Leanne Whitney, Jung, Patanjali and the Seat of Consciousness |476|

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.

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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, I was making a documentary film, I went to make a documentary about the evolution of human consciousness and then I took a big pivot and went into academia, back into academia and that’s where I got my degree in depth psychology and now I’ve been, you know, working on the lines of East-West, the Shamanic Tradition, you know, looking at basically a lot of different ways that we seem to be rooted or not on this planet.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:04:25] Well, you know, it’s so cool because you’re kind of balancing a lot of different things. I can already tell in,you know, your sketch of the life like, you know, you’re in your 20s you’re obviously a very attractive woman. I’m sure that in our society, I just say that because in our society that means something and steer someone down a course, which usually doesn’t easily inner say, intersect with either the spiritual awakening and or the deep intellectual, you know, I’ll just go get a PhD in depth psychology kind of thing and you know, like you said you’re even pulled towards the acting thing, which again, kind of plays into that. This is what the culture is feeding back to you about who you are and who you need to be. I am fascinated with how you kind of navigated that.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:05:19] I mean, yeah, let’s start there because I actually took a turn towards acting after the illness. I had acted in grade school and in high school. I did some of the musical theater, and productions in my grade school in high school. But it was the illness that actually made the term back to acting because I knew that there was a lot of emotions that needed to be discharged and I felt like creating characters, was one possible way of doing that. So actually the head towards the arts, towards acting, towards film-making was me trying to carve my way into healing as well.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:06:02] Okay and fair enough, I don’t want to push on to kind of personal stuff. I just think that’s kind of an interesting, I mean like for me, you know, being a guy, the thing was more money, right and success and that’s where I was totally geared. Now all along I had this idea that I had to probe some of these deeper questions. So I had a high tech start up and I’m doing the mail order, mail in things with self realization fellowship, you know, I’m in Texas and I’m getting it. So I always had those things but I was pulled towards because society, culture and family, that hey, man, you know, get the NBA get a good job and then make the money, you know and it almost sounds like your story had a couple of those shifts and not even mentioned the, you know, Kundalini kind of thing that some people don’t even recover from that. I mean, that just kind of like, or it takes them a long time to reintegrate that. I mean, does any of that stuff resonate with you?

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:07:15] Oh, God, it could take me a very long time to integrate that. But to go back to what I think you’re getting at is the cultural influence on our psyche and that I could say, played a big part in why I’m calling it now in my 20s, why it was a psycho spiritual crisis because the cultural pieces were weighing so heavily on me at that time. I came from a family, you know, where my father was very successful. By the time I was at university the first time, you know, he was making a lot of money and what you’re saying that influence of money, materialism to egoic, how do I make my place in the world? Sure, those factors were all influencing me and in a way that sent me into a crisis eventually, that’s what that first crisis was in my 20s, for sure, a lot of the cultural pieces collapsing in on me.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:08:17] You know and I don’t want to take it too far in another direction but I do think it’s super relevant in a way and that that’s that sooner or later, you have to face, if you’re thinking about things, if you’re waking up at all and thinking about these things, even intellectually not spiritually with your opening which we can get to but you’re going to face the crisis, right? You can’t be looking at just what you described as a cultural kind of thing. There’s all this money, there’s all this get egoic there’s all this demands on what I’m supposed to do, how I’m supposed to fit in, if you’re religious at all, you know, if you’re Christian and then you go to college, a lot of people face that first person that comes along and says, that’s bullshit, don’t you know, this and this and this? And it’s like, no I didn’t I was raised in a, you know, in a world where everyone kind of told me all this stuff makes sense, you know, no one told me there was this kind of wink and nod. Yeah, well, we know it’s not literally true. It’s you know, what I mean? So…

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:09:16] Alright, so, I was brought up Catholic. I went to a Catholic school. So there was a lot of regimentation there, a lot of control in my elementary school life and then there was a lot of control also in my in my family situation, but in particular to go into the Catholicism aspect. Boy, how do I articulate this specifically? My body always knew, when I look back on it, my body was telling me, I’m hearing these messages about Jesus and about love. But the the nuns and the priests, what they were emanating was not that. So the conflict was being literally, viscerally lived in my body, you know and by the time I got to high school I told my parents no more Catholic school, like, we’re gonna have to find a way around this because this doesn’t work for me. I just, you know, the tension was building Even then, you know, I couldn’t again, back down. I even in some way struggle to articulate about it now. But back then I couldn’t articulate at all. But now I see working in holistic and integrative medicine, the body keeps the score as Bessel Vander Kolk so beautifully said on a title of his book, The body is keeping the score, there’s no way to run from consciousness. There’s just, you can’t run away from it.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:10:46] That’s beautiful Leanne, that’s a great, great, beautifully put insight. Link that up for us with your yoga practice because we share this in common, a longtime yoga practitioner I am and it took me years and years and years to realize it’s not the least bit about the poses and that it’s deeper on so many levels and yet at the same time, like you’re just alluding to, hell yes it’s about the poses! you know, so because the body that that’s such a beautiful insight, and I think there’s some truth there that Yoga is trying to get at even though it has its same co-opting corruption kind of elements, as everybody else does too, which we can talk about. But thoughts on that?

