Excerpted from the forthcoming A Healing Space:
Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times (Sounds True, 2020)
by Matt Licata
"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 may be only a turning of the heart which 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 that can penetrate the deepest layers of our conditioning and felt sense of separation.
What this “turning of the heart” means in lived, embodied experience for each of us must be discovered in the fire of our own lives. To open to our pain, grief, and longing and allow the allies to reveal themselves requires that we work not only at the level of clear-seeing, but also with deep feeling and honoring of the psyche and soul, including a new valuing of our sensitivities, eccentricities, and unique symptoms.
The ancient alchemists were great models of this as the relationship they had with their materials with 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 that they loved. 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."
"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 may be only a turning of the heart which 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 that can penetrate the deepest layers of our conditioning and felt sense of separation.
What this “turning of the heart” means in lived, embodied experience for each of us must be discovered in the fire of our own lives. To open to our pain, grief, and longing and allow the allies to reveal themselves requires that we work not only at the level of clear-seeing, but also with deep feeling and honoring of the psyche and soul, including a new valuing of our sensitivities, eccentricities, and unique symptoms.
The ancient alchemists were great models of this as the relationship they had with their materials with 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 that they loved. 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."