A Healing Space

by Matt Licata

  There is a deeply rooted belief that the best way to care for ourselves is to turn away from feeling, from this tender sensitivity, and from what is happening in our bodies during times of activation. This is a belief we inherited from our personal, cultural, and archetypal histories, and we must discover for ourselves whether it is true, now. Ask yourself: Is it accurate that abandoning my vulnerability and falling into denial or acting out is truly providing the care I most long for in a moment of being triggered into pain or struggle? Although we might feel like what we most need is protection, numbing, and relief, our own presence, love, and holding meet the deepest longing in our hearts. By “holding” our experience in a new way, meeting it with curiosity and kindness—while simultaneously opening to the possibility that we are being “held” by something greater than ourselves—we begin to encode new pathways that allow us to unearth the wisdom and creativity in even our most challenging circumstances. We cannot take anyone’s word for this, though, and must plumb the depths of our own experience to find the unique truths about this for ourselves.

  After we begin to see more clearly what is going on and the nature of our conditioned responses, we are then able to map a new way, to catch these strategies as they emerge in a constellated here-and-now moment and replace them, over time, with responses oriented in mindfulness, acceptance, and self-compassion. Cultivating loving attention to the ways we’ve come to organize our experience and bringing new levels of awareness and kindness to ourselves are foundational and powerful expressions of this theme of “holding.” To truly hold our experience, we must first contact it in a curious, interested, caring, and even intimate way, replacing the old way of self-abandonment in times of stress and activation with that of empathy and warmth.

  Harbingers of Integration

  As a way to cultivate this curious attention and begin to hold your experience in a new way, I want to share an inquiry in which you can engage in a moment of activation, when you are upset, stressed, or thrown off center. Anytime you wish to come closer to yourself, to enter into relationship with the soul parts and pieces with which you sense you might have lost contact, or anytime you feel drawn to provide a deeper level of warmth, attention, and kindness to your experience, I invite you to try this inquiry. Although it can be helpful to contemplate the idea of holding and meeting our experience in a theoretical way, it all comes alive when we find ourselves in the midst of cascading thoughts and feelings that seem to be happening to us from the outside, coming of their own accord, and threatening to take us down. The following is a short exercise or meditation you can do during these times. As soon as you realize you’ve been hooked or triggered, take a few deep breaths, recognize what has happened, and state a simple intention to become curious so as not to abandon yourself and fall down the rabbit hole into the habitual pathways. “This time, I will try something different.”

  When your emotional world is on fire, and you are cycling in the claustrophobia of ruminative thought, pause and return attention into your body. It only takes one moment to return to curious interest, shifting awareness out of the swirling narrative and into the life moving through you. With this act, you offer rest to the spinning thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations and surround them with warmth. This is what allows relationship to take place, this field of safety and presence, where the entirety of what you are is welcome. Open to the possibility that the visitors—as they come in the form of ruminative thoughts, painful feelings, heat or cold, pressure in the body, or irresistible impulses—do so not to harm or take you down but to be allowed home, to step into the relational field with you and release their message.

  Drop underneath the compelling story line and into the alive world of feeling, sensation, and image. You can return to the story, characters, plot, drama, and climax at a later moment after the activation has been soothed with the cooling rains of loving awareness. From that more grounded, earthy place, you will be better able to access, articulate, and make sense of what happened, reauthoring the story in more integrated and cohesive and less shadowy ways.

  After you locate the intensity within the emotional or physical body, practice breathing into or with it. Instead of falling into one of the old strategies of repression or acting out, slow down and cut into the sense of urgency with breath and with the earth as your witness.

  With your hand on your heart, renew your vow to no longer abandon yourself. Even if for only one or two seconds, use your awareness and the warmth of your presence to infuse what is arising with curiosity, empathy, and kindness for the journey you’ve been on. Slow down the momentum of billions of moments of self-aggression, and lay down a new pathway.

  It all starts with the capacity and the willingness to recognize that we’ve been triggered—that the visitors have arrived, the figures of the psyche who’ve been trying to reach us for so long, not as obstacles for us to overcome but as orphaned parts of ourselves who only long to be allowed back home. Instead of meeting with shame, judgment, and blame the discovery that we have been hooked, we might cultivate our gratitude for the gift of awareness and see if we must act urgently to protect ourselves from the life surging within us. This momentary awareness alone is a true miracle.

