Matt Licata | “The Alchemical Traditions Understood That Transformation Requires A Vessel”
In psychotherapy, contemplative practice, and psychedelic integration alike, powerful experiences often emerge more quickly than they can be metabolized. Insight, catharsis, and altered states may open the door to transformation, but they do not in themselves ensure integration. What allows difficult emotions, shadow material, grief, trauma, and numinous states of consciousness to become part of a living and embodied process of healing?
Drawing upon alchemy, depth psychology, and contemporary relational approaches to healing, this presentation explores the therapist’s role in creating and tending the vessel: a relational field in which difficult and often overwhelming experiences can be welcomed, related to, and gradually integrated. Rather than approaching symptoms and challenging states as obstacles to overcome, we will consider how they may be understood as meaningful expressions of the psyche seeking relationship, expression, and a fuller place within the life of the person.
Together we will explore the role of presence, imagination, embodiment, and compassionate accompaniment in the healing process, and consider what kind of vessel is required for the return of exiled experience and the unfolding of genuine transformation.
Bio
Matt Licata, PhD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, and author whose work explores the intersection of depth psychology, contemplative practice, relational psychotherapy, and the alchemical and imaginal traditions. For more than two decades, he has worked with individuals and groups internationally, exploring the ways psychological, spiritual, and embodied approaches to healing can illuminate and deepen one another.
Matt is the author of The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You and A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times, and the forthcoming The Unfinished Work of Love. He also facilitates the Mystery School for Embodied Spirituality and Healing, a yearlong community devoted to psychological and spiritual inquiry, contemplative practice, and the mysteries of healing and transformation.
His work is especially concerned with the role of presence, relationship, imagination, and embodied awareness in accompanying the psyche’s movement toward greater wholeness.
Speaker
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Matt Licata