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:11:42]Sure, within sort of a guru tradition, there can be corruption that happens there. Yeah, the way I like to frame it is the body is a metaphor. So where the poses, I’m sorry, the poses, the Asana poses are a metaphor. So we’re looking, you know, for balance. Right, left, in, out, up, down. We’re looking to find, as the Buddha succinctly said, the middle way, so psychologically, you know, physically and so when we get on our mat and do the Asana, that’s what we’re doing is we’re living out sort of the metaphor of what we’re attempting also psychologically, to get our mind balanced and therefore in alignment with what perhaps we could say, pure consciousness and we could go deeper in this conversation also about the archetype of levels. But that’s the way I frame the Asana and the pranayama component, the breathing component is just so critically important because the breath helps us understand where the fear is located, where the binds are, where the blocks are in experience, you know. If this moment in time is about the realization that the body keeps the score, I would say, this moment in time is also about the realization that it’s imperative that we begin to eradicate fear.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:13:07] That’s awesome and you kind of laid it out only slightly differently but actually, than I would, although you kind of came back around to exactly where my kind of accumulated intuitive, limited intuitive, very, very limited, intuitive feel of it is that it is about releasing, it’s about breathing and releasing and that the poses the asanas, the physical positions, can help release the blockages. But that’s what it’s really all about. Because my experience is that anyone who does five minutes of meditation, realizes that the shift that’s coming up is, you know, of their creation and that the only way to get rid of it, is to release it, to allow it to be and to allow it to release itself. Because you’ve kind of created the mess, you got to kind of clean it up and I think I love your idea of the of the metaphor. But it’s almost like the first part of what you said is kind of true to, the body is a metaphor. The poses are a metaphor, but the body is also a metaphor for what we’re experiencing, you know at this time, so God there’s so many different ways we could go there. But I love this conversation because in my experience, yoga is so misunderstood and so up taught so poorly.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:14:40] I would say capitalism will devour anything in its path. I mean, it’s like a giant Pac Man. I mean, it just, it has an insatiable predatory capitalism seems to have an insatiable appetite. So it certainly has gobbled up yoga, at least in America, you know, Euro American culture. I probably can say and..

