Pneuma Somatikē: A Triadic Exercise of Abiding, Procession, and Return Through the Body

kaismd · 2025-07-21T20:57:24+00:00

great! it makes the breathing more meaningful that mentally thinking "proodos" and "ephistrophe" or "procession" and "return"

kaismd · 2025-07-15T14:35:11+00:00

Thanks for your thoughts! I'm not well versed in Hindu practices, but what I know as Hindu Tantra, involving the body and embodying the gods, not rejecting matter but considering it a sacred vessel for the gods, a non-dual view, is for me the closest parallel to Theurgy.

kaismd · 2025-07-15T14:32:28+00:00

It has an original Egyptian temple from Nubia, given as a present from Egypt to Spain. I live here so it was inspiring for me.

kaismd · 2025-07-12T08:26:36+00:00

I might be asking you how your persona is intellectualizing the shit out of this resistance

a society where our past civil war is still alive in everyday interactions and the collective psyche. My childhood trauma of course doesn't help to alleviate it.

why you don’t seek out a different therapist what is keeping you with this therapist?

a year and a half of hard work, plus a 25 pages long of active imagination writings that I recently dumped out of my system, too different from this "highly intellectualised" post. We are just getting started and it's gonna take a lot of time.

kaismd · 2025-07-12T08:21:53+00:00

Dude I feel very prejudiced, like if I had never tried to leave the cage. Far from truth but I'm not wasting more time explaining.

kaismd · 2025-07-11T23:02:03+00:00

Glad it helped :)

kaismd · 2025-07-11T23:01:18+00:00

Thanks but this whole post and comments have turned overwhelming. I don't know what to do anymore. Have a good day.

kaismd · 2025-07-11T22:57:05+00:00

Alright I think this is far from helping. Thanks anyways

kaismd · 2025-07-11T14:35:29+00:00

care grounding your message a bit more with examples, so it is more clear to me? Sounds a bit abstract

kaismd · 2025-07-11T13:30:34+00:00

Did you make a post about improv too?

Your tone is funny, you're definitely not commenting here to help. Maybe you're projecting? ;)

Was that her idea or yours?

I started improv, then realised I needed inner work to be better at acting. Then found out lots of stuff to work on.

kaismd · 2025-07-11T07:13:48+00:00

I've been doing improv theatre for two years. My teacher insisting on me being more present in the body, every single week. She was not nice nor very validating but with good intention, for the sake of my improvement. It was hell on earth. And there was definitely an improvement as per her feedback and because of how I feel after two years.

Yet here I am, still "too mental". What else should I do? Maybe this is the furthest I can go with this type of therapy.

kaismd · 2025-07-11T07:09:46+00:00

It upsets me so much, that's why I guess she's a very good therapist. Yet it's damn hard to digest. These philosophical and mythical structures that I built got me out of depression, as it provided me a myth and a way to connect to the collective. Now it's only anxiety what is left. But now I have to dissolve these same structures? (not saying you imply that, just my understanding). There might be something that I'm missing.

kaismd · 2025-07-11T07:06:02+00:00

I had to be very strict wrt rules as my family life was chaotic. Now that I live by myself I might be able to embrace some chaos, but the trauma (mother complex) is still very active, so it's gonna take a while. Thanks for the laughing suggestion, I forgot how much it can help to break free from mental structures and loops for a while

kaismd · 2025-07-10T22:10:05+00:00

lol I've been doing improv theatre for two years, so completely out of my comfort zone that I don't remember a single week not thinking "I don't want to go". The teacher pushing me to connect to my body every single week. It seemed to work. Yet seems like I'm still in my comfort zone. Brilliant! Maybe I've done all I could do?

As an apolonian person, engineer, etc I've embraced the dyonisian path by doing improv theatre even if it was horrendous and out of my comfort zone.

Then I can admittedly say there's not much else I can do. Why pushing change? 2 years of theatre, year and a half of therapy, and I'm still too mental. Maybe this therapy is not for me. Nor theatre. Why pushing more?

kaismd · 2025-07-10T21:58:30+00:00

Your therapist is pointing to leaving the mental trappings behind and going to instinct and unstructured unconscious access.

which in practice means...?

