The Body feels and intuits, the mind thinks and rationalises. The body learns in felt direct experience, the now; the mind must reflect on experience and learn in the Logos sense, whereas the body's knowledge exists in Eros.

In this episode, I explore how in diving deeply into a devotional yoga practice, I learned the wordless language of the body, of direct felt experience after being very burned out, numbed out and dissociated from the body.

I introduce the Jungian/Archetypal concepts of the body as the feminine element of our physical aspect of our psyche, and how the cultural mind body split has associations with the work obsessed, overly masculine composition of our culture.

I note how my personal complexes were reflections of our culture bias towards rationality and science. Living out this complex in action when after yoga teacher training (where I experienced a profound spiritual awakening, somatic trauma release and greater states of nervous system calm)

I returned to the authority of science and educational institutions to learn and understand what science and psychology had to say about my experiences and transformation, presuming all mystical experiences could be quantified and explained neurologically.

~Works referenced in Episode:

Bernini's sculpture of St Teresa of Avila

~ Jung Institute in NYC https://junginstitute.org/

References to Francis' Bacons' Quote " 'nature had to be hounded and made a slave to the new mechanicized devices; science had to torture nature's secrets out of her'."

https://sirbacon.org/mathewsessay.htm

~

As quoted in the episode:

"The transformation of our world-view necessitates the transformation of the view of the feminine. Man's view of matter moves when his view of the feminine moves; and this change regarding the feminine refers not merely to rights for women but a movement in consciousness in regard to bodily man, his own materiality and instinctual nature."

James Hillman The Myth of Analysis: Part III On Psychological Feminine, p. 217

Relevant quotes from Jung to the discussion: "Just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth"

Jung, The Role of the Unconscious, (1918) CW 10~ 19

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

Jung , Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, Vol 1, 21 November 1934, p. 251

Track 1 0:02

This is Gnosis of the body where we explore embodied wisdom in healing the mind body split through personal stories using Jungian depth psychology, mythology, and following collective trends and following wisdom stories of the body.

So in this episode, I'll continue my story about my journey through yoga, from burnout to healing, and begin to introduce some of the Jungian concepts of mind and body as a polarity, which is portrayed in the archetypal symbolism by the polarity of the masculine and the feminine.

So I had told the story of how I'd moved from being a professional, working with words, being a Porte parole communications manager for the French government to burning out, withdrawing from work where there was constant communication, there was constant consumption of information in media where responding and answering emails of the media and translating content was my job to withdrawing from the city to nature to heal and retreat into silence. Spending time and feeling my body instead of analyzing and being in the thinking mind and in my head and learning to listen inwardly in silence.

I learned to listen past the mind monologue that we all have with critical voices shoulds to do this. Which completely dominated my thoughts constantly. Barely turned off by sleep.

And this monologue of shoulds and critical thoughts dictated my sense of validity to exist, which I actually thought was my very proof of life. This monologue, and which I felt was needed for my survival. And then I moved into learning to practice in silence, to practice yoga and learning to truly hear the voice that was behind all of that mind chatter, which is so difficult for many of us. And this silence puts so many of us off even starting a meditation practice or any kind of Eastern practice,

because all of that talking that I was doing in the outside world, all that noise surrounding me necessarily from my job of news, social media, and then the constant work dialogues that were going on in my head and at work,

it was just too much. And instead of that, I moved into a space of learning to receive true wisdom that's different from information that's available to all of us at any time. Instead of analyzing, I learned to integrate and embody what my body through practice was. Showing me was the reality versus this idealized projected image of what I thought my life was and even who I was through those outward actions in the world.

What inspired me to start in this thread of thought for you all was reflecting back how now I see at the time I was relearning language and new modes of communication, which didn't necessarily involve words as opposed to my job. That was all words, as I said, and I moved into ways of gaining knowledge that was not like reading and taking in information, but was more gained, felt via direct experience and was closer to wisdom than knowledge, and which was beyond words. In fact, words were inadequate to describe the wisdom that was understood bit by bit by me in this practice. Over the course of about a year and a half. The understanding which came and I felt since I had been in a profession of communication. There was a good deal of talking meetings, phone calls, emailing going on, but there was very little true communication going on and there was nearly no listening.

