Dear friend,
I’ve been receiving some questions about whether it’s still possible to join the new 2023 Spirituality & Healing online group and community that started on February 2.
We have decided to re-open enrollment up until the start of the first live session in March (Thursday, March 2nd). At that time, the community will remain closed for the remainder of the year, so that the group can go through the course together in a cohesive, grounded, supportive way.
Enrolling now, you’ll be able to catch up on what you missed in February and review the videos, meditations, and teachings for the month, and join us for our live sessions in March.
While there will be a lot of space and holding of whatever it is the group is guided to explore, there are some basic themes that will be foundational in the journey we’ll be making together. These themes will rotate organically as we come into the relational field together and attune to what it is that wants and needs to emerge to be illuminated, held, and transformed.
The vision for the training is to help support you in whatever way I can to deepen your own path of transformation and healing, sharing with you my personal and clinical experience over the last 30 years in the fields of depth and somatic psychology; relational neuroscience and trauma studies; and the experiential discoveries of the alchemical and meditation traditions.
You can learn more about the course below:
>>Learn more about Matt Licata’s Spirituality & Healing Immersion Group here
Here is a sample of some of the rotating themes we’ll explore together as a community. We’ll meet live three times each month for teachings, meditations, guided practices, and interaction, where I’ll respond to questions about this path of embodied transformation, psychological integration, and a spirituality of the heart.
- Psychotherapy, Meditation, and the Creation of an Internal Holding Environment
- Initiation and the Journey of the Wounded Healer in the Contemporary World
- Trauma and the Sacred: Exploring the Link Between Spirituality and Our Wounding
- Slowing Down and the Importance of a Daily Attunement and Compassion Practice
- Relationship as Path: the Interactional Field and How Relationships Serve as the Healing Temple for the Modern Practitioner
- Encoding New Circuitry, Neuroplasticity, and the Capacity of the Nervous System to Rewire
- Ending the Trance of Self-Abandonment and Taking Care of Yourself in a New Way
- The Importance of Shadow Work and Listening to the Unconscious
- The Essential Role of Psychological Work on the Spiritual Path: the Union of Sun and Moon
- Your Alchemical Toolkit and the Various Types of Inner Work: Safety, Uncovering, Imaginal, Existential, and Transpersonal
- The Embodied Practice of Integration: Accessing, Verbalizing, and Making Sense of Your Experience
- Neural Integration, Attuning to Feeling, and the Wisdom of Your Body
- Past Wounding (Narcissistic/ Attachment), Historic Core Vulnerabilities, and Working in the Here and Now
- The Transformative Potential Within the “Blue Shades” of the Spectrum: Grief, Melancholy, and Heartbreak as Guides of the Soul
- Discovering a Yoga of Your Own: Individuation and the Uniqueness of the Spiritual Life
- Creating a Temple for the Lost Orphans and Children of Psyche and Soma: Integral Inner Child Work
This is only a sample of the territory we’ll be covering, which will also unfold organically as we begin to create and attune to the holding environment which presents itself as the weeks go by.
Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through the questioning and reorganization of patterns of thinking. In other words, we can’t think our way out of trauma, attachment, and narcissistic injury.
When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, and shame is overwhelmed, unmetabolized pieces of soul are held subcortically and in our cellular circuitry, unreachable by thinking which is a layer removed from the fires of the alchemical body.
Encouragement to “just get over it, it’s just your ego, just let it be, it isn’t who you really are” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as the activity of empathic failure, aggression, and psychic violence.
It’s like a neural form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of relational wounding and implicit memory, and only contributes to the intergenerational transmission of trauma.
In addition to shattering and unendurable experience – which is painful and terrifying enough – there is a profound sense of aloneness that goes with this, the disorganizing reality of the missing Friend, and no accompaniment into the dark night. “I am alone in this.”
This is devastating to the soul.
When the lost orphans of psyche and soma come surging to be held, they’re not all that interested in our crystal-clear analysis, detached witnessing and fantasies of “mastery,” or powerful spiritual insights.
