Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Stay right here


At times, our reference points will fall away, revealing a shimmering, pregnant, endarkened void. What we were so clear about just days ago is nowhere to be found. The relationship we thought would be there forever, the creativity in our work, inspiration in our spiritual lives, our deepest insights and realizations – recycled in the activity of the vast.

The solid ground we once took refuge in has disintegrated underneath us, sending us into unknown territory. We were so sure we were beyond breaking yet again, but the activity of love is not oriented in the maintenance of the status quo. It is the nature of all form to dissolve, by way of the alchemical yellowing, so that new forms may emerge.

It can seem that we are falling apart, but were we ever together to begin with? Is that even the right lens from which to approach the mystery? Or were we always something more majestic than all that, so whole that even “brokenness” can be held inside?

The invitation as always is to slow way down. Breathe deeply from your lower belly. Feel your feet in the mud of the earth. Allow her to hold you.

For just this moment, set aside the need to understand, to figure it all out, or to replace this moment with another. Today may not be the day for answers, but to let your heart break open to the vastness of the question.

Look up into the new winter sky.

Something is longing to emerge, in you, as you, as the poetry of your life and as the gifts you will share with others. Lay your hands on your heart. Listen. Receive.

There are blues coming into existence that have never made their way into this dimension. Oranges, reds, yellows, and not-yet-known colors that have been sent to remind you of the rarity and outrageousness of one human heart.

Stay right here.

Don’t move from this moment. Open your senses. Step into the mystery. See through the veil. Everything that has ever happened and everyone you have ever met, has led up to right here and right now.

Trust in the fires of disintegration and renewal, and in the sacred timeline that is written within you.


Photo by Mitch Kesler


My upcoming online course on Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety, starting March 1st, 20202 - Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times


Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed:


Sunday, February 21, 2021

Free webinar with Matt Licata on Tuesday


Dear friends, 

I'll be offering a free webinar this Tuesday, February 23rd at 11am PT/ 7pm in London. 


When you register you'll also receive instant access to a free mini eBook on the same topic. 

The webinar will also serve as an introduction to my new online course which starts in March - Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety.

As part of the webinar and eBook, I'll speak about:
  • The importance of resting the nervous system, especially in times of transition, uncertainty, and stress
  • How the experience of trauma is wired in to being an open, sensitive human being on the planet at this time
  • How any integral approach to our spiritual lives must include awareness of and sensitivity to trauma and relational wounding
  • How the felt sense of safety is the foundation for psychological growth, emotional healing, and spiritual transformation
  • The essential role of the body in healing, especially in times of overwhelm and stress
  • How the path of direct revelation unfolds by way of the human body.
I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday if you're able to make it live. If you register, you'll receive a link to watch a replay of the video as well, and also the free mini eBook. 

Please take care of yourselves. 

Warmly,
Matt



Wednesday, February 17, 2021

The temple of relationship


In any close relationship (where we take the risk of allowing another to matter) we open ourselves to the two primary archetypal energies of abandonment and fusion. At a 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 a living template of past relational experiences – will I be safe? Can I be fully as I am? What about all of my eccentricities, sensitivities, and essence-vulnerabilities? Will I need to become different in order to be held and known? 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 these ruptures are natural, organic, and quantum, and portals of wholeness and integration.

A healthy relationship is not one in which there is never any conflict, but one in which rupture is repaired. Through our shared, holy resonance circuitry and by way of right-brain attunement, we honor our connectedness as well as our own autonomy and integrity which, too, is sacred. The invitation is into the aliveness of paradox and contradiction, not unconscious merging into some homogenized leaky middle.

Embodiment to the cycle of rupture and repair is what allows the relationship to unfold, deepen, and disclose its secret essence.

Each of us arrives in the emerging we-space with biographical, cultural, and archetypal patterning, schemas, and implicit worlds of meaning and imagination. These intertwine to weave the interactional field, along with the companionship, play, and shepherding of the mysterious Other, the third who also appears.

Through co-illumination, co-articulation, and making sense of our experience together the templates reveal their transparency and become ripe for revisioning. But in the core of that ripening it is tender and sensitive, and will ask everything of us.

