of us have even disconnected from the simple experience of joy, a spontaneous sense of elation at being alive. I was once working with a man who was suffering from depression. What we discovered during our time together was how unsafe it was for him to express joy, how the experience of simple delight became tangled in his nervous system with danger and the likelihood of incredibly painful rupture with critical attachment figures in his life.

During our sessions, there were times we would become aware of this very simple, childlike, causeless joy coming to the surface as he was speaking about some experience he had, and how inevitably some (subtle) panic or anxiety would co-arise with the aliveness. He would then quickly disembody: change the subject, generate some sort of conflict between us, “leave” the room and go back into a prior conversation or nervously ask a question, or even just close his eyes and start to meditate.

After this happened a few times, we became curious about what was going on and were able to explore it together. Slowly and safely. With no judgment or shame. So that he had the experience of being felt and understood. Repairing those broken circuitries of love, empathy, presence, and warmth.

Being together in this, he was able access previously unconscious thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and bodily sensations, as well as early memories of how his father reacted to his joy and excitement, becoming aggressive and enraged, demanding that he “grow up” and stop acting like “a baby” and embarrassing the family. And how in response to that, his mother shut down and turned away from him to avoid the conflict.

He felt so lost, unseen, unheld, and un-allowed to be who and what he is, a man who longs to know joy and at times is presented with the opportunity to re-embody to the lost pathways of pleasure and elation deep in his psychic and somatic being.

He came to see how he had equated feeling full of life and natural states of delight, interest, play, and spontaneity with being judged and rejected. Over some time, he began to unwind this organization and was able to slowly re-awaken to this spectrum of experience and touch the natural joy he had disconnected from at an earlier time in his life.

While the term has a negative, darkened connotation and imagery, it is not only “negative” experience that we place in the shadow, but any material that has not found a home within the relational field.

To retrieve the lost joyous little boy and girl is an act of love, really, not only for one’s self but for all of life.

Photo by Tabitha Turner

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here. 

Learn more about my online community, Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times

Sitting with another in difficult times

At times, you may be asked to sit with another who has been touched by the darkness. To allow them to fall apart in your arms, unravel, be without hope, and feel lost. You may sense there is some sort of wisdom unfolding, but it is chaotic, uncertain, and not easy to stay with.

While it is natural to want to do whatever you can to help them feel better, listen carefully to what it is they are truly asking for. Extend to them a calm, regulated nervous system where their experience can be validated and held, exactly as it is. Ensure them – with words and with your presence – that they need not "get over it," "accept everything as it is," shift into a "higher vibration," "stay in the present," be cured, transformed, or "healed" in order for you to stay close.

To provide such an environment for another, you must first offer safe passage for the unmetabolized in yourself: the unmet sadness, abandoned shame, discarded grief, disavowed hopelessness, and deserted aloneness. If not, you may find yourself rushing to talk the other out of their experience, urgently spinning to relieve them of their feelings as a way to cut into your own anxiety and discomfort. All the while subtly and unconsciously disavowing the raging intelligence buried within the dark.

Together with them, make the commitment to not pathologize their experience. Pain is not pathology. Hopelessness is not pathology. Grief is not pathology. Shame and rage are not pathology. They are path. Seed this wisdom into the relational field and watch in awe as a new world unfolds.

As you attune to the "other" in front of you – as well as to the alchemical "other" within – feel the creative flow of love as it fills the space between, crafting you both as vessels of sanctuary for the pieces of the broken world, for the shards of confusion, and for the crumbled hopes and dreams that have dissolved in front of your eyes. Honor the holy truth that the forms that love take will always fall apart – for this is their nature – in order that they may come back together in more integrated and cohesive ways.

Within the aliveness of the relational field – despite the pain of the present, the traumas of the past, and the broken dreams of the future – you may see that it was only love after all, taking whatever form it must so that it may unfold itself into this world, in ways the mind may never understand.

Please do whatever you can to help others in whatever way you are able: attune to their emotional experience such that they feel felt, listen carefully to what they are saying, and how they are making meaning of their lives.

