THE SOUL ALCHEMIST
Trusting Your Inner Guidance
A 6-Week Journey: Wednesdays, Sept. 18th – Oct. 23rd
Join psychotherapist and spiritual mentor Matt Licata in a healing relational field this autumn: resting our nervous systems and opening into a grounded inner center that is always present.
Please note: you can still join us live for the second session, on September 25, and can catch up with the video from the first session at your convenience
“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. Learning to attune to the wisdom and the love of the inner ally is one of the most important activities on an embodied, alchemical path of the heart.”
Matt Licata
A Personal Invitation from Matt Licata
Dear Friend,
There has always been something unique about the autumn season for me, personally, that reveals a particular doorway and transition into a felt sense of a center; the center of who and what we are as open, sensitive human beings, as well as a portal into the center of Reality itself.
This time for me has often involved a real awakening of the feeling-body, and the possibility of a deeper connection with myself, with others, and with a sacred dimension.
The golden colors, the changing light, the falling away of the old – these are all expressions of the alchemical process of yellowing, a vital aspect of the transformational path – inviting us into a new way of being with ourselves and the world – an inner recycling and reorganization which mirrors processes occurring in outer nature.
In honoring the transformative potential of this time of the year, I wanted to offer a dynamic relational field and holding environment in which we can gather this autumn, rest our nervous systems together, ground and awaken our bodies, and open into the mysteries of healing and somatic presence.
This new live (online) course – The Soul Alchemist: Trusting Your Inner Guidance – will include meditation and experiential practice, guidance about the embodied transformative process (from both psychological and spiritual perspectives), and conversation where you can share your experience and ask any questions you might have.
Sessions will take place live on Wednesdays at 9am U.S. Pacific Time/ 5pm in London, on September 18 and 25; and October 2, 9, 16, and 23. Please note that it is neither required nor necessary that you attend live. You will be able to fully participate in the circle and the relational field by watching the videos (and engaging in the meditations, if you’re drawn to do so) at a time that is convenient for you.
It’s important to take time each day to slow down and discover an inner centering and place of ground, deep in the body, which connects us with ourselves, others, and the larger Self. Otherwise, we can end up on psychic autopilot, unconsciously plugged into the matrix of a collective disembodiment and trance.
As human beings with sensitive, tender hearts and nervous systems – wired with resonance circuitries and open mirror neurons – we’re deeply affected by unlived psychic and somatic experience, as well as the speed and frenetic-nature of the times we’re living in. This effect is often subtle and can generate a deep restlessness and exhaustion.
Through embodied re-attunement, centering, and shifting our psychic center of gravity, we can be here for ourselves and others in more wise, skillful, and compassionate ways, revealing a freedom, spontaneity, and creativity that is always, already here, opening us into a new way of living and being.
This new gathering is not an “online course” in the usual sense, but an experiential immersion into your own immediate, here-and-now, embodied experience, designed to illuminate the richness of your inner world and guide you toward a more present, aware, and meaningful existence.
I invite you to explore this page to learn more about the journey we’ll be taking together and look forward to seeing you inside the course, which will begin on Wednesday, September 18.
If you have any questions about The Soul Alchemist program, please write to us at support@mattlicataphd.com.
With appreciation and in friendship,
Matt Licata
What’s Inside the Course
Session One:
The Empty Cup: Into the Open, Alive Field of Not-Knowing
For those interested in things like healing, self-realization, and personal transformation, in ways we’re not always immediately aware of, our lives can become one unending project of self-improvement. What falls into the shadow of the seeker is what’s already here. One way of approaching the journey into the mystery of Being is through unlearning and opening to the unknown. This is not easy, though, as it goes against the very core of the psychic and collective status quo. Learning to attune to this unfamiliar, yet wide open experiential space opens us to the ally and inner friend who may be nearer than we imagine. It may, in fact, be their natural home and dwelling space.
In this session, we’ll explore:
- The archetype of the wounded healer and the path of initiation
- The importance of spending time each day resting in “unstructured” experience
- Creating an internal holding environment, especially in times of uncertainty and transition
- Dropping into the feeling-body and the importance of somatic sensitivity
Session Two:
The Mandala of Earth and Ground: Resting in the Center
In our busy, increasingly digital and frenetic modern world, it’s so easy to lose experiential contact with a felt center in our Being. In the midst of things falling apart, inside and around us, how can we discover and establish a centering and ordering within our bodies, hearts, and minds? Entering the gates of the mandala together – a sacred and contained, alive transformational circle – we will open into this always, already-existing centering together.
