by Matt Licata
“This is a book you will treasure for a lifetime. It’s more than a book, really. It’s a compassionate, nonjudgmental, and wise companion that gently helps you explore what it means to be deeply, courageously, and honestly human.”
Martin L. Rossman, MD, clinical instructor at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco, and author of The Worry Solution and Fighting Cancer from Within
“A Healing Space elegantly weaves together contemporary approaches in neuroscience and depth psychology with the ancient wisdom of the contemplative traditions, providing a modern, integrated path of deep transformation that fills in what might be missing in each separately. Matt Licata emphasizes radical befriending that reorients our inner critic in a kind way. This book lands in the heart and is ultimately about the power of love to heal trauma and attachment injuries. We need this fresh vision and perspective. Matt definitely delivers.”
Diane Poole Heller, PhD, founder of Dynamic Attachment Re-Patterning Experience and author of The Power of Attachment and Crash Course
“In this well-written book, Matt Licata challenges us to remember our disavowed parts, our painful emotions and traumas, and to treat each as if it were a lost friend needing our attention. In this way, though often difficult, we can arrive at a state of wholeness, embrace in a gentle, loving way those previously unwanted and unsupported aspects of ourselves, and become the person we were meant to be. Matt supports this process with great attention and compelling narrative and offers us a hand up in this challenging but essential task.”
Jeffrey Raff, PhD, Jungian analyst and author of several books, including Jung and the Alchemical Imagination and The Practice of Ally Work
“In the opening pages of A Healing Space, Matt Licata draws us into a meditative intimacy with the gift and miracle of our bodies, minds, and hearts. He keeps us there, offering trustworthy guidance in the gentle art of touching the hurting places within ourselves and others with tender-hearted clarity and love.”
James Finley, PhD, clinical psychologist, former monk, spiritual directee of Thomas Merton, and author of Merton’s Palace of Nowhere
“A Healing Space is a compelling invitation to embark on a bold personal journey—to dive deeply, consciously, into the pain of an unlived life. To radically trust in the process of intuitive inquiry. To be with and befriend, claim, and cherish the deepest, most intimate, sometimes disdained parts of ourselves. To listen to the wisdom and intelligence of their messages. To be held in that process in an inner, felt sense of sacred safety and loving presence. To become fully known and to reemerge in a radically new apprehension of the entirety of one’s self, fully alive, fully participating in life’s vast mysteries and possibilities, in difficult times, in all times. Matt Licata is more than a respected authority and trustworthy guide; he is a compassionate companion on this journey, providing the metaphors and markers needed to navigate the ‘green goo’ of the chrysalis as the humble caterpillar morphs into the beauty and freedom of the butterfly. He illuminates for the reader the nuanced complexities of this paradoxical dance of being and becoming, fully alive, already healed.”
Linda Graham, MFT, psychotherapist and author of Resilience
“Happiness is indeed a unique individual journey. A Healing Space provides a magnificent broad overview and personal spiritual path to inner peace during these current challenges.”
C. Norman Shealy, MD, PhD, founding president of the American Holistic Medical Association
“Despite our desire to live in the moment, most of us live in the past: rehearsing old dramas and applying old solutions to new challenges. In A Healing Space, Matt Licata offers us away out of the past and into the present. Not an easy way, but an authentic one. This book is not meant to be a page turner, but a life saver. Use it wisely.”
Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of Holy Rascals
“Matt Licata has written the perfect book for these unprecedented times, exploring the overlapping fields of psychological and emotional development.”
Lama Tsultrim Allione, Buddhist teacher and author of Wisdom Rising
“A Healing Space opens up an engaged pathway into the alchemical tradition of depth psychology, where Matt Licata offers powerful and responsible ways to work on oneself. As opposed to popular volumes that feature catchphrases and escapist esoteric fantasies, A Healing Space does not reduce the human journey to simplistic steps, but encourages us ‘to get messy with the stuff of life’ and to have the courage and wherewithal to bear the unbearable. Reminding us that ‘emotion is not pathology’ and that freedom is found in the embrace of all parts of one’s being, this work supports and illumines the journey of conscious awareness.”
Rick Jarow, PhD, associate professor of religious studies at Vassar College and author of Creating the Work You Love, Alchemy of Abundance, and The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide
“You need this book! We all need this book! Though written just before the pandemic hit, this book is a healing balm for the mind, body, and soul as we deal with external and mind-born stressors impacting us right now. Dr. Licata offers his compassionate wisdom, informed by clinical experience and his study of Buddhist traditions and depth psychology, for all of us to benefit from.”
Lawrence Edwards, PhD, faculty of New York Medical College, author of The Soul’s Journey and Awakening Kundalini
“In stark contrast to the pressures posed by our always-feel-good culture, A Healing Space offers a timely and welcomed invitation to venture deep, to embrace our fragility and wounding, and to access the tenderness we seek to become more fully human. Matt Licata draws on his unique blend of psychotherapy, meditative practice, and poetic imagination to help us transform the immediacy of our own awareness into a life-affirming crucible of unflinching presence and radical acceptance for all that we are and can be. Anyone with the courage to encounter their humanity in all its glory and failings will benefit from the medicinal balm that even a few pages can offer in our time of need.”
Miles Neale, PsyD, Buddhist psychotherapist, author of Gradual Awakening, and founder of the Contemplative Studies Program
“Because your journey through life, like everyone’s journey, is a unique story that has never before been told and will never be told again, no guidebook really fits the territory. Matt Licata’s beautifully crafted treatise is about as close as I’ve seen! From his premise that ‘you are not a project to be solved, but a mystery coming into form,’ he invites and shows you how to ‘open to the unexpected wisdom, creativity, and beauty in your immediate experience.’”
David Feinstein, PhD, coauthor of The Energies of Love and Energy Medicine
“Matt Licata’s new offering, A Healing Space, feels like a love letter to my wild heart—a gift of being witnessed through his poetic and potent words. After spending decades in the realm of dharma teachings that often look through the lens of transcendence, that recommend we overcome being human, this book offers a great exhale. It pierces the veneer and embraces the kaleidoscope that is our messy, raw, vulnerable, and tender being as we attempt to live with more awareness and mend old stories and wounds. It’s healing by embracing all the parts. His blend of psychology, spiritual understanding, and lyrical conversations about the whole of life’s unfolding makes me feel at home in the whole of my being.”
Janet Stone, yoga teacher and founder of the Stone Yoga School
Also by Matt Licata
The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You
Sounds True
Boulder, CO 80306
© 2020 Matt Licata
Foreword © 2020 Mirabai Starr
Sounds True is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author and publisher.
This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical recommendations of physicians, mental health professionals, or other health-care providers. Rather, it is intended to offer information
to help the reader cooperate with physicians, mental health professionals, and health-care providers in a mutual quest for optimal well-being. We advise readers to carefully review and understand the ideas presented and to seek the advice of a qualified professional before attempting to use them.
Published 2020
Cover design by Lisa Kerans
Book design by Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Licata, Matt, author.
Title: A healing space : befriending ourselves in difficult times / by Matt
Licata, PhD.
Description: Boulder, CO : Sounds True, 2020. | Includes bibliographical
references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020007698 (print) | LCCN 2020007699 (ebook) | ISBN
9781683643739 (paperback) | ISBN 9781683644255 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology) | Mindfulness (Psychology)
| Self-acceptance.
Classification: LCC BF637.S4 L48955 2020 (print) | LCC BF637.S4 (ebook) |
DDC 158.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007698
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007699
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Foreword
by Mirabai Starr
I don’t know about you, but I have grown weary of the self-improvement project. The endless quest to uncover and slay the host of inner demons who have been messing up my plans for enlightenment, which I have imagined as some pure land of perfect equanimity in which I hover over my worldly concerns like a cartoon yogi, forever free from narcissism and other embarrassing inclinations, reliably dispensing compassion to the vulnerable, wisdom to the ignorant, and a kind of sexy psychic luminescence to anyone who comes into proximity with my purified and perfected (no)self.
It hasn’t been fruitful, anyway. The same rage arises when I’m bombarded with three competing demands at once, for example, attempting to compose a politically delicate email whilst my dogs are barking their heads off outside my window and I’ve just knocked over my cup of tea. I still lose it. I holler and pound my desk, sending my little statues of Saraswati and Our Lady of Guadalupe toppling. It’s not pretty.
Not to minimize my neuroses. They get a lot worse than this. A stew of bad behaviors stemming from contradictory thought patterns: I’m too much; I’m not enough; nobody sees me; everyone wants something from me; why does so-and-so get all the spiritual accolades when this is my area of expertise? I indulge myself in mini tantrums or cold shoulders, demands for other people’s attention or ghosting those who irk me. I despair of ever rising above this quagmire.
Along comes Matt Licata’s compassionate book, A Healing Space. In these pages, Matt, with exquisite patience, warmth, and poetry, invites us to enter and inhabit the darkness in our souls as holy ground. He tenderly guides us to show up in our bodies, connected by our breath, and begin to consider the possibility of befriending the parts of ourselves we have abandoned, deemed shameful and unworthy, “unspiritual.” He lifts the veil from the face of our suffering to reveal the luminous beauty that abides there. He encourages us to share the truth of our shattering so that we become a kind of alchemical vessel in this world, a “healing space” in which others may experience their own transfiguration. Matt affirms that each of us has access to “the outrageous intelligence and bravery of the broken human heart” and the privilege of modeling the heart’s ability to return home.
This homecoming, Matt shows us, is probably not what we thought it would be when we signed up for the enlightenment track. We have been conditioned by our spiritual communities—whether traditional religious institutions or alternative practice spaces—to conquer certain feeling states in favor of some idealized realm where we are unmoved by these “lower vibrations,” free to claim to our birthright of peace, love, and bliss. Matt points out that this “aggressive campaign against various unwanted bands of the emotional spectrum” pushes a vast array of meaningful, intelligent, and valid energies into the shadows where they will spill from the seams of our strained psyches and cause even more suffering, to ourselves and to others.
What if, instead of rushing to our meditation cushion or asana practice like a grim soldier stepping onto the battlefield, ready to vanquish the ego once and for all, we take our ego into our arms and lean close and hear the wisdom at the core of its insistent lament? How about we enter into psychotherapy like a mother putting aside her endless to-do list and settling down to play with her toddler, driven by no other agenda than loving curiosity? Could we pray the prayers and serve the marginalized and work for peace and justice not to clean up our karma or grease the gates of heaven but rather as a lived recognition of our participation in the web of interbeing that connects us all?
One of my favorite parts of A Healing Space is in the teachings of alchemy. I have always been fascinated by the metaphor of transmuting the lead of our difficult experiences into something golden, whether a work of art or a life of service. But in this book, Matt offers a much deeper and more revolutionary aspect of the alchemical process that I ever imagined: the ancient alchemists did not view the base material as merely something to be transcended or gotten rid of, but as “the substance of the gods.” Sacred. Beautiful. Loveable. In fact, upon committing themselves to the vessel of transmutation, they entered into what Matt calls “a love affair with reality.” What would it look like, Matt asks us, if we were to love our heartbreak, our sadness, our confusion? Let’s add to that list: our depression, our envy, our shame? If we were to love reality however it is appearing in this moment. Alchemical transmutation! Warmed by the fire of our own tenderness, held safely in the vessel of loving inquiry.
What a revolutionary take on healing! Rather than muscle our way through spiritual disciplines and therapeutic interventions, we fall in love with our brokenness at last and welcome all the orphaned parts of ourselves home.
It takes a combination of courage, hard work, patience, and trust to meet our shadow, lift it to the light, and allow it to integrate with the rest of our being as we rewire our brains and recalibrate our lives. The parts of ourselves we’ve so desperately tried to banish, which keep dragging their asses back at most unwelcome hours, once served a useful purpose and deserve to be met with a degree of kindness and appreciation.
But it’s difficult to do shadow work alone. A few years ago, when I was first being called to step up as a public figure on the spiritual circuit, I was in turmoil. I was moody and ungrounded and felt like a spiritual fraud. Part of me was thrilled that everything I had so passionately cared about all my life finally mattered to the world, and the other part of me wanted to run and hide. I was simultaneously plagued by insecurity and annoyed by what I perceived to be false projections of my ability to save people’s souls. Something in me was about to die, I could feel it, and I was both attracted and terrified by the prospect.
Enter Matt Licata. I had the good fortune of being introduced to this gentle master of the human heart at a time when he was still offering one-on-one counseling. Matt created a safe container for me to enter the hot heart of my seemingly most intractable fears and sorrows. This was not some kind of spiritual boot camp, but rather an opportunity to lovingly welcome my own death, as the mystics I write about have celebrated in poetry and song, and emerge with the capacity of the heart to offer of myself as a “healing space” for others. Matt didn’t underestimate what would be required of me as I navigated the depths of darkness—not only the shadow parts of myself but the vast holy mystery itself—and yet he did not abandon me for a moment. His calm and kindly presence, his respectful holding, emboldened me to take the risk of offering myself to the flames of my own alchemical transmutation. Nor was this a one-time event that ended when our therapeutic relationship came to a close. It is an ongoing process of befriending myself and recognizing the face of the sacred everywhere
, not in spite of but as the fruit of suffering, both my own and the pain of the world.
Just as we have always suspected, this soul work is not an individual task, and we are not alone. “Behind the scenes,” Matt writes in this magnificent book, “love is at work, the beloved spinning out worlds of experience, longing to know itself through form, finding illumined passage through us as vessels of light and dark.” Whenever we show up for each other and bear witness, blessing each unique version of the human predicament, soothing one another’s overwrought nervous systems with our loving presence, we provide safe passage, Matt assures us, and “together we break more, burn more, and somehow become more whole.”
Introduction
An Invitation into a Healing Space
At some point along the way, each of us will be asked to revision the ideas that have accompanied us to this moment in our lives. Although at times the call arrives quietly and slowly, as a whisper guiding us into new territory, for many it comes as an unexpected visitor, erupting in the night as we find ourselves in transition, confused, angry, heartbroken, uncertain, or depressed. However it arrives, it is a reminder that even our most sacred identities and beliefs tend to become encrusted over time, worn-out symbols of a living reality no longer so alive. Somehow what was clear only days or even moments ago has lost its meaning and is no longer able to accompany us into the next phase.
The recurring theme we will explore in this book is how we can meet the challenges of life in a new way imbued with curiosity, wisdom, and compassion. In replacing the old circuitry of shame, self-aggression, and self-abandonment with holding, kindness, and attunement, we discover the sacredness of “ordinary” life, which turns out not to be so ordinary after all. In this unearthing, even our most difficult, confusing, and painful experiences are filled with intelligence and in some unexpected way turn out to be guardians on the path. As we make the journey together, we will uncover and experiment with new perspectives, tend mindfully and with tenderness to our immediate experience, and discover fresh layers of purpose and meaning.