Slow way down, bracket your favorite psychological and spiritual jargon and theories, and allow yourself to be curious about how they are making sense of their experience. Feed them, hold them, speak kindly to them, provide sanctuary and safe passage for soul to disclose its mysteries. And remind them that love is here and is alive. 

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here. 

Learn more about my online community, Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times

Boundary and compassion

The path of opening the heart is not the same as becoming an unboundaried, leaky vessel for the unloading of another’s unlived life. It is to the degree that we are attuned to our own grief, sadness, shame, and rage that we will most skillfully navigate within the we-space of the relational field.

Most of us we were not trained in the art of embodied attunement as we live in an increasingly disembodied world, where the capacity to hold unfolding emotional experience was not encoded into a tender developing nervous system.

But despite early relational trauma, inconsistent empathic mirroring, and transgenerational narratives of dysregulation and insecurity, you can embody and practice this now. You can experience reunion with the disavowed inner other and play with him or her, weaving together emotion in the body, story and image in the mind, resting and exploring in unstructured states of being.

While appearing “compassionate” on the outside, being an emotional doormat involves the re-enacting of early, unconscious organization. We learned that devaluing ourselves was the most reliable route to get our needs met, fit in, receive attention and affection, and maintain a precarious tie to an unavailable attachment figure. This activity was not neurotic, but was lifesaving, creative, and intelligent from the perspective of a little one wired to connect.

But the inner passageways are luminous and ache for reorganization by way of the slower circuitries of empathy, curiosity, wonderment, and awe. Look carefully and see the ways you may habitually place others’ needs over your own – not out of true compassion for them, but as a re-enactment of early interactional fields of shame and unworthiness.

Inside, something is stirring, a longing being awakened to return home, for new circuitry to encode, for a new pathway to light up and come alive.

Slowly, one moment at a time. Safe. Connected. Open.

Raw. Tender. Sensitive. Embodied.

There is no urgency on the path of love.

Photo by Dave Hoefler

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here. 

Learn more about my online community, Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times

Voices of intergenerational trauma and trance

At times, the wisest, most skillful, and most compassionate action is to establish a boundary with another person. To stand up and assertively say No. To move in an empowered and swift way to protect our own integrity. To privilege our own autonomy and interiority. To meet narcissism, abuse, and neglect with a fiery, fierce, and direct response.

This is not only the case with “external” others – other people in our lives – but also with the multitude of “internal” others who surge out of the psychic underworld and take form as voices and figures of the interior landscape.

You might recognize them by their predictable refrain: “There is something wrong with you. You have failed. No one will ever love you unless you change and become someone different. You are not okay. You have fallen short. You have done life wrong. You are no good. You are uninteresting. You do not belong. Your sensitivities and eccentricities are not welcome here.”

These are the voices of the past, the shadow of a culture of materialism and greed, of the lineages of transgenerational trauma and trance. The voices of disembodiment, insensitivity, of a societal and global ego that has fallen out of communion with the natural world, the body, and the imaginal realms.

These internal visitors to an open, sensitive nervous system must also be met with the boundaries of discernment. To realize those moments when we fall out of the wisdom-presence of the here and now and into the time machine of the “there and then.”

To engage in dialogue with these figures and to proclaim our own basic goodness. To stand on the rooftops and declare that sensitivity is not pathology, that the shaky tenderness is not pathology… but path.

To not merely accept their conclusions, reality tunnels, and the lenses through which they have come to see things. But to cleanse perception with clear-seeing and the wildness of love.

To take the risk of telling a new story, dreaming a new dream, spinning out a new tale, weaving new cloth. And to allow ourselves to be turned by the great Weaver Herself… as new vision is revealed, as we become that vessel in which she can come alive here again.

Photo by Rene Bernal

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here. 

Learn more about my online community, Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times

On psychotherapy

I’ve been asked recently how I work with a person in therapy. Of course, each situation is unique and in large part a matter of (al)chemical interaction and our intersecting worlds of emotional, somatic, and imaginal experience.

