Alchemical Healing and Accessing the Wisdom of the Sacred Wound
A 7-Session Deep Dive into a Psychotherapy of the Soul
with Matt Licata, PhD
INCLUDES: 7, 90-minute Teaching Sessions, with guided meditations and responses to frequently-asked questions
“The alchemical scintilla, the sparks of light, are alive inside you, awaiting your perception and your love, so they may be liberated and flow through the neural circuitry of the world.“
Matt Licata
A Personal Invitation from Matt Licata
Dear Friend,
What does it mean to live a meaningful, soulful life in these uncertain times?
Is it possible to step outside the matrix of intergenerational and cultural trance and discover a new sense of aliveness, creativity, and purpose?
The path of transformation and healing is going to be wildly unique for each of us. While we can benefit from the wisdom left behind by the mapmakers, we must make the journey ourselves.
Life is not a spectator sport and we can’t stand on the sidelines and participate from a distance. Something a lot more intimate, more creative, and even more alchemical is being asked of us right now.
But how will our hearts be polished, our perception be cleansed, and the pathways of our imagination be reawakened?
The discovery of meaning, which is at the very core of the human experience, isn’t preordained or given to us by our families, cultures, or religions, but must be unearthed in the depths of our own hearts.
At times, this soul-mining requires that we go against the status quo and forge a new way. It can feel shaky, vulnerable, achy, and tender, but the “lost orphans of psyche and soma” who are carrying this material for us are the prima materia, as the alchemists called it, guides and allies into the very depths of who and what we are.
Here is an overview of the 7 course sessions:
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Session 1: Initiation: Entering the Mandala
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Session 2: Somatic Wisdom and the Intelligence of the Human Nervous System
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Session 3: The Healing Potential of the Alchemical Imagination
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Session 4: Integration/ Commonly-asked questions #1
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Session 5: Making the Darkness Conscious and the Essential Practice of Integrating the Shadow
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Session 6: Holding and the Alchemical Vessel
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Session 7: Integration/ Commonly-asked questions #2
It can be a lonely journey at times and it’s not always easy to find friends and fellow kindred travelers on the path. As relational beings, companionship is essential as we’re wired to love and be loved, fall down and stand back up together, and hold and witness one another as we turn into the mystery.
As a way to enter into the mandala together, to meet in that interior garden where the water of life is flowing, I’m offering this online course, Alchemical Healing and Accessing the Wisdom of the Sacred Wound: A Deep Dive into a Psychotherapy of the Soul.
Over seven sessions, we’ll explore perspectives from diverse approaches such as depth and somatic psychologies, the meditative traditions, relational neuroscience, and the alchemical imagination, and dive deep into the teachings and practices that form the heart of my own life and clinical practice.
Even though we’re scattered throughout the planet, in my experience it is quite possible to come together within a healing relational field and connect deeply with one another, with ourselves, our bodies, and our hearts.
The soul is always calling out to us, but often in ways that are hidden to ordinary perception. It is my hope that your time in the course will help you to connect more deeply with the Inner Guide, the Inner Companion and Friend who is always nearby, shape shifting and taking unexpected forms to call us Home, into a soulful life of deeper purpose, meaning, and aliveness.
I look forward to making this journey with you.
Warmly,
Matt Licata
P.S. This course was originally offered live in March and April of 2022. If you took the course live at that time, you already own all of the video, audio, and written transcripts and would not need to sign up for this version.
“Even though it may seem as if we are alone – and in part we must walk this path by ourselves – we are never truly alone, as unseen helpers, friends, and companions are always nearby.”
Matt Licata
What’s Inside the Course
Session One:
Initiation: Entering the Mandala
The soul is always speaking to us, but often in ways that we least expect. Whether manifesting through our dreams, fantasies, moods, relationships, core vulnerabilities, or unexplainable physical symptoms, there is sacred data being presented to us all the time.
Rather than viewing this material as obstacles to our path, we might reimagine it as path, which is the more radical, non-conventional view of the alchemists, tantrikas, yoginis, poets, and artists.