It was really more a series of fear and ego monologues overlapping between myself and management, between journalists and myself. It was just combative wordplay. And so after dropping out of that world and into deep yogic practice and then yogic study and then teaching of yoga and breathwork and meditation, yes, I learned a language of anatomy. I learned some Sanskrit, but really much more importantly, my teachers gave me a new language for the felt understanding of this new embodied knowledge and embodied wisdom, which I was gaining, which is beyond words. We would learn to play with various adjectives for sensation of the body to indicate correct or incorrect feeling of the poses of asana. We learned how to play with variations of adjectives to explain Felton Terrill Subtleties of interception of Breathwork interception, which is being how we witness feeling inside of ourselves. And then I went on to learn in yogic philosophy my teacher, who gave me words and a framework to explain that feeling of vastness. That feeling of deep awareness of interconnection. This feeling in the Awakening experience I had in training was a feeling of explosive love and all that came to me. They gave me words to try and explain the and explainable.

Most of this came from yogic philosophy that gave a cosmological hierarchy that explained our place or my place, rather, as a yogi in practice, in this world, in my body and my role with my body in reaching that ineffable otherness, which was something very alien to me from my Western religion influence upbringing. Of course. Now here I need to note the irony that my next life stop was to go off and get a masters in clinical psychology, even if it was one that's specifically focused on spirituality. I was moving to thinking about spirituality and analyzing my intense experience and my awakening instead of staying and being in it. I wanted to know more about where I'd been and to tell others about it because I really felt I'd been to this other land.

There's an irony, of course, that there was this discomfort on my behalf in being. I had to know, despite experiencing something profound in my body via body based practice, despite gaining and embodied wisdom, I still had something of the collective's disdain for the body within me, within my subconscious,

and for this intuitive of wisdom I had gained that was not real enough knowledge. I needed it validated by book knowledge. I wanted an official stamp on my experience. What I later learned in my master's program via my Jungian studies is how I was living out in doing this. The mind body split and displaying my trained deference to the symbols of power, the patriarchy, knowledge institutions, official stamps.

It's symptomatic of our masculine culture and religion holding a great disdain and suspicion of the body. This has been taught to us for centuries. The body has long actually been associated with the feminine, and because I myself had so little faith and so much cynicism towards spiritual people, were I judge them as delusional or disconnected from reality and sort of floating on a little cloud, which of course is a psychological projection coming out of my own stance at the moment in my own coming from my own subconscious.

So therefore, I wanted to learn the language of science and psychology to, quote, explain what had happened to me in my yoga teacher training and in my profound spiritual awakening. And this felt experience of the divine, which afterwards I called an experience of God, which had happened to me in meditation in my training.

But my move, instead of diving into teaching and study or just staying in that space, was this retreat to the comforting shelter, science and words, and is very emblematic of our collective fear as a society and a culture of the feminine. Or rather, a culture with fear of the feminine, which is, I think, actually in human book and everything that that feminine archetype contains the body, bodily ness. And in that I want to make mention that this includes non beauty states of the body, non healthy states of the body, non youthful states of the body. Those are the ones that scares the most.

So in terms of my psyche being a reflection of the collective psyche, even after jumping into a body based practice and having a profound spiritual experience as a reflection of how we as the culture are evolving and relating to the feminine being in a very masculine, mind dominated culture, it makes sense that I rejected sitting in the feminine space of matter, of sitting in the body

instead of staying with yoga, practice and meditation. I run off to the mind space to do this masters and engage my mind to quote again, understand. Right. Now, speaking of quotes, there's a quote of the famous union James Hillman in relation to this that I want to read to you. Hopefully, it's not too academic, but it's regarding the polarity of the relationship to the feminine. And so I want to bring some of the young ends in here because we've not had them in at this time.

This is from James Hillman's Psychological Feminine. He is exploring Jung's piece on the archetype of the mother. And so Hillman says,

there needs to be a corresponding change of attitude in regard to the material part of man himself, which has, as Young says, always been associated in our tradition with the feminine, the transformation of our worldview necessitates the transformation of the world view of the feminine. Man's view of matter moves when his view of the feminine moves. And this change regarding the feminine refers not merely to rights for women,

, or other aspects of women's freedom and politics. Back to him. But a movement in consciousness in regard to bodily man, his own materiality and instinctual nature and quote.

So remember when I read this in one of my courses, this was part of the new language of psychology and archetypal symbolism that I was searching for to attach to this wordless understanding. I had experienced. But again, didn't really have words to explain.

But at the same time, I was beginning to see how it explained my own complexes and projections about this perspective demonstrated by my own actions. I had done a deep dive into the space of the archetypal feminine, going away for 30 days to train in yoga, leaving the mundane world, going into sacred space, going into an all female space. It ended up being I had been completely consumed and subsumed by this bodily feminine practice, very, very like watery. And then in a sort of panic discomfort, I decided the next move was a way to move out into masculine fire of action. The same fire that burned me out, by the way, thought, analysis and distance from the erotic space of the body into the logos space of the mind. I found in this archetypal symbolism, a language that explained what I felt and gave me a meaning for the journey that I'd been on in my program. Because archetypal symbolism uses myth through the study of analytical psychology and archetypal symbolism, I saw my personal experience and my small part as part of my participation in the collective current complex psychologically that regarded

with discomfort the space in which we reside in just being in our bodies. It was easier for me to move from being in the body to analyzing it, which is demonstrated by the use of my time, my actual movement, away from the spiritual practice back into the space of words and analysis. And this is so common of all of us that even go off and have profound experiences. And I will include within those experiences people that go off on psychedelic retreats. We have to come back and grasp it with the mind and own it with the ego.

And there is a lot of spirituality reintegrated into the ego. Just pick up social media.

I had been taken by sensation and by silence,

and I made something in my subconscious nervous, and my ego consciousness had to reject that and push it away. So now I was running from sensation and seizing upon the word, the logos, the masculine war or world of words and analysis to hang on to what was ineffable, intangible. And this is very emblematic of our male dominated body divorced religion and culture. Today, I needed to dissect and understand the bodily experience with a mind like Francis Bacon's quote of the heroic struggle with nature for man's, as he called it, dominion over the universe.

He is a personality whose legacy reflects an approach and attitude towards nature. In the 17th century, which were currently living out the consequences of collectively. We cannot, from that perspective, simply let nature be. We must, in this very enlightenment 17th, 18th century conquering perspective,

develop a scientific way to dissect it, pull everything that we can know out of it.

We're stuck with this compulsion that cannot allow any mystery of just being to exist, nor can we reside in it. We must claim it. We must come back from, for example, the psychedelic journey and blab about it on social media. We must proclaim it with our ego.

It's taken me years now to come to this perspective to see what was going on for me. Then at that time

I even apply to conquerors or reverent perspective to the spiritual. All that I experienced when I went into yoga to talk.

When I went into yoga teacher training, I was still such an A-type linear achievement. Move up the ladder, masculine world motivated person that I thought even after having a deep, profound, mystical experience, the divine, this awakening, this direct felt experience of God and experience of the true nature of my being, my soul and the entire universe. I still just thought it was something that everyone in white yoga teacher training, like, had like it happened to everyone. You know, you do these practices taught in in meditation, you know, eventually you get towards altered state of cosmic consciousness, you know, come the same way that, you know, if you strengthen this and stretch this, this pose will come. I thought it was like a step by step yoga achievement ladder, just like we do in school. You do this, you do this, you study this, you reach this level, you get this grade. I even went off after training to my first retreat with my teacher, asking others on the retreat. Oh. So when did you have your direct like, experience of God? And I was shocked to hear practitioners of 20 years say they still hadn't had theirs. And so I slowly began to learn through seeing their white eyes

that I had had that, that I'd had that experience. And I began to have a little bit more reverence for this completely incredible explosion of love and knowledge that love was all around us. And what had happened to me that day meditating, and I'll explain it eventually, but now it's still something that I actually finally hold sacred. So I'm keeping it in a safe space till I'll share that eventually. So

back to when I went to Columbia University's Spirit Mind Body Institute. My goal was to find something I presume existed in academic circles, like neurological studies and brain scans and psych studies, which would explain mystical experience of God. Thank you, William James But that wasn't enough.

It was really actually only recently, now that I've moved into reading about Catholic Mystics that I found reflections of what my experience was like, like the first visual representation I ever found of it was seeing Bernini, Saint Teresa of Avila, an Ecstasy statue and when I saw it, I was like, It felt like that. That's it. It was like that.

Well, I did learn in my graduate program to explain where I'd been was the language of myth, the hero's journey, an archetypal symbolism, mainly through young end up psychology or in analytical psychology, as you can call them, interchangeably.

I'd been obsessed since my early childhood with Greek myths because I was blessed to spend a lot of time in Greece as my parents practiced sailing before they took us on a journey, their dream of sailing around the world completely, which went on for five years when I was very little. You know, you don't want to start out sailing for a triple-A port without practicing and then the Greek islands have really major winds and it was a good place to practice. So they'd save up all their annual holiday and go all at once and immerse in some hardcore sea sailing together. And during the year my mother would sort of set me up for it during the school year by connecting me to Greek myths so that when I went there I could have this, you know, very visceral experience, a little bit more like, let's keep the five year old interest and things. So, you know, on this island, I could get excited like, Oh, this happened to Diana here or Apollo did this here. And I would start to have like, you know, a storybook connection to the places I was walking on. And that connection carried me all the way through the the boat trip around the world when when I was very, very lonely, having been plucked out of school, taken from my grandmother, didn't understand why my cat could not come on the boat. I now travel everywhere with my cat.

So in those days I used to go up on the bow of the boat and I guess you could say I always like to keep the magical and the psychological perspective alive. So my imaginary friend was the God Poseidon, and I would go talk to him for hours up there in the back of the boat. And sorry, I digress. The point being is that this is a union theme. The gods are dead, Young said. They have become our diseases. And for me, the gods were at that time very, very much alive. Something that came back to me and I connected to when I walked into my first youngin classes there.

This was something James Hillman actually felt as well. And my professor at Columbia, Dr. Curtis, who had trained directly under James Hillman, he would describe how you couldn't just go out after a Friday class and have a beer all together. He had to make a long speech to saluting, you know, Hermes almonds, mercury, however you want to say the God of communication and learning. And I, I remember hearing that in his class. And I thought, Oh, God, I used to do that when dad would do something like, be here, go through these orange pills overboard. I'd be like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I had to carry them off in a bowl onto the bow. Very reverently. And then there'd be a long speech I'd make about making an offering to Poseidon

to the point of the side note, as that myth has always been very, very much alive to me. When I was on the boat, my psychiatrist grandfather was making VHS tapes of Joseph Campbell's PBS series Here of a Thousand Faces. So he would post those to us in far outcroppings of the Pacific Islands where we were. And I don't think I entirely understood them as much as a seven, eight, nine year old.

But when I got to Columbia University, I very much went there to go study with Professor Curtis. I was really primed to dive deeply into union studies and archetypal symbolism.

Also joined with this work of Joseph Campbell, who taught at the school I went to for undergraduate Sarah Lawrence College,

and despite actually, I'd already taken two years in the New York Jung Institute of Young Studies, but I wanted even more . So I was really excited to find Dr. Curtis at Columbia University, and it was basically his course that drew me to enroll because I really did want to be his student.

But I digress. So, you know, I felt very, very passionate about my transformation via yoga. And yoga was really at that time, my whole life, I spent hours doing it every day. Even then, I still had this, like, shyness, an awareness that I was a Western woman, getting wildly into yoga, enthusiastically putting up puja tables and shrines with images of Hindu gods that were not from my original home tradition. I was very aware that I was part of a huge trend in the West, in the United States, a first world woman doing this. And I was aware I was a total cliché.

So when I was in this professor's classroom, learning words like the collective and what was behind this trend was part of something called the collective unconscious, the collective unconscious psyche, which motivates us to bring back the feminine because we live currently in an imbalance of a masculine dominated society. And then I learned that my burnout was considered a symptom of this collective imbalance, and I began to see beyond what we mean by cliché or what I understood as cliche, but that I was actually acting out a personal myth that was a small part of being a small part of the bigger collective movement, which is a mythic movement of the collective unconscious. And these young in teachings were showing me that that collective unconscious felt this mind body split as an imbalance between the masculine and the feminine. And that I had just been caught up through my unconscious, trying to pull it up out via my body to express what we were all trying to bring into consciousness. Yes. And, you know, in the masculine, heroic paradigm, burnout happens because you're going on this upward, consistent trajectory of achieve more, do more, do not have time to go down and out and pause or go into darkness or going to retreat or go into the body, which is the wisdom of the feminine aspect of the psyche. It shunted that to the side. Masculine says the body is merely a vehicle to push you along and to achieve in a masculine paradigm achieve, achieve. So think about it. We get lauded in our society for running over our bodies and exhausting ourselves. No one will ever applaud you for going home to rest because we don't have a value set for that in the masculine culture. We allowed you for burning the midnight oil and working and working and working extra hours, especially in the United States. What's interesting is that I learned how our myths had changed and how we had evolved alongside them, and now we've lost touch with them.