  Each of us must experiment for ourselves and see what is most true now, not what was true in the past or what our parents, teachers, therapists, family, or friends said was true. Each of us must set this and every book aside for a moment and finally turn toward ourselves in a moment of activation, see within, and provide sanctuary for the pounding in the heart, shakiness in the belly, and hopelessness in the throat. We infuse this surging life with presence, care, mercy, and compassion. “No, this time I will not turn away. I will not leave myself in this moment and spin out into shame, blame, judgment, and rejection. Just this time, I will stay close. And listen. Feel. And see.”

  This pause is a threshold to a new world where we are standing on a precipice with a cliff below and the stars above, where we are invited to travel inside that alive, creative, alchemical middle place in which new circuitry can take birth and bloom. It is an act of profound kindness to provide safe passage for the visiting feelings, emotions, and sensations as they wash through us, conveying significant information for the journey ahead. Yes, we might feel as if we need to numb ourselves or quickly seek relief, but this is the old groove laid down in personal and collective networks for billions of moments and kept alive each time we turn away. Through compassionate presence and the warmth of mindful awareness, we offer a home for these ancient companions where they can rest, be cared for and listened to, and then continue along their way.

  You are okay. Go slow. There is no urgency now. Stay with the sensations as they rise and fall in your belly and your heart. For just a second or two at first, just see.

  Waves are washing in, yes, not as obstacles or enemies but as harbingers of integration, seeking to find their rightful place within your wild ecology. As you return, over and over again, into the aliveness of the somatic world, slowly the love will dissolve the tangles and the knots. And all that will remain is a luminous field of awareness, warmth, and creativity. For this is what you are.

  Let us take a moment to rest and open to the notion that we are already being held by something vast. Take a few deep breaths, feel our feet on the ground, and realize that no matter what is happening in our lives, we and our experience are contained; without having to earn or deserve it, we are supported in ways we might not fully understand or be able to perceive at this time. I am not suggesting you believe this out of some expression of blind faith or just take my word for it, but just open to the possibility.

  Over time, as our inquiry and experience deepen, we might discover an increasing trust in our ability to return to this ground in times of stress, confusion, and challenge, in which we can tap into resources previously unavailable. Through this practice, we begin to build a certain confidence that whatever comes in our lives (as inner experience), even if difficult and intense, is valid i
n some fundamental way and need not be rejected. But more than anything it is workable, and we need not abandon ourselves or our experience in times of activation.

  3

  Self-Compassion and Caring for Ourselves in a New Way

  In this chapter, we will deepen our exploration of what it might look and feel like to come closer to ourselves, to replace old, worn-out pathways of self-aggression and self-abandonment with kindness and true care. We continue to step into new territory at a pace that is provocative but not overwhelming, honoring the realities of where we are as well as our longing to reach into the depths. To do this, we must explore novel ways of tending to challenging experience and the potential meaning and purpose of even our most intense and disturbing thoughts and feelings, and with as much subtlety as possible, how we are thrown off-center. As always, the goal is not to “get rid of” experience we do not like, replacing it with more desirable states, but to increase our consciousness of what is happening in a moment of activation. From the ground of this enlarged consciousness, we become more flexible, skillful, and compassionate in our responses.

  Jung discovered that our difficult experience constellated in clusters of energy that he called “complexes.” These complexes arise from emotionally triggering life situations, and they organize around specific themes in our lives such as mother, father, money, sexuality, abandonment, and inferiority. They consist of psychically charged thoughts, feelings, images, and behaviors that have a way of taking over our ordinary awareness during times of stress and activation. Colloquially, we refer to this process as being “triggered,” “hooked,” or “activated,” and for a few seconds or minutes (or hours) it can seem as if our “ordinary consciousness” has been usurped by some outside force. For example, we’re in a conversation with someone and then suddenly out of nowhere we are flooded with a cascading waterfall of hot, sticky, claustrophobic thoughts and feelings, as if we’re being pulled down into some sort of hole. Our perception is altered, our experience becomes inflamed, and we fall off-center. Later, we might even say, “Wow, what happened? That wasn’t ‘me’.”

  Although cultivating deeper layers of insight into precisely how we get caught in a complex, including tracing its origin throughout our personal history, can be helpful in depotentiating the energetic constellations, increasing our awareness is often not enough. This is a common realization I hope to invite in this book—the discovery that insight, however helpful and clarifying, is not usually enough to transform outmoded and tangled perceptions and ways of organizing experience. Although intellectual clarity is critical to unraveling our complexes, greater understanding tends to take us only so far. Even if we can bring new levels of perception to the nature of the complexes and the specific thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that constitute it, we’ve all had the experience of “knowing” what’s going on but still not being able to “do” anything about it, especially in real time.