Alex Tsakiris: [00:15:04] Let me interject, because I don’t know that we’re on the same page there necessarily and staying out of it, because I don’t think capitalism comes into it. You know, I have a really interesting dialogue a year ago when I was writing this book with a woman named Annika Lucas and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her. But she’s started something in New York, upstate New York called Prison Liberation Yoga. She does yoga for inmates and primarily women who are incarcerated and it’s dealing with all that kind of stuff. But the reason I contacted to her is she was a victim of that satanic ritual abuse cult in Belgium, back in the 80s and just horrible experience. Sometimes she was six years old. But where the story really gets interesting, so we’re talking about all that she goes, yeah and then I met Pattabhi Jois and he sexually assaulted me and then you go on and you look for Pattabhi Jois, there’s hundreds of women that have come forward and said, Yeah he did that and you look at Iyengar. So I started with Iyengar in Dallas and, you know, he was the the slap guy, you know, come around he’s just rude and obnoxious and would slap people but everyone had to go, you know, that’s part of his, you know, thing or, you don’t know what he’s been through with his brown skin and all the rest and it’s like, oh, no, but if that’s the fruits of this work it doesn’t seem right and then there’s the same kind of sexual misconduct going on there. So that, you got to take capitalism out of the thing there and it starts looking like all these other cults, it looks like every other cult we’ve run into and when power is concentrated and you know, particularly with, in this case, men who are great who are raised in one culture, India, who are kind of thrust into this other culture and they can’t deal with some of the stuff that comes with that culture. It’s very human, it ain’t very complicated on a deep psychology level, it’s just, they’re working out their shit and they haven’t done it and in that respect, that doesn’t have anything to do with capitalism. But I think that is the root cause of the problem with yoga. The problem with yoga is it needs a serious disinter-mediation. It needs ,you don’t need me to show you the fucking poses, you can just..that’s not the hard part, what you need me to do is help create an experience through which you can understand who you are by a combination of these very simple poses and breathing which aren’t magical but you just kind of do them and they kind of help.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:17:58] Yeah, I’m so with you with the guru culture,were actually talking about two different things where I was going with capitalism was this idea of, you know, buying $150 yoga pants and having a T shirt and there’s a lot of money, there’s $6 billion, I think i lost count or something like that. There’s a lot of money in the yoga industry so that the money that gets exchanged between all the products and I don’t know about the studios but again, there’s money out there to be had and I think that’s part of the corruption but also for sure the guru culture is part of the corruption as well.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:18:38] And if we could go into that just a little bit further because I think it ties, it does tie in, we’ll eventually get to your awesome book and all the rest that stuff. It’s not just the guru culture because I think the guru culture is a reflection of the coltish way that we’ve approached spirituality through religion. So what they’re doing is they’re just replicating the hierarchy, right. So you go to the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church says, God is awesome and all powerful and we will be your intermediary, your sole intermediary to experiencing that divine consciousness and then the Yogi’s are doing the same thing, whether they realize it or not, they’re saying, we will inter mediate that for you. There’s no way you could directly access that. Well, of course, you could do it. If you can’t directly access it, then it isn’t real and I think yoga runs the risk of making that same mistake, has made that same. Yoga in West is built on those same principles and they need to be ripped out of it.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:19:44] To the extent that it is yes, I wouldn’t make such a big statement, but it’s there. It’s definitely there. There’s no doubt about it. Is it everywhere? I’m not sure about that. But it’s definitely there. Yeah and I agree with you, ultimately yoga, like Jung is pointing us towards direct experience. I mean, that’s what, you know what the vision is, the vision is not mediated by a another person that you’re working to clear the distortions from your lens, which goes back to what you were talking about, you know, on the mat, that’s what we’re doing here, if consciousness is all there is, this is a big letting go. This is a big clearing of blocks, this isn’t about gaining anything, this is about letting go of a lot of things which has to do with, you know, distorted thought patterns and yeah confused tendencies in the mind and then pure consciousness is right there to show itself. It was either hidden inside, you know, there wasn’t good vagal tone or it was, you know, hidden down in the nervous system somewhere and we were clenched in fight flight or fear for long periods of time and then those nerve endings, those noughties, those channels begin to open and then that material becomes more available to us to process and integrate and, you know, stand stronger in the body because of.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:21:08] So how does this relate to Jung and Patanjali? What sent you down that path, what needed to be explored and exposed in that kind of juxtaposition?

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:21:24] So I was in a yoga room when I had that pure consciousness event and again, I, you know, I’ve said this in other interviews, I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t even know at that point, I hadn’t even studied the philosophy, I had been turned on to yoga because I was sick in my 20s, I was looking to feel better and to heal but I hadn’t, in any way explored the philosophy or the psychology. But I had that event and then I started to look deeper into the first text, actually. I went to was the Tibetan Book of the Dead, thankfully and that was a big relief to read that text and realize that the pure awareness that I had been, you know, if you could, if I could loosely say awakened into that that was already existing and being talked about and then I began to study Patanjali, somebody introduced me to Jung and you know, for the next eight years prior to going to the academy, I studied Jung and Patanjali and I just studied them both consecutively.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:22:35] So tell us, tell us, tell us, what what do you find in that, you know, kind of interesting interplay? you just did it with your hands, tell us.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:22:48] You know, there’s a lot of places where they meet, they have a lot of similarities, right? They’re both interested in the healing of human suffering. They’re both interested in religious function of the psyche, we could say, effect as an empirical means of entering the psyche. But ultimately, after studying them for a long period of time and it really ended up being looking like, you know, a needle in a haystack was finding that where Jung used capital as self, this term, the self, the archetype of the self and he was pulling from the eastern traditions from the wisdom traditions from yoga because he himself going up in Protestantism, he didn’t want to use the term God, we borrowed this term. But when you really look at it, Jung’s self has both conscious and unconscious components. He’s mostly talking about the contents of consciousness and what Patanjali is ultimately pointing to is this ontic reality of pure consciousness, not the reality of our being, it’s pure consciousness. So it can never go unconscious. Jung’s making a representation in other words.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:24:06] Yes, I’m interested in this middle ground. Because if you think about this very deeply and again, you have you’re an extremely deep thinker, and it’s so awesome to encounter somebody who is relatable and can speak on so many different levels but this book, I mean, I don’t want to like steer people away from it but look inside Amazon and make sure you’re up for it because it’s not like just the kind of quick breezy read, you know, which everything shouldn’t be a quick breezy read, you know, but the bottom line for me, is the middle ground, the middle territory, you know and Jung stopped there. In my read of it, is Jung is all about that, Jung is all about, okay, where are we? Where are we with the shadows? Where are we with the angels and demons? I mean, young is about, you know, I thought hypothesized spirit entities that are interacting with us, you know, whatever and Patanjali is kind of the traditional Yogi, like, why would you want to stop there? Just go pass that, keep asking what’s next? What’s fundamental? What’s at the base of all this? And one, I guess I want to know if that’s your read of it. And then what you make of that?

