Starting Soon: Matt's 2024 yearlong Spirituality & Healing group

Dear friends, 

My new 2024 (yearlong) Inner Work Group & Community will be getting started later this week on Thursday. We’ll meet live a few times each month, entering into a holding relational field, and explore together the mysteries of spirituality and healing.

>>Learn more about the group and community here

The vision for the group is to spend a year slowing down and attuning to the depths of who and what we are, listening to the wisdom of our bodies and emotions, opening to the imaginal, resting our nervous systems, and attuning to our essential nature.

We’ll explore an embodied, soulful, psychologically- and emotionally-grounded spirituality that includes not only meditative and transpersonal experience, but also the realities of our relational wounding.

And how the entirety of our unlived life, all of the unprocessed and unmetabolized somatic, emotional, neural, and imaginal material is a (required) doorway to the sacred.

And how the real power, mercy, and grace of this work is a felt-discovery that this material is not in the way of our healing and awakening, not obstacles to our path for us to enter into some imaginary battle with, but are the very path itself.

We can’t just accept this as yet another spiritual aphorism or wise sounding saying for us to believe in; it has to come alive in the very fiber of our being, in our muscles and cells, in our nervous systems and in our hearts, in our relationships, in our bellies and in our imagination.

Our live sessions will involve a practice of embodied attunement, to ourselves, one another, to our world, and also to the mystery itself, to the Ally, the Friend, and the Inner Guide, who we may discover is closer than we have ever thought.

Free live webinar with Matt next Thursday the 25th

I'll be presenting a free live webinar on January 25 at 9am PT/ 5pm in London, on "Turning the Light: The Mystery of Presence and Attuning to the Creative Unknown."

>> Register for the webinar at no cost here 

It’s so easy to lose contact with the experience of mystery and aliveness, where we’re spending time each day in play with reality, and in those nourishing organic embodied states of imagination, awe, wonder, and the joy of Being itself.

Things have gotten so speedy, shaky, and uncertain in the collective. It’s as if there’s a slow drip of cortisol or adrenaline coming out of the matrix and into our sensitive bodies and nervous systems.

It’s vital that we take time each day to slow down, to shift our awareness out of the collective trance and the urgency of the spin, and into the body, the heart, and the imaginal world, where we can truly listen to the Soul and the guidance it has for us.

During our time together, I’ll speak about:

-- Stepping out of the matrix of the collective and attuning to the wisdom of the body and the imagination

-- Creating an inner holding environment for ourselves and the scattered pieces of soul in times of transition, liminality, and stress

-- The mysterious link between relational trauma, a broken heart, and the sacred; the wounded healer and the path of initiation

-- Trusting in the soul and the ways it relentlessly and wildly pulls us toward wholeness, including by way of our sensitivities and “symptoms”

I look forward to spending some time with everyone on Thursday, January 25!

To learn more about Matt's upcoming 2024 Inner Work Group & Community, please visit the information page here. 

Matt's 2024 Spirituality and Healing group

My 2024 Inner Work Group & Community is now open for a limited time. 

>>Learn more about the group and community here

The vision and the intention for the group and community is to discover a healing relational field in which, together, we can move into the unknown and explore the mysteries of an embodied, emotionally-alive, imaginal, relational spirituality.

One that includes not only attunement to meditative and transpersonal experience, but also the depths of what it means to be an open, sensitive human being who has been touched by relational wounding, attachment and narcissistic injury, loss, and betrayal.

For the truth is that we've all been given experience in this life which has overwhelmed our capacity to process and metabolize it. As a result, it has come to be held in the body, in the imaginal field, and in subcortical circuitry, awaiting ripe (love) conditions when it can return in the holding of a new consciousness.

To paraphrase Jung, not only a path of imagining figures of light, but one of making the darkness conscious – to go into the body-vessel and to illuminate the pieces of soul and the lost orphans of psyche and soma, and to help them back home, as portals into Being.

In this way, we provide a sanctuary for the entirety of our unlived life and all of the unprocessed and unmetabolized somatic, emotional, neural, and imaginal material to come back into consciousness, into the body, where it can disclose its wisdom, creativity, and essence.