As I said, Jung said that having lost touch with the gods, diseases have become our gods, and that's because we fear nothing else. Which is interesting when you take into account how the collective estrangement from the body and estrangement from the natural rhythms of the earth we're living with them anyway, follows evolution in societies that reflected evolution within dominant mythologies in the past, which is mirrored in our our behavior today, especially shown in the evolution of the collective orientation away from nature, away from the body that happened in history over centuries. Dr. Curtis taught us that the culture was in this current situation of split of mind and body from not living in harmony with our bodies and not living in harmony with rhythms of nature in the earth, and instead of warring against it collectively and individually, which would send up a symptom, often a somatic symptom coming from the subconscious to make known what's being repressed. In my case, it was burnout and its accompanying issues of the body that forced me to return my attention to the body, to heal my souls. This is like the essence of the imbalance between the masculine feminine being lived out, which we are all collectively manifesting. You're a warring culture. You try to conquer your body, you try to conquer nature just like you're taming an animal. The origins of this is reflected in our mythology, all history, in its evolution, I learned and how we as a culture are now imbalanced due to what is missing for us in our own modern myth. How without the feminine, we are each trying to find our way back to correct that imbalance personally and collectively. And it's noticeable in our cultural trends.

Young said whatever's missing in the religion will come out through the culture or through its art, and we're trying to correct that imbalance. I saw that trend in this surge towards body based practices like yoga, like Tai chi, like Reiki. I still do include psychedelics because they're very sensitive and evocative.

Also in our move towards spiritual practices and also in our growing awareness and care of the environment

and also our draw to Eastern religions, which those Eastern religions allow for their

to, instead of being a separate entity from the God the divine, a connection to the divinity is allowed, as I found this in the discipline of yoga. In yoga, the body was a vessel for divine connection, not an obstacle to be pushed aside. Connection to ourselves and to our own bodily earth was the way to the divine and yoga.

And it was a way that I understood what a divine thing my body was, in my personal opinion.

Eastern religions teach so much more than just unity of body and spirit.

Yoga. Actually, one of the meanings of the word is union, and it is a body based practice that enables the body through the awesome of the poses to sit for long periods in meditation so that you can have with an object. Well, it is your objective to have communion with God and find spirituality through your body. And I coming from a Western Christian religion, the body was enemy to higher spirituality and had nothing to do with God. And that's the doctrine for many centuries. The body is sin covered up. We must discern its own desires. This will lead us away from God and I don't believe that's the case. I experience the body as a vessel for connecting to Spirit and the divine body based practices which were rare far and infringe 100 years ago, are now commonplace because there is a collective movement back towards the body which comes from the collective unconscious in order to rebalance the mind body split, to reunite ourselves with our archetypal feminine, which is experienced directly via directly via our own personal nature, our matter, our individual earth, our bodies.

So in the next episode, I'm going to be interviewing archetypal symbolist and mythology student Matthew Seely. He's been in the study of philosophy and comparative religion since his undergraduate work in philosophy at Princeton University. After gaining his Masters in Clinical Psychology and Education at Columbia University's SBI, where he focused on translating his shamanistic teachings into current practice for the modern era, he went into researching the evolutionary path also in history that links the heritage of shamanism to modern psychoanalysis and psycho analyst himself or herself.

And now he spent the past four years in debriefing of Joseph Campbell as well as music composition. So he's in this episode that's coming up, going to illustrate how ancient mythologies

and we as a culture collectively evolved away from the feminine in myth and in our culture. And what relevance this has on the modern singer.

So until then, remember to take time and sit quietly and ask your body what it has to tell you about what wants to come forth from your psyche to be healed. Because, as Young said, the psyche itself initiates a process of renewal.

Beloved, you welcome. In this episode, archetypal Symbolist Matthew Seely is going to discuss the history of mythology and how their evolutions reflected our changing religions, cultures and values, moving us further away from feminine earth values towards the masculine values of power over and dominance. And he's going to use both theories coming from Campbell and Jung's theories and showing.