  We can have a great deal of knowledge about these complexes, but in a moment of activation, all that knowing doesn’t really seem to help that much as we find ourselves tangled in shame, rage, blame, and self-attack. From within the charged state, awareness is not always synonymous with the transformation of the painful thoughts and feelings, not to mention our unhealthy behaviors in response. In addition to cognitive insight and perspective, we must bring in the emotional body as well as new, skillful, in-the-moment behavioral changes and new ways of responding live and on the ground. This takes a lot of practice and the willingness to meet, tolerate, contain, and work through a variety of challenging, anxiety-based experiences.

  Jung described the complexes as autonomous portions of the psyche behaving like independent beings, suggesting that they have a life of their own because they operate in large part outside our ordinary and conscious control.1 Before we know it, they arrive into awareness and cloud perception, hooking us into all sorts of painful (yet familiar) ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. They have a way of commandeering ordinary consciousness, taking us over in a moment of activation, cutting through (and liquefying) even our most profound insights and realizations. Perhaps we thought of ourselves as nice, patient, open, content, peaceful, empathic, caring, nonjudgmental, independent, spiritually awake, compassionate, and emotionally healed. But when we are caught in the grip of a complex, these qualities are nowhere to be found. Instead, much to our surprise and consternation, their opposites are alive and spinning in our experience, coloring the lenses through which we see ourselves and others and how we navigate our close, personal relationships. As Jung provocatively noted, “Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.”2

  Sometimes all it takes is someone looking at us in a certain way or saying or doing something rather innocuous—not calling us when they said they would, not seeing us as we would like to be seen, misunderstanding or abandoning us in a moment when we need them, or offering a relatively reasonable critique of our work, speech, or appearance. As a network of feeling-toned associations, the complex gathers energy like a tornado as it twirls across the plains. In my experience, more important than deepening insight into these complexes is finding a way to bring compassion, kindness, and the transformative warmth of the heart to these clusters of energy. It seems that self-love truly is the medicine that has the power to melt the complex over time, not instead of increased awareness but in addition to it. Mere cognitive insight, although critical, is often not enough. A full-bodied response that touches each of the layers and dimensions of our experience seems to be required. More on this later in chapter 5.

  The way we bring kindness to our experience and meet what is arising with compassion and warmth will look different for each of us; what opens the heart in a given moment is unique for each person. Taking a walk in nature, speaking with a friend, laying our hands on a part of the body that needs extra attention, speaking to an inner child, saying a prayer, and engaging in a healing visualization are examples of practices that work for some in different situations. The point here is that not merely an intellectual approach but a turning of the heart is required to untangle the complex from its historical associations. One without the other just does not seem to generate the requisite energy to overcome the built-up momentum.

  The Two Wings of Wisdom and Compassion

  We find an analogous view in Tibetan Buddhism, for example, which says both wisdom and compassion are required to reach the deepest levels of realization. Where only one “wing” is present, the bird is unable to fly, or flies in a way that is disembodied and disconnected from its inherent wholeness. Even as we incorporate both, engaging in the work of increasing awareness and deepening compassion, we might never eradicate the complex, per se, or fully eliminate it from our experience. No matter how much inner work we do, there is no guarantee that the activation will not occur in a future moment. Fortunately, it is not necessary that we purge the charged thoughts and feelings and remove or delete them from our experience in some wholesale and “final” way; it is only necessary to bring more spaciousness and warmth to them when they inevitably appear. Paradoxically, the continued arising of the complex allows us to deepen in ways not possible if our triggers were removed completely. The triggers allow us to think certain thoughts, feel certain feelings, and sense certain bodily sensations that might not be available in an “uncharged” state. Opening to this possibility supports my primary thesis in this book: wisdom, guidance, mercy, and even a certain type of grace are available in the core of our most difficult experience. But cleansed perception as well as new levels of self-compassion are required to mine this gold.

  Practitioners of certain alchemical and meditative traditions believe that our wounds contain information, and if we eliminate the hurt places, we will lose contact with the organic and inherent intelligence within them. Though our complexes might never be permanently removed, our relationships with them can change profoundly. Even though t
hey might continue to arise, they do so within the context of enormous space. Although perhaps still frustrating and unideal, they are no longer able to throw us off-center in the same way and tend to dissolve in shorter and shorter amounts of time.

  For example, a difficult conversation triggering cascading shame, rage, overwhelm, and abandonment that once took an hour (or more) to digest and metabolize might lose its charge in thirty minutes, or fifteen, or five. Eventually, in some situations, we might even notice that the activated material dissolves simultaneously with its arising because we are able to infuse immediate experience with new levels of curiosity, warmth, and awareness in real time (or close to it).