In this session, we’ll explore:
- Entering the interior garden of the wounded healer and the path of direct revelation
- The relational component of our wounding, and of our healing
- How our embodied sensitivites and vulnerabilities are not obstacles to our path, but secret portals into it
- Taking time each day to engage in our own “internal lab work” as the practice of an alchemy of compassion
Session Two:
Somatic Wisdom and the Intelligence of the Human Nervous System
Many of our contemporary self-help, personal growth, and even spiritual teachings have disregarded the body and the nervous system in their approach to the journey of transformation and healing. While we see some evidence that this is starting to shift, it’s important to remember we’re working against thousands of years of the marginalization of the body’s intelligence, including the diminishing of non-rational modes of inquiry and perception.
The fields of relational and contemplative neuroscience have helped us to see how essential it is to include the human nervous system as an essential part of the spiritual journey. From within these discoveries, there is a vast storehouse of wisdom to include on any contemporary, trauma-sensitive, and full-spectrum approach to our healing paths.
In this session, we’ll explore:
- The importance of including somatic experience on our paths of transformation and healing
- The felt experience of safety as the neural scaffolding for deeper psychological and spiritual exploration
- What it means to be “trauma-sensitive” or “trauma-informed” and why this is both wise and compassionate
- A simple approach to understanding trauma and how it organizes in the body, psyche, and nervous system, and how we’re all affected by trauma
Session Three:
The Healing Potential of the Alchemical Imagination
While approaches such as psychotherapy, mindfulness, and compassion practice are fairly well known these days, the ancient tradition of alchemy has almost fallen completely out of view. What were the alchemists up to, anyway? Weren’t they just early, naive chemists trying to turn lead into gold? These are reasonable questions.
Alchemy provides us with a rich set of metaphorical language, ideas, and symbols which describe processes and experiences occurring deep in the psyche and the soul. In what ways are these discoveries relevant to us today?
In this session, we’ll explore:
- What alchemy has to offer us and how the alchemical imagination might be helpful on our contemporary journeys of individuation and healing
- How alchemical images and processes are metaphors for the unfolding of the soul
- What it would mean to become an embodied alchemist of the interior landscape
- Alchemical metaphors, the philosopher’s stone, and the fantasy of gold-making
Session Four:
Integration/ Q&A Session #1
In this session, we’ll integrate what we’ve been exploring thus far in the course, though experiential exercises and Matt’s responses to commonly asked questions.
Session Five:
Making the Darkness Conscious and the Essential Practice of Integrating the Shadow
In his text on Alchemical Studies, C.G. Jung stated that, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” What did he mean by this and how is this provocative statement relevant to those of us committed to our own individuation, healing, and spiritual transformation?
Many have heard about “shadow work,” but the reality is that it is often marginalized, misunderstood, or left out of our contemporary spirituality altogether. Illuminating and integrating shadow components of the personality releases tremendous energy and helps allow our deepest insights and realizations to filter down into our bodies, relationships, creative lives, cultures, societies, and into the world.
In this session, we’ll explore:
- The nature of the “shadow” and what it means to illuminate and embrace it
- How we all have certain feelings or experiences that we just don’t want to feel, and how these can be essential doorways into the soul
- How spirituality isn’t only about ascending and the movement upward, but also descending downward into the earth and the ground
- What is meant by “integration” and how experience we aren’t able to access, verbalize, and integrate will come into our conscious experience in less than ideal ways
Session Six:
Holding and the Alchemical Vessel
Just because we “have” an experience doesn’t mean it is properly “metabolized.” Just as there is the literal, physical condition of “leaky gut,” there is an analogous experience in the soul, which arises when we lack the psychic “nutrients” of wisdom, awareness, embodiment, and compassion required to “digest” our emotional and somatic experience.
Circumambulating the image of Winnicott’s “holding environment,” we’ll explore the importance of digesting and metabolizing our experience in a way that allows us to make use of its energy to discover a life of meaning, connection, and a felt sense of wholeness.
In this session, we’ll explore:
- The metaphor of “digestion” and what it means to metabolize our experience
- How our emotional and somatic experience can get “backed up” if we are in a phobic, avoidant, or defensive relationship with it
- Mindfulness-based and imaginal ways of attuning to, holding, and tending our experience, especially that which is triggering or activating
- The power of self-compassion and unconditional kindness, and how our default position of “self-abandonment” can be transformed
Session Seven:
Integration/ Q&A Session #2
In the final session, we’ll integrate what we’ve been exploring thus far in the course, though experiential exercises and Matt’s responses to commonly asked questions.
Here’s What You’ll Receive Inside the Course
#1) 5 Video-Based Teaching Sessions with Matt Licata
Over five, 90-minute video-based sessions, you’ll dive deep with Matt into the heart of the course curriculum. Sessions will include guided practices and experiential exercises, presentations on course content, and Matt’s responses to commonly-asked questions.
#2) 2 Video-Based Integration Sessions with Commonly-Asked Questions
Additionally, as part of the course, you will receive access to 2, 90-minute integration sessions with Matt where he also responds to commonly-asked questions.
#3) Access to All Course Content Through Video, Audio, and Written Transcripts
As part of each session, you’ll receive video, audio, and written transcripts of the teaching materials. By the end of the course, you’ll have a library of video and audio material to work with over the months, as well as a set of written transcripts of the sessions that you can read through and integrate into your daily life.
#4) A Private Member Portal [Website, Mobile Phone, and iPad Accessible]
All of the video, audio, and written transcripts will be available in a private member portal for easy access. You can watch, listen, and engage with all course materials on your computer and smart devices at any time that is convenient for you.
Plus Receive These 4 Bonuses…
Bonus #1:
Trauma & The Wounded Healer
(video webinar)
In this webinar, Matt outlines an embodied, contemporary approach to spirituality and healing through the archetype of the wounded healer. During the webinar, Matt explores the connection between trauma and the sacred, the nature of healing from relational wounding, and how a new relationship with our sensitivities and vulnerabilities can be a living portal into psychological growth, emotional healing, and spiritual transformation.
Bonus #2:
An Invitation to Rest Your Nervous System (video webinar and PDF article)
In this webinar (and accompanying article) Matt invites us to slow down and atune to our immediate, emerging experience, especially in moments of liminality and transition. As part of an integral approach to our paths of transformation and healing, it’s essential to include the wisdom of the nervous system as part of an embodied spirituality.
Bonus #3:
Being & Belonging: Keeping Your Heart Open When Things Fall Apart (video webinar)
At times, the sacred world can seem so near. But at other times it remains hidden behind the veil of conditioned perception.
We hear that “the path is everywhere,” but what does that mean in our embodied, lived experience? How do we see and unearth the silver, emerald, and gold that are sparkling and alive as an organic aspect of inner and outer nature?
In this webinar, Matt invites us into a field where we can explore the mysteries of the open heart and remember together what is most important as we move into this next phase.
Bonus #4:
Guided Meditations for Grounding and Being a Friend to Yourself
In this set of 5 guided meditations, Matt invites you into the holding of the earth and into true friendship with yourself.
Your Guide for the Course
Matt Licata, PhD is a psychotherapist, writer, and independent scholar who for nearly three decades has been involved in the unfolding dialogue between psychotherapeutic, meditative, and relational-neuroscientific approaches to personal growth, emotional healing, and spiritual transformation.
He is the author of A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times (Sounds True, 2020), and The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You (Wandering Yogi Press, 2017). His new book on alchemical healing and the sacred wound is scheduled to be published in 2023.
Matt Licata presents:
Alchemical Healing and Accessing the Wisdom of the Sacred Wound
A 7-Session Deep Dive into a Psychotherapy of the Soul
INCLUDES: 5, 90-minute teaching sessions
& 2, 90-minute Integration sessions
Here’s what you’ll receive:
1. 5, 90-minute Video-Based course presentation sessions with Matt Licata
2. 2, 90-minute Video-Based integration sessions with Matt Licata
3. Complete Session Audios, Videos, and Written Transcripts
4. Private Membership Portal
You Will Also Receive Bonus Gifts:
Bonus #1: Trauma & the Wounded Healer Mini-Webinar
Bonus #2: An Invitation to Rest Your Nervous System Mini-Webinar and PDF Article
Bonus #3: Being & Belonging: Keeping Your Heart Open When Things Apart Mini-Webinar
Bonus #4: Guided Meditations for Grounding and Being a Friend to Yourself
REGULAR PRICE
$467
INTRODUCTORY OFFER
$267
Join Matt for Alchemical Healing and Accessing the Wisdom of the Sacred Wound
A 7-Week Online Journey
Choose the single payment or the easy payment plan below:
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My Personal Guarantee & Promise You
I created this program as a source of guidance and inspiration. This course is a direct expression of my own personal and professional journey and experience. My sincere hope is that you will benefit from this offering from my heart. If you are not satisfied with the first week of online experience, you can receive a full refund simply by emailing us within the first 7 days that you register.
Matt Licata PhD
Praise for Matt’s work and new book
A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times
“A Healing Space is a brilliant weave of Jungian and Eastern contemplative wisdom. In this powerful new offering, Matt Licata guides us to a place of sacred refuge, where we can meet even our greatest moments of confusion and suffering with compassion and grace.”
– Tara Brach, PhD, author of Radical Compassion
“Matt Licata pinpoints a space within us where healing, awakening, and a vibrant reckoning of who we actually are can be realized. The wisdom hidden deep within our darkest experiences comes from not turning away from these, but by directly tending to them with gentleness, love, and compassion. This book depicts a way of genuine freedom.”
– Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness
“In A Healing Space, Matt Licata serves as a compassionate and insightful guide to the transformative task we all must face: how to forge our pain and sorrow into remedies of Spirit that can illuminate our way. With the soft clarity of a magnifying glass, Matt brings into view the many things that inhabit our nature, though they are seldom easily seen. Stay in conversation with this book and you will be a better friend to yourself, those you travel with, and to life itself”
– Mark Nepo, author of The Book of Soul and Drinking from the River of Light
“Weaving the wisdom of reflective practices, the insights from Carl Jung and the alchemists, and the relational truths of attachment research and psychotherapy practice, Matt Licata offers us a beautiful tapestry of truths to transform trauma into healing and strength. Adversity can constrain us, but with this wonderful book, we can find the perspectives and courage to embrace the reality of life’s innate uncertainty to guide us on a journey of growth and discovery—moving from post-traumatic imprisonment to liberation.”
– Dan Siegel, MD, clinical professor at UCLA School of Medicine, director of Mindsight Institute, and author of Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence and Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation
“If you are looking for a book to be a companion to you during this extraordinary time, it’s this one. A Healing Space is a robust guidebook into the inner territory of yourself, assisting you in the exploration of deep and rich personal and life questions that lead, always, to wondrous realizations and growth. What a treasure to find in these times of great change.”
– Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Intimate Conversations with the Divine
“Tender, profound, and deeply useful, this book is gem. Remarkably, Matt Licata weaves together self-compassion, depth psychology, and radical acceptance into a beautiful, passionate, soaring exploration of all that it means to be human.”
– Rick Hanson, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness
“A Healing Space is a beautiful, insightful, and moving contemplation of the journey of healing we all undertake as human beings. It illuminates how self-compassion—holding our own pain with love—transforms our experience in a profound way so that we can learn the lessons life offers us moment by moment.”
– Kristin Neff, PhD, associate professor, University of Texas, and author of Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself
“A Healing Space is a beautifully written book exploring how walking through the darkness ultimately brings blessings, wisdom, and beauty to your life, and moves you onto a path of evolution that you simply cannot perceive during difficult times. Matt Licata is a perfect guide as evidenced through his life experience and work as psychotherapist. This book is so timely and filled with helpful tools to guide you from the darkness into your own divine light.
– Sandra Ingerman, MA, award-winning author of twelve books, including Walking in Light and The Book of Ceremony: Shamanic Wisdom for Invoking the Sacred in Everyday Life
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the sessions live or prerecorded?
Each of the sessions were presented live in March/ April 2022 and have been uploaded to a membership site for easy access. You can watch all course videos here as well as download audio and written transcripts to listen and read at your convenience.
How can I get support?
We are here to support you along the way with any questions you may have about accessing the course.
*For support please email: support@mattlicataphd.com.*
Please always use this support email rather than contacting Matt directly. We typically answer within 48 hours and we are here to make your journey as easy as possible.
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