If someone is struggling with trauma, drowning or flooded by unbearable feeling, we build resource in the nervous system, bottom-up by way of metabolizing sensation in the body, recognizing micro-moments of dysregulation and exploring ways of coming back into ventral. Safety and connection. I’m here with you. We will do this… together.

With borderline or narcissistic organization, we build structure in the sense of self, where there have been profound deficits and consistent empathic failure, a seemingly infinite number of relational ruptures with little or no repair.

In these situations, we would not lead with transpersonal work such as active imagination, shadow, or resting in open awareness, but first build the requisite safety or structure, and repair the pathways of relational misattunement.

For someone relatively regulated and more neurotically organized, we would explore the transpersonal bands, with an emphasis on uncovering and shifting one’s center of gravity into the embodied experience of open awareness… focusing not as much in establishing resource or emphasizing safety.

But underneath it all, it’s clear I know little about the soul, how it heals and unfolds. The person in front of me is vast and majestic and I can only stand in awe at the power and beauty of one human heart as it longs to return home. To attune to and be a companion within that level of mercy and grace.

In the end, in my experience, it’s not techniques that heal. It’s love that heals. Techniques are fine, but it is the relationship between two nervous systems and the love that infuses that which allows the techniques to come alive, if and when they do. Love first, techniques second.

The nature of what this love is must be discovered moment to moment as it emerges in that vessel where we dwell together and is the neural and spiritual scaffolding that opens a light into the darkness.

Photo by Adrian Campfield

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here. 

A safe home where the brokenness can reassemble

In speaking with a friend, I was reminded of the deeply embedded bias in our modern world to the solar, happy, and upward, where the lunar, earthy, and descending current is split and fragmented. 

When we meet with someone who is feeling melancholic, empty, or down, we can quickly become convinced that something is wrong, and that we must act urgently to fix them.

Before we know it, we’re scrambling to put them back together again as we impart our favorite spiritual techniques and processes, hurling at them our favorite metaphysical beliefs,” laws,” and “secrets.” All the while falling out of attunement to the holiness of the Other, to their own psychic integrity, and to the raging authenticity of their internal world.

Even as we wish them relief, we may be called into deeper territory. There may be a profound wisdom in the images and somatic data, important communication from the soul which is serving an initiatory function beyond what we can perceive. 

As we slow down, we might discover how much of our “fixing” activity arises not from true compassion but from an unresolved relationship with the darkness within… and from the ghosts of our own unlived life that spin in the relational field.

Perhaps the kindest thing we can offer our friend is to sit in the charged energy with them, empathically attuning to their immediate, embodied experience, and stay close… and remove the burden that they come out of their pain, feel better, transform, or heal in order for us to stay near. 

Perhaps they do not need to be healed in this moment, but to be held, to be heard, and to feel felt and understood, for someone to companion them as the hidden wisdom unfolds… a safe home where the shards of a broken world can reassemble.

As we turn to embrace our own unmet disappointment, grief, and despair, we remove the burden from others to tend to this material on our behalf, providing that safety which allows us to come closer to one another.

And then what is left is love, that mystery-substance which seeds the interactional field when two or more gather by way of empathic circuitry, bursting forth into the four directions.

Photo by Patrick Hendry

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here. 

How well did I love?

It is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come, that another opportunity will be given to bear witness to a sunset, take a walk in the forest, listen to the birds, or share a moment of connection with the one in front of us. But another part knows how fragile it truly is here, how tenuous, and the reality that this opening into life will not be here for much longer.

Before we realize it, we can so easily fall into the trance of postponement. The spell of tomorrow looms large in the personal and collective psyche.

At the end of this life – which is sure to come much sooner than we think – it is unlikely we'll be caught up in whether we accomplished all the tasks on our to-do lists, played it safe, healed all the wounds from our past, or wrapped up our self-improvement project.

Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?

One day we will no longer be able to look at, touch, or share a simple moment with those we love. When we turn to them, they will be gone. One moment will be our last to encounter the immensity of one more breath, experience awe at a color or fragrance or blooming of a violet, or to enter into union with the vastness of the sea.

It will be our last chance to see a universe in a drop of rain, to have a moment of communion with a friend, or weep as the light yields to the night sky.