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:25:38] Well, I would say what Patanjali does, what Patanjali’s view does and potentially can do, is it therefore, it changes the perception, the field of perception, the paradigm. Reality ends up looking quite holographic, which as I say, in my book, right, we know Kyle Pribrim was pointing towards that, we know David Bohm was pointing towards that, Mount Sedona, I think his name is, there’s definitely quantum physicists currently who are pointing towards that and no, you know, Jung points towards synchronicity. There’s, he doesn’t comprehensively put all his phenomenology together all his theory and phenomenology together, to him, you know, the psyche is this ongoing dynamic and, you know, rightly so. But what Patanjali’s outlook does, is it allows us to take a comfortable seat more so in the body. I don’t think we can ever take a comfortable seat in Jung’s middle path because suffering always remains and you know Patanjali’s continuing to see through all that phenomenon, not get caught in it and that’s why I’m saying, is 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. Yeah, Jung helps for sure. The Shadow Work is beautiful and amazing and right in alignment with the self inquiry of Patanjali yoga, no doubt about it.

Alex Tsakiris: [ 00:27:22] Awesome. I mean, there’s like, we could spend an hour talking about all that. But I’m just gonna ask you to keep going with this because I don’t know if everyone’s understanding, I don’t know, if I’m understanding. I think I’m understanding, I think we’re on the same page here. But 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. We may have to go through, it’s not perfect because the shadow, it’s not perfect because what entities are interacting with me? you know. So how do you see people who come to you for help? How are they dealing with that path towards Patanjali seat of awareness?

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:28:24]Well, if I can just say, look, in chapters one and chapter two, I think the title only makes it clear, we absolutely have to deal with this material. There’s no way to get to that comfortable seat without doing all that work. Both the growth phenomena on the front of our eyes, but also the more subtle phenomena, all feelings, all subtle thought forms on the interior of our eyes, that this all has to be looked at and Patanjali is very clear on that, I think.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:28:53] Right ,right. But hold on, because there’s a bunch of people in the non dual community or whatever you want to call it. Readers and you know, thinkers about Patanjali, who kind of spin it a different way which has merit, which is, as soon as you realize that as soon as you read chapters one and two, it is kind of over, right? Because I have to work through that. Okay, that’s done. I didn’t, you know. All I need to do is wake up to the reality that that is the reality and then there really is no work to do right? I mean, there is that interpretation of it. That is, you know, I’m not saying it’s, a lot of people wake up to, you know, there’s no me here, there’s no anything, you know and I’m not saying I’m in that camp but I do see a certain escapable you know, reality to that too you know, it’s like how long you can play the game.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:29:53] I think I hear what you’re saying. It’s so interesting, right? Like talking to, you know, because again, everybody’s interpretation of Jung and Patanjali are different, I really set myself up for a challenge picking these two scholars, because it’s like a hornet’s nest, no matter what way you turn, you know, if you look at like all the Jungians in societies now in England and Chicago, they all end up breaking apart because even the Jungians can’t agree on what Jung’s saying, right and then everybody reads Patanjali differently. So, but you know, both the scholars maybe we could say are so broad in a way, so everybody puts their read into it.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:30:28] If I were to present to you and say, Leanne you’re not talking to Alex, you’re talking to what is being presented as Alex now to you, but the real me is, you know, that I realize is beyond that and is always with me and I can play this game here, this egoic game of Alex, but I am so aware that that’s not who I am, I kind of move in and out of even being able to play that game.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:45:00] And then we need to grab it back and say, okay, what what we really, really meant by giving up control is, we have to make sure that this happens and that social justice happens in this way that I define a social justice and that these people are penalised in this way as I understand it. Then I go back to my story with my friend Annika Lucas, right. So she’s sold into a satanic ritual abuse cult at six years old. I can’t tell you how many people cannot accept that ,deal with that. They turn off tonight. I go, we’ll just go. They have the photos of the guy who was arrested in Belgium. They have pictures of the kids in cages. They have kids who died because while he was in prison awaiting trial, he wasn’t able to go and feed the kids that he was peddling to elites, right and people are still like, no, no, no, no, no. I wouldn’t to believe it even if it was true, because it doesn’t fit into their thing. But then here’s the problem with Annika, is go talk to people are doing between life research and between life regressions and they say, well her soul chose that, her soul chose that as part of this experience for whatever lesson she was going to get out of that. Now I can’t wrap my head around that but I can’t dismiss that either and that just sends us in a whole different direction in terms of how this stuff is supposed to play out, not only on an individual level, but on a, you know, global level on a national level on a cultural level.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:46:36] Really, I mean, that’s where the deep, the depth comes in, right? Because it really is it’s so complex and there’s so many elements to it. But that’s why, I mean, at least through the lineages of Jung and Patanjali this turn, that we each have to make the turn within to find where that evil is within us. Where any of that aggression, where any of that power over is within us. Because when we understand how it’s playing out within us, then we have a better understanding of then how it’s playing out in other people. So I hear you but really until, I don’t know what enough of us would be, but it’s, if there is strength in numbers, then it’s taking that deep, deep turn within to process our own deep levels of,like we’re talking about either evil. But I also like to say fear for sure. Because the fear ends up manifesting as a power over as some kind of aggression, that I can somehow alleviate my own internal fear by controlling people in my external world and again, when we do that work within we have a better understanding of why people, other people are doing it.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:47:58] Yeah, really..