This path of illumination, holding, and making sense of our experience in a new way is an experiential process that must come alive in the very fiber of our being, in our muscles and cells, in our nervous systems and in our hearts, in our bellies and in our imagination. As we dream a new dream, and to be dreamed by the Great Dreamer (herself).

And, together, as relational beings, in a way that isn’t always possible on our own, to perceive and listen to the Self, the Guide, and the Ally, which can reveal itself within the interactive field, and to receive its wisdom and guidance.

From the side of the psychotherapeutic traditions, we will tend to the wounds around love; while from the meditative/ spiritual, to explore our essential being; and also open into the imaginal world, the province of soul, that in-between liminal area where a new kind of healing and self-realization may emerge.

Free live video meeting with Matt - Thursday, January 25

 

I'll be presenting a free live webinar on January 25 at 9am PT/ 5pm in London, on "Turning the Light: The Mystery of Presence and Attuning to the Creative Unknown."

>>Register here at no cost for Matt's upcoming free live webinar 

It’s so easy to lose contact with the experience of mystery and aliveness, where we’re spending time each day in play with reality, and in those nourishing organic embodied states of imagination, awe, wonder, and the joy of Being itself.

Things have gotten so speedy, shaky, and uncertain in the collective. It’s as if there’s a slow drip of cortisol or adrenaline coming out of the matrix and into our sensitive bodies and nervous systems.

It’s vital that we take time each day to slow down, to shift our awareness out of the collective trance and the urgency of the spin, and into the body, the heart, and the imaginal world, where we can truly listen to the Soul and the guidance it has for us.

During our time together, I’ll speak about:

• Stepping out of the matrix of the collective and attuning to the wisdom of the body and the imagination
• Creating an inner holding environment for ourselves and the scattered pieces of soul in times of transition, liminality, and stress
• The mysterious link between relational trauma, a broken heart, and the sacred; the wounded healer and the path of initiation
• Trusting in the soul and the ways it relentlessly and wildly pulls us toward wholeness, including by way of our sensitivities and “symptoms”

I look forward to spending some time with everyone on Thursday, January 25. 

Vulnerability, intimacy, and aliveness

It can take a lot of practice, mercy, and an unwavering love of the truth to explore the various strategies we employ to take ourselves out of feelings we don’t want to feel.
To encode new circuitry requires a real devotion – to soul, to the materials arising within the body-vessel, and to the alchemical experiment itself.

At times, it will seem as if we are inside the vessel, fused with the orphans of psyche and soma; at other times, as if we’re watching on the outside. At other times, as if self, soul-piece, and vessel are one.

For each of us, there are certain felt experiences that have come to be associated with unworkable anxiety, triggering a survival-level sort of panic. In response, pathways are put in place to get away from the underlying vulnerability and back to safe ground.

This was once a lifesaving response, an early attempt at self-compassion, and can be respected. In the dissociative split away from the tender, however, we cut ourselves off from the aliveness we so long for.

In a moment of emotional activation, when we notice we’re starting to fall down the rabbit hole, sensing the familiar claustrophobia, the voices are getting louder, we can use this as an invitation into the experiment. The doorway to the laboratory is opened.

In one moment of recognition, we can pause, slow down, feel our feet on the ground. Things are not always what they appear.

Slowly, one moment at a time, with the help of the breath and the Ally, we can return into our embodied vulnerability, find the one there who is longing for us, hold them, listen to them, and ask them to show us what it is they need.

In this, we cut into the habitual momentum and trance of self-abandonment. We begin to see that the intimacy and aliveness can only emerge in our willingness to touch the vulnerability and provide sanctuary for its embodied metabolization.

Vulnerability and aliveness are not-two, and co-emerge together, each a pathway into the other, interpenetrating and balancing each other in union.

Learn more about Matt's 2024 Inner Work Group & Community

Register for a free webinar with Matt on January 25 - Turning the Light 

Falling apart and coming back together

Allowing ourselves to fall apart, to deintegrate, to de-fold, and then come back together in more cohesive ways is the very essence of the alchemical unfolding of the soul.

Me and my life and who I’ve come to imagine myself to be… the death of an old dream, how it was all supposed to turn out: what a relationship is, what will bring me meaning, what the substance of this world is.

