Listen to the Inner Friend - Matt Licata

In times of liminality and transition, there is a unique invitation
delivered to each of us, form the inner Friend, to slow down and
open to what it might truly feel like to play and imagine once again.

To explore from that place of beginner's mind, re-opening to those
natural states of awe, wonder and the simple joy inherent in a few
moments of just Being, Being who and what we already are,
without having to turn our lives into some unending self-improvement
project.

While we can hold an intention to improve our lives, relationships,
and sense of self, which is intelligent, and kind, simultaneously to
spend some time each day in these less-structured experiences, ones
that aren't oriented in improvement, in getting a different experience.

Maybe for us that's being out in nature (perhaps without our electronic
devices) or writing down our dreams, or doing some type of yoga or
meditation or prayer or whatever that might be: Writing, dancing,
putting our hands in some sand...

Tending to the wild undomesticated aliveness of the sensual world.
An invitation of being emptied-out of the known, the frozen, and
the crystalized within us...

Taking time each day to interrupt the trance of the collective, the
pull into a survival-level restlessness, and return into our bodies,
and provide an inner temple in which we can feel, where that
which has remained unlived can come into embodied reality and
disclose its wisdom.

To attune to that emerging right-brain flow of image, feeling, 
sensation, and those states of communion, Union and Unity
[within]...

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Notice the reflection of the statue in the round sand frame,
The "Inner Friend"? ... :)

 

Befriending Ourselves - Matt Licata

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 lost its meaning and is no longer able to
accompany us into the next phase.

[.....]

To see our pain, confusion and struggle as an intelligent
communication from the deepest parts of ourselves is a
radical approach... To suffer consciously is an ancient,
sacred art lost in our time, replaced by a well-intentioned
solar self-help industry designed to take us out of the 
darkness and complexity and into consistent joy, flow,
happiness, and bliss...

[.....]

True healing is not a state in which we become liberated from
feeling, but freer and flexible to experience more fully the
deeper, more complex, and more nuanced dimensions of the
psyche... to touch the fullness of what it means to have taken
birth here....in the universal human experience.

[.....]

This exploration [of befriending ourselves] is not oriented in
transcending our vulnerability - fleeing into a state of power,
untouchability, and control - or safely hiding in some protected
spiritual cocoon where we've risen above it all.  It is not taking
refuge in spiritual concepts.  It is in knowing that in any moment
life will reorganize and rearrange all our constructed spiritual
identities and fantasies...

[.....]

We will never feel fully alive through embracing only those
feelings, images, and parts of ourselves that our families,
societies and [religious] 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...

Matt Licata

Excerpts from the Introduction to his book:
A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

Photo - from the Internet

 

"Homecoming" - Mirabai Starr

I don't know about you, but I have grown weary of 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....to anyone who comes into proximity
with my purified and perfected (no)self [image]...

[.....]

But the "homecoming" 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 our birthright of peace,
love, and bliss...

[.....]

What if, instead of rushing to our meditation cushion or
asana practice....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?

[.....]

The ancient alchemists did not view the base material [ego]
as merely something to be transcended or gotten rid of, but
as the "substance of the gods."  What if we were to love
reality however it is appearing in this moment, with its
heartbreak, our sadness, our confusion, our depression, or
[rage], our shame?  Rather than muscle our way through
spiritual disciplines and therapeutic interventions, we fall
in love with our brokenness at last and welcome the orphaned
parts of ourselves home.

Mirabai Starr
Contemporary Mystic
Writer, Author

Excerpts from the Forward
in Matt Licata's book:

A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

Photo from the Internet

 

The Ancestors' Unlived Life - Matt Licata

Deep in the somatic unconscious, the ancestors continue to live
within us, emerging-into-now by way of their sensitivities and
gifts, as well as through the shards of their unlived lives.

Their lost joy, broken dreams, and unfulfilled creativity have a
way of taking up residency in our cell tissue, subtle bodies, and
in our bellies and hearts.

As we enter into the mandala of descent - downward into body,
mud, roots and Earth - these ones begin to appear: as symbol,
image, feeling and synchronicity.  They have a way of shifting
shapes in order to find us, through color, tree, water, and sound.

What is that we're carrying on their behalf?  What dreams remain
undreamed and unmanifested for them?  What are their deepest
longings?  What secrets have they never been able to share?

What keeps them awake at night?  What brings them alive and
unleashes their creativity and unique essence?  What visions are
not permitted to take form, of the divine within and of the divine
world?

