Matt Licata

Matt Licata Psychotherapist • Author
Healing as a spiritual path.

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Hey friends — I’m going to be hosting a free live online gathering in a couple of weeks, on Tuesday, September 15.It’s c...
09/02/2026

Hey friends — I’m going to be hosting a free live online gathering in a couple of weeks, on Tuesday, September 15.

It’s called A Different Way of Understanding Healing, and we’ll be exploring why insight, self-awareness, and spiritual practice don’t always create the kind of lasting change we hope they will — and what another way of approaching healing might look like.

It would be lovely to have you there.

The gathering is completely free, and you can learn more and sign up here: https://mattlicataphd.com/a-different-way/

Catharsis is not the same as integration.There are places within us that do not long simply to be released, expressed, o...
08/31/2026

Catharsis is not the same as integration.

There are places within us that do not long simply to be released, expressed, or discharged. They long to be met. The lost orphans of psyche and soma may not be asking us to intensify what we feel, or to find some dramatic way of getting it out. They may be asking for something more subtle.

To stay. To feel what is here without collapsing into it. To remain close without needing to fix it, transcend it, or make it go away.

Because what we are meeting is not only emotion. We are meeting history—the traces of moments when there was not enough support, enough safety, enough attunement. These places do not need to be performed. They need relationship. They need to discover, slowly and over time, that they no longer have to carry what happened alone.

This is the quieter work of integration. Where there was compulsion, a little more space. Where there was reactivity, a little more choice. Where there was exile, the possibility of relationship.

Shadow work is not catharsis. It is the slow work of embodied integration.

I’ll be offering a new six-week Shadow Work journey beginning September 22. More soon.

Space is too wild, undomesticated, and vast to be “held.”The image of holding is an evocative one. We speak of “holding ...
08/27/2026

Space is too wild, undomesticated, and vast to be “held.”

The image of holding is an evocative one. We speak of “holding space” for another—staying near, listening, attuning to what they are feeling and how they are making sense of their experience. Through empathic resonance, something in them feels felt and understood.

And yet, in my own experience, when I’m with someone who is overwhelmed, grieving, or wandering beyond the familiar edges of themselves, it does not feel as though *I* am doing the holding. There is holding occurring, certainly, but it isn’t mine. It feels older than that, as if the room itself has opened into something larger—the silence beneath our words, the earth beneath our feet, the stars moving outside the window.

My role is less to hold this space than to enter it: to move into reverie, to loosen my certainty about what healing should look like, and to listen for what is trying to emerge. To wonder, to pray, and to allow something unknown to have its life between us.

Perhaps this is why I love the image of birds moving through an open sky. The sky does not hold their flight; it gives their flight somewhere to happen.

Maybe this is closer to what we offer one another—not a space we possess or manage, but a vastness we enter together, something we can participate in, tend to, and love, while remembering that it was never ours.

Space cannot be held, but it can be entered into and loved.

There is a vital place for disappointment on the spiritual path. Not the kind we quickly metabolize into meaning, but th...
08/25/2026

There is a vital place for disappointment on the spiritual path. Not the kind we quickly metabolize into meaning, but the kind that actually disappoints us—that removes an image we had been living toward and does not immediately replace it with another.

There is a lunar dimension of the path that asks us to allow what is waning to wane, to refrain from rushing toward the next illumination, to let certain dreams, identities, and images of the future lose their light.

To be made into dust. And to grieve all that is inevitably lost on the path of healing and awakening.

Disappointment can be an extraordinarily intelligent movement of the soul. Something that once carried meaning no longer does, and our instinct is often to repair the image—to find the lesson, recover the meaning, locate the hidden gift.

That can be a noble move, an honorable and very human one, and at times a kind one. But sometimes it comes too soon.

The alchemists understood that there are moments when the material must be allowed to blacken, when what has been carefully constructed must lose its coherence. The *nigredo* is not a problem to be solved on the way to the gold. It belongs to the gold.

There are times when healing asks us not to become more luminous, but less certain. To wander for a while without the old coordinates and allow ourselves to be changed by what could not become what we hoped.

Perhaps some disappointments are how the soul releases us from a future we have already outgrown.

Grief is not merely something we pass through on the way back to life. It is a form of earth: a hidden, patient ground i...
08/24/2026

Grief is not merely something we pass through on the way back to life. It is a form of earth: a hidden, patient ground in which what has ended can decompose, and forms of life we cannot yet imagine can begin to gather.

We are often encouraged to think of grief as a passage, something with an entrance and eventually an exit. We enter the dark wood, endure what has been lost, and slowly find our way back into the world.

But some grief does not seem to work that way.

Some losses become part of the ground we walk upon. They descend into us, altering the soil of the life that remains. What has ended is not simply left behind. It breaks down slowly, mingling with memory, love, longing, and all that could not be completed.

There is something almost unbearable about the patience of this process. The earth does not hurry decomposition. It does not ask the fallen thing to become new life before its time.

Maybe we are allowed this patience, too.

To stay near what has ended without knowing what it will become. To let some part of the old life return to the dark, to the soil, to places in us where we cannot follow it.

For a long while, there may be nothing to see.

The ground keeps its own time.

There are forms of spiritual realization that reveal that we were never separate. That beneath the apparent division bet...
08/21/2026

There are forms of spiritual realization that reveal that we were never separate. That beneath the apparent division between self and world, subject and object, you and me, there is a unity that was here all along.

This is a profound realization. But perhaps it is not the end of the story.

There may be things the One cannot show us. Some mysteries require two.

The alchemists knew something about this. Sol and Luna must remain different enough to meet. The king and queen cannot enter the coniunctio if we dissolve them too quickly into an underlying unity. Something becomes possible only in the space between.