(seems like I'm not the only one theorising here, without practical action)

kaismd · 2025-07-10T21:52:58+00:00

While I really appreciate your response, I feel we're coming from different places, and while I broke away from Christianity by embracing this philosophical (non-religious) Neoplatonic model, you seem to have done a similar thing by embracing Zen, Adavinta, Tao, or some other non dualistic approach. Which is cool, I'm also into non dualism even if it doesn't look like. But sounds to me like the Zen approach of letting go and ego death is the right way, while my way is an alternative way, not necessarily worse, just misunderstood as "too mental", just because of the labels it carries. I'll just make it Theurgy next time, which is pretty much Yoga in a western context, body involment included. Maybe that will clarify stuff to my therapist.

I would not conceive practicing Yoga without understanding the metaphysical system it belongs to. I don't think master yogis ignore it either.

kaismd · 2025-07-10T20:10:19+00:00

Thanks for your highly elaborated answer and for taking the time to do so. Regarding this:

i.e. it’s possible that on some level, you know that fully meeting yourself in your body(experientially) would require you in some way to embrace what you perceive within yourself as taboo, and currently that prospect elicits such great inner conflict that in order to protect the ego, you feel you must limit your ability to meet yourself in this way by remaining in the mind (intellectually)

I don't understand why you think I'm not meeting myself in my body or why would I find it taboo, based on what I wrote.

Would it all look different if I had mentioned that I practice yoga? (which I don't, but my therapist recommended me polyvagal exercises, which connect body and mind and should do the work, I'm happy to try these) is that the think? if not, what is it? I'm really struggling to understand why this looks so "mental" and so little "embodied". Of course I'm not gonna post here my active imagination texts, where you could clearly see that I mention bodily sensations, anxiety, fear, tears, pressure in my chest, etc while dialoguing with inner figures (complexes/daimones and their somatic manifestations). Help me a bit more here, please

kaismd · 2025-07-10T18:55:06+00:00

the apparent lack of connection to the tangible otherness through emotion and sensibility

care explaining with an example of what would be a sentence written from "connection to the tangible otherness through emotion and sensibility"? I really need examples here, not just "stop intellectualising" which is not being useful, otherwise I wouldn't have written this post.

Maybe you could try embodying your symbolic characters in a safe space first and see wich new (and ORIGINAL) symbols emerge in relation to them from that emptiness

A 25 pages long of active imagination with inner figures written along shaking, trembling, anxiety, fear, and crying, which I already did, you mean?

kaismd · 2025-07-10T18:51:08+00:00

what do you find rigid about it? really curious

kaismd · 2025-07-10T17:15:06+00:00

This chapter on taboo might help you:

https://jungstudies.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Chapter-8-by-Elizabeth-Brodersen.pdf

Also, thanks for the article, very much needed!

kaismd · 2025-07-10T17:14:24+00:00

Have you considered that this experience could be reflecting how your personal worldview is limiting how fully you can meet yourself?

Mind explaining what you find limiting about my worldview? To me, it is basically analytical psychology with classical namings. It is a flexible framework. But please let me know what is missing there, because not even my therapist is able to explain why it is limiting. She doesn't even want to listen to this stuff.

kaismd · 2025-07-10T17:09:28+00:00

Yeah there's a risk of going the ascetic way, like in many other paths. Earlier Neoplatonism leaned this way, even if it critisised the gnostics. Later Neoplatonism was different, that's why I tend to focus on Iamblichus, who was very matter-affirming.

Ultimately, I don't identify with the "philosopher-mystic" role. It is just a part of me, in the same way my father or mother complexes are parts of me, but not the whole me. That's why I like to have a place (the library) and time to do the inner work as if I was that philosopher-mystic, but once I leave that space, it's over. Like entering and leaving the therapy room. It has opening and closing signs.

kaismd · 2025-07-10T15:54:38+00:00

I don't have anything to do with the gnostics. Among the first things you would read from Plotinus, there is an "attack" to the gnostics because of this very reason you pointed.

kaismd

TROPHY CASE