Online Courses

My 9-session self-guided, home-study course on Embracing the Shadow and the Path of Light is now available. The course was presented live between December 2020 and February 2021.

The Path of the Wounded Healer: A 5-Session Online Course to Open Your Heart, Tend to Old Wounds, and Find Meaning in Your Life is also available as a self-guided, home-study course which you can learn about here.

My current live online course – Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety began in March 2021 and is now closed for registration. A home-study version of the course will be made available later in 2021. Please sign up to my mailing list to be notified of its availability.

 

 

Topics for the Resting Your Nervous System online course include: 

  • The importance of resting the nervous system, especially in uncertain and transitional times
  • How any integral approach to our spiritual lives must include awareness of and sensitivity to trauma and relational wounding
  • How the felt sense of safety is the foundation for psychological growth, emotional healing, and spiritual transformation
  • The essential role of the body in healing, especially in times of overwhelm and stress
  • A not-too-technical, experiential understanding of the nervous system and its role in healing
  • A fresh look at what trauma is and how it is more common than we might think
  • The relationship between trauma and feeling unsafe, and how “safety” is the ultimate medicine for trauma 
  • Trauma, the nervous system, and the workings of implicit, bodily memory 
  • How and why we cannot “think” our way out of trauma and other types of relational wounding
  • The meaning of integration and how trauma is a dis-integrating experience and the need for experiential process in healing the emotional brain 
  • Neuroplasticity, new experience, and the encoding of new neural circuitry 
  • The role of the “other” in healing – self-regulation and regulating with another
  • Neural integration and the importance of linking together the layers of our experience
  • The unconscious investment we may have in not healing and honoring the realities and implications of what true healing will always ask of us 
  • Establishing a list of specific, individualized practices and exercises you can engage in the moment when you notice yourself falling out of your window of tolerance
  • The role of contemplative practices such as mindfulness, breathing, and yoga – and discerning when they are being used in healthy vs. less-than-healthy ways
  • How meditation and practices oriented in “open awareness” are not always the most wise, skillful, or kind approach to working with trauma and other relational wounding
  • The importance of having even one “safe other” in our lives, including the accessing of this “other” by way of imagination 
  • How spiritual beliefs and practices can overwhelm our nervous systems and can also serve as unconscious pathways of self-abandonment and avoidance 

PREVIOUS COURSES: 

THE PATH OF THE WOUNDED HEALER

A Five-Session Online Course in Deep Soul Work to Open Your Heart, Tend to Old Wounds, and Find Meaning in Your Life

This online course, originally presented in the spring of 2020, is now available in a home study version. Please see The Path of the Wounded Healer course page to learn more or to register. 

 “Medicine is not found within a healed wound, but in a wound that is weeping.” -Matt Licata

Many who are called to paths of healing and spiritual transformation have experienced deep wounding in their lives, profound grief, and difficult transition and loss. Whether this wounding manifests by way of trauma and attachment insecurity, an unexpected dissolution of lifeforce or meaning, as difficulties in intimacy and connection, or in more religious language as loss of soul, it has a way of coloring our lives, shaping our perception, and influencing our relationships and work in the world.

Please note that you need not identify, professionally or otherwise, as a “healer” to take and benefit from this course. It is not for “professional” healers, per se,  but for all human beings drawn to the mystery, longing to tend to their soul in new and creative ways, and to engage life as a true alchemist or archaeologist of the heart. Each of us is linked to one another and to the archetype and myth of the wounded healer by nature of the call we’ve received to healing, spiritual awakening, and to deep, embodied transformation – not only for ourselves but for others and for all of life. 

Matt will guide participants through a special series of pre-recorded practices created especially for course participants. In addition, you will receive writing exercises each week, designed to facilitate experiential immersion into the course content, and more importantly into your own heart.  

Topics include: the path of the wounded healer in contemporary times, revisioning what we mean by “healing,” creating an internal holding environment, mining the alchemical gold inside the wound, the nature of a “weeping” wound, the importance of shadow work and what it really means, the essential role of meditation and imaginal work on any integral path of healing, a guided tour of attachment theory and its relevance on the journey, and the unique experience of close personal relationships and how they serve as a modern-day temple and vessel of deep transformation. 

While it is natural and so very human to want to “heal” our wounds, there is another portal through which to navigate the creative realms of the psyche and the heart, one that has been shared by the great wounded healers who have come before us. Whether the shaman, the poet, the mystic, or Chiron poisoned by Hercules’ arrow, their archetypal journey involves initiation by way of the wound.

The wound, in its many forms and manifestations, is alive and a passageway into deeper self-awareness and compassion for ourselves and others, but we have to work against the grain and status quo in order to mine the gold at its core. Here, we might discover that the wound has its own longing, which may not be to be “healed” in any conventional sense, but something more vast and mysterious. In the speediness of the materialistic-consumeristic world in which we live – with endless quick fixes, pre-programmed steps to take, and overly simplified “solutions” – it can take an act of great courage to slow down and reimagine.