What were they required to disown in order to fit in to a place that
had lost its sensitivity and soul?  What became buried in the
shadows?  What story were they unable to tell, what feelings were
they unable to feel?

In what way are we being asked to open a portal into re-emergence,
re-enchantment, and revisioning?

As we open to receive this offering, an inner sanctuary forms to
illuminate and transmute this transgenerational soul-material.  Inside
that structure, the seemingly solid lines between past, present and
future begin to fall away.

Being "in the present moment" we share this moment with the
ancestral ones and the spirits of the Earth who are with us.

In this way, past, present, and future co-emerge and interpenetrate,
opening a diamond-like passageway into the mysteries of self 
and other, being and becoming, and a new alchemy of
separation and union.

The individual self is an emanation, a manifestation, of the Totality,
a unified expression of the clear-light nature.  Unique and 
differentiated, while at the same time non-separate and one.

Matt Licata

~

Vortex Art
Mystic Meandering
Feb. 2024

 

The Descending Path - Mat Licatta

The path of the heart is not only one of transcendence - ascending
and rising above - but also one of descent: Into the underworld,
earth, and shadow, and into relationship with the figures of the
somatic unconscious.

The lunar way isn't as clear as its heroic or solar counterpart.
It is unclothed: of fixed concept, a precise map, and knowing
how it's all going to turn out.  It has a way not of confirming but
of dismantling the spiritual persona. 

No promises, no guarantees, no mythical tales of some "permanent"
state of enlightenment or unending transcendent experience, 
where we can remain safe and free from the reorganizing fires of
love, which burn through the known to reveal essence.

[.....]

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Rhythm of Sadness...

A deep rhythm of sadness 
arises from my heart...
unexpectedly,
spontaneously...

It rises even though
I "know"
that before thought and feeling
"I" am Eternal Beingness...

The rhythm of sadness
is not assuaged
with the knowledge of
that "I am That"...

It will not be held back, suffocated, 
repressed by sand bags of knowledge of
"the teachings,"
from the caverns of the mind...

It matters not to
"The Eternal"
that sadness and grief
arise in this mechanism called
"me",

like the tides of the ocean
rising and falling
in a darkened harbor;
felt not seen...

It is held in the embrace of "The Eternal"
breathing me...

It just is - sadness,
rising and falling
through me...

I follow the rhythm of sadness
breathing into the Heart
where it meets
The Rhythm
of
"The Eternal"

and slowly
becomes
rivulets
of energy;
just energy,
decreasing in
intensity.

Only to rise again
on the next tide...

Mystic Meandering
Feb 3,2021

~

Sadness is not something you need to fix, cure or
transform.  It need not be "healed", but held.  You need
not shift the sadness into some "higher" state or apply
teachings so that it will yield into something else.  For
it is complete and pure on its own.

With the fire of awareness and the ally of your breath,
touch your heart...
Go on a journey into the core of the feeling, the sensation,
the images, and the raw, shaky life that is longing to be held.
And listen.

It is by way of this journey that sadness will be revealed to be
what it is, a bridge into the universal heart, a messenger
of power, mercy, and fierce compassion...

Matt Licata

 

Honoring Uniqueness - Matt Licata

...honoring the reality that we are not only connected, 
but also separate, with our own interiority, subjectivity, and ways
of making sense of our experience.  In spirituality, we tend to
emphasize connection, unity, and oneness, which are essential

dimensions of the human heart.

Alongside this, however, it's essential that we also recognize
the reality (and holiness) of experiences - [that] we each perceive
reality, the divine, and this world in our own unique ways.
We each fall to the ground in a distinct way, and behold the
beauty of the stars and the planets and the trees uniquely.  No one
can perceive, fall, or behold for us, or on our behalf.

While from a transpersonal perspective, we can speak about unity
and oneness, within the relative we are also differentiated and
wildly unique, each with our own ways of organizing our
experience.  Each with our own fate and relationship with the
divine, and with our own path to travel.  To dissolve these
differences into some homogenized spiritual middle does not
honor the sacredness of form.

Matt Licata
Excerpt from an article entitled: The Yoga of Intimacy and 
Relationship

~

  Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The "Spiritual Journey" Is Unique - Matt Licata

The "spiritual journey" is by its very nature unique...
It must be explored by way of primary, first-person experience.

Contemporary spirituality is filled with all sorts of ideas and
concepts about what it means to be "spiritual" and we must
find the courage to question even the most sacred of these ideas,
trusting the path of direct revelation as we come to have more
and more confidence in our own unique experience.  There
are infinite number of ways to open to, touch and enter the
mystery, and the right way for us might look quite different
from others, even our "spiritual teachers."

