The Longing of Our Wounds - Matt Licata

Healing can't just be conceptual.  It's not a matter of thinking
differently, more "positively", or even more "spiritually" -
orbiting around the wound with our favorite metaphysical
beliefs, ideas and fantasies.

It's not clear thinking, or even "awareness" that can reach into
the wound and reorganize it. These can all be supportive, of
course, but in the end, healing is experiential, somatic, and
embodied.

While the wound is open, while it's activated and online,
there's a way in that moment that it's weeping.

That weeping, those tears that emerge from inside the wound,
these are emanations of a vital process in alchemy called solutio.

There's a dissolving that must occur in order for transmutation
to unfold.

In that moment of open weeping, the wound presents itself to
be reorganized, to receive something which has been missing,
something the wound has been longing for.

Not just the wound in some abstract way, but the longing of the
little one, the lost orphan of the psyche and soma who has been
carrying that burden of trauma, of aloneness, of unbearable 
emotional pain on our behalf for so long.

That longing, that yearning in the heart is to receive what has
been unavailable..., and what was missing at the
time the trauma became embedded.  
What that is, is love...
The healing medicine is love...

Matt Licata

~

For those still traumatized by 

9-11-2001

Blessings of Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Eternity Portal...

Awoke 9 months ago and

lost my freedom
to move through life
the way I need to:
my natural rhythms
with life:
playful and free
dancing to a celestial tune;
in sync with the Rhythm of the Soul...

Melancholy takes up residence
in my Heart now - grieving the loss.

The cry of the Soul
trapped inside my Heart,
screaming to be free again.

Physical functioning is
becoming harder...
I have become "old"
in just 9 months.
Hardly able to bear the burden
of living life as it is  - now.

I shuffle through life,
losing my balance.

I heard a distant owl the other night.
Maybe it was calling my name...

I could sense death this morning;
we're all just waiting for the inevitable,
but it's how we wait that matters.
Maybe it's coming for me.

To relieve me from the weight of my
responsibilities here...

Released to the final freedom;
disappearing into a portal of light;
taking flight through the Eternity Portal
to a Greater Freedom...

A Blessing...

Mystic Meandering
July 28, 2023

PS - I woke up this morning in a totally different place
I was at peace, feeling my true nature again, playful and free;
dancing with my Soul
Not ready for the Eternity Portal just yet.  :)

Feeling Blessed

Aug. 2, 2023

_/\_

~

Photo - Dorothea on Beach
a few weeks before her walk into the portal of light.

 

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

 

Suffering - Francis Weller

No one escapes suffering in this life.
None of us is exempt from loss, pain, illness and death.
How is it that we have so little understanding of [and empathy for]
these essential experiences?  How is it that we have attempted
to keep grief separated from our lives and only begrudgingly 
acknowledge its presence at the most obvious of time, such as
a funeral.

It is the accumulated losses of a lifetime that slowly weigh us
down - the times of rejection, the moments of isolation when we felt
cut off from the sustaining touch of comfort and love.  It is an ache
that resides in the heart, the faint echo calling us back to the times of
loss.  We are called back, not so much to make things right, but to
acknowledge what happened to us.

Grief asks that we honor the loss and, in doing so, deepen our
capacity for compassion.  When grief remains unexpressed, however,
 it  hardens, becomes as solid as stone.  We, in turn, become rigid and
stop moving in rhythm with the soul.... with the flow of life.  Grief is
part of the dance.

As we begin to pay attention, we notice that grief is never far from
our awareness.  We become aware of the many ways it arrives in
our daily lives. It is the blue mood that greets us upon waking.  It
is the melancholy that shades the day in muted tones.  It is the
recognition of time's passing, the slow emptying of our days.  It
is the searing pain that erupts when someone close to us dies -
It is the confounding grief when our life circumstances are
shattered by the unexpected....  the ground beneath us opens,
shaken by violent rumblings.  Grief enfolds our lives....

It is essential for us to welcome grief, whatever form it takes.
When we do, we open ourselves to our shared experiences in life.
Grief is our common bond.  Opening to our sorrow connects us
with everyone, everywhere.  There is no gesture of kindness that
is wasted, no offering of compassion that is useless.  We can be
generous to every sorrow we see.  It is sacred work.

Francis Weller

from The Wild Edge of Sorrow:
Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief;
The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Feel What You Feel - Fred LaMotte

I don't need you to change me.

Just help me Be
who I am.

It is good
and very good for me
to feel precisely what I feel,
this cloud of grief,
this downpour of despair,
without any names or notes
to self.

Only let me dissolve
in a healing rain
that penetrates all my shadows.
A liquid sliver of sun may arise
on the jagged edge of mourning.

Or not...

Now I can feel everything
because I have tasted
the night.

How a bud bursts, spilling
beauty from its wound.

How the chrysalis shatters,
frees the golden
moth from her season
of uncertainty.
How a single tear
becomes the sky.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

These are difficult times for the Earth and a lot of people 
on the Earth now are suffering. There's a density intensity
on the planet now.  I feel it.  It is difficult to be
"lighthearted" and celebratory when so many people are
suffering.  The Earth itself and the people on it are unsettled,
and many are in darkness within, affecting the whole Cosmos -
the whole order of life.

