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.

>>Learn more about the group and community here 

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. 

>>Register at no cost for both webinars here

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

Take care,

Matt

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.

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.

Free live webinar with Matt - January 28 at 9am PT/ 5pm London

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

Matt's 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community

Matt's YouTube page

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.

Photo by Manfred Richter

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

Matt's 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community

Matt's YouTube page

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

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

Matt's 2025 Spirituality & Healing group and community

Matt's YouTube page