Perhaps this is true of the people we love, too. Of the images that visit us in dreams. Of grief and eros, psyche and world, the human and the divine. The other must remain other enough to speak.

We may discover realities through non-separation that relationship cannot reveal. But perhaps relationship reveals realities that non-separation cannot reveal either.

The spiritual life may not always be about seeing through the many into the One. Sometimes the holy thing is to let the many remain many—to resist explaining the moon by the sun, to allow the stranger to remain strange, to become quiet enough before the other that something we could never have discovered alone might come into being between us.

The parts of us that remain wounded are not evidence that awakening has failed. They are where awakening is still becomi...
08/19/2026

The parts of us that remain wounded are not evidence that awakening has failed. They are where awakening is still becoming human.

It’s understandable to fantasize that if we could see clearly enough, the grieving one would disappear. The nervous system would stop shaking. The abandoned one would finally dissolve into the light of awareness.

Awakening does not remove these figures from the inner world, but enters them. Colors them from within.

To become intimate with the grief that still trembles. To accompany the frightened places that once had to survive alone. To find its way into memory, relationship, conflict, and the vulnerable architecture of the human soma.

Awakening reveals what has never been wounded. Healing brings that realization into relationship with what still believes it has been.

The alchemists spoke of the rubedo, the reddening—the moment when spirit could no longer remain separate from blood and the work began to enter the substance of a life.

Perhaps this is what it means for the soul to be “dyed red”: not transcending our woundedness, but allowing love to enter so deeply into it that even the unfinished places begin to take on another color.

The light does not need to become brighter. It needs somewhere to land.

The unfinished places within us are not obstacles to realization. They are where realization becomes flesh.

We are sometimes touched by grief without knowing exactly what it is we are grieving. There may be no particular loss we...
08/17/2026

We are sometimes touched by grief without knowing exactly what it is we are grieving. There may be no particular loss we can name, no memory that rises to meet the feeling, no story from the past that would explain why tears have suddenly come. Perhaps it was a passage in a book, a piece of music, an image in a film, the particular way the evening light fell across the room, and something opened.

We are accustomed to believing that our feelings must be about something, that grief especially must have an object, a history, a reason for being here. And of course sometimes it does. There are losses that belong unmistakably to the events of our lives, to those we have loved and lost, to what happened and what did not happen, to the endings we never would have chosen.

But there may also be a grief that cannot be located so precisely. A grief that belongs not only to our personal history but to the strange beauty and vulnerability of being alive at all. To loving what cannot be kept. To inhabiting a world in which everything we touch is passing away, even as it is being given to us.

Perhaps the poem or the music does not create this grief so much as give it somewhere to appear. For a few moments an image becomes a vessel, and something that has been waiting without words is allowed to take form.

We need not always hurry to discover what the feeling is “about.”

There are times when the search for explanation carries us away from the very thing that has come asking to be felt. We can let the tears come without interrogating them. We can allow grief to move through the body without requiring it to tell us its story.

There are forms of knowing that do not arrive as answers. Sometimes the feeling itself is enough, asking only for somewhere within us to be received.

Sometimes life comes not to soothe us, but to overturn the world we have made. Something arrives—death, a new lover, sha...
08/11/2026

Sometimes life comes not to soothe us, but to overturn the world we have made. Something arrives—death, a new lover, shattering grief, the end of a dream, an encounter we cannot explain—and the spiritual house of cards begins to fall.

The beloved has appeared, in one of her fierce or more wrathful forms, carrying the power to undo the familiar arrangement of who we have taken ourselves to be.

This is part of what makes healing and awakening so disagreeable at times. We imagine they will make us feel better, safer, more certain, perhaps even more whole. And sometimes they do.

But initiation has another movement. It contradicts the persona. It disturbs the world it has so carefully arranged. It brings us into contact with a life that may bear little resemblance to the one we were certain we were going to live.

Something unexpected enters the room and pulls the rug out from underneath us.

There is a mercurial intelligence in the psyche that does not seem particularly interested in preserving who we think we are. It disturbs what has become fixed, opens what has become closed, and returns movement to places that have crystallized around certainty.

Perhaps this is one of the deeper purposes of regulation: not to become increasingly undisturbable, but to develop enough ground that we can allow ourselves to be genuinely moved.

To be touched by beauty. Undone by love. Rearranged by grief. Astonished by what we cannot explain.

Not every disturbance is a sign that we have lost our way. Sometimes the path itself comes to disturb us.

In the old image of the wounded healer, it is through tending our own wounds that we become capable of accompanying anot...
08/10/2026

In the old image of the wounded healer, it is through tending our own wounds that we become capable of accompanying another into theirs. That because we have wandered through the underworld, we know something of its terrain and can help another find their way home.

There is truth in this, but I wonder if the wound offers a stranger initiation.

The wound does not give us special knowledge about what another’s suffering means, where it came from, or what it is asking to become. It does not make us the healer.

If anything, the wound brings us down from the high places. It takes the maps from our hands and initiates us into the limits of what we know. It grounds us to dust.

Being there with another will inevitably displace the heroic therapeutic or spiritual ego. We become less interested in fixing what hurts and more willing to kneel before it. To listen. To wonder. To pray.

Perhaps this is where Hermes slips quietly into the room, as a third inner companion, rearranging the familiar positions of healer and healed and pulling the rug out from underneath everything we thought we knew about awakening and healing.

There are things we can hear from the ground that we cannot hear while standing above the wound.

Maybe we are not here to heal one another.

Maybe we are here to kneel together before the mystery...
..and listen.

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