One last moment to imagine, to feel an emotion, fall in love, or listen to a piece of music. To know heartbreak, joy, sorrow, and peace – to behold the outrageous mystery of what it truly means to be an open, sensitive human being. To know firsthand the preciousness and rare, unique opportunity to have a human body and nervous system.

What if today is that last day? Or tomorrow? Or later this week?

Knowing that death will come, how will we respond to the sacred and brief appearance of life?

Perhaps our “life's purpose” has nothing to do with what job we find, what new thing we will manifest or attract for ourselves, or what new belief system we take on. But to fully live, to touch each here and now moment with our presence and with the gift of our one, wild heart.

And do whatever we can to help others: to hold them when they are hurting, to attune carefully to the ways they are making sense of a world that has gone a bit mad; to meet them with empathy and kindness, and listen to what keeps them up at night and what brings them alive.

To speak kind words and not forget the erupting miracle of the other as it appears in front of us. To companion them and be an open, warm, spacious vessel through which love can come into this world.

Perhaps this is the most radical gift we can give.

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here. 

The friend is everywhere

No matter how things are going in your life, you can start right where you are. In any moment, slowly and safely, you can feel what you’re feeling and stay close to yourself.

It is through these micro-moments of slow, empathic attunement that new circuitry is encoded, where a growing sense of trust and confidence in the workability of your experience can emerge.

In a moment of activation – in the burning, claustrophobic, spinning world where the uninvited visitors have appeared – recognize what has happened, pause, and provide holding for the energy in the body to be contained, modulated, and gently integrated.

In a moment of overwhelm, it may not be safe in the narrative, which has fallen out of date by a few decades, no longer coherent in the here and now, but frozen in the time machine of the “there and then.” You can come back to the story and update it later with fresh vision, once the achy nervous system has been soothed.

In this pause, renew the vow you took long ago: I will not turn from myself and abandon my vulnerability. I will not bail out of my body. No, not this time. I will not desert myself. I will be a friend, a companion, and provide sanctuary and safe passage.

This time, I will not pathologize my emotional experience. Grief is not pathology. Nor is heartbreak, shakiness, uncertainty, or melancholy. They are the path. They are valid, workable, and harbingers of integration.

One second, then rest. Two seconds. Rest. Then three. More rest. As you send breath into the broken shards, a new groove is laid down.

Ask the earth to hold you, to share her soothing water, shade, and safe haven; and to stay near as you open. Find a friend, therapist, moon, star, or animal friend to bear witness as you turn into the raw alive somatic world. A being of the imaginal world, a family of wise owl guides, an attachment figure of light to unfold the resources within you.

The seen and unseen ones are always here to help us, to reveal the way home. In just one moment of pause, of remembrance, of sacred conversation, the veil parts.

Photo of Owl Tribe/ Pöllöjen Heimo by Krista Marleena 

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here. 

A visitor of the blue

There are times we wake in the morning and are greeted with an unexpected visitor. Perhaps blue in color, we feel her in our heart, his presence has seeded our body, saturated us with uncertainty, a sadness, a raw tender hesitation about who we are and what we are doing here.

In these moments, it is tempting to remedy the situation. Apply some teachings. Think positively. Manifest a new state. Remember all the reasons to be grateful. Replace the sadness with joy.

In this way, the visitor is abandoned and denied entry, turned from at the door and sent away. But she had never come to harm, he was never an obstacle to be overcome; only a non-ordinary companion, a fellow traveler and penetrating guide into the mystery.

Sadness is not something you need to fix, cure, or transform. It has come not to be healed, but to be held, to be allowed safe passage in order to reveal. It need not be shifted into some “higher” state or operated upon so that it will yield into something else. For it is complete and pure on its own.

There may be an important message in the core of the sadness – a unique blessing which is not able to be received in moments of peace and joy. A reminder of something that has been calling you home. A dispatch from the beloved that can only be decoded in the slow silence of aloneness.

When turned toward and entered, sadness reveals a portal through which we can connect with ourselves, with others, and with this world, a world that has forgotten something sacred about the wisdom of a broken heart.

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here.