A Healing Space

by Matt Licata

  Meditative-based inquiry, in contrast, is not as oriented in understanding and working with the content of our experience but attuning at deeper and deeper levels to the context in which it occurs. It is a pure, phenomenological inquiry in which we allow ourselves to apprehend whatever appears with warm, spacious, accepting awareness as it unfolds moment by moment in the here and now. We’re not as interested in its implicit meaning or entering a dialectic relationship with it, investigating why it has come, its historical origins, what purpose it serves in our experience, and so forth. It is just an open, naked attending to our experience as it flows in through the doors of the senses. In meditative awareness, we aren’t as interested in the meaning of our unfolding experience but in its essence, in its ground.

  Training ourselves to access, regulate, and integrate challenging experience—making sense of it and exploring its underlying meaning—is the heart of psychological inquiry, especially as it relates to material previously dissociated, disowned, or only partially metabolized. To provide safe haven for those aspects of ourselves to come home into awareness is a profound act of self-compassion—not so that we can merely recognize, accept, and let them go, but so that we can get to know them and explore their contours, purpose, and meaning in our lives.

  Entering into noninterpretive, open, direct apprehension of the nature or context of our experience as it unfolds in each here-and-now moment—without any agenda to understand, transform, or heal it—is the essence of meditative inquiry. From this perspective, difficult, disturbing, and confusing experience does not arise to be healed but to be held, to be permeated with and soaked in loving awareness. Whether it transforms is a secondary concern, but what remains primary is the agendaless engagement with what is.

  Most forms of mindfulness-based meditation (at least classically speaking) are generally not concerned with understanding, unpacking, making sense of, or exploring the meaning of the content that comes into awareness but returning to the object of meditation so as to not get tangled up in the content itself, in the endless display of discursive thought that flows spontaneously in the mind stream. Training ourselves to disidentify with repetitive thinking and painful feeling states is an important and helpful skill; however, the shadow side of this is slipping into dissociation and subtle pathologizing of psychic experience, which carries its own wisdom and information apart from its actual nature. If we dismiss or repress emotion and feeling as part of our meditation practice, we are not able to mine this intelligence, and we place the material deeper into the shadow, thereby creating the conditions for projection and future suffering. Although most meditative techniques, of course, do not have this as a goal and are not avoidant by nature, as I mentioned earlier, we can use any practice to further dissociation. The invitation, therefore, is not to abandon any particular practice we find beneficial but to engage it with eyes wide open as to its possibly unintended consequences.

  Psychological inquiry invites us into an embodied intimacy with our experience but not so close that we fall in and become flooded, enmeshed, and retraumatized. The invitation here is into relationship, not identification, and healthy intimacy, not fusion; to allow ourselves to care deeply about what we’re experiencing, to be willing to get messy, to stay with states of not knowing, to enter into the body and the heart and take the risk to see what is there. To set aside our fantasies of invulnerability, mastery, and power and lay ourselves at the feet of the mystery. To see that life would never ask us to “master” it but to open to it, dance, and play as its humble kindred traveler. To tend not only to the nature of our experience but also to its content, details, fragrances, and unfolding meaning. To be willing to go into the experience all the way, not just with pure awareness but with the creative faculties of the imagination and the soul.

  Tending to the Voices with Soul

  It’s so instinctive and automatic to equate the voices in our head with expressions of objective reality. We hear these voices throughout the day, and they can become especially loud in times of activation, overwhelm, and stress. We so quickly assume that if we think it, it must be true, especially those thoughts that have appeared thousands (millions) of times. But as the great yogis, meditators, and wizards of cognitive science have discovered, identifying with thinking (in the research known as “cognitive fusion”) tends to result in a enmeshed state in which we lose perspective, become overwhelmed, and lose touch with the larger field of awareness in which all thought comes and goes. We forget that just because a thought or voice appears does not mean it is true. Although this is a simple enough concept to understand intellectually, to let it in at the deepest levels is an act of revolution. To allow this realization in even for a second or two can bring great relief to a frazzled nervous system.

  What are these voices, anyway? Or, more precisely, whose are they? Are they ours? Our parents’? Ancestors’? Teachers’? Politicians’? Authority figures’? Celebrities’? Television characters’? When we slow down and turn toward them with curiosity, who do we discover?

  Although the voices can be varied and cover many topics, one of the more common themes they express is that something is wrong—with us, with our lives, with our immediate experience—which we must urgently correct. This particular voice is sometimes described as the “inner critic,” an archetypal figure that has visited human beings throughout recorded history. Although the specific language might be different, the underlying message, especially in a moment of activation, is often something like:

  “Something is wrong with me. Even though I can’t quite pinpoint what it is, I just know it. When all is said and done, I know that if I fully show another who I am, I will be abandoned, attacked, rejected, and remain lonely and unseen.”

