The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You

by Matt Licata

Your feeling of disconnection is not neurotic—it is intelligent. It has something to show you that oneness could never reveal. Travel inside the felt sense and into the hidden passageways and you will find the emissaries waiting.

wanderer and traveler of the inner and outer worlds.

If you do not take care of them consciously, they have no other recourse than to communicate by way of the unconscious, including through symptoms, emotional and physical challenges, dreams, images, fantasies, and the unfolding of the shadow in interpersonal relationships.

Rather than turn from difficult feelings, reenacting the well-grooved escape routes and exit strategies of the past, we are invited into a new world. It is the work of a lifetime and will not be mastered in a few weeks or months—or likely even years—as the path of the heart is endless in its depth. No hurry, no urgency, just moment-by-moment awareness, attunement, and kindness.

Buried inside even our deepest neuroses are the raw materials of love. In the tantric and alchemical traditions, those less-than-awakened thoughts, feelings, emotions, impulses, and raw sensations are the prima materia for us to work with. The shit, the piss, the dirt, the darkness, the failures, the disappointment, the deflation: this is the sacred material we have to work with as alchemists of our own lives.

While the encoding of shame, unworthiness, and abandonment is deeply embedded, it can be reorganized. It may feel incredibly entrenched but it is not as solid as it appears.

No matter what is happening in your life, you can start right now. In this moment. There is only ever this moment. The opportunity for reorganization is always here and wired within you. Don’t give up. Love will never give up on you.

In my experience, techniques do not heal. Relationship heals.

Never, ever underestimate the power of love. Even one moment of empathic, attuned, contact can change a person forever. Please don’t forget that many have never actually known this—or have known it in only very small amounts. For it is rare here.