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:47:59] That makes sense?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:48:00] Oh, absolutely and I really like the way that the way that you put that. So, Leanne, how is the best way for people to connect with you? Is it through this book, I see that you actually, I said the book is pretty dense, you’ve actually put together like a training course that people can kind of go through, but is that the material that people are finding most useful? And I love the way you say making that turn, you know, what’s, what’s the best way for people to connect with what you’re doing?

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:48:31] Well my book is definitely academic you know. It’s definitely academic so it’s definitely for people who want a deep dive but through an academic lens into both Jung and Patanjali. I do hope to write a book that’s more, it has more mass appeal to it in short order, but I do, I teach yoga online often. I have an upcoming course in January. I have some events with the young society coming up. But overall the best way to, if they wanted to reach out to me directly is to my website, Leanne Whitney.com

Alex Tsakiris: [00:49:07] Great, Leann Whitney.com, easy you got the URL, Surprise. You must have gotten it a long time ago,that’s good.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:49:15] I did.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:49:17] Well, it’s been absolutely super connecting with you, really fun conversation. I hope somebody out there has an interest enough in this kind of deep deep dive, but there’s so much meat there, so. But awesome having you on. Thanks for joining me.

Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:49:36] Thanks for having me Alex, nice to be with you.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:49:40] Thanks again to Dr. Leanne Whitney for joining me today on Skeptiko. I really enjoyed the conversation and the way we were able to really bring this back to some of the fundamental questions about spirituality. So the natural question to tee up from this interview is ,which superhero do you choose? Jung or Patanjali? I’d like to hear your thoughts on that the place to do that is Skeptical forum. Check it out and do stick around. I have a lot of great shows coming up. Until next time, take care. Bye for now.

