360° J O Y 🌅 F U L L

Movement and Music, Aligned and Attuned I Wonder What's Over That Next Crest "When I use the term “somatic,” I am referring to bodily-based experience, raw sensations in the body in contrast to thoughts, beliefs, behaviours, or even emotions (which can often include a narrative component). If we drop underneath the interpretations of immediate experience, we find a very alive world of sensations such as contraction, expansion, freezing, speed, pressure, excitement, numbing, intensity, flatness, nausea, constriction, spaciousness, dullness, warmth, and cold. We can experience these on their own as well as components of more complex conditions such as anxiety, depression, and trauma. In a moment of emotional activation – say with panic, despair, shame, or rage – it can be helpful to temporarily set aside these words and make direct contact with what is unfolding in our immediate experience. In doing so, we may discover that we cannot find “anxiety” or “shame” (these ...

Moving The 5 Pranas "In close relationships there may always be ruptures which arise in the field of lovers and friends. When we take the risk of allowing another to matter, when we open our bodies and our hearts to them, a call is sent out to the lost ones of the inner family, an invitation to return home. Relationship has an uncanny ability to illuminate those parts of ourselves that we have lost touch with – the orphans of the emotional world, and the emissaries of our unlived lives. As wisdom-guides, they remind us of the two great relational fears, of being abandoned or overwhelmed by the other. We’re just not sure if we want to take that kind of risk. As we deepen along the way, we may discover that the “other” is not only those fellow travelers that we meet, but that there is also an “inner other” who also longs to be known, to be held, and to be a part of the love story of our lives. This “other” yearns more than anything for intimacy, to no longer be shut out, a...

"Falling apart, holding it all together. Then falling apart, then coming back together. Cycles of clarity and confusion. Hopelessness and hope. Heartbreak and bliss. Knowing who we are and why we are here in one moment, deflated in the next as an old dream is recycled into the vast. As it is in the natural world, inside the heart the sacred process of death and rebirth unfolds, an expression of the unity of matter and spirit. Inside the opposites it is alive and creative, but there is no solid ground from which to orient. No familiar reference point to look back to or rest in. Only tenderness. Raw. Open. Pregnant. Potential. But what will be reborn from the ashes has not yet been given. If we remain too identified with “falling apart,” we lose contact with that which was never unhealed, untransformed, and was never “together” to begin with. That innate radiance, the holiness of the breath, and the miracle of having an open sensitive nervous system. We disconnect with the ma...

"One of the common things I hear when I speak with couples is an underlying fantasy that goes something like this: by Matt Licata “We’re supposed to feel connected all the time. And if we don’t, that is clear evidence that something is wrong with the relationship.” While it isn’t always said (or felt) explicitly, this idea is often alive under the surface, playing out in chronic conflict and disappointment. In response, we try to figure out how we can always “feel connected,” subtly shaming and pathologizing the authenticity of our separateness and the truth that no feeling is permanent or vast enough to be the single representative of the relational field. We lose touch with the reality that the beloved will make use of whatever energy (feeling, image, mood, sensation) it/ she/ he/ they must to remind us of how vast love is and of everything that longs for illumination within us. The temple of intimacy is inherently provocative, contradictory, creative, and unresolvable...

"The next time you find yourself looping in self-attack, disconnected with your body, and spinning in shame, blame, and complaint... slow down. Feel your feet on the earth. Breathe deeply from the lower belly. Return to your senses in the here and now. Come out of the seductive, sticky, compelling story line for just a moment and send your awareness into the centre of the vulnerable, tender, raw life that is surging to be held. Go slowly, pushing yourself a bit, testing your window of tolerance but taking care not to fall into overwhelm. Cut through the momentum of self-abandonment and descend into the core. Make the journey out of self-aggression and into the slower circuitry of empathy, curiosity, kindness, and space. Stay close. Be a friend to yourself. Provide sanctuary and safe passage for the visitor to be illuminated, held, and transformed, for in a moment of activation you need yourself more than ever. While the temptation is to turn from the shaky center, it is ...

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...