"We suffer very much from the fact that we consist of mind and have lost the body."

Carl Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra:Notes of the Seminar Given, 1934-1939, Vol 1. p.251

Gnosis of the Body, where we explore embodied wisdom in healing the cultures’ mind body split through personal stories. 

Pulling from the vast array of fields in my education, healing practice and experience, I use Archetypal Symbolism, Jungian analytical psychology,developmental psychology, Attachment Theory, theories about nervous system regulation, trauma research in neurology, research in psychedelic therapy, sociology, sexology, yogic philosophy & spirituality,

to see what they have to tell us about how body based practices like yoga, breathwork,  meditation, 

which can lead to regulation of the nervous system, and to alleviation of physiological symptoms like anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, inexplicable body aches and healing illnesses and sexual dysfunction; subjects which fall under the ubiquitous over used title of “healing” in spiritual circles.

With my psychology training as grounding resource, I examine the mind body connection; 

how the body tells us about our subconscious, 

examine perspectives on mystical experiences from body based spiritual practices and psychedelics, and how the body serves as a vessel for spiritual awakenings,

 and how increased spirituality is one of the most universal psychological therapeutic assets and individual can posses on their quest to come back to the union of wholeness.

Track 1 0:01

Gnosis the body. We're here to see and learn what the body has to tell us or teach us about the psyche or the subconscious, about what it wants to come up into awareness and consciousness about what's been held and is now ready to be released. We're sharing and exploring personal stories and experiences, linking them to psychological theories, relating those stories to research in neurology, spirituality, sociology and psychology to see what they have to tell us about how body based practices like yoga, like breathwork, like meditation, lead to regulation of the nervous system, to alleviation of physiological symptoms like anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, inexplicable body aches and healing illnesses and sexual dysfunction. All of this I'm viewing with a spiritual lens as I'm bringing into this discursive this logos. That's Greek for words, this discursive based space. The body and its felt experiences which fall into that area of like world word listeners that felt area. I'm talking about that kind of knowing that occurs in and via the body via sensation image feelings combining and mixing all the senses in the near sinister kneejerk kind of a sense that defies and moves beyond logical reasoning, but which delivers to the experiencer this undeniable sense of knowing, knowing in that felt sense. Not the logical one, not a thought. When I'm creating Harris space of sharing and tearing apart direct felt experiences that have been the preserve provenance of yogis, mystics, shaman psychonauts to find what wisdom they have to bring us. I want to show that the ubiquity and the spread of practices like breathwork, sacred sexuality, yoga, meditation, chant, song, dance and psychedelics that we're now in an era where such experiences are becoming both more frequent, more accessible to everyone. That's what I'm here to explore, and this is to the body.

So in Hysterical Yogis, I was analyzing my experience that went from going from being a chronically sick, burnt out insomniac workaholic to sleeping, having a healthy body, being peaceful in my mind, and a total Eugenie and then I went to become a major spiritual seeker after having this profound spiritual awakening during an in-depth yoga teacher training that I went away to for a month in Spain.

But being the kind of person who wants to know and explain the how and the whys behind things and finding everything that had happened to me completely unexplainable to other people outside the spiritual circles of knowing. I jumped back into headspace and into studying clinical psychology to try and figure out what the heck could happen to me, how psychology and science made sense of these spirits, all experiences and evolutions. So in my thesis that I cobbled together, I used a perspective of young in depth psychology, yoga philosophy, and some poly vagal theory to unpack my experiences. The title, Hysterical Yogis, was inspired by my studies of 19th century psychiatric pioneers like Charcot, Boyer and Freud, all who are mentors of young and what I term their primitive theories and observations of people. They termed hysterics. I was specifically interested in how Jung, as a young psychiatric doctor, had focused on the somatic symptom, which he frequently believed had an origin based on trauma or traumatic experiences.

