Matt Licata's online course starting on Thursday

Even though it may seem as if we are alone – and in part we must walk the path by ourselves – we are never truly alone, as unseen helpers, friends, and companions are always nearby. We can help one another in so many ways and it is in this spirit that I have put together the upcoming online course - Alchemical Healing and Accessing the Wisdom of the Sacred Wound: A 7-Week Deep Dive into a Psychotherapy of the Soul.

>>Learn more about the Alchemical Healing and Accessing the Wisdom of the Sacred Wound online course

Over seven weeks, we’ll make a journey together into the heart of an embodied spirituality, the alchemical imagination, and a psychotherapy of the soul. Starting this Thursday, we’ll meet within a healing relational field and immerse ourselves in the teachings and practices which are such an essential part of my writing and clinical work. 

It’s not easy to do transformative inner work on our own as the path can become blurry, hazy, and even a bit lonely. Anytime we open to the shadow, the lunar, and to our own unlived lives, it can be helpful to have others to kindle a lamp in the darkness. For it is within these more dimly lit dimensions of the spectrum of the heart that a luminosity appears, what the alchemists refer to as the scintilla, or the sparks of light.

In gathering together over these seven weeks, we’ll participate consciously in the power and transformative nature of the relational field to support us to cleanse our perception, open our hearts, and remember what’s most important.

>>Learn more about the Alchemical Healing and Accessing the Wisdom of the Sacred Wound online course here

The live sessions will last around 90 minutes and include experiential exercises, talks and presentations of the course curriculum, sharing personal experience, and live interaction where you can ask questions.

It is not necessary to attend live in order to fully participate. Many are unable due to other commitments. After each session, you’ll receive a link to access all of the video, audio, and written material, and work through the course at a pace that is right for you. 

I’d love to have you join me as we move into the renewal of Spring where together we can create and participate in a safe, warm, yet provocative and creative interactional field, and explore some of the mysteries of the healing journey together. 

Into a temple of wholeness

When we meet with someone who is feeling melancholic, empty, restless, or down, we can quickly become convinced that something is wrong, and that our role is to act urgently to fix them. And to engage in techniques, theories, and ideas to help them replace the actuality of their experience with what we believe they should be having instead.

It’s totally natural to want relief for those we care about and we want to do whatever we can to help; we don’t need to pretend this isn’t the case. We can hold that larger intention that they feel better, while simultaneously staying open to a call emerging in the field between us into deeper territory.

Perhaps it is something more subtle, more nuanced, more beautiful than relief that they are most longing for. For the Friend, for a companion who will go with them into the dimly lit, endarkened landscape of the soul.

From an alchemical perspective, there is wisdom and guidance in the images, emotions, and somatic data arising into the relational field between you, vital communication from the soul serving an initiatory function beyond what we can perceive. We don’t want to short-circuit that, especially as a result of our own anxiety and discomfort.

If we slow down and reflect, we might discover how much of our “fixing” activity, the movement toward relief, arises not from true compassion but from an unresolved relationship with our own darkness, with our own historic core vulnerabilities and untended complexes, and from the spinning and twirling of the ghosts of our own unlived lives.

It is possible that the most skillful and kind thing we can offer our friend is to sit in the charged energy with them, bearing witness to pure feeling together, in that claustrophobic or restless space, and stay near; to remove the burden that they come out of their experience, “feel better,” or heal in order for us to stay close.

Perhaps they don’t need to be healed, but to be held, to be heard, and to feel felt and understood, for someone to companion them as the hidden wisdom unfolds.

Where, together, we weave a safe home, a sanctuary, a wholeness-temple where the shards of a broken world can reassemble.

Photo by Jackson David

Access free videos and learn about Matt's self-guided online courses 

Matt's new live online course - Alchemical Healing and Accessing the Wisdom of the Sacred Wound

My new (live) online course - Alchemical Healing and Accessing the Wisdom of the Sacred Wound - will begin on Thursday, March 3rd. Over the course of 7 Thursdays, we'll dive deep into many of the topics that are important to me and my writing, as well as to my clinical work as a psychotherapist. 

>>Learn more about the Alchemical Healing online course here

While I'd love to have you join us live, it is not required as many have other commitments. You can fully participate in the course at your own pace and will receive access to all video, audio, and written course materials shortly after each session. The live sessions will take place on Thursdays at 11am US Pacific time and last around 90 minutes. 

