Learning a New Language of the Body; felt experience

Gnosis of the Body

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