At some point on our journey, we might hear a call to set aside
the beliefs, teachings and practices we've gathered throughout
our lives and rest.  This "rest" is not passive, cold or resigned
but lit up from within...  we open to a more paradoxical 
invitation that comes roaring out of thundering silence.  Just
what this is must be discovered by each of us in the fire of
our own direct experience.  We cannot take anyone's word
for it.

In this "rest" we are taken inside a dimension of experience
where we honor the entirety of what we are - [we are] drawn
to bring more awareness to this dimension of experience.
Something mysterious, magical, alive and sacred is wired into
this moment by its very nature and carries the fragrance of the
holy.

...something is granted permission and space to emerge - exactly
as it is.  We are invited into a deeper, richer exploration of the
dimension of the soul; re-entering the state of pure wonderment.

Matt Licata

From: A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves In Difficult Times

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Courage - Matt Licata

A certain 'death' occurs as part of the ["spiritual"] process;
in the deepening of self-awareness...  There is a fantasy that we
can come out the other side intact, without having to sacrifice
some aspect of ourselves in the fires of transformation.  But it
doesn't really seem to work this way...  There is wisdom within
the reorganization itself that we cannot know if we abandon
[the process] prematurely.

When we engage in any work of depth, we inevitably come up
against a cultural bias toward the light, the upward, and the
brightened dimensions of the path.  We cannot sidestep or bypass
the darkened condition, those parts of the psyche buried and
hidden beneath ordinary awareness. This turning into the dark
can be quite challenging, especially if we identify as a 'spiritual
person' - kind, compassionate, giving, selfless, [loving], grateful,
forgiving, at peace, and not ever caught in the so-called
negative emotions of fear, rage, and depression.....but we must
find the curiosity and courage to engage this dimension.

[In this dimension] we see things that could not be seen from
the held-together state.  The old dream crumbles - the image
through which we'd been seeing ourselves, or any emotionally
significant part of our world - has finished its time here.

The wisdom in the dark is preparing the vessel [us] for the
next illumination.  The invitation is to allow the old to wash
away, and let our perception be reorganized.  New images, new
myths, new lenses must emerge through which we can navigate
a new world. [A new way of being in the world.]  A shift in the
heart is most required, a willingness to befriend ourselves at
levels previously thought impossible.

We must clarify within us what is most wanting and needing 
our attention, awareness, care and love.....even if it feels
unspiritual.  The intelligence in the heart brings forward the
prima materia for us if we slow down and open into the
unknown - and the unknowable...
We must honor the realities of our hearts...

Matt Licata
from - A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Yin/Yang Bowl

 

Turning of the Heart - Matt Licata

[You may be asking] 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 am I always feeling
disappointed?  When do I reach the end, become fully awakened,
enlightened, totally healed!  When will it change?  Will the
longing ever be fulfilled?

...true 'transformation'...does not always conform to the ways we
thought it would all turn out.  Many discover the 'great liberation'
in the realization that they are not who they thought they were..

...true 'transformation' isn't 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' our live without befriending
all parts of ourselves, calling them all back home into the larger
field of what we are.  It is an attunement to the entirety of what
we are...

Many of us have quite a lot of insight into our embedded patterns
[samskaras and conditioning] and "know" what we need to do
to 'awaken'.  But - despite all the "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.

We must tend to our turning of the heart through the fire of our 
own direct experience - opening to our pain, our grief, our longing,
honoring the psyche and the soul.  Mere [intellectual] insight
alone will not reveal the deepest layers... instead [they are revealed]
through awareness illumined from within by the heart, by warmth,
and by love.

Matt Licata
from: A Healing Space

~

Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all
the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Rumi

~

Photo - Mysitc Meandering

 

Homecoming - 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
 perfect (no)self.

Matt Licata's compassionate book, A Healing Space...affirms
that each of us has access to 'the outrageous intelligence and
bravery of the broken human heart' and the heart's ability to
return home.

This homecoming, as 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"...  Instead, he encourages us to share the truth of
our shattering so that we can become our own alchemists -
and learn to love reality however it is appearing in this
moment.

The ancient alchemists did not view the "base material" - as 
Matt calls our difficulties, our thoughts, our darker feelings
and emotions - to be transcended, but as 'the substance of the
gods' - Sacred, Beautiful and Loveable...  Matt's invitation is
to enter and inhabit those abandoned parts of ourselves and
our unlived lives as holy ground.