What does it mean to live a meaningful, soulful life in these uncertain times?

Is it possible to step outside the matrix of intergenerational and cultural trance and discover a new sense of aliveness, creativity, and purpose?

The path of transformation is going to be wildly unique for each of us. While we can benefit from the wisdom left behind by the mapmakers, we must make the journey ourselves.

The spiritual and healing paths not spectator sports and we can’t stand on the sidelines and participate from a distance. Something a lot more intimate, creative, and even more alchemical is being asked of us right now.

The discovery of meaning, which is at the very core of the human experience, isn’t preordained or given to us by our families, cultures, or religions, but must be unearthed in the depths of our hearts and vessels of our bodies. 

At times, this soul-mining requires that we go against the status quo and forge a new way. It can feel shaky, uncertain, and tender, and it can be helpful to connect with friends and fellow travelers along the way. 

It is in this spirit of companionship that I'll be offering this new live online course, Alchemical Healing and Accessing the Wisdom of the Sacred Wound: A Deep Dive into a Psychotherapy of the Soul.

During our time together, we’ll explore perspectives from diverse approaches such as depth and somatic psychologies, the meditative traditions, relational neuroscience, and the alchemical imagination, stepping into the teachings and practices that form the heart of my own life and clinical practice.

Even though we’re scattered throughout the planet, in my experience it is possible to come together within a healing relational field and connect deeply with one another, with ourselves, with the heart, and enter into communion as we move out of the winter and into the spring. Out of the darkness and into the light.

The soul is always calling out to us, but often in ways that are hidden to our ordinary perception. It is my hope that our time together will help us connect more deeply with the Inner Guide, the Inner Companion and Friend who is always nearby, shape shifting and taking unexpected forms to call us Home, into a soulful life of deeper purpose, meaning, and aliveness.

I’d love to have you join me, and one another, as we make this journey together.

Hope to see you online soon. 

Free webinar with Matt Licata on Thursday

A reminder that I'll be offering a free webinar on “The Alchemy of the Heart” this Thursday, February 24 at 11am Pacific time/ 7pm in London.

>>Register at no cost for The Alchemy of the Heart webinar with Matt Licata

During the webinar, we’ll likely do some meditation together and I’ll share my experience about the nature of healing through the varied lenses of depth and somatic psychologies, relational neuroscience, meditative awareness, and the alchemical imagination. 

Each of these doorways offer a series of perspectives and practices through which we can come to know more deeply who we are as open, sensitive, relational human beings, with bodies and feelings that can sometimes shatter and hurt. 

But it’s in the core of this shattering, inside the shards of the heart and fragmented pieces of the soul that the mysteries of healing are to be found. It is inside the wound that the tincture is flowing. 

The ancient alchemists - our friends on the journey - referred to the illumination arising out of the darkness as the scintilla, or the sparks of light. 

Healing may never look quite like we expected or imagined - it’s just too wild and mysterious for all that. It requires that we question the status quo of the culture and shift our perception outside the intergenerational matrices of collectivity and trance. 

I look forward to seeing you on the 24th at 11am PT/ 7pm in London. You can sign up at no cost here.

The union of sun and moon

Often, our paths of transformation and healing are dominated by solar metaphors and images - those of growth, moving upward, rising above, and transcending the messier, more chaotic, more unknowable dimensions of our human experience.

But an alchemical perspective, while not denying that organic movement of the spirit, includes and at times privileges the lunar current - the descending, earthy, soulful return to the mud and the ground.

The alchemical imagination honors this movement out of the clouds and the high mountaintops of crystal clarity, and downward into the valleys, gardens, and richness of the rotting logs and green moss.

It’s not as clear or known here, but is vital and pregnant with color, fragrance, and essence. It’s rich and multi-layered and contradictory. And utterly unresolvable.

If what we’re interested in is the felt experience of wholeness, where we’re able to touch and breathe and move within the entirety of what it means to be an open, sensitive, embodied human being, it’s essential to include both solar and lunar dimensions of the spectrum of consciousness in our practices and in our lives.

That wholeness includes not only a solar, heroic movement upward into spirit, ascending and transcending, but also a lunar, endarkened, rich, subtle, nuanced movement downward into soul, into dream, fantasy, imagination, and creativity… into the soil and mud and the womb of the earth.

