Saturday, April 12, 2025

Free online gathering with Matt Licata - April 23rd - When the Center is Lost


FREE ONLINE GATHERING WITH MATT LICATA

WHEN THE CENTER IS LOST: NAVIGATING THE HEALING CYCLE IN TIMES OF HEARTBREAK, UNCERTAINTY, AND GRIEF

Dear friends, I'll be having a free online gathering on Wednesday, April 23, at 9am US Pacific Time/ 5pm in London - When the Center is Lost: Navigating the Healing Cycle in Times of Heartbreak, Uncertainty, and Grief.

You can register here at no cost here - https://mattlicataphd.com/when-the-center-is-lost/.

It’s no secret we’re living in times of profound transition and uncertainty. There’s a lot of restlessness, stress, and groundlessness in the collective, which as open, sensitive relational beings has a way of becoming mirrored within our own bodies, hearts, and souls. It’s a lot to hold.

The path of the heart is not only one of transcendence – ascending and rising above – but also one of descent: into underworld, earth, and shadow, and into relationship with the figures who we find there. Companions on the night sea journey.

These pieces of psyche and soma – personal, collective, cosmic – have something to share with us, that longs to be incarnated, indwelled, and embodied in this time, an element of the mystery that has been forgotten in a world that has (understandably) grown weary.

The lunar way isn’t as clear as its heroic or solar counterpart. It is unclothed: of fixed concept, a precise map, and knowing how it’s all going to turn out. It has a way not of confirming but of dismantling the (spiritual) persona. That disassembling has a way of burning, aching, and also of tenderizing us, at times to our very core.

Inside the temple are the holy images of our broken dreams, disappointments, hopes, and fears – the entirety of our unlived life; the grief of the ancestors, the lamentation of the earth, and the sensitivities of the soma. Along with lost joy, wonder, beauty, and awe.

Here, in the center, the wound is weeping; it is opened and no longer covered over. This is what allows the tincture to enter. In this we may discover that perhaps the heart’s deepest longing isn’t so much to be mended, but permitted to disclose its essence, which reveals a doorway into compassion, aliveness, tenderness, grace.

During our time together, we’ll explore:

- The unique (but difficult) opportunity for soulwork in times of liminality and transition
- How the deep longing in our hearts and aching in our bodies are potential doorways of entry into the Self
- The importance of spending time each day resting the nervous system and attuning to the feeling body
- How it’s not possible to always feel grounded and regulated – and why that’s okay
- A short practice we can do each day to attune to the Center

I look forward to spending some time with everyone on the 23rd



Monday, April 7, 2025

Return to the Center


You might imagine yourself in the very center of a circle, enclosed within a sacred space, an inner courtyard, with all of the aspects of your life circumambulating around the center, pointing inward.

And in the very center with you, you may find a guide or an inner ally, or just a sense of centering, in the Heart.

Deepening into the felt sense of this center, and how this inner guidance, the Self, is always, already here – and always communicating, disclosing – as an ordering principle within you, pointing toward wholeness.

This inner center was never and could never be tainted by anything that has happened to you - relational trauma, emotional wounding, unrepaired attachment circuitries, betrayals in soul; none of that is able to truly affect your essential Nature, which is primordially pure.

It is possible, with attention and devotion, to familiarize ourselves with this centering function, where we live with the Self as an inner partner, who is always here, as our true Spiritual Director, the conductor of the orchestra of the soul.

You can turn to this inner Friend and Guide in times when you feel out of center. And in dialogue and relationship with this One, you may see that even those unwanted, confusing, uncomfortable emotions, are somehow attempts at self-healing, self-realization, guiding you back into that centering, and into a natural wholeness and completion.

This is the reality and invitation into the mandala of the wounded healer, a dynamic and emerging archetypal experience that is alive in somatic, psychic, and collective networks.

A natural ordering within the soul, where each emotion, feeling, sensation, dream image, and piece of psyche, has a purposive quality to it, where each aspect of our lives are circulating around and pointing towards the center.

A peering behind the veil and into the mandala principle.



Monday, March 31, 2025

Turning toward them - and holding them in love


At times, pieces of soul will become frozen or crystallized, and fall out of reach, only to call out to us, through strange feelings or moods, images and dreams, and through a variety of what we often refer to as “symptoms.”

These lost orphans of psyche and soma are personifications of our “unlived lives,” aspects of experience which we’ve lost contact with: unfelt grief, unmetabolized sadness, abandoned joy, disavowed anger and shame, dissociated states of connection and Unity.