  The first step always is to recognize that a voice is speaking—and not to confuse this voice with objective reality, with some ultimate truth. The reality is that it is one voice among many, one that often has historical roots in environments of empathic failure on the part of our early caregivers. In this recognition, we can slow down and realize that without a new level of curiosity, awareness, and perception, we will become entangled in the forest of habitual, conditioned thinking. Just this time, we will choose differently.

  In the slowness and spaciousness of warm, embodied presence, we might come to discover that these voices carry and transmit intergenerational trauma, the passing of insecure attachment narratives through the psychic and genetic pools. Through repetition and looping, they attempt to reorganize and make sense of painful experience. These “inner persons” long for us to hear them, get on their side, and somehow liberate them from the trance of nonlove, from the spell of “something is wrong.” They have not come to harm us per se but for redemption.

  I hope it goes without saying, but I’m speaking about a situation in which there really isn’t anything “wrong”—you’re not actually in danger, being attacked, or otherwise needing to take immediate action to protect yourself. If that is the case, by all means, set aside all this “inner” work and take care of yourself through whatever external behavior you must. Here, though, I’m speaking about a more common situation in which, in a relationship or at work or in a moment of stress, you subtly (or not so subtly) notice yourself attacking your own vulnerability, bailing out of your body, falling into a spiral of shame and complaint, blaming and practicing aggression toward yourself in a moment of emotional activation.

  In this latter situation, which we all experience at times, we are invited into experimentation. We can experiment with allowing these voices to be there and infusing them with spacious, warm, curious attention. “Ah, you again. Hello. Tea?” Through meeting them in open awareness, they might dissolve into the background field from which they came. When we step off the battlefield and wash them with space, they lose their charge. It’s not so much that we “let them go” by way of some active spiritual process, but we bear witness as they let go of us when they are no longer kept alive through enmeshment with and fueling of an int
ernal war.

  At other times, we might be called to engage them with a hotter, more active flame, not as oriented in nonjudgmental, mindful attention but in relationship. A different medicine is asking to be applied; an alternative alchemical operation might be more skillful in the moment. The voices are calling for a more direct, penetrating, inquisitive, confrontational way of navigating the material that is oriented in our own integrity. We separate from the voices and open a dialogue:

  “I am listening but will not fuse with you. I will not allow myself to be flooded by your dysregulating energy. But I am here. Why have you come? What do you need? Why do you continue to return? What are you afraid of? What do you feel you must protect me from? Let me free you from the burden you are carrying.”

  We allow the voice to take form as an image or a figure with whom we can dialogue as we move the psyche along, unfreeze what had become frozen, and separate from what had become sticky and fused.

  Either way, each are valid experiments and worthy of our attention, inviting space, breath, and compassion into the relational field. Entering into the middle realms between repression and fusion, denial and flooding, suppressing and acting out, we allow these ones temporary passage into the tavern of the psyche and body, to then continue their journey onward.

  In an act of love, we tend to them as they arise, and in an equally holy act, we allow them safe passage into the other world.

  The Unique Nature of Spiritual Discovery

  It is important to remember that inner work is unique to the individual and might not always conform to collective norms. Before we know it, we can fall into the trap of a one-sized-fits-all mentality, in which we come to believe there is one remedy to the complexity of human suffering and the entire majesty of the soul is reduced to one explanation and a singular form of medicine. In my experience, there is a tendency to oversimplify the journey of healing and awakening, which fits comfortably into our fast-food consumeristic culture as a defense against the anxiety that arises in the face of just how complex, mysterious, deep, and nuanced the psyche and heart truly are. Although it is fashionable to see the spiritual journey as “simple”—“Just be in the now, just love everything as it is, just return to the present moment; it’s so simple!”—this is not my experience or the experience of many of the great wisdom traditions. The human heart has endless dimensions and chambers. Although we can appreciate the desire not to overcomplicate things—or to turn the journey into yet another vehicle through which to accumulate endless information—we must also remain vigilant to the movement, especially in our contemporary world, to oversimplify and reduce the majesty of the soul to a few generalized catchphrases. It requires a lot of courage and patience to embrace the complexities and depths of the path oriented in the slow, nonurgent maturation of the human heart. There is no rush to the finish line and no need to patch up the mystery, resolve the contradictions, or wrap it all up in a weekend of enlightenment experiences and nonthreatening spiritual slogans.

  If a certain teaching or practice is not working for you, before you conclude you do not have enough “faith,” “discipline,” or “commitment” or you are “stuck in a low vibration” and your “ego is in the way,” pause and consider whether this teacher or teaching is the right one for you, at this unique time and place in your life. Perhaps you are not “lost in your ego” but in touch with your heart, your body, and your innate intuition. As always, you cannot take anyone’s word for it, but you must go inside and bring forward as much discernment as you are able, shining light into the darkened places and receiving the guidance found only there. It takes courage to trust in your own experience, especially when surrounded by voices attempting to convince you that you have lost your way, that ego has got you again, and that you have no idea what you “truly need” to progress along some preprescribed path. Whether these voices sound your mom’s and dad’s or your therapist’s, guru’s, teachers’, and politicians’, they must be brought into the fire and heated with your own direct experience.

  Forcing a methodology, belief, or practice upon another because we think it is the “best” or “most spiritual” (and then subtly or not so subtly shaming them when they cannot “follow” it) when they do not possess the developmental capacity or individual resonance to engage that practice is tremendously unkind, needlessly aggressive, and even violent in certain situations. It is one thing to honor the other’s higher capacities and to never forget the brilliance of their true nature, especially in the face of profound suffering but another altogether to impose our views upon people in a way that does not honor their native intelligence, relative functioning, and current situation.

  May we truly be there for the others we counsel and push them a bit, if this is our agreement together, but always remain aware of the possibility of sending them spiraling outside their window of tolerance. Before we act in a way that causes others to mistrust their own experience, let us commit to slowing way down, metabolizing those feelings and beliefs within ourselves that most need attention, and opening to what will truly be most beneficial for others, then act from that place.

  Of course, all this goes for ourselves as well, when we judge or shame ourselves for not living up to someone else’s ideas about the way our journey should be unfolding. And then we begin to mistrust our own experience as we privilege another’s, often an enactment of early relational configurations colored by empathic failure. Of course we want to learn from others and push ourselves beyond what we already think and know, but there is a fine line between doing so and attacking ourselves when we are unable to fit into others’ visions. We must illuminate this line and navigate it with fresh vision, discernment, and kindness.

  Ego as a Partner on the Journey

  Proper understanding and skillful use of ego-consciousness is vital on the path, and we must clarify what we mean by this term to fully grasp its importance. As always, we must vision and revision these and all worn-out spiritual concepts so that we can play and dance loosely with them, in a flexible and nonfixated way, in order that they serve our exploration rather than generate additional struggle and confusion.

  Ironically, especially with traditions that emphasize the realization of “no self” or ego transcendence, it is not too difficult to make use of such teachings in an unconscious way to sidestep important developmental deficiencies and longings. Without adequate discernment, it is easy to make use of even our most potent spiritual experiences to hide out from aspects of the personality that could really use some illumination and attention, if not for ourselves, then certainly for the benefit of those around us.

  It is essential to remember that the word “ego” is a concept, an abstraction. It’s not a thing. We’re not going to go into our immediate, embodied experience and find an “ego.” It is already one step removed, dissociated from the experiential world. The “ego” is an interpretation of some psychic activity or process, not a phenomenological discovery of reality. This doesn’t mean that we can’t use the term to point to some aspect of our experience or to communicate with others. However, it is critical that we slow down and begin with the truth that ego is not a thing but a once-removed, abstract, generalized concept.

  Generally speaking, because of great confusion regarding this term and owing to its many varied (and contradictory) uses, I try not to use it all that often. But when I do, I tend to do so in two unique ways. First, in a more functional sense, we can speak about the importance of ego strength or ego capacities, especially those that seem to be required to engage with the deeper layers of psyche.

  If we’re lacking in basic ego functioning—for example in certain forms of narcissistic or borderline organization (yes, we all have the potential to dwell at times within these parts of the spectrum)—we need to build that structure before we can most skillfully engage in “deeper” work such as uncovering unconscious patterns, withdrawing projections, transforming internal working models, and the varieties of meditative discovery and experience.


  From this perspective, ego is responsible for stabilization of our personality and identity through time, reality testing, executive functioning, and the capacity to take on perspectives and reflect upon our subjective experience. Without adequate ego development, life can get pretty gnarly, pretty quickly. If we aren’t able to navigate consensual reality and remember who we are when we wake up in the morning, we will inevitably fall into various states of fragmentation and even fall apart wholesale.

  But more experientially, for me ego refers to the way we’ve come to imagine ourselves and by extension how we’ve come to imagine others and the world. These imaginal lenses are usually formed and maintained outside conscious awareness and within an intersubjective or relational field at the intersection of self and other. When all is said and done, who do I believe myself to be? This imagination is full spectrum and has cognitive, emotional, behavioral, somatic, cultural-historical, and archetypal aspects.

  Given all this, wise and skillful psychological (and spiritual) work, then, asks that we illuminate these imaginative lenses of perception, and from that clear seeing we can make a more conscious choice to imagine, dream, live, and breathe from a different set of images, fantasies, myths, and lenses, ideally more integrated, current, accurate, kind, poetic, and representative of our brilliance as open, sensitive, unique, eccentric human beings.

  So the common idea in some spiritual circles to “get rid of,” or worse yet, “kill” the ego really doesn’t make any sense, at least from this perspective. The way I conceive of the term is not in line with the notion that “ego” is some wretched, homunculus-like being inside of me who is horribly unspiritual, ignorant, of a “low” vibration, and all the rest of it that I need to root out and banish into the underworld. In terms of this death, who or what would be the executor? And if we were to succeed in sending it underground, do we not think it will rise up in less-than-conscious ways in its natural attempt to return to the larger ecology of what we are?