A Healing Space

by Matt Licata

  For some reason, we were given a heart that is whole, and no matter how seductive it can be at times, we will never be satisfied resigning ourselves to that which is partial, even if it does feel a bit more safe and secure. Perhaps this wired-in longing for the full spectrum is a blessing and a curse, for at times it can feel overwhelming because the burning can and will incinerate everything that is less than illuminated within us. This incineration is another vital process we can learn about from the alchemists, for like the solutio, the calcinatio burns and transmutes the raw material into a fine, white powder, into the ashes of new life.4 We will never feel fully alive through embracing only those feelings, images, dreams, and parts of ourselves that our families, societies, and authorities claim are worthy and valid, but only through the courage required to embrace the entire display, to befriend it all, and to transform the raw material of our lives into the luminous expression of wisdom and love in all its forms.

  Together, may we partake of the entirety of the range of this human experience, with as much curiosity, soul, and kindness as we can discover. And may we give ourselves permission to care, to take a risk in allowing one another to matter, and to tend to the heart as it inevitably breaks in response to a bittersweet world—not to mend the heart, necessarily, for we are not sure if this is what it truly wants. We must discover the heart’s deepest longing and whether it needs repair, even during times when it has been shattered. Or maybe it is crying out for something a bit more magical, more creative, more alive. Maybe at times we need to crumble to the ground at the magnificence of it all, awestruck at the bounty laid out before us. To fall apart. To fail. To get back up. To be humbled again. To start over. To be a beginner. An amateur at the ways of love. To make this journey with our kindred travelers and the sun, moon, and stars. And to realize together how little we know in the face of it all.

  Thank you for sharing some of your heart and life with me as we turn toward the mystery together.

  Matt Licata

  Autumn 2020

  Boulder, Colorado

  1

  Reimagining What It Means to Heal

  It is important to slow down and bring new life to the ideas, language, and lenses through which we engage our psychological and spiritual lives. To at times start over, begin anew, and not assume we know too much about the heart and its mysteries. Otherwise, we can find ourselves in an overly abstract relationship with soul and spirit, flattened and uninspired, and out of contact with something dynamic and alive. One concept in deep need of reimagining is that of “healing” itself. In my work as a psychotherapist and with those on longer retreats, underneath the varied experiences and unique life circumstances, nearly everyone I speak with reports a longing to experience true healing, whatever that might mean for them, a healing that goes beyond the surface and into the depths—not a temporary fix but a transformation that penetrates to the core.

  Many are exhausted by old ways of being and worn-out approaches to enlightenment and improvement, frustrated with not being able to bring forth a life they know is possible, based on the deepest truths they have discovered. But all too frequently, the concept of healing becomes generalized and theoretical and loses its vitality. Perhaps it was once associated with a creative, transcendent vision of life but over time has become just another word among many, a distant goal and faraway dream, devoid of the meaning and possibility it once had. It has become experience-distant, pointing to some vague sense of a life without disturbance, free from emotional intensity, reliably certain and safe, in which we dwell outside history and time in a realm filled with consistent feelings of peace, bliss, and spiritual insight. Although this all sounds good on the outside, somehow the lived reality of “healing” has lost its potency and promise.

  What people often mean by “healing” is a permanent condition in which we will no longer have to be in direct contact with certain experiences we do not like, ones that we are unable to manage and control or that in some way represent a sense of failure to us. Healing then becomes a way of protecting ourselves from the ever-alive reality of our own vulnerability, not knowing, and the mysteries of life. The underlying belief is that if we can “heal,” then we will be able to avoid the uncertainty. Even if we might not be consciously aware of these ideas about healing, for many of us they color our perception under the surface.

  As we penetrate the deeper layers of our experience, which we’ll do as we make our way through this book together, we might discover ways we’ve come to imagine “healing” as a condition in which we’ll never again be asked to confront disappointment, confusion, depression, shame, fear, or the reality of a vulnerable, shattered heart. The absence of certain feeling states would be clear evidence that we have “healed” and can now get on with our lives. But is this healing or is it fear? This largely unexamined view of healing, which tends to operate subtly and for the most part outside conscious awareness, sets up a situation in which we are subtly in resistance to life. It can be revealing to discover how our ideas about healing are tangled up in the fear and avoidance of certain experiences, in staying out of those human states of disappointment, uncertainty, and not knowing. If fear is the guiding energy behind the activity to replace one experience with another, are we actually healing or just furthering our own entrenchment in the energy of fear itself?

  If, for example, each time anger—or jealousy, grief, sadness, or confusion—arises in our experience, we make a move to replace it with happiness, gratitude, or joy, and the anger temporarily “goes away,” is this healing? Or is it something else? I am suggesting that any activity of self-abandonment takes us away from true healing, fueled by fear and the deeply wired-in belief that we cannot stay close and befriend ourselves in the face of certain challenging emotional experience. We’ve fallen out of touch with the wisdom inherent in the difficulties of life, which is understandable. But we’re going to reexamine this together, slowly and provocatively, and step back into the unknown, where the mystery awaits us.

  Throughout A Healing Space, I’ll refer often to the idea of “self-abandonment,” which points to a whole family of ideas, strategies, and behaviors designed to take us out of the immediacy of our experience, especially difficult feeling experience, and describes how we turn from ourselves in difficult times. When we abandon ourselves, we often fall down a rabbit hole of dissociation, denial, shame, judgment, and blame and lose touch with the valid, human, and honorable inner experience that longs for our attention, curiosity, and care. I’ll be saying a lot more about self-abandonment in future chapters because untangling it is one of the core foundations of a profound transformation and healing and the encoding of new circuitry woven of the substances of curiosity, empathy, and self-realization.

  The challenge with our conditioned strategies of self-abandonment is that they are effective, in a way. They do seem to work . . . well, sort of. At least they appear effective in the moment because they can help remove us temporarily from some shaky territory. We can see our various forms of addiction, for instance, as expressions of self-abandonment, as ways to avoid feeling states we have come to associate with something incredibly unsafe, unworkable, embarrassing, or seen as evidence that there is something wrong with us. For example, eating when we’re not hungry; unconscious use of television or the internet; unhealthy sexual expression; or harmful dependency on drugs, alcohol, or even another person, especially when that person is unkind to us. Perhaps we’ve trained ourselves to control and manage our lives so that they’re okay; things might be relatively certain and safe. But we might also feel dead, flat, and frozen, with a vague sense that something is missing. Even if we can’t put our finger on it, it haunts us as a ghost of our unlived lives. What is it?

  When all is said and done, we must set aside all outside definitions of healing (including the ones in this book!) and turn home, back into the fire of our own direct experience. For only there can we discover for ourselves what healing is, its unique meaning and expression in our lives, our m
otivations for wanting to heal, and the ways we might unconsciously be resisting the changes we know will be required. This inquiry around the nature of what true healing means specifically for us is one we are each invited to engage slowly, with curiosity, to sit with patiently, yielding as it penetrates us cell by cell. We have to allow ourselves to return to the openness of the amateur, take the risk of stepping into the unknown, and start afresh. We can burn in the sacredness and purity of the questions and resist the temptation to scramble into answers for which we might not be prepared or that belong to another. One of the core aspirations of this book is to hand this holy task back to you, the reader, to support and empower you to make the journey for yourself and to discover your own subtleties and truths about these matters, so sacred, personal, and poetic that only you can decipher them.

  The Contradictory Nature of Healing

  To discover the nature of healing for ourselves, we must open and listen to previously unacknowledged parts of the psyche; otherwise we will be in touch only with what we already know. One of the core premises of this book is that true healing and transformation are in large part discovered in the unknown—in those unfamiliar voices, thoughts, feelings, and images that dwell deeper in the soul, in those realms of experience not always lit by conscious awareness. Although a part of us genuinely wishes to heal, awaken, and transform, there are lesser known, hidden parts that have an unconscious investment in maintaining things the way they are.1 The momentum to preserve the status quo, emotionally and otherwise, is deeply embedded, and we must never take for granted the power of the pull back into the way things have always been. Throughout the book, we will illuminate and provide sanctuary for these concealed parts, explore how and why they have become so established in our experience, and how we can befriend and illuminate them, ultimately recognizing their true nature as allies and helpers. These shadowy figures and energies speak throughout the day and night, not to harm us or provide unnecessary obstacles to overcome but as invitations into depth, as guides, messengers, and emissaries of the vastness of what we are. But in order to discover this for ourselves, we must cleanse our perception, untangle the pathways, and begin to imagine ourselves and the world in a radically new way.

  We can hear these voices, for example, as they make themselves known through questions such as: Why, after years or even decades of working on myself, meditating, praying, surrendering, and going to therapy can it seem like nothing is changing? Why do I keep choosing an unavailable partner? How can this grief still be here? Why am I depressed? When will I ever find meaningful work? Why I am always feeling disappointed or disappointing others? When will the feelings of shame, unworthiness, and rage go away? When do I reach the end, become fully awakened, enlightened, totally healed? When will it change? Will this burning ever be resolved; will the longing ever be fulfilled? As these and similar questions come into our conscious awareness throughout the day and night, the veiled parts of ourselves make their way into the light, the lost and orphaned ones of the soul reach out to us in the hope of reunion, where we can finally tend to them with curiosity, awareness, and compassion. Through our willingness to touch and be touched by them, they are able to find their rightful place in the greater ecology of what we are.

  Learning to contact and bring illumination to those parts terrified of and resistant to healing and change is an act of profound kindness, though this task is often overlooked as part of our inner work. It is natural to provide a home for ideas and aspects of ourselves that align with the ways we want to be seen, that support our fantasy that we’re consistently in control of all aspects of our lives. But when it comes to other voices that do not line up with who we think we are, who we want to be, or how we want to be seen by others, we understandably run into resistance. We defend against these figures and energies, abandon them when they appear, and send them into the shadow, where they will continue to try to reach us in ever creative (and often disturbing) ways. I’ll have a lot more to say about the shadow and unacknowledged soul parts in chapter 8.

  As we begin to listen carefully to the differentiated voices and parts of ourselves that have something to say about the process of transformation, we encounter one of the most subtle and powerful discoveries of this work: the foundation of reorganizing our experience and manifesting true healing is in a radical new revisioning of friendship with ourselves. Sufi tradition speaks eloquently and poetically about the nature of this “Friend,” the mysterious “other” who longs for relationship with us at all times, pointing to the mystery of friendship and its role on the path of awakening. This Friend can appear as an internal or external other and draws us into itself—into union, discovery, meaning, and light. True friendship must not only involve those parts that are positive, flowy, and confirming of who we think we are but perhaps even more importantly those with which we are not so familiar or repelled by, those that run counter to the image we have of ourselves. In ways often contradictory to the one seeking control and maintenance of the status quo, the radical act of befriending all parts of ourselves is what makes true healing possible. It is important to realize and respect how revolutionary this is—the journey to reverse years, decades, and perhaps even lifetimes of habitual, conditioned patterning of repressing parts of ourselves and placing them into the darkness, where they have no choice but to reach out from the shadows to find us once again. More poetically, the Friend misses us, and we miss him or her; we long to be together again, dancing and playing in unstructured states of being, awareness, and love.

  Healing Will Always Surprise Us

  Although we can honor the authentic call to transformation—those voices, images, and parts of ourselves that genuinely want to heal—we must also be prepared to confront the real-world implications of what all this will inevitably require, which can be life-shattering. For when we heal, the way we have come to organize our experience—the things we like to do, the people we find ourselves drawn to, the familiar reference points that provide our identity—tend to fall apart. But this “falling apart” is a sacred process, evidence of the critical alchemical operation of putrefactio, or putrefaction, in which the known crumbles and disintegrates, revealing important and lesser-known dimensions of our experience not available during times of clear reflection and “holding it all together.” These old, inner soul companions can no longer be accessed and used in the same way, to locate ourselves and confirm who we think we are and what will fulfill our deepest longing. They just can’t contain us any longer; they’re not subtle, nuanced, or magnificent enough. To transmute our lives in this way might sound inspiring on the surface, even thrilling (sign me up!), but remember, true transformation is destructive as well as creative and does not always conform to the ways we thought it would all turn out. In other words, healing will surprise us.

  For example, if we fully transform our shame and unworthiness and heal from that deeply rooted sense that something is wrong with us at the most basic level, what will our lives be like? What will our relationships be like? How will we interact with others if not through these painful wounds of a lifetime? Who will we be; how will we live, move, and have our being? If those familiar lenses are no longer available, how will we see and navigate? What will we organize around? What is the axis around which we will orient? What will be the new image, metaphor, or lens through which we engage?

  Many I have worked with over the years have come to discover the great liberation in the realization that they are not who they thought they were, as well as the profound disorientation of losing their familiar reference points in the aftermath of a profound healing or awakening experience. It’s important that we honor both of these events, the freeing and liberating nature as well as the existential and primordial confusion that can arise in the wake of healing. One of the mysteries of this work is that we cannot know in advance what it will be like to live our lives without our conditioned ways of seeing the world. If we set our glasses down (or if they are removed by life or God or spirit or soul),
we will be required to see with new vision, unable to depend on the known to guide us in the way it used to. This can be a profoundly contradictory place to find ourselves. Yes, there is a certain excitement in stepping into new territory, but it can also generate bewilderment or even panic because we sense a pending confrontation with the unknown. We must be kind to ourselves during times of transition, honoring the actualities of what it truly means to heal. We must slow down and soften as we are asked to provide sanctuary for the wounds, grief, and unfelt joys of a lifetime and offer a temple of rest where the disowned inner travelers can gather and return.

  Turning the Heart

  As we move into this enlivened new territory, we open the doorways (in some cases floodgates) for reunion with unknown aspects of ourselves, as well as the survival-level anxiety our defensive organization has successfully kept at bay for so long.2 It’s literally impossible to know what this will be like, but we sense the implications, I believe, at a deep level. This core sensing gives rise to the part of us that feels contradictory when it comes to healing, convinced that maintaining things as they are—even if “as they are” is less than ideal, flat, overly protected, and uninspiring—is the safest bet, the surest way to stay out of overwhelming feeling and the exposure of too much vulnerability.

  Facilitating a dialogue between these various voices can help us to make sense of this paradoxical territory, where we listen compassionately to both sides and come to deeper understanding of their perspectives and concerns. This way, when either side surges in a here-and-now moment, we are prepared to meet whatever thoughts and feelings come our way and not judge or attack ourselves in the face of the perceived inconsistency. If we do not provide a sanctuary for those voices that genuinely desire healing as well as remain in resistance to it, it is likely we will conclude that the conflicting energies are evidence of some problem or that somehow we have failed. We can cut into this habitual conclusion by training ourselves to expect to feel this way, not falling into the trap of shame and blame when the contradictions inevitably arise, and staying committed to befriend whatever appears as best we can. Although providing an accepting home for the uncertainty might not be something we ever want to do, true healing is not possible without tending to our essential vulnerability and the entirety of unfelt feelings and aspects of ourselves we have kept out of conscious awareness. It is not possible for us to awaken and transform our lives without befriending all parts of ourselves, calling them all back home into the larger field of what we are.