"Your subconscious mind is telling its story through the body, through your posture, through the body sensations. There's a lot of ways that the subconscious expresses through the body, but because it's subconscious, you can't necessarily put that masculine and rational mind on it" -Alex Amorosi

Second half of the discussion between Alex Amorosi and Katherine, using her own story as case study, Katherine shares her experience of Traumatic Somatic Memory, a common occurrence for those in embodied practices such as yoga, breath work, or trauma release therapy. Using Archetypes of masculine and feminine Alex reflects how he's seen this unfold in his 20 years of teaching yoga and meditation.

www.alexamorosi.com

www.gnosisofthebody.com

"That quiet little voice that comes as a feeling....Yoga helps us inhabit that space of our body where lots of information exists" Alex Amorosi

Dropping into Yourself at Time of Crisis: Stories of how and why we get drawn into our body and to retreat from the world at times of crisis and flux in our lives. We explore healing of burn out, grief & mourning and the wisdom coming from our subconscious leading us through silence and sensation from dissociation to reconnection. The surprise of finding profound spiritual connection when we feel at the end of our rope, broken or disconnected. Using her own story as case study Katherine discusses with Alex Amorosi (Buddhist meditation teacher, master yoga teacher, reiki practitioner, trauma informed life coach) why and how deep dives into yoga can come as a call from psyche to come into our bodies to fix the broken parts of ourselves and reconnect to our own deep sense of knowing and Self.

https://www.alexamorosi.com/

Mushing together learning mediation, Western Vs Eastern conception of God, Developmental Psychology, trauma release and healing via Eastern Body practices as seen by today's established psychology "hero", Bessel Van Der Kolk and the Archetype of Initiation by violence through mythic figure of Persephone... all using my personal story.

I cover what learning Eastern meditation has in common with the baby learning to self soothe, as seen by Developmental Psychology. I compare Western and Eastern conceptions of relation to the Divine, to a baby hoping for an outside source of comfort to respond to their crying and this carries on into our adult years and what this had to do with the emergence of my spirituality after years of detesting religion. 

What learning to sit in silence, and its discomforts taught me, how it pushed to me edge, how Eastern meditation pushed me over the edge in spiritual breakthrough and what the angry meditator has in common with the crying baby having to learn to self soothe in the crib.

Ending with discussing how Eastern body and mindfulness practices can bring about healing from trauma, using a quote from Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and sharing my own story of healing.

Using my education in Developmental Psychology, I compare how the essential developmental step of the infant learning to self sooth is an edge that is met again in learning meditation and mindfulness. We develop coping mechanisms as adults (we rage, we exercise, we use substances, we over work, we over sleep, we freakout) and how in meditation we meet  silence, stillness and are confronted the limit of those inadequate self soothing habits, which forced me to reach for something deep inside, and surprise, I found the infinite, and had a major cosmic spiritual experience. 

I break down how  the Western concept of relation to the Godhead, as it had been preached to me by Christians and priests, where it was taught as “Divine power outside yourself, greater than “little unworthy you”  created spiritual and embodied separation from Source for me; and how the doctrine and teachings of Yogic Philosophy created union and oneness with the Divine, and truly healed my split created by a false idea of unworthiness and sin, how the Western religious concept of separateness from the Godhead was reorganized by Eastern teachings of the relation to the Divine during my experience of training in yoga. 

I discuss how this experience of union brought through somatic traumatic memory and healing, and how trauma can be a form of initiation to embark on a Hero/Heroine's Journey to go forth and become a Seeker. I raise Persephone as a mythical archetypal figure of initiation by violence.

I then bring in the text from The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk to explain how psychology and science see the healing power of Eastern body practices for the discomfort in the body of traumatised people.

Show notes:

Tammy B episode:

Rave to heal

From Raver to Healer  Reenactment 

English CBT and play therapist, Tammy Brett shares her wisdom and stories starting from the glory days of raving in Manchester in the 1990’s to healing her trauma from abusive relationships in body based therapies such as breathwork, myofascial release and EMDR.

Starting out with a spoken word ode to 1990’s UK and raving in the spirit of the witch, diving right into ritual, body and archetype, and the role of dance in coping with and healing from abuse, PTSD, eating disorders and trauma. We discuss how subconscious knows the needs that were then met in the raves. Tammy reflects on essence of dance and rave environment  of places like the legendary Hacienda and warehouses, use of ecstasy and the collective needs for rebellion and coming together of violent gangs in the raves.

Mythic elements discussed are the orgiastic, ritual Dionysian aspects of raves and the collective need to experience rebellious, bodily release in ritualistic times and spaces. We dive into  how nightclubs are spaces where our bodies reexperience in womb like environment in sensation.  How collective trauma is healed by movements of dance, as in poly vagel theory, we discuss women's groups where dance  for women of all ages is a healing ritual. Katherine explains the “Shakeout” she uses in teaching trauma informed yoga that has the benefit of discharging anxious energy and taking the system to parasympathetic nervous system; tammy ties this into her TRE trauma therapy work. 

In later half, Tammy shares her wisdom from practicing therapy with children with ADHD and the role early infant environment can play in subconscious held aspects in the body later in life. Identifying as a witch, Tammy, shares how connecting with nature and its wisdom in ritual and retreat has played a role in her healing journey.  Through her evocative spoken word poetry, Tammy tells stories of her raving days and ends with one about returning to feelings of safety in the body.

We end with another of Tammy’s poems of which tells what feeling safe in the body feels like, what is the feeling of conscious healing. 

Contact for Tammy Brett

[email protected] 

https://www.facebook.com/tammy.brett.5

http://www.soulution-events.com

― Joseph Campbell

Sexual repression, porn, retreat to sacred space, shamans touching men... Matthew and Katherine pick up the discussion on the role of the body in modern society.

Spirituality is now the taboo sexuality was for the era of early psychiatry and psychoanalysis; Matt and Kat unpack our cultures modern "hysterics" and their collective "somatic symptoms" manifesting through our bodies.

We start with concept of body as block to spirit in West but mode of divine connection in the East, how the Gods are now present in our bodies (in Jung's view) as the body is what is real to us, versus spirit and how trends (yoga, breathwork, spiritual retreats, etc) of returning to the body is an urge to return to ritual, and bring spirit in via the body.

They explore the rediscovery of importance of retreat to sacred space for release of trauma, just in ancient times there was the return to cave to leave society, echoed now in the therapeutic space where the therapist holds space for transformation. We touch on retreats and healing for women versus shamanic healing for men where touch is so forbidden for men.

Katherine explores how pleasure in the body was so damaged by legacy of the protestant church and work became the main purpose of the body, and the pleasure of practices like yoga versus being good and forcing body into a desk all day.

WE return to exploring the the imbalance of masculine and feminine in current society in sexual fantasy, manifesting in the literature and TV where the "monster" is the object of sexual desire, where the feminine transforms the monster.

As a clinical sexologist, Katherine explores current sexual opposing trends: interest in Tantra and sacred sex versus pornographic sex. Then we explore the role of pornography as symptom of the culture attached to the image of perfect, potent, powerful magical sexuality that is unrealistic but sought after.

Works referenced: Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel

We reference the C curve position of hysterics studied by Charcot, teacher of Freud's, in Paris at Hopital Salpetriere in late 19th century.

Discussion with Archetypal Symbolist, psychology educator and Joseph Campbell aficionado Matthew Spencer Seely, about the relevance of the evolution of dominant myths through history to our current masculine over feminine imbalance in our culture and how this influences our values and actions and why there is a trend in the masses towards body practices, like yoga, as the collective unconscious is called to return to the wisdom of the body, and how illnesses, as Jung says have become our Gods.

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

Continuing my personal story of going from burned out travel presse attache to full time yogini.

Musing on how yoga quieted my burned out mind and brought my attention inward to the felt sense of the body.

Yoga was my way of returning to Source of vital energy.

Diving into the practice of yoga also changed my awareness of the place of body in our culture, as a disrespected vehicle for the working body and thinking mind. Small commentary on social values and our relation to workaholism, and how we shame retreating and taking a break.

I compare values of French versus American culture on this.

Relevant quote from Carl Jung:

"It is obvious that social group consisting of stunted individuals cannot be a healthy and viable institution; only a society that can preserve its internal cohesion and collective values, while at the same time granting the individual the greatest possible freedom, has any prospect of enduring vitality. As the individual is not just a single, separate being , but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation."

Carl Jung, Psychological Types (1921) CW 6~758

www.GnosisoftheBody.com

"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.