Recontacting the unlived life, and the figures who carry these experiences on our behalf, is the activity of mercy, compassion, and intelligence, a vital process on the path of embodied healing, individuation, and spiritual renewal.

Whether due to unresolved trauma, stress, environmental or social factors, disorganization in attachment, or effects of a narcissistic or borderline early holding environment, these ones become sequestered into underground storage, into the shadow and somatic unconscious.

From here, they live and move and breathe, spin and twirl, in their longing to return home.

Especially in uncertain, transitional, and other in-between periods of time, it’s easy to lose contact with the figures who inhabit these more subtle regions of the spectrum of consciousness.

As a result of this splitting, dissociation, and rupture in relationship, we can feel tired, weighed down, depleted, and exhausted, not only physically, but at a deeper soul level.

Turning away from the unlived within us – personally, culturally, collectively, ancestrally – is something we all do as a way to protect ourselves, from fragmentation, a survival-level anxiety, and an annihilatory sense of panic. This is not neurotic, “unevolved,” or “unspiritual,” but intelligent and adaptive, early forms of self-compassion.

It was the best way we knew to take care of ourselves and keep us out of an immediate, overwhelming, unbearable, naked confrontation with our historic core vulnerabilities and sensitivities, all of which have a way of surging in times of uncertainty and transition.

Recontacting the achy, burning, longing, shaky, tender pieces of soul – turning toward them and holding them in love – is one of the essence-alchemies of our time.

Sunday, March 23, 2025

A vessel for love to find its way here...


It can be an act of love (and revolution) to take a few moments each day to pause and interrupt the density of the collective right now, the trance-loops of disembodiment, and the pull up into sympathetic arousal, restlessness, and stress.

It can seem as if there were a slow descent of cortisol or adrenaline dripping down into organ, muscle, and cell tissue; into throat, heart, belly, and into the air and soil around us. Infusing the space around and inside.

It’s seductive out there, and so easy to find ourselves on autopilot, tangled in spirals of repetitive, unfresh thinking, disconnected from our senses, our bodies, and especially from what we’re feeling.

But the unlived life, the untended grief, the unmetabolized shame, fear, apathy, wild joy, and rage – and the figures carrying these experiences – are circling and longing for a home in which they can be held, and from which they can share their voice, body, and mercy-essence.

There is a spin in the collective matrix that requires our presence, our care, fidelity, and devotion to move behind the veil, even if for just a moment. To call forth the wisdom-guides to help us to see, and to feel.

What is emerging now, in my body, belly, heart, and throat; in the imaginal field; what is it that is alive in the somatic unconscious that is needed at this time?

What am I experiencing right now, in my body and in my vision, without any interpretation or commentary; without referring back to what I already know and what this world is telling me? Just for a moment. It will all be there waiting for us when we return.

Just a few moments of raw immediate, embodied knowing, right-brain attunement, image, feeling, sensation, senses open.

Even if a few times a day we can return into the crystalline, transparent vessel, perhaps love can find its way through into this world, with us as its vehicle. To find some sort of open portal though which it can incarnate into a world that so needs it right now.



Sunday, March 16, 2025

When the Center is Lost (special Blood Moon eclipse edition)


When the Center is Lost: Navigating the Healing Cycle in Times of Heartbreak, Uncertainty, and Grief (special Blood Moon eclipse edition)

The path of the heart is not only one of transcendence – ascending and rising above – but also one of descent: into underworld, earth, and shadow, and into relationship with the figures who we find there. Companions on the night sea journey.

These pieces of psyche and soma – personal, collective, cosmic - have something to share with us, that longs to be incarnated, indwelled, and embodied in this time, an element of the mystery that has been forgotten in a world that has (understandably) grown weary.

The lunar way isn’t as clear as its heroic or solar counterpart. It is unclothed: of fixed concept, a precise map, and knowing how it’s all going to turn out. It has a way not of confirming but of dismantling the (spiritual) persona. That disassembling has a way of burning, aching, and also of tenderizing us, at times to our very core.

Inside the temple are the holy images of our broken dreams, disappointments, hopes, and fears – the entirety of our unlived life; the grief of the ancestors, the lamentation of the earth, and the sensitivities of the soma. Along with lost joy, wonder, beauty, and awe.

Here, in the center, the wound is weeping; it is opened and no longer covered over. This is what allows the tincture to enter. In this we may discover that perhaps the heart’s deepest longing isn’t so much to be mended, but permitted to disclose its essence, which reveals a doorway into compassion, aliveness, tenderness, grace.

