Hey everyone! I am a huge fan of Matt Licata.  All of his writing is extraordinary, but I feel moved to share this particular article. I just copied and pasted it from his blog, but I also added some additional comments he made on Facebook after he posted this. Enjoy!
The agony of an untold story, By Matt Licata.  (See original) post at:
http://alovinghealingspace.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-agony-of-untold-story.html
“Talk therapy” gets a bad rap these days, from caricatures of analysts and couches in cartoons to the shaming of “one’s story” by certain forms of spirituality, quick to label any hint of narrative or subjectivity as evidence that a person has lost their way.
Clearly articulating our story, the way we have come to make meaning of our lives and experience, into a field of empathic, non-judgmental, attuned, right-brain to right-brain connection can be incredibly healing, reorganizing, and transformational.
While the reality of the power of a true I-Thou relationship has been known intuitively for a long time, the field of interpersonal neurobiology has discovered the mechanisms of what is actually happening during moments of empathic attunement, and the neural integration that is fostered within this field. This is not some sort of airy-fairy pseudoscience and positive thinking. Read the research and see. Or just open your heart and feel.
Often when I speak with someone who is deeply invested in their spiritual life, they will preface their communication with, “Well, I mean, not to get into my story or anything…” As if “having a story” was somehow evidence of not being spiritual. Something to be ashamed about. Some obstacle to transcend, “get over,” or do away with, some clear manifestation of being “lost in the ego.”
This is madness.
I love what Maya Angelou has to say on the matter, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I find this to be so true.
Of course, it is important that as friends, therapists, counselors, and healers we work at multiple bands of the spectrum, also including the emotional, somatic, and spiritual. That we send breath and life into each level, using whatever skillful means at our disposal to attune to what area might most need attention at any given time.
As many of us know all too well, it is easy to drown in our stories, to fuse with them, and be flooded or engulfed; to forget that no story will ever fully encompass the entire majesty of what we are. But that is not indication that story is impure or an obstacle to our healing and awakening. There is pure wisdom buried in the story if we will take the time to allow its meaning to unfold. It is the fusion that is the issue, not the story. We must make this discernment in the fire of our direct experience.
The appearance and navigation of story is not evidence of some spiritual failure or that you’ve fallen short. But evidence that you are a human being. Welcome. We human beings are storytellers. It is a very valid, creative, and honorable aspect of our holy brains and nervous systems, of our souls. Rather than shame and attack our storytelling capacity as error, let us embrace it as a gift from the Gods, and engage it with our hearts open.
Get to know in a really clear way the story you are telling about yourself, others, and the world. Get curious. Listen closely. Travel inside the story, with breath, into its very core and secret places. Illuminate it with awareness and with compassion. From this ground, you can then decide if you’d like to update the narrative, re-craft the story of your life, re-envision a new perspective, re-enchant the plot and cast of characters, bringing forth a more integrated view, perhaps one that is more up to date and a reflection of the deepest truths that you’ve discovered, not just inherited from an earlier time.
The goal is not to “not have a story,” but to have a flexible relationship with story, playing and dancing and dreaming with the lens through which you see yourself and engage reality. As a creative, open, and luminous pathway in which you journey as the hero or heroine of your own life. And to use your story as a way to connect with others, to truly meet and touch and be touched by them, to love and be loved. To help them with everything you have within you.
Go ahead. Tell a story. Dream a new dream. Author a new poem of your life. The Gods are listening. Your heart is listening.

(For those of you interested, the four fundamental psychological functions that Carl Jung defined are thinking, feeling, intuition and sensations.) 😉

Matt’s additional comments on Facebook: As someone so riveted in the work of the heart, I do feel called at times to come to the defense of the intellect, of cognitive functioning, reality testing, executive functioning, the development of the self and subjectivity, which in my experience are inseparable from the heart itself, a luminous expression of spirit, as it comes into and infuses the world of matter. Of course, we can always stay open to the trance of over-intellectualization, the overuse of the conceptual, and engaging with it as a means to defend against the unresolvable, creative, wild, mysterious energies of the body and the heart, but let us not do so at the expense of splitting off from the miracle of this brain, this mind, and the ways it can serve us on the journey of love.
In Jungian psychology, for example, there are four primary functions by which we perceive and enter into relationship with others and with life itself, different (but related) pathways by which we engage with spirit and matter (which are inseparable from a more tantric view). Thinking is one of these functions, and incredibly important, a gift given from the Gods and Goddesses as one way to enter into relationship with the mystery.
Like all functions, it has both a wisdom aspect and a more neurotic aspect, when not applied skillfully. The invitation is to inquiry deeply, to honor the wisdom aspect, while challenging the more neurotic aspect.
The other functions (in this model) are intuition, sensation, and feeling. In my experience, the invitation is to honor the reality that we tend to specialize in one over the other three and as Jung notes we are usually quite deficient in one of the four, but this one serves as a very unique doorway or portal into the unconscious.
To consciously develop (differentiate) each of the functions is an important aspect of inner work, in my experience. It is common in contemporary spirituality to de-value the thinking function and value feeling and intuition, and of course we can understand this given our culture’s overemphasis on thinking. But this overvaluation is not an indication of some inherent problem of thinking, but rather a disconnection with the wisdom aspect of thinking, and an undifferentiated relationship with the four functions overall.
 

It takes practice to rewire neural circuitry, to re-encode pathways with empathy, attunement, and compassion. Unfortunately, for most this foundation was not available; there was no holding environment that could contain, dance, and play with the magic of a little emotional being.
Intellectual understanding, while important, is not enough. It takes action in the moment, a new response to the eruption of dysregulating thoughts and feelings, over time, to reorganize the nervous system and re-author a new, more integrated narrative about who we are.
The good news is that you can begin right now, no matter what is going on in your life. Instead of urgently seeking relief, become curious about the unique ways you become activated in relationship. Instead of falling into the habitual extremes of dissociation and fusion, enter into communion with the burning, the charged, and the claustrophobic, unresolvable alive world of feeling.
The journey of metabolization occurs in stages, which we cannot skip. Initially, we must train ourselves to stay with the intensity for very short periods of time, titrating and pendulating the overwhelming thoughts and feelings, going back and forth testing our window of tolerance. Slowly, we discover that even though it may feel otherwise, we can endure this material. Our survival is not actually being threatened. Before we can begin to move deeper, we must first know in an experiential way that staying with it is not going to take us down.
Once the nervous system has the experience that it can tolerate very small doses, we then stay for two seconds, instead of one. We move from merely “tolerating” to starting to contain it, realizing it is not some enemy coming at us from the outside, but a lost aspect of ourselves, longing to be allowed home.
Once contained, we can begin the journey of accepting it. Not “acceptance” in that we are condoning or settling for something – or that we “like” it or “want” it to say – but in the sense of a fiery, compassionate willingness. We are willing to experience what has come, finally, for we sense that resisting what is, this whole play of experiential avoidance, is the root cause of nearly all our psychological suffering.
We are no longer willing to abandon ourselves. No, I’m not going to do that any longer. Even though it takes everything in me, I am going to move toward my vulnerability and care for it, re-encoding a new pathway. Even though I will not be “perfect” at it and likely “fail” over and over again, I will remain steadfast in my vision.
This is where the work shifts to a more heart practice, where we aren’t as interested in clear insight and pure awareness, safe as a witness on the sidelines, but rather begin to explore what it would actually mean to open our hearts to our pain. To hold it like a mother surrounding and enveloping her baby. This can be pretty radical and truly goes against the grain. We start to bring kindness to the feelings, to the parts of ourselves we had to disown at an earlier time.
It just moves on from there, with deeper and more integrated forms of awareness, compassion, and exploration, traveling into the core of whatever arises and touching it with our hearts. Eventually we may even come to love our triggers, longing to hold them and know their subtleties, standing in awe at the opportunity to learn more about love as it comes into form.
Depending on the degree of trauma and dysregulation, this work is often best done within a safe (yet provocative) relational container, where we can make use of an attuned other’s calm and soothed nervous system to help contain, hold, and integrate this material. That’s not to say that we cannot do a lot on our own. It is kind to allow ourselves to at times turn to another for help, while at other times to stay contained and practice on our own.
In this way we can become vehicles of love in action, knowing that this work we are doing is never for ourselves alone. But is for life everywhere.
For more of Matt Licata’s brilliant writing, visit: http://alovinghealingspace.blogspot.com/
 

There are so many amazing techniques, methods, books, steps. They can be so useful, but they can also distract us from ourselves – separates us from ourselves. Like mental candy that lures us away from our own ability to feel and sense what is real and true for us right here and now. All these brilliant, complicated processes can convince us that if we could just try hard enough and apply the latest idea in the right way, we would solve whatever “problem” we are facing in the moment. But it’s always the same problem isn’t it? Something is wrong with our lives, something is wrong with us, something is just WRONG. “Something’s wrong” becomes the general tone and foundation of life itself. So we seek solutions, we read, we are sure that the latest author is right and if we could just do what they did, then all of our “issues” will be resolved. But all these mental stories and fabulous new ideas on how to solve “the problem” all stay within the paradigm that there is, in fact, a problem. All of those methods and latest ideas just keep distracting us from the fact that there might not even BE a problem. They keep us moving, keep us in action, and keep our attention away from our own inner knowing. They can add to our stories that want us to forget the underlying truth – that all is well. All IS well. All the time. No matter what life is presenting, it is love showing up in some form or another.

As my dear friend Ruth says: This is our Oneness made visible in a really beautiful way!!