It's a revolutionary approach.  Rather than muscle our way
through spiritual disciplines, and therapeutic interventions,
we fall in love with our brokenness and welcome all the
orphaned parts of ourselves home.

Mirabai Starr
from the Forward to
A Healing Space:Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

Matt Licata, PhD

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Tend to Your Soul - Matt Licata

Art by Joe Maccer at Deviant Art

There are times in each of our lives when a chapter comes to
an end, when we find ourselves on the precipice of rebirth
and renewal.  Something has dissolved - the dream of me and
my life and the way it was all supposed to turn out - but it's
not yet clear what's going to arise from the ashes to take its
place.  As disorienting as these times of transition can be, they
are evidence of a sacred process occurring deep in the personal
and collective soul.

The question now for so many of us is: what is it that the soul
wants? Not what I thought I wanted, what I should want, or what
others want for me, but what is calling to me from the depths of
who and what I am, into a life of new vision, purpose and meaning?

As we engage in this holy reassembling, it can be so easy to lose
track of our home base, whether we imagine this center as the
palace of the soul, or the light of the spirit...  The great poets,
alchemists, wayfarers, and mystics have declared that the path is
everywhere, but it can take a slowing down and a cleansing of 
our perceptions for this to become a living reality.

The very foundation of transformation and healing is our capacity
to slow down and bring new levels of awareness to our experience,
as a way to cut through the billions of moments of habitual
consciousness and collective networks of trance. In the Daoist
alchemical text, The Secret of the Golden Flower, we are invited
to "turn the light around," which is an evocative metaphor for
inner work as alchemists of our own lives.

The reality is that most of us were not trained to practice embodied,
compassionate self-attunement and our increasingly electronic,
speedy, and fragmented world does not always provide a sensitive
holding environment in which to be a true friend to ourselves.

The spiritual path is a matter of direct revelation,
of primary first-person experience, and must be lived... 
Contrary to the beliefs of a world steeped in networks of
transgenerational trauma and trance, our unique sensitivities,
vulnerabilities, and eccentricities are not obstacles to our path,
but are the very path itself.

The soul is always calling to us, but often in ways that are hidden
to ordinary perception.

What is it calling you to?

Matt Licata

From: Tending the Soul

 

Multiplicity and Unicity - Licata and Ruvinsky

The experience of multiplicity is just as holy, as valid, and
as "spiritual" [as unity]...  God itself has no bias toward
unity or multiplicity, oneness or differentiation, but rather
expresses itself through each of these perspectives to
disclose one of its qualities or fragrances.  We need not
take sides but only enter into communion with each of
these energies...

Matt Licata
From: A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

"The question doesn't even arise in Silence..."

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

She ["God"] births herself as the many who interchangeably
play the roles of objects and subjects, reciprocally adapting,
each of the many, even in their individual forms,
embodying the One...

Joan Ruvinsky
From: The Recognition of Our Own Heart

~

Photo from the Internet

 

The Dimension of the Soul - Matt Licata

Part of the challenge of practices and orientations organized
exclusively around returning to the background field or
context of awareness is that we can lose touch with the
richness of the inner world, the wisdom of creativity...in the
sparkle of the imagination.

We spend so much time [mentally] interpreting and understanding
our experience that we lose touch with the magic of just one
present moment with the aliveness of the senses and more 
intuitive knowing...  Through imagination and creativity a new
poem is received, a new story is able to tumble out of the stars
into, through and as our lives.

The "spiritual journey" is by its very nature radically unique...
It must be explored by way of primary, first-person experience.

Contemporary spirituality is filled with all sorts of ideas and
concepts about what it means to be "spiritual" and we must 
find the courage to question even the most sacred of these ideas,
trusting the path of direct revelation as we come to have more
and more confidence in our own unique experience.  There are
infinite number of  ways to open to, touch, and enter the mystery,
and the right way for us might look quite different from others,
even our "spiritual teachers."

At some point on our journey, we might hear a call to set aside
the beliefs, teachings and practices we've gathered throughout
our lives and rest.  This "rest" is not passive, cold, or resigned
but lit up from within...  we open to a more paradoxical
invitation that comes roaring out of thundering silence.  Just
what this is must be discovered by each of us in the fire of our
own direct experience.  We cannot take anyone's word for it.

In this "rest" we are taken inside a dimension of experience
where we honor the entirety of what we are - [we are] drawn to
 bring more awareness to this dimensions of experience. 
 Something mysterious, magical, alive and sacred is wired into
this moment by its very nature and carries the fragrance of the
holy.

