The Body as Alchemist: Turning Life’s Lead to Gold, with Tina Stromsted, PhD

The Embodied Way Podcast

On following the body's internal and evolutionary wisdom to generate new life. We speak to Tina Stromsted, PhD about the body as an intelligent orchestra always organizing for healing and growth, movement as the language of the soul, and bringing light into the dark places of the psyche by using the body's guidance.

A guided practice is offered at the end of the conversation.

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Tina Stromsted, Ph.D. is a Jungian psychoanalyst, dance therapist, and somatics educator. She was a founding faculty member of the Women’s Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a co-founder and faculty member of the Authentic Movement Institute in Berkeley (1993-2004). Currently she teaches at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, the Depth Psychology/Somatics Doctoral program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and as a core faculty member for the Marion Woodman Foundation. With 40 years of clinical experience, and a background in dance and theater, she teaches at universities and healing centers internationally, and has a special interest in the creative process, neuroscience, attachment theory, eco-psychology, and embodied spirituality. Developer of Dreamdancing, Embodied Alchemy, and Soul’s Body Center, Dr. Stromsted’s numerous articles and book chapters explore the integration of body, brain, psyche and soul in healing and transformation.

For more information visit www.AuthenticMovement-BodySoul.com

More episodes @ www.embodiedway.com

THIS EPISODES WISDOM QUOTES

“We tend to split the body and spirit, we think of the body as matter as something to carry our head around, to perfect, to diet, to repress, to represent us in a particular way, rather than a deep living organismic collection of rivers and island and soft places and deep places and organs. The body is like an orchestra that, with all its tempos and rhythms and wisdoms, is always trying to let us know more about our experience: The nervous system works quickly like the high violins and the flutes, and the organs, the viscera, are slower, more like the cello and the base, the bones are more like the drums. If we bring our attention and curiosity to the life, the sensations, and imagery that arise from the body, when enough care and safety and cherishing are there, the soul begins to light up the body. There is more consciousness, more electricity, more warm, the light within the dark body is beginning to grow: The body becomes an alchemist.”

“One way that we can discover what our bodies are trying to tell us through the less conscious, spontaneous movements that our bodies make as we speak is to slow down and get interested in our bodies’ sensations, the signals that are trying to bubble up from the deep body, from the cellular wisdom, that level of intelligence, before it gets to the cranium, way before it gets to the reflective centers of the brain– when it’s still liquid or hot or pulsatory, pre-verbal, before they move from the brainstem to the right (limbic, emotional) brain and across into the left brain, the language centers, way before that, there is a reservoir of intelligence that we often don’t pay attention to.”