I'll be presenting on this material in a free live Zoom call next month. Details to come. You can always join my mailing list to receive new writings, videos and information about live and online gatherings. 


Image by Stefan Schweihofer

Friday, March 7, 2025

A broken heart is not unwhole


I hope you’re doing okay in the midst of all the transition and uncertainty out there. Of course, all of the arousal in the collective - all the chaos and well as the glory, the moments of openness and spaciousness, and those of grief, rage, and deep sadness - all of this is mirrored in the depths of our own bodies, psyches, and souls. It’s a lot to hold.

The path of the heart is not only one of transcendence – ascending and rising above – but also one of descent: into underworld, earth, and shadow, and into relationship with the figures who we find there. Companions on the night sea journey.

These pieces of psyche and soma – personal, collective, cosmic - have something to share with us, that longs to be incarnated, indwelled, and embodied in this time, an element of the mystery that has been forgotten in a world that has (understandably) grown weary.

The lunar way isn’t as clear as its heroic or solar counterpart. It is unclothed: of fixed concept, a precise map, and knowing how it’s all going to turn out. It has a way not of confirming but of dismantling the (spiritual) persona. That disassembling has a way of burning, aching, and also of tenderizing us, at times to our very core.

Even our most profound realizations of the “ultimate” and “absolute” can be taken to pieces, collected in a holy vase, and placed on an altar in front of us.

Inside the temple are the holy images of our broken dreams, disappointments, hopes, and fears – the entirety of our unlived life; the grief of the ancestors, the lamentation of the earth, and the sensitivities of the soma. Along with lost joy, wonder, beauty, and awe.

Here, in the center, the wound is weeping; it is opened and no longer covered over. This is what allows the tincture to enter. In this we may discover that perhaps the heart’s deepest longing isn’t so much to be mended, but permitted to disclose its essence, which reveals a doorway into compassion, aliveness, tenderness, grace.

A broken heart is not unwhole.





Wednesday, February 12, 2025

The fragility of it all


I was noticing there’s a bit more light now than there was just last week. The darkness is yielding to the light, just as the stars do at dawn.

This time of year, there’s often a reddish-purplish glow in the mountains at sunrise, but it only lasts a few moments. If I take too long heating up the tea, I’ll turn back, and it will be gone. I wonder if it was ever really there, that color, that glory.

It’s a reminder of how fragile it is here; how tenuous, fleeting, this opening into life. We go to make the tea and it’s gone. We turn to the world, a tree, or the deer – or to someone we love – and they’re no longer there. One day it will all be gone.

Remembering this has a way of making things more vivid and precious, a moment of wonder and awe at the opportunity that has been given here, knowing that we and everyone we know will be called away a lot sooner than we might hope.

Even in the midst of the chaos and uncertainty, of things falling apart inside and all around us, in each particle of the glistening snow, tucked away in each cry of longing in the bird outside my window, an invitation into communion. The Beloved unfolding Itself out of Itself and aching to be known.

It can seem so far away at times, as if the great vision is hidden behind a veil. But where could it go, really? Taking the time each day to slow down, to take a break from the collective trance, and listen again; feel, sense, touch, attune.

To bear witness as the veil is parted - and to step through - is the activity of love.

To somehow be crafted as a more and more transparent, translucent vessel in which love can find safe passage here is something we do not only for ourselves, but for all of life in these times; so that we can be there for others in ways beyond what we already know.

Friday, February 7, 2025

Relational wounding and a sensitive alchemy


Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through questioning and reorganizing patterns of thinking. We can’t think our way out of trauma. A more tactile, sensual, sensitive alchemy is required.

When our capacity to process psychic states of terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, unmetabolized material (pieces of soul) are relocated into underground storage (shadow) and held in subcortical and bodily circuitry – in our muscles, cell tissue, belly, throat, heart, breath.

From here, the disowned ones long to come out of their crystallized state and return home.

Encouragement to “just get over it, you can’t really believe that; you know that’s not true, come back to the present moment, that’s ‘just’ your story,” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as profoundly misattuned, aggressive, even violent.

In response, the orphans retreat deeper into the subtle body. Of course they do. This is the activity of intelligence.

This “advice” – even if well-intentioned – is experienced as an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of traumatic organization and the workings of implicit memory.

In addition to the terrifying and shattering emotional pain is a profound sense of aloneness. No one can understand; no companionship into the dark night.

As relational beings, this core experience of aloneness is equated with death, especially in the heart and fragile psyche of a little one.

That one is here now.

Though it may appear they are a remnant of the past, from time to time they move through the veil and appear. Not as an obstacle on the path, but as a radiant manifestation of the path itself.