To participate in this cycle without pathologizing or prematurely transcending it is the activity of love. And will ache and burn as in the body and the heart, and can turn us to dust. But that dust is of the golden.

Death and rebirth are not two separate processes, but one, death-rebirth. They co-arise and co-interpenetrate.

The Divine, or the Beloved is not only present in states of union and oneness, but unfolds itself by way multiplicity and differentiation, incarnating its body in and as ours. It is the at the same time the alchemical vessel and the materials inside that vessel.

Form is equally as holy as the formless. It is in that union that the mystery reveals.

Inevitably, ruptures will occur within the relational field, in that tender intersection between ourselves and another, and between the shadow and light parts within us. These ruptures are natural, creative, and carriers of quantum-potential wholeness.

The invitation is into the aliveness of paradox and contradiction, into intimacy without fusion, not unconscious merging into some homogenized leaky middle.

Embodiment to the cycle of rupture and repair, and containing it in the heart, is what allows the relationship (to Self, Other, and Divine) to unfold, deepen, and disclose its secret essence.

Learn more about Matt's 2024 Inner Work Group & Community

Register for a free webinar with Matt on January 25 - Turning the Light 

Into the mandala of the wounded healer

The wounded healer isn’t only a myth to learn about, but a living reality inside you, with its own images, feelings, fragrance, and modes of vision. It is more like a mandala or inner atmosphere that you can enter into.

Or perhaps more accurately, it will at times find you so that it might draw you nearer to itself, through your dreams, unexpected moods, a color, a friend who irritates you, or through unexplainable symptoms in your body. Just as you may be longing for the Beloved, he or she (or it or they) are also looking for you, and will do whatever it takes to find you.

Within the center of the mandala, to speak mythologically, we find Chiron and his merry band of travelers, as well as each and every person who has been initiated into the mysteries by way of the sacred wound.

Perhaps the fact that you are reading this post may indicate that you are somehow part of that lineage, the stream coming down by way of the Asklepian dream temples of ancient Greece, where wayfarers and travelers would go to receive vision.

But this isn’t only an anthropological or historical matter. Chiron and the dream-vision incubation temples are alive inside you right now, infusing your muscles and cells, hidden in the chambers of your heart, and wired into the strands of your DNA.

We might open our imagination and discover that these mythological figures are not trapped back in ancient Greece, but are alive in the collective fields which play out in our personal lives through our relationships, creative work, spiritual practice, and health challenges.

Because the energetic imprints of the wounded healer are alive in the collective, we can be in relationship with these figures, their qualities, and ways of perception that they represent.

Through our practice and prayer and silence and being in nature and in the chaos of relationship and work, we can enter experientially into the center of the mandala, or interior garden. In this sense, the wounded healer is an actual “place” that exists in the landscape of the soul, that we can find our way to in the imaginal world.

You might start to sense or hear it, feel or see it, or know it is there in some unexplainable way.

You won’t be able to “find” this place within your physical anatomy or with a high-powered microscope, but you may very well find it in the anatomy of the soul.

Register for Matt's free live webinar on January 25

Matt Licata's new 2024 Inner Work Group & Community

Dear friend,

I wanted to let you know that the new 2024 online Inner Work Group & Community is now open for enrollment for a limited time. We'll be getting started officially on Thursday, February 1.

You can learn more about the group and sign up here:

>>Learn more about Matt's new 2024 online Inner Work Group & Community

We'll meet live three times each month to explore the nature of an embodied, soulful, trauma-sensitive approach to spiritual transformation and healing, integrating the fields of depth and somatic psychotherapies with the wisdom and experiential discoveries of the yogis, mystics, and alchemists.

It is not necessary to attend live in order to participate fully in the teachings, meditations, and holding of the relational field itself. Many are not able to attend live due to other commitments.

To stay up to date on details regarding the group, please be sure to sign up for my mailing list.

I hope to see you inside the course soon.

Warmly,

Matt

P.S. If you're already a member of the group, please stay tuned for details on how to continue (or unsubscribe), or write to the team at support@mattlicataphd.com. You do not need to re-register via this new link.