What brings you to your knees?
What causes you to suffer inside?

What happened to empathy for those who are suffering in our midst?

My neighbor hung himself in his garage over a month ago.  No one
knew he was suffering.  Now his wife suffers.

Those who suffer do not need "fixing."
They need our heart...

_/\_
Namaste

MM

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Dakini Speaks - Jennifer Welwood

My friends...
Let's stop pretending we don't know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven't noticed, let's wake up and notice.
Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It's simple - how could we have missed it for so long?
Let's grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please. let's not be so shocked by them.
Let's not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.
Impermanence is life's only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.
To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion exquisitely precise:
Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.

This is the true ride - let's give ourselves to it!
Let's stop making deals for safe passage:
There isn't one anyway, and the cost is too high.
We are not children anymore...

Give everything for what cannot be lost...

Jennifer Welwood

~

Personal Note: I had to look up what a Dakini is :)
A Dakini, in the Tibetan tradition means "sky dancer/walker"
and is a tantric deity that might best be described as a female
embodiment of enlightened energy.  Dakinis are energetic
being in female form, evocative of the movement of
energy in space.

~

Photo Art - Mystic Meandering

Primal Energy

 

Hey God - John Roedel

John: Hey God.

God: Hey John

John: Grief keeps sneaking up on me.

God: That's because grief is like a ninja.

John: When will it leave me alone?

God: Hopefully never.

John: Um. What?!

God: To grieve means that you have loved.
Grieving is one of the truest human experiences
that you will ever participate in.  It often arrives
without warning - like a late day summer storm -
obscuring the sun and drenching you in a downpour.
It is a gift, isn't it?

John: Uh, no.

God: Grab a pen and write the following four things down.

1) Grief can come and go as it pleases.
You gave it a key to your house at the exact moment you
gave your heart to somebody else.

2) Bereavement is the debt you must pay for having loved.
There is no getting over the loss of a beloved who is now
resting in the arms of endless love.  Grief has no expectation
date.  Despite the passing time, the phantom pain of mourning
is always one memory away from returning.

3) Of all the emotions you face, grief is the by-far stickiest.
It gets all over everything.  Like peanut butter, grief sticks
to the roof of your soul.

4) Grief is like an
afternoon thunderstorm
in late July.

It's the storm
that's always waiting
on the edges
of your most sunny
days to roll
across the horizon
and right over you.

The ghosts of your loved
ones who have died
are the clouds.

The webbed lighting

illuminating the
dark canvas sky is
their reminder to you
that life is just a
brilliant temporary flash
of time.

It's a reminder
to live now.
to be bold.
to be electric.

The pounding rain isn't your tears.
It's the hope of eternal life that
falls on you.

It's that downpour of hope that will
help you grow deep roots in love...

The gale winds
of these storms are
the messages from
those you have
lost to death that
are whispering
to you through the pines
the following psalm:

"It's okay, my love.  Eternity is holding  me.
Death isn't an end.  Death is a threshold.
I'm still here.  I never left.  Love doesn't die.
I remain.  There is no afterlife.  There is only life.
I'm here with you.  Love doesn't die."

It's all such an adventure!

John Roedel
from: Hey God, Hey John
a book about John's simple conversations with God...

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Grief is Sacred - Francis Weller

No one escapes suffering in this life.
None of us is exempt from loss, pain, illness and death.
How is it that we have so little understanding of these
essential experiences?  How is it that we have attempted to
keep grief separated from our lives and only begrudgingly
acknowledge its presence at the most obvious times, such
as a funeral?

'If sequestered pain made a sound,' Stephen Levine says,
'the atmosphere would be humming all the time.'

It is the accumulated losses of a lifetime that slowly weigh
us down - the times of rejection, the moments of isolation
when we felt cut off from the sustaining touch of comfort
and love.  It is an ache that resides in the heart, the faint echo
calling us back to the times of loss.  We are called back, not
so much to make things right, but to acknowledge what
happened to us.

Grief asks that we honor the loss and, in doing so, deepen
our capacity for compassion.  When grief remains unexpected,
however, it hardens, becomes as solid as stone.  We, in turn,
become rigid and stop moving in rhythm with the soul...

When our grief stagnates, we become fixed in place, unable
to move and dance with the flow of life.  Grief is part of
the dance.

As we begin to pay attention, we notice that grief is never 
far from our awareness.  We become aware of the many ways
it arrives in our daily lives.  It is the blue mood that greets us
upon waking.  It is the melancholy that shades the day in
muted tones.  It is the recognition of time's passing, the slow
emptying of our days.  It is the searing pain that erupts when
someone close to us dies....  It is the confounding grief when
our life circumstances are shattered by the unexpected.....