Monday, February 3, 2025

Matt's online Inner Work Group & Community


Dear friends, 

The new 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community is now open for enrollment, for the next few days; we'll be getting started with our first live session on Thursday, February 6.

We'll meet a few times each month to explore a contemporary, embodied path of spirituality and healing, which integrates teachings and practices from the fields of depth and somatic psychotherapies, developmental psychology and trauma studies, relational and contemplative neuroscience, and the wisdom of the meditative and spiritual traditions.

Weekly live sessions, guided mediations and psychological inquiry, shadow and emotional integration, and conversation/ dialogue, as we spend the entire year together (re)committing to our own healing and spiritual opening.


If after reviewing the information page for the group you have any questions, please reach out to us at support@mattlicataphd.com. 

I hope to see some of you inside the community soon. 

Warmly,

Matt




Thursday, January 30, 2025

Summer retreat with Matt & Jeff Foster - early registration ends tomorrow


A Sanctuary of the Heart: A 5-Day Retreat to Calm Your Nervous System and Rest in the Mystery of Presence


My summer retreat – along with my dear friend Jeff Foster – will take place from June 3-8 in Loveland, Colorado. Early registration ends tomorrow, Friday, January 31. It will be nice to be together in person again, after a long hiatus.

>>Learn more/ register for the retreat here 

Single rooms are sold out, but there are double, triple, dorm, and camping options left (maybe not too many doubles as of today).

Looking forward to seeing many of you in June!



Learn more about Matt's 2025 Spirituality & Healing online group and community - enrollment open for another week 




Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Now Open: Matt Licata's 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community


Dear friends, 

The new 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community is now open for enrollment, for the next two weeks; we'll be getting started with our first live session on Thursday, February 6.

We'll meet a few times each month to explore a contemporary, embodied path of spirituality and healing, which integrates teachings and practices from the fields of depth and somatic psychotherapies, developmental psychology and trauma studies, relational and contemplative neuroscience, and the wisdom of the meditative and spiritual traditions.

Weekly live sessions, guided mediations and psychological inquiry, shadow and emotional integration, and conversation/ dialogue, as we spend the entire year together (re)committing to our own healing and spiritual opening.


Also, I'll be having two free live webinars coming up, on January 28 and then on February 1. The first will be a public webinar on Listening to Your Soul: Finding Wholeness in Times of Groundlessness and Uncertainty. 

In Saturday's webinar, February 1, I'll speak and take questions about the new 2025 group. By signing up for Listening to the Soul, you'll also receive the link to join us on February 1. 


I look forward to spending some time with everyone next week... 

Take care,
Matt




Saturday, January 18, 2025

Upcoming free live webinars with Matt Licata


FREE LIVE WEBINAR WITH MATT - TUESDAY, JANUARY 28 


Dear friends, I’ll be presenting two free live webinars later this month and into early February.

You can register at no cost for both of the webinars here:

>>Register at no cost for the upcoming free webinars with Matt Licata

Tuesday, January 28

Listening to Your Soul: Finding Wholeness in Times of Groundlessness and Uncertainty

Saturday, February 1

In Saturday's live gathering, I’ll be speaking about my new 2025 online group and community and responding to questions about the journey we’ll be making together starting on February 6. Registration is open for the group for a limited time here

I don’t think it’s any surprise that we’re living in what we might call liminal times; things are shaky and uncertain, and there’s a felt sense that we’re “in between” one thing and another.

The deep instability and groundlessness in the world has a way of being mirrored in our own psyche and soma: in our muscles and cell tissue, hearts, and nervous systems; and affecting our capacity to feel and to imagine. To dream a new dream.

Making time and space in our lives to establish an inner home – or holding environment – for the scattered pieces of soul to emerge and be metabolized is one of the essential tasks on any embodied, emotionally-grounded, somatically-sensitive path of transformation and healing.

Taking time each day to interrupt the trance of the collective, the pull into a survival-level restlessness, return into our bodies, and provide an inner temple in which we can feel, where that which has remained unlived can come into embodied reality and disclose its wisdom.

The soul has its own language, fragrance, and ways of expressing itself that aren’t always apparent in the busyness and stress of our daily lives. It communicates to us in a language that is unique to each of us, by way of image, emotion, feeling, and synchronicity. And especially through our relationships, and what we call “the relational field,” between us and another.

As we learn to “meet the soul halfway” as an inner partner and friend, it may surprise us to discover how close it truly is, working behind the scenes to draw us nearer to Itself, and into its world.