...something is granted permission and space to emerge - exactly
as it is.  We are invited into a deeper, richer exploration of the
dimension of the soul; re-entering the state of pure wonderment.

Matt Licata

From: A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves In Difficult Times

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The body knows, the heart knows - Matt Licata

You don't have to fix anyone's problems.  You don't have to save
them, heal them, or get them to take on your favorite metaphysical
beliefs, theories, and techniques.

Just be there with them so that they feel felt and understood.
Bear witness to their own organic wisdom as it re-calibrates,
reorganizes, and emerges.

Listen.  Not only to their verbal narrative but to the somatic
story as well.  To the secret, sensitive language emerging from
their heart.

Bracket your beliefs and systems for a few moments.
Attune.  Enter into the miracle we-space with them, so that
they feel felt.

Extend to them a field of permission where they can go through
their experience without any pressure to heal or to meet some
hidden agenda in order for you to stay close.  Resist the
temptation to "teach" them.  But instead, "reach" them, finally,
by way of the circuitry of empathic immersion.

It's going to be difficult to do this if we are out of touch with 
our own unlived life - with the unmet grief, the unheld sadness,
the unmetabolized rage.  If we have disavowed these visitors -
including through our endless [spiritual] theories and beliefs...

Of course the mind has such a hard time with this.  It just can't
believe it.  What about my theories and techniques and spiritual
beliefs and all of it?  I must convey it all and show them.

But the body knows.  The heart knows. The holy nervous system
knows.

The "other" is not in need of new information, theories, or spiritual
beliefs, but needs and wants and longs for you...  your nakedness,
your tenderness, your raw unfiltered being, your love.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
November Rose

 

Held - Matt Licata

When we are able to "hold" our experience as well as allow
ourselves to "be held" by something larger than our personal
self, we learn to trust ourselves and the workability of our lives,
even in the midst of uncertainty.  We become better able to
respond to the challenges life will inevitably provide and trust
deepens in the basic wisdom that underlies even our most trying
experiences...  Over time, as we illuminate and befriend our
experience at deeper levels, we invite its meaning and intelligence
to disclose itself...  symbolically and metaphorically and begin
to realize that even during times of intense struggle and suffering,
we are contained within something immense and ultimately
trustable...

We are always, already being held by something infinite and vast -
the contemplative and meditative traditions provide a portal
into this larger, already existing dimension of experience...

Matt Licata

from - A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

Photo from the internet

 

The Weaving of New Cloth - Matt Licata

At times, the wisest, most skillful, and most compassionate
action is to establish a boundary with another person.  To
stand up and assertively say No.  To move in an empowered
and swift way to protect our own integrity.  To privilege our
own autonomy and interiority. To meet narcissism, abuse, and
neglect with a fiery, fierce, and direct response.

This is not only the case with "external" others - other people
in our lives - but also with the multitude of "internal" others -
from the interior landscape.

You might recognize them by their predictable refrain: "There is
something wrong with you.  You have failed. No one will ever
love you unless you change and become someone different.  You
are not okay.  You have fallen short.  You have done life wrong.
You are no good. You do not belong.  Your sensitivities and
eccentricities are not welcome here."

These are the voices of the past, the shadow of a culture of
materialism and greed, of the lineages of transgenerational
trauma and trance.  The voices of disembodiment, insensitivity,
of a societal and global ego that has fallen out of communion
with the natural world, the body, and the imaginal [mystical] realms.

These internal visitors, to an open and sensitive nervous system,
must also be met with the boundaries of discernment.  To 
realize those moments when we fall out of wisdom-presence of
the here and now, into the time machine of the "there and then."

[We need to] reclaim our own basic goodness, and not merely
accept their conclusions, reality tunnels, and the lenses through
which they have come to see things.  But cleanse our perception
with clear-seeing and the wildness of love.

To take the risk of telling a new story, dreaming a new dream,
spinning out a new tale, weaving a new cloth.  And to allow
ourselves to be turned by the great Weaver Herself...as new
vision is revealed, as we become that vessel in which She
can come alive here again.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Dancing In The Fire - Jennifer Welwood

There will always be voices that promise you greatness and glory;
They call out from the worldly marketplace;
They call out from the spiritual marketplace;
They call out from the bigger-better-more marketplace.

