Safety on the Spiritual Path, Relational Trauma, and Tending to the Lost Orphans of Psyche and Soma

We can’t ask the spiritual path to always feel safe, at a feeling level, as it is oriented in the archetype of death and rebirth. When it comes to trauma, however, safety is everything. It’s vital that our relationship with spirituality and healing not remain generalized and abstract, but concrete and embodied; we can’t open our hearts to a concept, to an abstraction. But we can ask psyche to image itself, to appear as a figure and to enter into relationship with that figure, hold them, and help them to return home. We can’t stay on the sidelines in a safe position of “witnessing” our deepest unresolved experience; those interior ones carrying that experience have no interest in our clear witnessing, but only in our embodied, ensouled presence.

This video was excerpted from a 2023 session with Matt as part of his yearlong spirituality and healing group and community.

Learn more about the group here - https://mattlicataphd.com/spiritualit.... If interested, you can join the waitlist for the new inner work group and community which will begin in February of 2024. You can also join Matt’s mailing list here.

Matt Licata, PhD is a psychotherapist and spiritual counselor based in Boulder, Colorado, and was trained in the psychology of religion. He is author of A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times (Sounds True, 2020), The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You (Wandering Yogi Press, 2017), and the forthcoming The Path of the Wounded Healer: A Soulful Spirituality and the Alchemy of the Heart.

#healing #spirituality #psychotherapy