In this, we might come to see even our most “ordinary” or even difficult experiences as portals to the soul, invitations into wholeness, and into a life of deep creativity, meaning, and aliveness.

This listening is something you can learn to do, slowly, one micro moment at a time, a certain type of devotion and fidelity to your own inner guidance system, providing a doorway in transitional and liminal times to the depths of who and what you are.

During Tuesday's webinar, we’ll explore:
  • How times of groundlessness and uncertainty offer a unique opportunity to reconnect with the heart and the mystery of life
  • The importance of taking time each day to return to the feeling-body, and rest our nervous systems
  • Reconnecting with the Inner Friend and Ally and the unique ways it communicates with us
  • How the spiritual and healing path is ultimately an invitation into deep receptivity and the gifts of not-knowing
In addition to Listening to the Soul webinar on Tuesday, January 28, I will also host a gathering on Saturday, February 1, at 9am US Pacific Time/ 5pm in London where I'll speak about and take questions regarding the new 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community.

Upon registering for the Listening to Your Soul webinar here, you will automatically receive the link for Saturday's webinar and conversation. Everyone is welcome to attend.




Friday, January 10, 2025

Held, not healed


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 meaningful 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.



Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Relationship as path


In close relationships there may always be ruptures which arise in the field of lovers and friends. When we take the risk of allowing another to matter to us, a call is sent out to the lost orphans, an invitation to return home.

Relationship has an uncanny ability to illuminate aspects of ourselves we have lost touch with –emissaries of our unlived lives. As wisdom-guides, they reveal images, memories, feelings, and potentialities of being abandoned by the Other; or of being overwhelmed and unconsciously fused with them.

It's understandable that we feel shaky and hesitant about the whole thing. Is it going to be worth it? To lay naked before the Other in this way.

This “Other” is not only other people we meet but takes form as an “inner other” as well, who also longs to be known, held, and to be a part of the love story of our lives.

The link between the inner and outer other is of the mystery. We may notice that we attract and are attracted to those who manifest qualities that we’ve disowned in ourselves, pieces of soul who are longing to find us.

Shards of unlived joy, unmetabolized rage, repressed grief. The barely remembered peace, the dissociated sadness, the forgotten beauty.

At times, taking up residence in our organs and muscles, cell tissue, and patterns of breathing; or as figures in our dreams. They never give up. Even presenting at times as the ones who irritate us the most.

The invitation of the beloved, in whatever form it emerges, is to step fully into the crucible of relationship where we no longer limit the mystery of love’s expression, resisting the temptation to have the fires of love conform to our requirements.

And to open to the reality that the purpose of relationship is not always to provide feelings of safety, certainty, connection, and validation. But, at times, something much more vast and creative.

As we reunite with these ones and allow them safe passage, we remove the burden from the outer other to take care of this sacred work for us, which was never theirs alone to carry. They are then able to return this task to us, as the ultimate act of love, as they stand by our side while we tend to it.

It may then be safe enough for us to come closer.

Friday, January 3, 2025

Companions on the night sea journey


The path of the heart is not only one of transcendence – ascending and rising above – but also one of descent: into underworld, earth, and shadow, and into relationship with the figures who we find there. Companions on the night sea journey.

These pieces of psyche and soma – personal, collective, cosmic - have something to share with us, that longs to be incarnated, indwelled, and embodied in this time, an element of the mystery that has been forgotten in a world that has grown weary.

The lunar way isn’t as clear as its heroic or solar counterpart. It is unclothed: of fixed concept, a precise map, and knowing how it’s all going to turn out. It has a way not of confirming but of dismantling the (spiritual) persona.

Even our most profound realizations of the “ultimate” and “absolute” are taken to pieces, which are collected in a holy vase, to be placed on an altar in front of us. Perhaps they are gathered by Hermes and Sophia, and other guides of alchemical vision.

Inside the temple are the holy images of our broken dreams, disappointments, hopes, and fears – the entirety of our unlived life; the grief of the ancestors, the lamentation of the earth, and the sensitivities of the soma. Along with lost joy, wonder, beauty, and awe.

Here, in the center, the wound is weeping; it is opened and no longer covered over. This is what allows the tincture to enter. It wishes not to be mended, or even healed, but permitted to disclose its essence, which reveals a doorway into Unity and compassion.

The feast is laid out before us, sprinkled throughout the inner and outer oceans, stars, forests, and beams of moonlight; scattered throughout our cell tissue and DNA, hidden in our mirror neurons, and in the eyes of the one in front of us.


Photo by Erik Mclean