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


Photo by Valiphotos


My upcoming online course on Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety, starting March 1st, 20202 - Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times


Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed:


Saturday, February 13, 2021

Matt Licata's new online course - Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma Sensitive Spirituality


Dear friend, 

I want to let you know that registration is now open for my new online course, which begins with our first live session on Thursday, March 4th.

>>Learn more about Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety

The course will take place over four months and include 12 live sessions, on the first, second, and fourth Thursdays of each month, at 11am PT/ 7pm in London. It is not required that you attend live and you'll receive a video replay, audio MP3s, and a written transcript shortly after each session.

As part of the course, I'll be sharing the teachings, practices, and perspectives that I offer in my writing and in my clinical work, which explore the role of the body and the nervous system in transformation and healing, and the nature of an embodied, contemporary, trauma-sensitive approach to spirituality.

Some of the topics we're likely to cover include:

  • The importance of resting the nervous system, especially in uncertain and transitional times
  • How any integral approach to our spiritual lives must include awareness of and sensitivity to trauma and relational wounding
  • How the felt sense of safety is the foundation for psychological growth, emotional healing, and spiritual transformation
  • The essential role of the body in healing, especially in times of overwhelm and stress
  • A not-too-technical, experiential understanding of the nervous system and its role in healing
  • A fresh look at what trauma is and how it is more common than we might think
  • The relationship between trauma and feeling unsafe, and how “safety” is the ultimate medicine for trauma
  • Trauma, the nervous system, and the workings of implicit, bodily memory
  • How and why we cannot “think” our way out of trauma and other types of relational wounding
  • The meaning of integration and how trauma is a dis-integrating experience and the need for experiential process in healing the emotional brain
  • Neuroplasticity, new experience, and the encoding of new neural circuitry
  • The role of the “other” in healing - self-regulation and regulating with another
  • Neural integration and the importance of linking together the layers of our experience
  • The unconscious investment we may have in not healing and honoring the realities and implications of what true healing will always ask of us
  • Establishing a list of specific, individualized practices and exercises you can engage in the moment when you notice yourself falling out of your window of tolerance
  • The role of contemplative practices such as mindfulness, breathing, and yoga - and discerning when they are being used in healthy vs. less-than-healthy ways
  • How meditation and practices oriented in “open awareness” are not always the most wise, skillful, or kind approach to working with trauma and other relational wounding
  • The importance of having even one “safe other” in our lives, including the accessing of this “other” by way of imagination
  • How spiritual beliefs and practices can overwhelm our nervous systems and can also serve as unconscious pathways of self-abandonment and avoidance
You can learn a lot more about the course and how to register via the course homepage here

I hope to see you online starting in March and look forward to making this journey with you into the spring, into a time of rejuvenation and renewal.

Warmly,

Matt



Thursday, February 11, 2021

Into the blue shades


It's okay to be sad, to feel a bit shaky and uncertain, melancholic, to lament, and to grieve.

Despite a collective disembodiment to the blue shades of the spectrum, these states are not evidence that something is wrong with you, that you have failed, that you need to meditate more or pray harder. Or that you need to become better at staying in the present moment, manifest the opposite of sadness, or transcend it by way of some process.

It is high-voltage evidence that you are alive, with a tender beating heart, subtle and perceptive mirror neurons, and senses that are open to the full-spectrum, chaotic glory of being a human being who is alive at this time.

Just in this one moment, be sad. Fully. Not partially. Go inside the sadness. Find the sad one there. Speak with her, listen to him, feel what she is feeling, see what he is seeing. Turn your body into a vessel, a temple where the lost orphans of psyche and soma can come to share their art, and rest.

Get close to the sad one, but not so close that you become flooded. Intimacy without fusion. Relationship without merging, honoring your own integrity, interiority, and perspective. Offer sanctuary and safe passage for the shattered pieces to unfold, illuminate, and reorganize.

Sadness and melancholy are not things you need to fix, cure, or transcend. They are arising at this moment not to be healed, but to be held. You need not shift sadness into some “higher” state or apply teachings so that it will yield into something else. For it is complete and pure on its own, as a unique messenger of the personal, cultural, and archetypal soul.

