Intimacy without fusion - real magic

Many are familiar with the term “holding environment” as elucidated by Winnicott, an evocative and poetic description of relational experience rooted in embodied, empathic attunement and right-brain to right-brain resonance.

As the matrix of secure attachment, it provides the fertile, creative neural and psychic foundation from which we can explore reality, play within the imaginal world, and rest in unstructured states of being - wonder, awe, and the mysteries of Pure Being.

From within this centering, we’re able to venture out into the unknown, know experientially the full spectrum of the feeling body, and explore relationship with both inner and outer others.

Not having to hold it all together by way of our own effort, we relax into a holding which is always, already here; a holding which is so vast that it naturally contains momentary states of disintegration and “falling apart.” 

These states are no longer viewed as pathology, but as path.

Intimacy without fusion, closeness without engulfing, healthy attachment without impinging. This is the psychic soil from which a baby’s little brain and heart emerge into being. What a miracle. Real magic.

Holding manifests within psyche and soma, as interior pieces of soul companion one another; interpersonally through relationships where we take the risk to allow another to matter; as also transpersonally through containment by the Totality and Divine Ground.

In this way, the holding environment is wired into who and what we are. At times appearing inside, and at other times outside us, just like the Beloved itself, it will take any form – outrageous, wild, untamed – so that it may embody and incarnate itself through us as its vessel.

Learn more about Matt's ongoing Spirituality & Healing online group and community

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Learn more about Matt's summer in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster) 

When the Old Dreams Fall Away: Grief, Healing, and the Temple of the Heart

The journey of healing and spiritual realization will by its nature feel lonely at times. Even though we’re interconnected with others and with all of life, there is a solitary aspect to the path.

No one can truly know what it’s like for us - for our hearts to break, what keeps us up at night, what is meaningful for us, what it feels like, for us, to fall in and out of love; or to be sad, ashamed, scared, or joyful.

It’s not easy to make this journey on our own. As open, sensitive relational human beings, we’re wired to connect, to love and to be loved, and to support one another as we open into the mysteries.

Whether our primary interest is in tending the wounds around love – attachment, trauma, narcissism, betrayal in soul – or in exploring within the experiential depths of the transpersonal (communion, union, Oneness, Unity with the divine ground), we do so by way of an unknown and mysterious relational field, through the dance and play of love in form.

I know many have been through so much this year and lost many of their familiar reference points, unsure where to look for refuge and meaning, confronting feelings of groundlessness and uncertainty.

In so many ways, we’ve been asked to turn toward the unlived within us. To provide a temple where the shattered pieces of the heart can come to reassemble.

Rebirth is tied intimately to our willingness and capacity to grieve, a holy activity not always honored in our world. But here we are, the misfits of despair, ecstasy, sorrow, and wonder, knowing the aliveness we long for will only be found in embodied attunement to the full spectrum.

The process of “falling apart” is not some great cosmic error or mistake we need to correct or repair, but an emissary of wholeness, a way shower of what will emerge from the ashes of reorganization.

It is love, of course, that will guide the reorganization. But it is love, too, that is the substance of the ashes, and also the tears.

There’s a certain longing that appears in the middle of the process of death and rebirth, but the object of that longing is not always clear and is of the mystery. The vastness of the Other looms in personal and collective networks.

All the old reference points are washed away, dissolved, and made to dust. A cleansing deep in the subtle body. Emptied out, with nothing yet to take its place. Just a shimmering, and a periodic glimpse of the scintilla, the pieces of light.

And so it goes on the path of the heart…

Of course, it’s natural to want to escape the shakiness, claustrophobia, and not-knowing. It aches there, as it is the ground of the unlived life.

At the same time, another potential pathway appears: to stay with the uncertainty, turn all the way into the tenderness, attune to the imaginal, and to the wisdom of the feeling body. There is data and information here that is only available in times when the psychic quo is being tenderized and dismantled.