Photo by Stergo/ Игорь Левченко

Access free videos and learn about Matt's self-guided online courses 

Free live webinar with Matt Licata - Thursday, Feb. 24

I’ll be offering a free webinar on “The Alchemy of the Heart” next Thursday, February 24 at 11am Pacific time/ 7pm in London.

>>Register at no cost for The Alchemy of the Heart webinar with Matt Licata

During the webinar, we’ll likely do some meditation together and I’ll share my experience about the nature of healing through the varied lenses of depth and somatic psychologies, relational neuroscience, meditative awareness, and the alchemical imagination. 

Each of these doorways offer a series of perspectives and practices through which we can come to know more deeply who we are as open, sensitive, relational human beings, with bodies and feelings that can sometimes shatter and hurt. 

But it’s in the core of this shattering, inside the shards of the heart and fragmented pieces of the soul that the mysteries of healing are to be found. It is inside the wound that the tincture is flowing. 

The ancient alchemists - our friends on the journey - referred to the illumination arising out of the darkness as the scintilla, or the sparks of light. 

Healing may never look quite like we expected or imagined - it’s just too wild and mysterious for all that. It requires that we question the status quo of the culture and shift our perception outside the intergenerational matrices of collectivity and trance. 

I look forward to seeing you on the 24th at 11am PT/ 7pm in London. You can sign up at no cost here.

The return of the Friend

In moments of unbearable feeling - absent the internal resources or relational support to process that arousal - pieces of emotion and image are stored outside conscious awareness in our bodies and nervous systems, where they remain available for metabolization at a later time.

There’s a lot of wisdom in locating this material outside awareness so it’s not continually pouring into our experience. Despite how intelligent and adaptive this process is, however, the unintegrated material is subject to being reactivated in a future moment.

Early in our lives, we don’t have the developmental capacity to integrate unendurable emotional, psychic, and somatic material. Prior to the ages of 4 or 5, we’re not able to repress that which is potentially fragmenting and have no choice but to experience it directly.

So healing then requires that we go into that yet-to-be-processed emotion and bodily arousal, by way of the neural network that is holding that material, and infuse it with those qualities that weren’t available at the time it was stored there - empathy, warmth, companionship, and holding.

Where, instead of disintegration, there is re-integration. Instead of dissociation, there is re-association. A relinking of mind and body where they were once (understandably) split.

The most essential of these qualities to bring into the network, the required neural scaffolding we might say, is the felt sense of safety. Safety is the treatment.

So we have these two core components of trauma and any deep relational wounding: emotional and somatic experience that’s overwhelming, on the one hand, and then the felt sense of aloneness on the other.

Not only do we have the emergence of unbearable and unendurable images, feelings, and sensations, but at some very basic level we’re alone with all that. There’s no experience of companionship, the Friend is absent and non-locatable.

It’s the return of the Friend that we long for. The nature of who and what this “Friend” is must be discovered in the fire of our own direct experience.

Photo by Sarah Richter

Access free videos and learn about Matt's self-guided online courses 

An arrow in the quiver of the beloved

Even if our primary interest is in spiritual transformation, we cannot separate out our unresolved relational trauma, attachment wounding, and the narcissistic injury we may have experienced.

What I’ve discovered in my own life (the hard way) and also in my clinical practice with a lot of dedicated spiritual practitioners is that if we fail to tend to our own wounding and trauma, it will inevitably leak out, and color any realization that we might have.

Unprocessed somatic and emotional material has a way of creating a perceptual sieve through which we come to imagine ourselves, others, and the world; and also how we imagine and relate with nature and with the Divine.

There is no bright line separating our verbal, emotional, somatic, and autonomic narratives; they weave together and interpenetrate one another in strands of dark and light. Each, we might say, an equal arrow in the quiver of the Beloved as he or she or it or they seem to come into the world of form, of time and space.

No matter how deep and profound our realizations have been, they will be filtered through whatever unmetabolized trauma that remains in the vessel of the body.

The invitation is to enter into that vessel with curiosity, with a fidelity, even a devotion to the full-spectrum unfolding of this human form, to care deeply about all of it, and to allow that devotion and care to flow out into the neural circuitry of the world.

Photo by Ingo Jakubke

Access free videos and learn about Matt's self-guided online courses