In this session, we’ll explore:
- Shifting your psychic center of gravity into the natural grounding wisdom of your body
- Discovering a natural centering and ordering within you
- The body and nervous system as alchemical vessel
- How unresolved emotional trauma and wounding can interfere with our capacity to truly rest (and trust)
Session Three:
Integration I – Awake Body, Clear Mind
During the integration sessions, we’ll rest our nervous systems, connect within a healing relational field, and be together in empathic presence, gathering and collecting where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed. There will be time to share our experience, clarify any aspects of the course content, and ask any questions that may be coming up for us.
Session Four:
The Union of Sun and Moon: Becoming a Transparent Vessel
The journey of healing, individuation, and self-realization is not only a movement from “here to there,” from personal to Transpersonal, from ego to Self, but how our individual consciousness is able to become a more and more transparent and translucent vessel, or vehicle, for love, wisdom, and embodied vectors of healing to find its way into our world.
In this session, we’ll explore:
- How our personal sense of self, individualized consciousness, is differentiated, yet not separate from the Totality
- The shadow side of spirituality and the importance of dissolution and descent
- Being a unique individual location for the embodiment or incarnation of the Sacred
- The practice of embodied attunement as the ground of true healing
Session Five:
The Path is Everywhere: Opening to the Activity of the Ally and Inner Friend
Being in relationship with something larger than our own personality and what we already know is one of the essences of the spiritual path. Whether we identify this greater presence as God, the Beloved, the Self, Soul, Presence, Totality, the Ground, or the primordially-pure clear-light nature of the mind, we can learn to open to how this level of reality is always communicating with us, but often in ways that we may least expect. Through dreams, emotional activation, triggers and hooks in close personal relationships, and through all manner and variety of “symptoms,” we are embedded in a field of intelligence and creativity.
In this session, we’ll explore:
- How the Inner Guide reaches out to us through our bodies, unexpected moods and symptoms, and learning to listen and trust in its wisdom nature
- How through attunement to our psychological, emotional, and bodily “symptoms” we can open to the intelligence and creativity of the soul, or the deeper Self
- How even unwanted experiences such as existential forms of anxiety and depression, fear, doubt, and uncertainty contain important data, information, and guidance
- How difficult emotional experiences, confusion, and states of not-knowing are not obstacles to our path, but radiant expressions of the very path itself
Session Six:
Integration II – Psyche-Soma Link
During the integration sessions, we’ll rest our nervous systems, connect within a healing relational field, and be together in empathic presence, gathering and collecting where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed. There will be time to share our experience, clarify any aspects of the course content, and ask any questions that may be coming up for us.
What You’ll Receive Inside the Course
#1) 6 LIVE, Online Teaching Sessions with Matt Licata
On six consecutive Wednesdays, you’ll meet live with Matt for 90+ minutes of guided practices and experiential exercises, talks and presentations on a contemporary path of embodied spirituality and emotional healing, and interaction where you can ask questions and eneter into conversation with Matt. It is not required that you join the sessions live in order to fully participate in and benefit from the course.
#2) Access to All Course Content Through Video and Audio Downloads
Shortly after each live session, you’ll be able to watch or listen to the replay at any time that is convenient for you, as well as download each of the sessions. By the end of the course, you’ll have a library of video and audio material to work with that you can integrate into your daily life and practice over the months and years to come.
#3) A Private Member Portal [Website, Mobile Phone, and iPad Accessible]
All of the course materials 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, take notes, reflect on the teachings, and practice along with the meditations in whatever way is most resonant and convenient for you.
#4) Members-Only Private Facebook Group
We’ve created a private Facebook group for those of you who would like to be in connection with others around the world who are also making this journey, where you can provide and receive support and share about your experience in a private setting. Please note that the Facebook group is totally optional and not required to engage fully in the course. Matt will not personally be participating in the Facebook group so you will not miss any teaching or course materials if you do not participate.
Plus These Three Bonuses
Bonus #1:
Somatic Wisdom, Trauma, and the Healing of the Human Nervous System
Embodied Healing in the Here-and-Now
AUDIO WEBINAR
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 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.
Bonus #2:
Illuminating the Unlived Life
VIDEO WEBINAR
We all have aspects of our experience that we’ve had to push out of awareness, as a way to avoid anxiety and overwhelm. Whether due to early relational trauma, ruptures in attachment, narcissistic injury, or any other form of deep betrayal in the soul, this “pushing away” served a vital (lifesaving) adaptive function; it was intelligent, creative, and our early attempts at self-compassion and self-care.
But as we know, dissociated and split-off material does not go away but becomes held in our bodies and nervous systems. Or, to use psychological language, it becomes located into the psychic underworld known as “the shadow.”
Through a (lifelong) alchemical process of embodied attunement, we can create an inner temple, or sanctuary in which this material can return home – be felt, metabolized, and integrated – which can help us to live in a way that is more meaningful, whole, loving, and joyful.
Bonus #3:
Trauma and the Sacred Wound
Liberating the Lost Orphans of Psyche and Soma
EBOOK
For many of us, our deepest sensitivities and vulnerabilities are intimately linked to our paths of transformation and experiences of “the holy.” In ways that may seem paradoxical, there is a sacred component to our wounding – a profound connection between trauma and the sacred – a discovery we need to unpack as it’s nuanced and subtle, and easily misunderstood.
Over the years, in my work as a psychotherapist and teacher, there is probably no topic which has come up more frequently than that of trauma – the nature of what trauma is, how it shapes our perception and behavior, and the nature of what it might mean to “heal” or “recover” from the effects of traumatic organization in the body, brain, and nervous system. And how a new relationship with the shattered is a form of initiation for so many.
In this short eBook, though we’ll only be able to scratch the surface, we’ll open up into a conversation and landscape where we can begin to explore some of the nuances of this very subtle (and heartbreaking) territory.
Your Guide for the Course
Matt Licata, PhD is a psychotherapist, author, and spiritual mentor, who was trained in the psychology of religion. Over the last 35 years, he has been involved in the dialogue between psychological, contemplative, and meditative 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 next book – The Path of the Wounded Healer: A Soulful Spirituality and the Alchemy of the Heart – is scheduled to be published in 2025.
THE SOUL ALCHEMIST
Trusting Your Inner Guidance
Here’s what you’ll receive:
1. Live 6 Session Online Course with Matt Licata
2. Audio and Video Downloads of All Course Content
3. Private Membership Portal
4. Private Facebook Group (optional)
You Will Also Receive the Following Bonus Gifts:
Bonus #1: Somatic Wisdom, Trauma, and the Healing of the Human Nervous System Audio Webinar (with Guided Meditation)
Bonus #2: The Practice of Embodied Attunement Video Webinar
Bonus #3: Trauma and the Sacred Wound eBook
REGULAR PRICE
$397
INTRODUCTORY OFFER
$197
Join Matt for The Soul Alchemist
LIVE 6-Week Online Journey today.
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My Personal Guarantee & Promise You
I created The Soul Alchemist as a vehicle for us to connect with one another and open to the mysteries of healing and spiritual self-discovery in a way that’s embodied, compassionate, and kind. The course is a direct expression of my own personal and professional journey and experience over these last 35 years. My sincere hope is that you will benefit from our time together and find it interesting and supportive. If you are not satisfied with the course, you can receive a full refund by emailing us before September 23rd, at midnight U.S. Pacific time. We appreciate your understanding that no refunds will be possible after this time.
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?
All of the sessions will be held live and then uploaded to a membership site within 24 hours (usually much faster) for easy access. At the membership site, you can watch, listen to, and download all course content and engage at a time that is convenient for you.
What are the dates and times of the live sessions?
Live sessions are held at 9am U.S. Pacific Time / 5pm in London on six consecutive Wednesdays: September 18, 24; and October 2, 9, 16, and 23. Call last for 90 minutes, sometimes a bit longer. If you are not able to attend live you can watch the replay in the membership area within 24 hours of each live teaching.
How can I get support?
We are here to support you along the way with any questions you may have about accessing materials and participating in the course.
*For support please email: support@mattlicataphd.com.*
Please always use this support email rather than contacting Matt directly. We typically answer within 24 hours or sooner and we are here to make your journey as seamless as possible.
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