A door swings open that is usually closed or hidden behind the veil. There are letters and engravings on that door that can only be deciphered by you. It’s not a collective door, but one that has emerged unique to your own soul print. The script on that door is written in the letters of grief.

The passing of an old dream – me and my life and how it was all going to turn out, supposed to turn out.

There is no rebirth without an embodied tending to the unlived, the ancestral, and the figures of grief who dance and spin and twirl within us, come not to harm or take us down – not as an obstacle on our path, but as the very path itself.

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.

Please take care of yourself and I look forward to staying in touch over the weeks and months to come.

P.S. There are still some places left on the summer retreat with myself and Jeff Foster. Learn more here.

Learn more about Matt's ongoing Spirituality & Healing online group and community

Matt's YouTube page

Learn more about Matt's summer in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster) 

Next month's retreat with Matt Licata and Jeff Foster

Looking forward to seeing everyone for our summer retreat in June!

Come rest with us for five days, a gentle and supportive gathering in mountains. Within an empathic, safe holding environment.

As we give ourselves the gift of rest and rejuvenation, and explore the nature of an embodied, compassionate, sensitive spirituality and healing.

See you soon in Colorado 🤎

>>Learn more about A Sanctuary of the Heart 5-Day retreat here

Relationship as path

In close personal relationships, it is essential to emphasize our connectedness and the preciousness of secure attachment, leading with our vulnerability, receptivity, and sensitivities. In this, we prioritize the relationship and its value in our lives.

It is equally vital to be on the lookout for unhealthy fusion, honoring the reality that we are not only connected, but separate, with our own interiority, subjectivity, and ways of making sense of our experience.

Any secure attachment must include healthy differentiation, where at times the most skillful activity will be to honor our separateness from the other, differentiate from them and assert our views and needs, establish firm boundaries, and privilege our own autonomy and personal sense of integrity. This activity is active, dynamic, and alive.

To differentiate in this way will require each party to feel and integrate experiences of aloneness, uncertainty, confusion, and shame. Allowing one another the space and safety to metabolize this activation is the activity of love.

Once we take the risk to allow another to matter to us, it’s inevitable that we will disappoint them - and be disappointed by them in return. This will burn and ache and will bring alive our (and their) historic core vulnerabilities.

In the face of this, there can be an urgent impulse to do whatever possible to prevent the shattering of their heart and the achy (non-negotiable) confrontation with their own unlived life. But to allow the other to meet the reality of their own heart is an act of profound mercy and compassion. This will ask so much of us.

While from a transpersonal perspective, we can speak about unity and oneness, within the relative we are also differentiated and wildly unique, each with our own ways of organizing our experience. Each with our own fate and relationship with the divine, and with our own path to travel. To dissolve these differences into some homogenized spiritual middle does not honor the sacredness of form.

If we do not consciously honor the reality of our separateness, it will inevitably express itself in less than conscious ways, leaking out into the relational field as emotional and somatic symptomatology of all kinds.

Paradoxically, it will also keep us disconnected with the other at a very core level, for if we have placed the burden upon them to tend to our unlived experience for us, it is simply not safe enough to come closer, for either of us - physically, emotionally, or at a deeper soul level.

In the fire of relationship, the lost orphans of psyche and soma call out from the underworld, from the depths of the soul and from within the pathways of somatic being. They long to be held and integrated and allowed their rightful place in the larger ecology of what we are. Like all work of depth, this art form evolves slowly, as it marinates and cooks in the alchemical vessel of the body.

May we be kind to our partners as we navigate this territory together, honoring the vehicle of intimacy as one of the most transformative, sacred, and challenging that we have in our modern world.

Freud said it was the dream that was the via regia, the royal road, to the unconscious; for Jung, it was the complex. But for many of us, it is relationship that is the royal road, a road that is precious while at the same time tenderizing.

Learn more about Matt's ongoing Spirituality & Healing online group and community

Matt's YouTube page

Learn more about Matt's summer in-person retreat (with Jeff Foster)