Dr. Leanne Whitney explores the shadow work of  Jung, and it’s connection to Patanjali |476|

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:08] That’s Three Faces of Eve from way back.

Audio Clip: [00:00:13] Want to try hypnosis again? I mean, keep punching and wait for a fumble.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:17] But they knew what’s up, they understood Shadow Work, and..

Audio Clip: [00:00:23] You’re gonna protect them against me?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:24] But they didn’t understand the connection with Patanjali at least not nearly as much as today’s guest, Dr. Leanne Whitney.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:00:35] That’s why I’m saying if this moment is anything, it’s also a moment to call us towards fearlessness and that’s what Patanjali, you know, pushes us towards more so than Jung does.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:48] So the Shadow work may be something that we do have to experience on the way towards Patanjali’s transcendent seat of, we’re co-creators and everything so just relax, everything’s perfect the way it is.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:01:06] There’s no way to get to that comfortable seat without doing all that work.

Click Here for Dr. Leanne Whitney’s website

Click here for Forum Discussion

Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:10] Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris and today we’re joined by Dr. Leanne Whitney and she’s the author of Consciousness in Jung and Patanjali. Very interesting, intriguing title and she sent me an email and I was immediately drawn in because these are kind of on the fringes of stuff we talked about and then I looked more into Dr. Whitney’s work, super fascinating. Listen to this holistic and integrative mental health specialist, specializing in the intersection of Western psychology and yoga, yay! So this is going to be a deep dive kind of discussion. It’s a deep dive kind of book. It’s rigorous, it doesn’t shy away, but it still makes this stuff somewhat accessible and I’m really looking forward to this, so Leanne, thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:02:16] Thanks, Alex. Nice to be here. Nice to be with you.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:19] So tell us more about who you are and how you came to do, you know, this particular work in this particular way?

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:02:32] Oh boy, it was a long slow climb, or a long descent, I guess, take it that way too. In my 20s actually, I was really quite ill. My immune system collapsed and in retrospect now I look at it as sort of a spiritual crisis. So that was a lot to grapple with in my 20s you know a lot of my friends were out, you know, clubbing and enjoying life in ways that I wasn’t able to, so it took me switching into holistic modalities to get my body back on track and feeling better and then as I sort of healed from that I was, began practicing yoga and I was in a yoga room and I had what’s known in other religious studies literature as a pure consciousness event and then that radically re-shifted my way of looking at the world, even more so than the illness in my 20s, that pure consciousness event happened in my early 30s. So those two things shifted my way of being in the world completely. I was in the film world, I had done some acting,