Into the Thanksgiving field

On this new Thanksgiving Day, it is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come – that another opportunity will be given to witness a sunrise, spend a moment with someone we love, or be astonished at the crystals in the newly fallen snow.

But another part knows it is so fragile here, precarious, shaky, outrageously precious and at times so shattering, that this opening into life will not be here for much longer. One moment, we will turn toward it, and it will be gone.

May we give thanks on this new day by no longer postponing our time here, not waiting any longer, not forgetting.

By remembering what's most important and what truly matters. By doing whatever we can to help others, using our words wisely and with kindness, listening to others so that they feel felt and understood, holding them in moments when they need a lamp in the darkness.

At the end of this life, it is unlikely we'll be caught up in whether we accomplished all the tasks on our to-do lists, manifested all the things we fantasized we wanted, played it safe, or completed some endless self-improvement project.

At that moment, there may be only one question that remains: how well did I love?

Did I pause each day to slow down and truly behold the beauty of this place? Was I willing to take a risk, feel more, allow this life and others to truly matter to me, and experience what is already here, what has already been given? To fully participate in that overflow.

The sound of the birds, the sunset, an emotion all the way through, to truly experience a color, a tree, the sky, the miracle of this human body and heart, and the wild, undomesticated chaos and glory of the whole thing.

Ending the trance of postponement and dissolving the dream that there is some breath, some beauty, some love coming tomorrow. Tomorrow is a dream that may not arrive. Love is now.

The bounty and harvest of thanksgiving is upon us, waiting to be seen, felt, tasted, and heard, in the trees and the snow, in the imagination and in the heart.

In the very center of our holy mirror neurons as they light up when we attune to one another and bear witness to their subjectivity, to how they’re making sense of this crazy world, what keeps them awake at night, what is truly meaningful to them, what scares them and brings their heart alive.

To peer behind the veil for just a moment and into the background majesty of the sacred world, as it unfolds itself, as the Beloved pours herself out of herself, weaving the world of form, of time and space.

Needing us, these bodies and these hearts, as an increasingly translucent vessel in which she can finally come alive here, in the incarnational journey from pure Spirit into wild manifestation.

I hope I make it all the way through this Thanksgiving Day, but if for some reason I do not, this would have been enough. I have been given so much more than enough.

Matt's Summer 2025 in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster)

Matt's YouTube page

Summer in-person retreat with Matt Licata and Jeff Foster

Dear friends, 

I'm happy to announce my first in-person retreat since 2019, with my friend Jeff Foster, June 3-8, at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado.

Tickets for A Sanctuary of the Heart will go on sale on January 1st.

>>Learn more about the retreat here  

I’m looking forward to being together with everyone - seems like it’s been so long

The heart is quivering, but alive

The contradictory feelings of hope and hopelessness, connection and collapse, anxiety and rest. The shakiness in the belly. The tightness in the throat. The shattering emptiness inside the heart. Glimpses of true joy that in the next moment are gone.

All the techniques, teachings, and advice; the new beliefs to take on, the worn-out ideas about how to respond, how to make sense of the senseless, how to find relief. These are all dissolved, and only a burning remains.

This burning is the doorway, the portal, and the lifeline. In ways the mind can’t always understand, there is refuge in the burning, in the core of the broken pieces.

It can feel as if we’re inside the bardo between one moment and the next. We know that we can’t go back to the way it was, but what’s next has yet to appear. It’s being heated and cooked in the vessel. There is creativity in the liminal, but it requires a relinquishing of the known for it to be revealed.

We are asked to marinate in the womb of now, tend to the groundlessness, and find refuge in the unknown: to be midwife to the darkened illumination. To shepherd the wandering orphans of psyche and soma.

There are signs, symbols, synchronicities, and guidance all around and inside us, but our perception must be cleansed to receive that high-voltage communication.

As we bear witness to a new day, the breath is here. The heart is quivering, but alive. The birdsong, the trees, the vast blue sky. The miracle of the senses. The sun has come up again. The moon is hiding nearby waiting for her turn to bless. For just one moment, the veil parts and we are provided with a glimpse behind the scenes.

Perhaps today was never going to be the day when we figured it all out, resolved all the contradictions, or integrated the wild undomesticated activity of love. We can’t integrate love, but we can bear witness as it integrates us.

Today may not be the day for answers, but to let your heart break open to the vastness of the question. To fall to the ground as a humble lover of the mystery. And listen once again.

Photo: attuning to the heart beat, Lappohja Beach

Learn more about my new 2025 Spirituality and Healing online group and community

A Sanctuary of the Heart: live, in-person retreat with me and Jeff Foster - June 3-8, 2025 in Loveland, Colorado - stay tuned for more information 

Revealing an open door

We’ve all been given experience in this life that we haven’t been able to process consciously. For whatever reason, it was just too much. Overflow in the vessel.

To turn toward it directly was a portal into overwhelm, shut down, collapse, and fragmentation. It was intelligent to protect a sensitive psyche and nervous system.

Emotional experience that is unable to be felt, articulated, made sense of, and integrated becomes sequestered into underground storage, into neural networks and shadow regions, held in our bellies, hearts, and throats; frozen and crystallized into our muscles, organs, and cell tissue.

From here, it colors our perception and capacity to imagine and play in reality.

Unlived, undigested psychic material becomes personified as the figures who come to visit us during the dream time as well as our dayworld fantasies. Not to harm or take us down. Not as an obstacle to our path, but as an emissary of the path itself. A representative of a future wholeness; an ally of integration, though in an unrecognized, sometimes wrathful form.