It is essential for us to welcome our grief, whatever form it
takes. When we do, we open ourselves to our shared
experiences in life. Opening to our sorrow connects us with
everyone, everywhere.  There is no gesture of kindness that is
wasted, no offering of compassion that is useless. 
We can be generous to every sorrow we see.
It is sacred work.

Francis Weller
from - The Wild Edge of Sorrow

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

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

 

Grief as it is - Joan Didion

 Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die,
but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that
immediately follow such an imagined death.  We misconstrue
the nature of even those few days or weeks.

We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock.  We do
not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both
body and mind.  We might expect that we will be prostrate,
inconsolable, crazy with loss.  We do not expect to be
literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband
 is about to return and need his shoes.

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." 
A certain forward movement will prevail.  The worst days will
be the earliest days.  We imagine that the moment to most
severely test us will be the funeral, after which the hypothetical
healing will take place.  When we anticipate the funeral we
wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion,
exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the
correct response to death.

We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I

be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I
be able even to get dressed that day?  We have no way of
knowing that this will not be the issue.  We have no way of 
knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of
narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of
others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion.

Nor can we know ahead of of the fact (and here lies the
heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it
and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the
void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession
of moments during which we will confront the experience
of meaninglessness itself.

Joan Didion
From: The Year of Magical Thinking
with thanks to Death Deconstructed

Joan suddenly lost her husband from a heart attack as they
 sat down to dinner after being at the hospital with their
deathly ill daughter.

~

Personal Note: My mother suddenly lost my father to a fatal
heart attack back in 1985, just 7 yrs after quintuple by-pass surgery.
 He was sitting in his chair in the living room in the middle of the
 night, unable to sleep, after returning from a road trip to the
 east coast to see family - which evidently proved to be too
stressful for his heart. My mother had gone to bed and dreamed
 that she had lost her right arm.  She woke up at around 3am to
find him dead in his chair...  Attempts to resuscitate him failed.
She basically sleep-walked through the next year, often
standing in the kitchen watching for his car to come down
the dirt road...  I can't imagine what that must have been like,
although I have known grief from many other kinds of losses...
And the world now continues in a collective grief from
the millions of deaths due to COVID... So many lives
impacted...  No matter what our "spiritual" beliefs are
about death, or whether there is life after death or not...
 we are still all impacted by death or loss both
personally and collectively...

~

Photo from the Internet

Rest the Nervous System - Matt Licata

 We've been through so much over the last year [or more]...
not only personally, but culturally and collectively as well...

It's been a slow continuous drip of cortisol/adrenaline into
the collective, a deep unsettling restlessness, on the one
hand, and on the other a collapse; an alternation between
hyper-vigilance and shutting down.

Many of us are experiencing a [deep] tiredness, not only
physically, but a soul-level sort of exhaustion, where what
we thought we knew about ourselves, who we are and what
 matters most to us, what we're doing here, and where we're
 headed...  so much of this has really been called into
question, been dismantled, and in may ways fallen apart...

There is a deep longing to rest and to feel safe again in
our bodies...

It is important to slow down - to mourn not only the losses
of health and life, but also the dream of the way we thought
it was all going to turn out.

The rebirth part of the death-rebirth cycle is embodied
through our willingness and capacity to grieve.  The
portal to new life opens through conscious, embodied
lamentation, as we gather the shards of the heart and
collect them in a holy vase...  as we prepare for what
will emerge out of the ashes of dissolution...

Matt Licata

From: An Invitation to Rest Your Nervous System

Resting Your Nervous System Webinar info

~

Photo from the Internet digitally altered

Unfolding Spirals of Grief - Matt Licata

 Art by Joe Maccer at Deviant Art

Tending to grief is the essence of....providing a sanctuary and
safe passage for its unfolding - in the body, the psyche, and the
nervous system - which requires that we fall to the ground,
at times, and weep.

Weep for our shattering [collective and personal], for the dying
of a dream, for the  entirety of the unlived life.  For it is these tears
 that form the substance of the portal of joy. [Rebirth].

Grief is not something we "get over", but a partner we spin
with, honor at times, argue with at others, and lament with as
the cycles of our lives unfold.

We live in a world that has lost contact with the holy waters of
reorganization.  But to marginalize the experience of grief is
to work against nature.  Out in the natural world, the earth grieves
by way of her seasons.  We can feel that grief in a rain drop, if
we allow ourselves to be taken apart and put back together.

There is no endpoint to this restructuring, no final state of
resolution where we land in some untouchable place, free from
our embodied vulnerability, our somatic aliveness, and from
more burning.

Rather, we find ourselves in what the alchemists call the rotatio,
the holy rotation of vast cycles of rupture and repair that touch
and open the human soul.

The soul is endless and the visitors of grief may companion us
for a lifetime.  But the grieving, orphaned ones of the psyche
and soma come not to harm, but to reveal.  And to open a
doorway into wholeness, mercy, and light.

Grief is not so much a process that we "make it through" and 
come out the other side fully intact, but a non-linear transforming
midwife of the unknown.  It moves not by way of straight line,
but by that of circle and spiral.

Matt Licata, PhD