Free Resources
Relational Trauma & the
Path of the Wounded Healer
How Our Deepest Wounds Can Serve as Pathways of Initiation
In this short webinar, I speak about:
- How difficult experience, including early relational wounding, can serve an initiatory function in the soul
- The link between trauma and spirituality, and the importance of psychological work on the spiritual path
- Embodied healing and accessing an organic internal guidance system that is unique to each person
- Creating and attuning to an internal holding environment that is wired into our True Nature
Alchemy of the Heart
During the webinar, we’ll explore:
- The importance of taking time each day to attune to the images, feelings, and other living messages that are reaching out from the soul
- How metaphors and images from the alchemical tradition can help us on our unique journeys of indiviation and healing
- Bringing awareness and compassion to those parts of us that may have an unconscious investment in keeping things the way they are
- How our deepest emotional vulnerabilities and sensitivities are unique passageways into the soul
In this free short webinar, we’ll explore the nature of healing through the varied lenses of the alchemical imagination, relational neuroscience, meditative awareness, and depth and somatic psychologies.
Each of these doorways provide a series of perspectives and practices through which we can come to know who we are as open, sensitive, relational human beings, with bodies and feelings that can sometimes shatter and hurt.
But it is in the core of this shattering, inside the shards of the heart and fragmented pieces of the soul that the mysteries of healing are to be found. It is inside the wound that the tincture is flowing. The ancient alchemists — our friends on the journey — referred to the illumination arising out of the darkness as the scintilla, or the sparks of light.
Healing may never look quite like we expected or imagined – it’s just too wild and untamed for all that. It requires that we question the status quo of the culture and shift our perception outside the intergenerational matrices of collectivity and trance.
Being And Belonging: Keeping Your Heart Open When Things Fall Apart
During the webinar, we’ll explore:
- The sacredness of “in-between” times and entering the portal of not-knowing
- How our sensitivities, vulnerabilities, and eccentricities are doorways into soul
- The alchemical nature of spiritual transformation and emotional attunement
- Dropping into the endlessness, wildness, and wisdom of the tender human heart
- Reimagining our lives as alchemists of the inner and outer worlds
We live in an era of unprecedented change and transition, which we can see happening all around us. Simultaneously, the same process is occurring within the vessel of the human body.
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 free webinar, psychotherapist and author Matt Licata 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.
Remembering the Sacred
It’s an act of kindness – for ourselves, for others, for nature, and for the world – to take some time each day to slow down, breathe deeply, feel our feet on the ground, and attune to what’s unfolding in our immediate, embodied experience.
Otherwise, that which is unlived within us – unfelt feelings, grief, sadness, rage, even forgotten joy – is unable to be metabolized and mined for the soul-nutrients it contains.
When our experience remains unprocessed and undigested, we may find ourselves uninspired, flat, unexpectedly tired, or even depressed, unable to fully be here, to help ourselves and others, and to participate in the bounty of the sacred world.
- Slowing down and the practice of embodied attunement
- The dynamic, fiery nature of compassion and lovingkindness
- Turning into the body (and nature) in times of overwhelm, stress, and activation
- The alchemy of everyday life and the endless polishing of the heart
An Invitation to Rest Your Nervous System
Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety
In this mini-webinar psychotherapist and author Matt Licata speaks about slowing down and attuning to our bodies and the earth as we move into the next phase. As part of an integral approach to our practices of transformation and healing, it is an act of kindness to train ourselves to listen to and include the nervous system as part of an embodied spirituality.
Many of us have been shaken, thrown off, or even shattered by all of the transition over the last year or so, where our nervous systems have been or toned or cued away from an embodied, felt sense of safety, and have shifted into subtle – or not so subtle – states of restlessness, fear, loneliness, and stress of all kinds.
Perhaps now, more than ever, it is essential to find ways to rest our nervous systems, not only to manage traumatic stress and this core soul-level exhaustion and disorientation that many of us are experiencing, but to deepen our relationship with the earth and the natural world, with our hearts, and to reconnect with the sacredness of what it means to be a human being alive on the planet at this time.
In order to experience the deep healing, joy, and aliveness that so many of us are longing for, it’s essential to be able to have our baseline or our psychic center of gravity within a felt sense of safety, where safety is the “neural scaffolding” you could say, or the experiential foundation from which we’re able to open, explore, play, connect, and create with one another. To really live.
Trauma & The Wounded Healer Webinar
In this short webinar, psychotherapist and author Matt Licata explores an embodied, contemporary, trauma-sensitive path of spirituality and healing through the archetype of the wounded healer.
Many of us interested in things like spirituality, yoga, and meditation have been wounded in our lives – physically, emotionally, or at a deeper soul level. How can we come to see our wounding not as an obstacle to our path, but as the very path itself?
The great mystics, poets, and alchemists have suggested that our wounding serves an initiation into the soul, but what does this mean and how does all of this fit into our modern understanding of trauma and its profound effects on our bodies and nervous systems?
Join Matt on this deep dive into the nature of trauma, how trauma is healed through an “updating” of the neural networks which hold unprocessed material, and how a new relationship with our vulnerabilities, sensitivities, and eccentricities can be a portal into psychological growth, emotional healing, and spiritual transformation.
Spirituality, Shadow, & the Figures of Light Webinar
In this mini webinar, psychotherapist and author Matt Licata explores the nature of an integral spirituality which is embodied, emotionally-attuned, and sensitive to trauma. Spiritual transformation is not only a movement “upward” into transcendence, but also “downward,” into shadow, earth, and ground.
We are wired as relational beings to attach and connect with others, and as little ones with open and sensitive hearts, brains, and nervous systems, we’ll do whatever it takes to feel safe, seen, held, and included.
In order to be received and to feel that we truly belong, we inevitably disconnect from parts of ourselves, aspects of our personalities, and vulnerable pieces of our souls. These split off dimensions of what we are – the “lost orphans of psyche and soma” – end up being “relocated” in what is referred to as “the shadow,” where they remain, awaiting a time when it is safe to return.
We all have strategies – including at times the use of our spiritual beliefs and practices – to keep us out of too much pain, fear, panic, overwhelm, and shame, from a direct confrontation with our own trauma and attachment wounding, and from the terror of rejection, blame, and abandonment.
By bringing curiosity and discernment to how these strategies may be manifesting in our lives, we can discover the light and the gold that have been sent into the shadow, and what it would mean to provide a home, or sanctuary, for this material to return home, back into embodied, conscious awareness. For it is through this sacred return that we are able to live a life of wholeness, purpose, meaning, and aliveness.