With the fire of awareness and the ally of your breath, descend into your belly, travel inside your heart, open a portal into your throat, your imagination, and the life force which is reverberating within you. Tend to the raw, shaky life that is longing to be held. And listen.

It is by way of this journey that sadness will be revealed to be what it is, a secret wisdom-guide and bridge into the universal heart, a messenger of power, mercy, and fierce compassion that wants you as its midwife.


Photo by Ricco Stange


My upcoming online course on Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety, starting March 1st, 20202 - Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times


Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed:


Friday, February 5, 2021

Trust in the wisdom of your process


On a conscious level of course we very genuinely want to heal and fully step into a life of deep intimacy, creativity, and aliveness. This authentic human longing is precious and can be honored and held close.

It’s also wise and compassionate to realize that we may simultaneously have an unconscious investment in not healing, which is adaptive and intelligent, because we know the implications of doing so are world-shattering.

On a very deep level we sense that things will never be the same, that to truly heal we will be left with no familiar lens through which to imagine ourselves, others, and the world. While something about this is exhilarating and exciting, it is also profoundly disorienting.

In the context of early relational experiences, we learned how to fit in, survive, and stay out of unworkable bodily states of fear, pain, loss, and grief. Our perceptual, somatic, and autonomic lenses helped us to stay safe.

As these lenses are removed or recalibrated, we lose the protective and adaptive functions they provided, and we may find ourselves in a very direct, unfiltered relationship with life. As if our heart was no longer inside our rib cage but fully exposed on the outside, raw and tenderized.

We may wonder why we’re “not healing fast enough” or in a way that conforms with others’ paths or with the fantasies of a culture that is addicted to positivity at all costs. Rather than attributing this to our own weakness, failure, or inherent badness, we might remember, with mercy, that our adaptive ways have been put in place with incredible creativity and intelligence, to keep us safe and alive; that they are, in their own ways, manifestations of an outrageous sort of grace.

And in those moments where you feel that familiar self-attack, shame, self-aggression, and critical self-judgment boiling to the surface, to slow down and bring a bit of loving, spacious kindness to yourself. Trust in the wisdom of your process.

And to realize what true healing requires: the unraveling and rebirth of a new world… including the middle liminal period which, too, is essential and holy, and is crafted of a timeline written in the stars.


Photo by Petra Boekhoff


My upcoming online course on Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety, starting March 1st, 20202 - Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times


Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed:


Tuesday, February 2, 2021

The friend appears


Just because we “have” an experience does not mean it is “integrated” and metabolized. Just as the belly can experience leaky gut, undigested emotional and somatic experience can leak from embodied awareness making it difficult to assimilate its essential nutrients.

At times, we will have the internal resources (enzymes of spaciousness and safety) to digest intense experience, while at other times we need the presence of another. This presence does not involve more insight or advice, but right-brain immersion in embodied we-space where we feel felt and understood.

When an experience is “integrated,” it becomes part of a cohesive, retrievable narrative and memory – a whole neural net of bodily sensations and impulses, smells, sounds, thoughts, emotions, and images, all wired up together in a coherent way. We are then able to make use of the experience to support resilience, aliveness, creativity, intimacy, and play, with others and with the phenomenal world.

If the enzymes are not present, the experience is stored outside awareness, limbically and in the body, where it remains available for re-presentation, re-imagination, and re-organization.

Colloquially we refer to this re-presentation as a “trigger,” which is a bit aggressive, however that is often the way it feels. Jung speaks of a complex being “constellated,” which evokes imagery of space and the stars.

In these moments, the little one appears, peeking their head around the corner, longing, “How about now?” “Am I safe to come yet?” “I’m not here to harm you, I just want to return home. I’m tired, scared, and so alone.”

It can be so difficult in the moment to hold that little one that is enraged, anxious, or frightened, to provide just a moment of that true nourishment they have been aching for, for so long. The enzyme of holding, of love, in which they can rest in safety from an exhausting journey.

The shakiness in the belly, constriction in the throat, that deep sense of annihilatory panic... yet somehow the resources, the help, the ally, the friend appears. It may seem that we are alone, but things are not always as they appear.


Photo by Lisa Runnels


My upcoming online course on Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety, starting March 1st, 20202Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times


Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed: