A Healing Space

by Matt Licata

  As we allow ourselves to honor these contradictions, to see them as natural and even intelligent and holy, we realize at deeper and deeper levels that healing is not a process of eradicating the unwanted and sending it into the shadow, but it is attunement to the entirety of what we are. By deserting that which longs for reunion, we create the conditions for future eruption, which is sure to occur in less-than-conscious ways. The invitation, then, is to cultivate a conscious relationship with even our most disturbing and challenging experience, which paradoxically opens us to a larger, more spacious perspective that can make use of whatever arises as “food” or energy for deeper layers of healing. We will never reorganize the patterns of a lifetime by means of self-aggression, which only reinforces the realities of early empathic failure and the shame that arose from the deep sense there is something fundamentally wrong with us.

  Increased awareness is critical and necessary, but for most it is not enough to shift the intergenerational trances of habitual consciousness. Many of us have quite a lot of insight into our embedded patterns and “know” what we need to do to heal, to awaken, to transform. But despite all this “knowing,” fundamental change can remain elusive. At some point it might only be a turning of the heart that has the power and beauty and poetic impact to soothe the cosmic exhaustion, wounds, and pain of an unlived life, where love is revealed to be the ultimate medicine, which can penetrate the deepest layers of our conditioning and felt sense of separation.

  What this “turning of the heart” looks and feels like for each of us must be discovered in the fire of our own direct experience. To open to our pain, our grief, and our longing and allow the allies to reveal themselves requires that we work not only at the level of clear seeing but also at that of deep feeling and honoring of the psyche and soul, including a new valuing of our sensitivities, eccentricities, and unique symptoms. It’s important to remember that for most of us, mere insight alone will not reveal the deepest layers of transformation and healing we long for but instead the awareness illumined from within by the heart, by warmth, and by love.

  The ancient alchemists were great models of this because the relationship they had with their materials was akin to a love affair. It was hot and intimate and alive. It was painful, heartbreaking, chaotic, and glorious. They allowed the material to matter to them. They loved the minerals and vessels and fires—and related to them as living beings they cherished. For them there was no solid dividing line between matter and spirit.

  These are all metaphors for how we might tend to our own inner experience—the “matter” of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations—practicing intimacy with the emotional world and the varied experiences that come to us as we commit to the alchemical opus of our own lives.

  Metabolizing Experience

  In order to know and befriend ourselves at the deepest levels, one of the core foundations for true healing, we must cultivate a new way of relating with ourselves that allows even our most difficult and challenging experience to disclose its meaning, intelligence, and purpose in our lives. To do this, we have to slow down and shift our relationship from one of thinking about our experience to fully embodying it. We have to allow ourselves to truly touch it and be touched by it rather than merely orbiting around it, where we are sure to continue to feel some degree of disconnection. Just as we must properly digest the food we eat to absorb its nutrients, we must also assimilate our experience to receive the wisdom and sacred data within it. All through the day and night, we are receiving impressions—through our mental, emotional, somatic (i.e., body-based), imaginal, and spiritual bodies. Life is a constant stream of experience—conversations with friends, caring for our kids, cooking a meal, wandering in nature, practicing yoga or meditation, engaging our work and creative projects, reading a book, shopping for groceries, running errands. But to what degree are we experiencing all of this? How present are we to our moment-to-moment experience, embodied and engaged, allowing it to penetrate us, where it can become true experience and not just some passing event? To what degree are we on autopilot as we make our way through the day, only partially connecting with our friends and family and engaging the sensory reality of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch?

  I’m pointing toward a way of “metabolizing” our experience that allows us to touch and engage it at the most subtle levels, where it is able to disclose its qualities, intelligence, and purpose. By evoking “metabolization,” I am making use of a biological process in a metaphorical way to refer to working through and integrating our experience, especially those thoughts, feelings, sensations, and parts of ourselves that historically we have pushed away. Other words from the biological sciences, for example “digestion,” “absorption,” or “assimilation” can be used to point to the same idea, indicating that it requires concentration, attention, and a certain fire or warmth to “make use” of our experience and mine the “nutrients” contained within it.

  Just because we “have” an experience does not mean we properly digest and absorb it. If our emotional and sensory experience remain partly processed, they become leaky (a psychic version, if you will, of “leaky gut syndrome”) and unable to provide the fuel required to live a life of intimacy, connection, and spontaneity. This inner psychic situation is analogous to not properly chewing and breaking down the food we eat and thus not being able to mine the energy and nutrients our bodies need to function optimally.

  Although the desire for change and transformation is natural, noble, and worthy of our honor and attention, if we are not careful, it can serve as a powerful reminder and expression of the painful realities of materialism and self-abandonment. One of the shadow sides of spiritual seeking and the (seemingly) endless project of self-improvement is that we never slow down enough to digest what we have already been given, often much more than we consciously realize. In some sense, most of us have been given everything in terms of the basic alchemical prima materia required to live a life of integrity and inner richness, but not the “everything” the mind thinks it needs to be happy and fulfilled, found by way of a journey of internal and external consumerism. And not the “everything” that conforms to our hopes, fears, and dreams of power and control and that keeps us consistently safe and protected from the implications of what it means to have a tender (and breakable) human heart, but the “everything” already here as part of our true nature, the raw materials for a life of inner contentment and abundance, revealed by way of slowness and humility, not unconscious acquisition.

  It is important to remember that for most of us, healing happens gradually, slowly, over time when we begin to perceive ourselves and our lives in a new way. Each micromoment of new insight, understanding, and perspective must be integrated and digested on its own, honored and tended to with curiosity, care, and attention. Before we “move forward” to the next moment, we must fully apprehend and open our hearts to this one; this slow tending (metabolization) is one of the true essences of a lasting, transformative, and deep healing. If we are not able to metabolize even our most intense and disturbing experience, we will remain in opposition to it, at subtle war with it, and not able to be in relationship with it as a healing ally.

  In Tibetan tradition, there is an image of the hungry ghost, a figure of the imaginal realms with a large, distended belly and tiny mouth. No matter how much food (experience) is consumed, there is a deep ache and longing for more. Regardless of how much is taken in, the ghost retains an insatiable hunger. Because this one is not able to digest, make use of, or enjoy what is given, a primordial hole is left behind that can never seem to be filled. One invitation, as this image appears in our own lives, is to slow way down and send awareness and compassion directly into the hole, infusing it with presence and warmth, and finally tend to what is already here, not what is missing and might come one day in the future by way of further procurement.

  Just as with food—choosing wisely, chewing mindfully, allowing ourselves to taste the bounty of what is being offered, and st
opping before we are full—we can honor the validity, workability, and intelligence of our inner experience, even if it is difficult or disturbing. The willingness to fully digest our own vulnerability, tenderness, confusion, and suffering is an act of love and fierce, revolutionary kindness. There are soul nutrients buried in the food of our embodied experience that yearn to be integrated, metabolized, and assimilated in the flame of the heart. But this digestion requires the enzymes of presence, embodiment, compassion, and curiosity about what is here now.

  Let us slow down and become mindful of the ways we seek to fill the empty hole in the center, whether it be with food when we’re not hungry or experience when we are already full. And in this way, we can walk lightly together in this world, on this precious planet, not as hungry ghosts desperate to be fed but as kindred travelers of interior wealth, richness, and meaning.

  Layers of Metabolization

  In a spiraling and nonlinear way, the process of metabolization seems to loosely unfold in layers and stages we cannot really skip.3 We can try to skip them, which many of us will naturally attempt to do, but this usually results in further suffering and struggle for ourselves and others. I will discuss in detail in chapter 7 “bypassing” certain aspects of our experience to avoid difficult thoughts and feelings. Rather than shaming or attacking ourselves for seeking a shortcut, or faster or safer way, we can use this discovery to go deeper. The alchemists realized, often through perilous trials and tribulations, that they could not move on to the next phase of their work until the first was completed, or at least understood, in great detail. If we skip over the critical stages of dissolution, deflation, and differentiation, we’re not going to be able to fully realize and navigate future operations such as coagulation, synthesis, and unity.

  Although it is increasingly common in psychological and spiritual teachings to “accept” and even “love” our deepest fears, vulnerabilities, and shortcomings, it might be naive to believe we can do so without first meeting the material as it is, without any further agenda to transform it into something else. There must be some prerequisite tending of the material with warmth, curiosity, and interest, so that we can get to know it and its qualities, before we open our hearts to it. That sort of artful patience and slowness is a great act of kindness that we can bring to the work and not force ourselves to “love,” “accept,” or “forgive” before it is indicated and before we have fully touched and been touched by the pain, grief, confusion, vulnerability, and sensitivity with us in the vessel. By slowly and carefully relating to the “material” of our emotional experience in this way, we further the process of its digestion and metabolization. When we encounter the material of our lives in an embodied, mindful, and curious way, we can then see the fears, vulnerabilities, and shortcomings for what they are, feel their qualities and textures, explore their subtleties and nuances, and discover that although they might appear as obstacles to what we most deeply long for, they are actually portals and passageways into it, disclosing more nuanced depth and soul.

  As the alchemists discovered, we must first separate from the content so that we can enter into relationship with it, where we can see it clearly and differentiate its various components, qualities, and essences. We want to get close but not so close that we merge with the material and become fused, thereby losing perspective. We want to feel its textures and how it comes to us in a moment of activation, or being triggered, genuinely interested in knowing it at the deepest possible level, not as an enemy from the outside but as a part of us that longs to return home. The alchemical process of separatio is critical in our coming to know the material in this way, practicing intimacy but not becoming flooded or enmeshed. The potential confusion between me and the material is something both meditative and alchemical traditions have noted, tracked, and attempted to illuminate in their work.

  We cannot expect to move directly from a triggered state of overwhelm into acceptance and love, for this would require that we circumvent the critical stages of getting to know the material first, discovering its qualities and fragrances, its validity and the adaptive role it might still play in our lives. It is honorable to aspire to acceptance and love as noble virtues and goals; however, these experiences remain disembodied concepts until they arise organically as the result of tending to the pain, grief, and emotional vulnerability existing just under the surface. As long as there is an unconscious motivation to work with the material solely so that it will be purged from our experience, it is unlikely we’ll be able to get close enough for it to be thawed out and clarified by the warmth of the heart.

  Initially, we must train ourselves to stay with the intensity for short periods of time, checking in for a few moments in provocative but not traumatizing ways, pushing ourselves a little in a way that does not overwhelm us but builds our resourcefulness and resilience, and allowing ourselves to touch those parts of us that have felt unapproachable and unsafe in the past. Here, slow is good because it increases our tolerance for emotional and somatic intensity bit by bit over time. There’s no rush to the finish line or shaming ourselves because the process is taking “too long” or we’re not doing it right. There is no “too long” in the heart, in the soul, and in the nervous system, only just long enough.

  Compassionate Retraining

  To reacquaint ourselves with the ways of being, feeling, and perceiving we have historically disavowed takes practice and compassionate retraining of our nervous system to tolerate and contain that which at one time was not possible. It is not a project to rush through or attack ourselves for not doing fast enough, some new goal to add to our spiritual to-do lists. The process has its own timeline, which is unique for each of us and must be respected. The urge to “get in there” and heal everything quickly is not usually an expression of true self-compassion but a leftover remnant of the way our families of origin might have reacted to our emotional experience when we were young children; that is, it’s wrong, bad, not okay, and inappropriate and must be dealt with (eliminated, repressed) immediately.

  Slowly, we might discover that over time we can endure this material and begin to breathe life back into those parts of ourselves where breath was once not available. We can unfreeze the body, the heart, and parts of ourselves we have closed down to keep us safe. Although it might feel otherwise in the moment, it is possible to realize in an experiential way (not just by taking another’s word for it or through conceptual understanding only) that staying with an intense feeling for a few seconds is not an actual threat to our survival. This alone is a profound realization that should not be taken lightly. Somehow, in a way that might surprise us, we are able to meet and make room for experience we were convinced would take us down. Although we might attempt to convince ourselves that “a few seconds” is insignificant, that is not accurate. Seconds at a time weave the neural scaffolding that supports lasting transformation.

  Before we can begin to move deeper into areas of acceptance, love, and forgiveness, we must first come to know in a personal and embodied way that staying with what was once unbearable is not going to drop us into an unworkable state of anxiety. This requisite sense of safety is an experience that cannot be skipped; otherwise, it is likely we’ll end up reinforcing old patterns of self-aggression and even violence. Historically, lacking in certain capacities to keep ourselves regulated, we had to do whatever it took to escape the fire and get back quickly to safe ground, even if doing so required that we abandon ourselves and enter states of dissociation. It was the wisest choice in the moment, and we can be grateful that we had the wherewithal to make such a decision (even if unconscious), which not everyone is able to do. Although the activity of repression generally carries a negative connotation, it is a developmental achievement that occurs early in our lives, and for those unable to employ dissociative strategies, the consequences can be quite grave. If we allowed in every thought, feeling, emotion, and memory that exists in implicit form in any particular moment, we would find ourselves in a threatening and unmana
geable place.

  Coming Closer to the Material

  After we have the repeated experience that we can withstand small doses of intensity as it takes form as activated thought and feeling, we can then begin to increase our tolerance and stay for two seconds instead of one, or ten instead of five, and so forth. Please note that I’m referring to seconds here, not minutes or hours. In this way, we move from tolerating the material to starting to contain and hold it, slowly discovering capacities that might not have been available even weeks or months ago. Even if only in a small way, this discovery begins to open our hearts. We naturally become more curious, wanting to care for ourselves in a new way, which “heats up” the material in the vessel and allows us to move closer.

  After the intensity is a bit more contained and we are further confident we can stay for short periods of time without falling apart, we discover the safety and permission to continue into more open and undefended dimensions of our experience, including starting to accept what has come. By “accept” here, it’s important to note we are not condoning or settling for something, resigned to it staying forever, or even making some claim that we “like” what is happening—that we are “okay” with it or have forgiven another for causing us pain. But we start to recognize a deep desire (and capacity) to no longer abandon ourselves and our immediate experience, even if we deem it less than ideal. We are willing to experience what has come, to go through it and not around it, for we sense that resisting what is—what in psychological literature is referred to as experiential avoidance—is the root cause of so much of our emotional suffering.4 We accept that this is the way reality appears in this moment, and we do not want to argue with reality any longer, for to do so only increases our struggle.