Matt Licata, PhD: The Alchemy of Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

    —
November 17, 2020

Matt Licata, PhD: The Alchemy of Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

Matt Licata — November 17, 2020

Matt Licata is a practicing psychotherapist, a co-facilitator of a monthly online membership community called Befriending Yourself, and the author of The Path Is Everywhere. With Sounds True, he has written a new book titled, A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Matt about what it is to be a healing space, that is to hold space for ourselves and others, as well as how we can feel held by something greater than ourselves during challenging experiences. They also explore our inner wounds and self-abandonment, spiritual bypassing and the ways in which many practices allow us to gloss over the real healing needed, and how coming into an embodied state can open us to greater inner depths. Finally, Tami and Matt discuss becoming an alchemist of your own life, discovering the inner gold that each of us has within, and befriending all of ourselves.

Matt Licata, PhD, is a practicing psychotherapist and hosts in-person retreats. His work incorporates developmental, psychoanalytic, and depth psychologies, as well as contemplative, meditative, and mindfulness-based approaches for transformation and healing. He co-facilitates a monthly online membership community called Befriending Yourself, is author of The Path Is Everywhere, and is the creator of the blog A Healing Space. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. For more, visit mattlicataphd.com.

Author photo © Krista Marleena

Listen to Tami Simon's in-depth audio podcast interview with Matt Licata:

The Alchemy Of Befriending Ourselves In Difficult Times  »

900 Episodes and Counting…

Subscribe to Insights at the Edge to hear all of Tami’s interviews (transcripts available too!), featuring Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Adyashanti, and many more.

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Each week on Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon interviews leading voices in the Mind/Body/Spirit space about a vast spectrum of fascinating ideas. Since 2009, Tami and her guests have been exploring the edge of understanding, nearly 1,000 episodes on the honest work of change, including spiritual discovery, awakening, intuition, purpose, trauma, and grief.

Photo © Jason Elias

Also By Author

Matt Licata, PhD: The Alchemy of Befriending Ourselves...

Matt Licata is a practicing psychotherapist, a co-facilitator of a monthly online membership community called Befriending Yourself, and the author of The Path Is Everywhere. With Sounds True, he has written a new book titled, A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Matt about what it is to be a healing space, that is to hold space for ourselves and others, as well as how we can feel held by something greater than ourselves during challenging experiences. They also explore our inner wounds and self-abandonment, spiritual bypassing and the ways in which many practices allow us to gloss over the real healing needed, and how coming into an embodied state can open us to greater inner depths. Finally, Tami and Matt discuss becoming an alchemist of your own life, discovering the inner gold that each of us has within, and befriending all of ourselves.

You Might Also Enjoy

Just One Question | Jeffrey Rutstein: Did I Inherit My...


Ever notice how a tiny criticism can send you into a full-blown spiral, and then you spend the rest of the day furious at yourself for spiraling? Dr. Jeffrey Rutstein has a theory about why that happens, and it starts before you ever had a say in the matter: with the nervous system you were born with.

Rutstein, a clinical psychologist, Hakomi-certified somatic psychotherapist, and host of Sounds True’s Healing Trauma Program, talks with Tami Simon about inheriting his own mother’s fight-or-flight wiring, and how a childhood encounter with Indra Devi’s Yoga for Americans sent him down a decades-long path through pranayama, Hatha yoga, and Zen practice.

In this conversation, Tami and Jeffrey explore:

  • Why your baseline nervous system state is more inheritance than character flaw
  • How naming that inheritance can interrupt years of self-blame and shame
  • The difference between a fixed nervous system and one you can learn to shift

This one’s for anyone who’s ever hated themselves for “overreacting.” So…pretty much everyone.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Jeffrey Rutstein titled “Not Being a Prisoner To Your Nervous System.”

Find the complete interview: https://bit.ly/iate-jeffrey-rutstein

Beatrice Chestnut: “Going Deeper with the Enneag...

What if the type you’ve been typing yourself as isn’t the whole story? Tami Simon sits down with Enneagram pioneer Beatrice Chestnut to mark the re-release of her classic guide, The Complete Enneagram, and to ask why facing our shadow, not avoiding it, is the real path to waking up.

Beatrice Chestnut, PhD, is a global expert, researcher, and educator on the Enneagram. She holds a PhD in communication studies and a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and is a licensed psychotherapist, coach, and business consultant based in San Francisco. She is the author of several acclaimed books on the Enneagram, including the newly re-released edition of The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge, widely considered a classic in Enneagram literature.

In this conversation, Tami and Beatrice explore:

  • The difference between personality (the protective “false self” formed in childhood) and our essential, true nature
  • Why each of the nine Enneagram types has its own distinct shadow challenge to confront and integrate
  • The 27 subtypes, and why Beatrice believes they matter far more than Enneagram “wings”
  • How the connecting lines, or arrows, reveal each type’s specific growth pathway — and why the order matters
  • What each type looks like at its highest, most evolved expression
  • Why more people may be ready to “wake up” to who they really are now than ever before

This episode is for anyone who’s taken an Enneagram test and wondered what to do next, as well as therapists, coaches, and longtime students of the system looking to go deeper with the subtypes.

Listen now to discover your own path to greater self-knowledge. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

Just One Question | Gabor Maté: What Keeps Me from Be...

Why do some of the most hardened people—lifers on death row, people who’ve killed—turn out to be, underneath it all, remarkably sensitive? Physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté has spent decades working with addicts and prisoners, and he’s found a pattern that upends how we usually think about cruelty and compassion.

Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician and bestselling author whose work on trauma and addiction has shaped how millions understand pain, illness, and healing. He’s the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, When the Body Says No, Scattered Minds, and, with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal.

In this conversation, Tami and Gabor explore:

  • Why compassion is wired into us from birth and what shuts it down
  • The neuroscience of care, drawing on affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s research on emotional systems
  • What Gabor has witnessed firsthand working with lifers and people on death row
  • The difference between “orchid” and “dandelion” temperaments, and why high sensitivity can become either a liability or a gift
  • Why genes linked to addiction may really be genes for sensitivity

This one’s for anyone trying to understand the roots of cruelty, or working through their own compassion fatigue; toward others, or toward themselves.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Gabor Maté titled “Gabor Maté: Healing Principles to Embody in a Traumatized World”