Do not buy their false promises, or purchase their ephemeral wares;
What fulfills for a moment is not worth the price of your soul.
There are heights that will lift you,
but not when you try to ascend them;
There are powers that will fill you,
but not when you make them your own.
There are treasures, and there are imitations of treasures.
If you have lost your true gold, at least turn away from the glitter.

Want only what is true.
This will lead you to the well of your deepest sorrows.
Follow the passageway, all the way down;
Become the dark emptiness of your core.
Be still.  Don't measure the waiting.
Be still.  Let the fire show you its secret heart;
A strand of clear light running through you.
Gather yourself there, and the luminous universe opens.

In the vast expanse, fathomless, infinite ocean of light,
lose yourself, and find yourself, and become what you already are.

Jennifer Welwood
Original title "Renunciation"

~

We can descend into the fire of direct experience of our feelings.
It is within the very core of this holy fire, in the alchemical crucible
of the body where the naked, groundless somatic territory of
illumination occurs, where healing emerges, and a new pathway
of love, care and compassion unfolds and illuminates within you.

Matt Licata

~

Art - Mystic Meandering
Woman Whirling in the Fire
(looking from overhead)

Craypas Oils
2012

 

The Golden Scaffolding - Matt Licata

It's an act of mercy and compassion to step back and acknowledge
how much we've been through over these last couple of years.
Just to be alive as a human being on the planet right now carries
with it a certain tone of activation in the body and nervous system.

It's like there's been a continuous drip of a soul-level cortisol or
adrenaline, on the one hand, and a collapse into hopelessness/
helplessness on the other - an alternation between hyper-vigilance
and a numbing shutting down.

Each of these responses and the bodily felt arousal that accompanies
them are coherent and make sense.  In addition to our verbal
narratives and stories, there are the stories of the body and also
those of the nervous system that weave together.

Underneath it all, a deep longing to rest and to feel safe again in our
bodies, to re-tune and enter consciously into the next phase.  
Something has fallen away that we will never be able to return to,
but the exact nature of what's coming next has yet to be given.

This not-knowing where we're headed can generate that deep, even
cosmic sort of restlessness that many are experiencing.  We are in
that period of liminality and transitional space, in between the way
things used to be and the birth that is yet to come.

The temptation is to get out of the in-between and into the rebirth as
quickly as possible.  But if we bypass the reorganization prematurely,
we will not be able to receive the gold that is found only within the
core of that which is falling apart.  This is the invitation into the
rich, alchemical yellowing.

This is a difficult realm to navigate as it is not held as valid and
honorable in our conventional world.  But it is one of potential
and creativity, a doorway to experience that is not always available
in times of certainty and flow.

In the very center of the paradox and contradictory energies is the
water of life.  It is a courageous journey into that territory and one
that will surprise us.

It may grind us into dust, but it is the particles that survive that
initiation that form the golden neural and soul-scaffolding of a
new world.

Matt Licata

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Turning Into The Not-Knowing - Matt Licata

There is a certain death that occurs as part of the healing
process, a part of us unable to survive illumination.  As we
turn the light around, according to one Daoist alchemical
text, a piece of soul will fall away.

While it is tempting to spin out of the uncertainty and
quickly into rebirth, there is wisdom and purity within
the reorganization which we cannot bring into embodied
knowing if we patch it all up prematurely.

The dissolution itself is initiation as it offers vision and
feeling not available in the put-back-together-state.  An
old part of ourselves that has accompanied us for so long,
a fellow traveler is no longer permitted to continue the
journey by our side.  This prior soul-companion can be
another person or it can be a member of the inner family.

Somehow, we're asked to bear witness to the crumbling of
an old dream - my life and the way I was so sure it was
going to turn out.  This is the holy alchemical operation of
putrefactio, a sacred process that is evidence of.....fierce grace.

In order to be initiated, we must slow down, and turn into
the not-knowing.  To take some time to mourn the
reassembling of our world,  to grieve all that we will
inevitably lose as we heal and awaken.

To tend to the pieces of the soul, the shards of the heart,
and the fragments of the psyche that are being rearranged,
to honor the role they have played, for standing by us for
so long, and providing refuge during difficult times.

To lament the loss of their companionship and allow them to
continue into whatever realm is next for them, [and give them]
permission to travel and experience new things.  Even if we
 are unable to "accept" this, we can touch the ground where
 they once were, and bow.

To stand in awe at this process, despite the profound pain and
grief, to care for all of it as we allow the Mystery to reveal
itself in deeper and deeper ways.  To know that healing and
awakening is messy, glorious, and full-spectrum... and is not
only an act of creation, but one of destruction as well.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering