A vessel in which love is able to find its way here

Because our deepest wounding, which is always a wounding around love, emerges relationally, it will be most effectively tended, repaired, and healed within a relational field. We are relational beings and all healing is relational in its essence.

The nature of this relationship, and that of the Other, is of the mystery and can take many forms, as a shapeshifter and trickster-ally. It can be astonishing and is sure to never look like we imagined.

The death of an old dream is an essential aspect of the death-rebirth journey, the dream of me and my life and the way it was all supposed to turn out. The invitation is to hold the shattered soul-pieces near and grieve all that we will inevitably lose on the path of awakening and healing.

It is these tears that are the alchemical aqua permanens, which water the seeds of new life. In tending these tears the broken pieces are not mended but revealed to be carriers of light, as they are, in their un-mended state. They are whole and complete in their brokenness, and not in need of being transformed.

It is the Friend, in whatever form It appears, that parts the veil and cleanses our perception, by way of mercy and grace.

That grace is not only the sweet and flowy kind that we cherish and long for – nurturing, holding, containment within the womb of the Divine Mother – but will at times appear in a more fierce and wrathful form, and will reorganize and take us to dust.  

This is the grace of the alchemical yellowing, the putrefaction, which is also the activity of love, but is an emanation of its darker side.

It is a coming together of unity and multiplicity, solar and lunar, that reveals a vessel in which love is able to find its way here, incarnating through our bodies, emotions, and imagination.

Whether sweet or fierce, containing or reorganizing, each are grace, and will polish the heart with a unique fragrance of the divine.

Photo by Anton Maskimov

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Videos from Matt - Embodied Spirituality & Healing

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In the video here, I speak about the sensual, tactile, embodied nature of healing, updating neural networks, and the encoding of new circuitry - and how this emerges by way of the longing of the lost orphans of psyche and soma.

This excerpt was edited from a 2023 session with as part of my yearlong spirituality and healing group and community. The group is currently closed to new members but will likely reopen in February of 2024. 

 

Matt Licata, PhD is a psychotherapist, writer, and independent scholar based in Boulder, Colorado. He is author of A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times (Sounds True, 2020), The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You (Wandering Yogi Press, 2017), and the forthcoming The Path of the Wounded Healer: A Soulful Spirituality and an Alchemy of the Heart.

The friend is near

As we move through the second half of life, a new voice will often emerge, pouring out through our longing, our grief, our anger, and our disappointment. A figure from deep in the soul.

To hear and respond to that call, we have to slow down and listen through the veil, beyond the noise and density of the collective, and the matrices of intergenerational trauma and trance.

It takes courage to listen to the soul and to take it seriously. To cultivate a real devotion to the messages it is sending to us. We are called into this devotional place by way of our dreams, our study and practice, and through prayer, ritual, dance, art, creativity, and being a parent, a teacher, a lover, and a friend.

It can be a lonely journey at times, as if there is no one who can truly understand us. We turn to look for the Friend though they are not there.

But the Friend is near, even if unable to be seen.

Holding and tending this aloneness, and the grief that accompanies it, lies at the very heart of archetypal process of death and rebirth, and the truth that all healing is relational in its essence.

There can be no unity or oneness without there first being an experience of separation. Otherwise, union would have no meaning. They co-arise together, where a subsequent union lays the seeds for a more subtle separation, and then a more subtle union, and on and on.

Separation and multiplicity are just as holy as oneness and union; they are equally valid emanations of the Beloved.

There is no end to the depths of the human heart. We don’t wiggle into some sustained transcendent state where we’re “permanently” awakened, gone beyond the reality that the Beloved will pull the rug out from underneath us, in order to draw us nearer, and to reveal more of its essence.

In the end, love seems quite uninterested in our fantasies of permanent transcendence.

Even as we may yearn to rise above our embodied sensitivities, emotional wounding, and relational trauma, on the alchemical path they are the prima materia, the required matter, soaked with spirit, and portals into the depths of Soul.

Art by Stefan Keller

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