Specifically how he believed that the symptom possessed a symbolic meaning with a teleological function that would point the patient and the doctor towards both the cause and the cure. I found it most interesting, this concept that the cure was not found out in the world, but within the body and the psyche of the patient themselves. So then in my thesis, I reflected this narrative on to the current day

Western world yogis and their problems, who I'd met in yoga, who in my perception were coming to the practice of yoga at various points of like change flux crises, breakdown in their personal lives, who were, quote unquote, inexplicably drawn to this eastern spiritual body based practice, which served as a vehicle for what I couched as a heroine's journey. And yep, I'm switching the sex purposely, and it doesn't matter if it's experienced by men or women, but I consider the feminine heroine's journey versus the hero's journey, one that goes inward into the body and the subconscious, as opposed to the hero's journey, which is out there in the world with outward adventure and action and much more masculine in tone. Again, whether experienced by a male or a female.

So you all probably recognize that. That comes from Joseph Campbell, who I started studying from VHS tapes that came in care packages my grandfather would send me on the sailboat that I grew up on. My parents had taken me on this their trip around the world. And at the time we were exploring the islands of the South Pacific in Southeast Asia, and it was very long passages between points and places where we could get and send letters or packages back to America. So my New York psychiatrist, grandfather, who was always teaching his children and grandchildren to be, quote unquote curious seekers like himself, would send me these VHS tapes he'd made of the Mythologist Joseph Campbell's TV series on PBS, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and he'd include notes explaining what to look for. So all the while, I was he knew he was sending this because he knew I was I was getting this chance. I was out there in these places, seeing sometimes rituals or practices, but I was being exposed to cultures from places such as Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu. We lived in New Zealand for a while and I got to learn a bit about the Maori culture. I learned about cannibals in Papua New Guinea. I saw rituals in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and then we moved on up the Red Sea in the Mediterranean and I got to visit Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Turkey, Greece. I'd spent tons of time in Greece already because my parents would practice their sailing skills there every summer when I was really little, and I'd always been obsessed with Greek myth. Anyway, I digress. But all that was to say that myth had informed all my formative years. And so I actually eventually went to Sarah Lawrence College for my undergrad where Joseph Campbell taught. So later when I was writing my thesis and I'm sort of looking and asking myself like, what's the modern myth? I was asking myself, What's this modern myth that I had lived out in my experience? And that was also lived out by 19th century females stuck under this lovely eye of the early psychiatrist being called a hysteric. And then also looking at the myth I saw in, you know, my fellow yogis and yoginis is these 20, 21st century Western world yogi. I saw an archetype. I saw an archetype that was similar to the Sumerian myth of Anon, the descent of a nana to the Babylonian version, which is the myth of the descent of Ishtar, and how that later turned into the permutation of the power reduced abduction of Stephanie, which is the Greek version that we most of us know.

My study followed the Jungian concept that subconscious can initiate a process of destruction and renewal for the purpose of psychic healing. And I theorized that this was basically what had occurred to me, and that was drawing, you know, fellow classmates and other yogis into the practice of yoga who were because they were finding personal experiences of transformation. And those personal experiences of transformation were giving them a new renewal on life, like a new rebirth. So in my paper I posited that the subconscious was making its desire known via somatic symptoms from the body and that the same thing had occurred and early 19th century studied so-called hysterics and now it was ranging in symptoms from illness to burnout to high anxiety to insomnia, to panic attacks. And it was calling for the person to do a practice which quieted the mind and alleviated the subconscious

to be able to be heard. And it was making itself heard via this language of the body. So gnosis of the body was encouraged by these classmates who saw in this crazy web of associated experiences and analysis that I wove together something that was worth sharing. And so this is created in honor of them. They all came from backgrounds that were as diverse as like Caribbean, American, Midwestern, American, Dutch, French, Belgian, Indian, East Coast, American and Canadian. And they all found something in this narrative and this framework that resonated with their own lived experiences. And they all had experiences that ranged from solo world travel to religious pilgrimages to yoga. Some of them were psycho dance, some of them were ayahuasca, its major meditators. There was even some voodoo. So I opened the space up to discuss all of these things in some sort of wild collage of stories and felt experiences.