They’re longing for something else… for you, for your heart, for your holding. To know that you will stay near, that you will not abandon or shame them, that you will do your best to provide sanctuary and safe passage for them to come Home, to be helped out of that frozen, crystallized state and to live once again.
Photo by Lisa Runnels
Even if our primary interest is in spiritual transformation, we can’t separate out our unresolved relational trauma, attachment wounding, and narcissistic injury we may have experienced. There just isn’t a bright line separating these things. They intertwine in the body and mind and weave in and out of the cells of our nervous systems and hearts.
There isn’t something called spirituality over here, and then over there something called psychological and emotional healing.
I’m sure many of you have heard the saying that goes something like, “We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.” And of course, it has that wise-sounding ring to it. But from a more alchemical point of view, or a perspective from the fields of wholeness, it’s pretty dualistic.
A more alchemical approach would be to simultaneously contain both of those statements and the contradictory energies they embody, hold the tension of those opposites and through facilitating a dialogue and relationship between them, allow a new, third thing to emerge which includes the truth of each.
The union of spirit and matter, solar and lunar, oneness and multiplicity, transcendent and descendent currents - each equally holy as an emanation of the Beloved into the world of time and space. Each an equally sacred and valid arrow in her quiver.
If we attend only to that part of us which is Pure Spirit or Pure Awareness, what inevitably happens is that aspects of our embodied humanity, pieces of soul, and the lost ones of psyche and soma are located into the shadow. From there, they color our perception, become evoked in others, enacted in the relational field, and somatized in the body as a variety of unwanted symptoms.
It can feel cleaner and clearer to stay in Spirit, to be sure, as if we’ve risen above the mess of it all and are in some untouchable and invulnerable state. We can use our present-moment awareness practices to come closer to ourselves and our unresolved wounding, or we can use these same beliefs and practices as a way to dissociate and split off from our embodied vulnerability, unfelt feelings, and undigested psychological material - all in the name of “being in the now.”
Because these lenses of perception are unconscious, meaning they’re operating outside of our conscious knowing, we aren’t able to see how they are affecting us. Instead, we just assume we’re perceiving reality “directly,” “as it is,” in some pure and unadulterated form. We stay in the present moment, but that present moment is alive with the ancestors and the ghosts of our unlived lives, the reality of implicit memory networks, and the entirety of our unmetabolized trauma and attachment wounding.
We stay lodged into the matrix of intergenerational trauma and trance, but aren’t aware of it.
If we fail to include in our inquiry the entirety of what we are – the shadow, the sore and hurt places, the betrayals, the unfelt grief, the disavowed rage, and a relationship with the orphans of psyche and soma - we won’t be able to live here fully, in a way that guided by wisdom and compassion.
If we don’t tend to the wounds around love there will always be a dis-integration within us, which will manifest as a dissociative split from our True Nature. And we won’t be able to access that natural joy, aliveness, openness, and warmth that are the qualities of that nature, the capacity to play, to create, and to fully be here, in a way that is deeply meaningful and beneficial, for ourselves and for others.
Dear friend,
Just a quick reminder that my new 2023 Spirituality & Healing group will be starting on Thursday with our first live session if you’d like to join us.
→ Click here to join our group or learn more
I’ve created this community in response to an inner call that I’ve felt as well as many requests that I’ve received over the years to spend a year together where we can commit to our healing and spiritual path in a new and deeper way.
Over the last 30 years (including many years in meditation and my own therapy), I’ve come to see how supportive, loving, and wise it can be to bring together the very essence of psychotherapeutic healing, working with early trauma, the wisdom of the body and nervous system, along with spiritual and meditative realization, in the creation of a path of embodied spirituality.
I know there is a real longing that many of us feel to commit to our inner lives in a deeper way and to step into the mystery of this life, to fully participate in the reality of the sacred world that we sense is very near, yet often can seem out of reach. It is my sincere intention that this group and training offer a powerful, merciful, wise, and effective holding environment in which we can engage the mysteries of the heart together.
I look forward to making this journey with you.
Gratefully,
Matt
P.S. Please reach out to support@mattlicataphd.com if you have any questions about the new group.