There are moments in my therapy practice when I’ll be sitting with someone who is really struggling. But there’s a way that they can’t actually feel what’s happening, they can’t contact the felt quality of the open wound. It’s just not safe enough. And by this “someone,” I of course include myself.

There is no healing without the wound being open first, weeping and seeping its essence, for a closed wound cannot receive the tincture. In a way that the mind has a difficult time understanding, inside the wound the medicine is already active.

In the very center of the physical and subtle tears, the lost orphans of psyche and soma reside, awaiting the nectar that will unfreeze and de-crystallize them, and reveal an open door.

It’s possible to slow down now, lay on the Earth, go into the forest, into inner and outer nature and unveil a portal to these ones, and communicate our intention, desire, care, and devotion to know and hold them, and to help them find their way home.

This isn’t something we do only for ourselves, but for all of life: including the ancestors and the ones who have yet to arrive here, circling until conditions are ripe.

Art credit: The Path is Everywhere by Krista Marlena

Learn more about my new 2025 Spirituality and Healing online group and community

A Sanctuary of the Heart: live, in-person retreat with me and Jeff Foster - June 3-8, 2025 in Loveland, Colorado - stay tuned for more information 

In times when the center is lost

There are times in our lives when the rug gets pulled out from underneath us - the death of an old dream and how it was all supposed to turn out. What was once so clear becomes incinerated and taken to dust.

The center is lost.

The (very human) tendency is to get out of the death aspect of the archetypal cycle, and as quickly as possible into rebirth. This is so understandable; it hurts to turn toward the dying element.

But there is wisdom, mercy, and grace within the dying itself that we short-circuit if we leave prematurely, before the grief, rage, and despair have been tended. There is a shepherding, a midwifing that is needed, a holding environment for aching and burning to be embodied and known.

Death is always an invitation into a grieving process, where we’re asked to gather the shattered pieces and place them on an altar in front of us. To assemble the broken shards into a special container and enter with them into a portal of mourning.

It’s an act of kindness to slow down, turn off the electronics, unplug for just a bit, touch the earth and ask her (and other seen and unseen ones) for help; and take the time and space and devotion to feel what we’re feeling so that it can be digested and metabolized.

Otherwise, the shattered orphans are sequestered into underground storage, held in the somatic unconscious and nervous system, in our muscles and cell tissue, in a frozen, half-processed, unassimilated form.

From there, they burn, cry, rage, erupt, longing to return home.

If we move too quickly past our grief and onto the next thing, we run the risk of abandoning the grieving one, the heartbroken one, and the enraged one to wander alone in an empty forest. They freeze there, crystallize, and contract in the time machine that is the very essence of relational trauma and wounding. And they reach out to us from inside that soul-place, from that frozen state, in whatever way they can, which we all know at times can be in highly dysregulated, anxious, and panicky ways; for that is the only way they know.

These ones, the longing orphans of psyche and soma, are not obstacles to the path, but are the very path itself. The invitation is to offer ourselves permission, by way of a dispensation deep in the body, cultivating a well-sealed vessel or sanctuary in which the broken pieces can go through the alchemical cycle.

And, in this, we can ask the heart if what it truly wants at this time is to be mended, or if its deepest longing is for something else, cracks in its armor where a certain light can come in and illuminate the broken pieces.

The darker light of the rays of the black sun can only flow when the tears are flowing, when the wound is open and seeping, weeping with its essence.

This grief, heartbreak, shattering, isn’t in need of healing, as it’s not un-whole. It’s perfectly valid and pure on its own, as it is, as a radiant manifestation of a Whole Heart. It’s not waiting to be mended or put back together, but to finally be allowed to share its gifts, its fragrances, its mercy, in new and creative ways.

To speak kindness, to embody compassion, to remember what’s most important to us, and to love this world in ways that haven’t been possible until now.

At some point along the way, we may discover that the inner process of restructuring and falling apart isn’t the expression of some cosmic error or mistake, but of a certain kind of grace.

It’s not easy to embrace this, to see the dissolution, putrefaction, and the alchemical yellowing as the activity of intelligence, of the infinite creativity of Spirit as it unfolds and incarnates itself through matter, body, mind, and soul.

Of course, we prefer our initiatory experiences to come by way of the soft, gentle, and nurturing activity of the Divine Mother, which we can honor and be grateful for when they arise in that way.

In ways the conscious mind isn’t always able to understand, we can also be held by the darkness. There’s a benevolence in the not-knowing and in the disassembling itself. It’s a more wrathful, reorganizing, wild, untamed form of grace, but grace nonetheless.

This level of mercy doesn’t have the maintenance of the status quo as its aim or keeping alive the fantasy that we’re in control of the process of healing and awakening. The fantasy of control is turned to dust.

It’s a grace that is unbounded, undomesticated, and operating outside our own hopes and fears. It’s not part of the intergenerational matrix of trauma and trance, and is never going to conform to how we thought it was all supposed to turn out.

Its role is to cleanse our perception and polish our hearts, which it does with the substance of love.

It can ache and burn as we tend to the unwanted, marginalized, and orphaned aspects of our embodied vulnerability, and to illuminate, liberate, and release the crystallized pieces of soul who have wandered off course and are longing to return home.

The wandering ones – who take up residence deep in the somatic unconscious – are also held, at times, in underground storage, in the shadow, along with the guides of the underworld - Persephone, Hermes, Sophia, and the others, whose role it is to guide us through liminal and transitional times, through the in-between places and into the luminous heart.

P.S. We will be reopening the yearlong spirituality and healing group and community in February 2025. You can learn more and place your name on the waitlist here. 

Also, please look out for updates here or via my social media pages regarding a live, in-person retreat in Loveland, Colorado in June 2025.