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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, I was making a documentary film, I went to make a documentary about the evolution of human consciousness and then I took a big pivot and went into academia, back into academia and that’s where I got my degree in depth psychology and now I’ve been, you know, working on the lines of East-West, the Shamanic Tradition, you know, looking at basically a lot of different ways that we seem to be rooted or not on this planet. Alex Tsakiris: [00:04:25] Well, you know, it’s so cool because you’re kind of balancing a lot of different things. I can already tell in,you know, your sketch of the life like, you know, you’re in your 20s you’re obviously a very attractive woman. I’m sure that in our society, I just say that because in our society that means something and steer someone down a course, which usually doesn’t easily inner say, intersect with either the spiritual awakening and or the deep intellectual, you know, I’ll just go get a PhD in depth psychology kind of thing and you know, like you said you’re even pulled towards the acting thing, which again, kind of plays into that. This is what the culture is feeding back to you about who you are and who you need to be. I am fascinated with how you kind of navigated that. Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:05:19] I mean, yeah, let’s start there because I actually took a turn towards acting after the illness. I had acted in grade school and in high school. I did some of the musical theater, and productions in my grade school in high school. But it was the illness that actually made the term back to acting because I knew that there was a lot of emotions that needed to be discharged and I felt like creating characters, was one possible way of doing that. So actually the head towards the arts, towards acting, towards film-making was me trying to carve my way into healing as well. Alex Tsakiris: [00:06:02] Okay and fair enough, I don’t want to push on to kind of personal stuff. I just think that’s kind of an interesting, I mean like for me, you know, being a guy, the thing was more money, right and success and that’s where I was totally geared. Now all along I had this idea that I had to probe some of these deeper questions. So I had a high tech start up and I’m doing the mail order, mail in things with self realization fellowship, you know, I’m in Texas and I’m getting it. So I always had those things but I was pulled towards because society, culture and family, that hey, man, you know, get the NBA get a good job and then make the money, you know and it almost sounds like your story had a couple of those shifts and not even mentioned the, you know, Kundalini kind of thing that some people don’t even recover from that. I mean, that just kind of like, or it takes them a long time to reintegrate that. I mean, does any of that stuff resonate with you? Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:07:15] Oh, God, it could take me a very long time to integrate that. But to go back to what I think you’re getting at is the cultural influence on our psyche and that I could say, played a big part in why I’m calling it now in my 20s, why it was a psycho spiritual crisis because the cultural pieces were weighing so heavily on me at that time. I came from a family, you know, where my father was very successful. By the time I was at university the first time, you know, he was making a lot of money and what you’re saying that influence of money, materialism to egoic, how do I make my place in the world? Sure, those factors were all influencing me and in a way that sent me into a crisis eventually, that’s what that first crisis was in my 20s, for sure, a lot of the cultural pieces collapsing in on me. Alex Tsakiris: [00:08:17] You know and I don’t want to take it too far in another direction but I do think it’s super relevant in a way and that that’s that sooner or later, you have to face, if you’re thinking about things, if you’re waking up at all and thinking about these things, even intellectually not spiritually with your opening which we can get to but you’re going to face the crisis, right? You can’t be looking at just what you described as a cultural kind of thing. There’s all this money, there’s all this get egoic there’s all this demands on what I’m supposed to do, how I’m supposed to fit in, if you’re religious at all, you know, if you’re Christian and then you go to college, a lot of people face that first person that comes along and says, that’s bullshit, don’t you know, this and this and this? And it’s like, no I didn’t I was raised in a, you know, in a world where everyone kind of told me all this stuff makes sense, you know, no one told me there was this kind of wink and nod. Yeah, well, we know it’s not literally true. It’s you know, what I mean? So… Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:09:16] Alright, so, I was brought up Catholic. I went to a Catholic school. So there was a lot of regimentation there, a lot of control in my elementary school life and then there was a lot of control also in my in my family situation, but in particular to go into the Catholicism aspect. Boy, how do I articulate this specifically? My body always knew, when I look back on it, my body was telling me, I’m hearing these messages about Jesus and about love. But the the nuns and the priests, what they were emanating was not that. So the conflict was being literally, viscerally lived in my body, you know and by the time I got to high school I told my parents no more Catholic school, like, we’re gonna have to find a way around this because this doesn’t work for me. I just, you know, the tension was building Even then, you know, I couldn’t again, back down. I even in some way struggle to articulate about it now. But back then I couldn’t articulate at all. But now I see working in holistic and integrative medicine, the body keeps the score as Bessel Vander Kolk so beautifully said on a title of his book, The body is keeping the score, there’s no way to run from consciousness. There’s just, you can’t run away from it. Alex Tsakiris: [00:10:46] That’s beautiful Leanne, that’s a great, great, beautifully put insight. Link that up for us with your yoga practice because we share this in common, a longtime yoga practitioner I am and it took me years and years and years to realize it’s not the least bit about the poses and that it’s deeper on so many levels and yet at the same time, like you’re just alluding to, hell yes it’s about the poses! you know, so because the body that that’s such a beautiful insight, and I think there’s some truth there that Yoga is trying to get at even though it has its same co-opting corruption kind of elements, as everybody else does too, which we can talk about. But thoughts on that? Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:11:42]Sure, within sort of a guru tradition, there can be corruption that happens there. Yeah, the way I like to frame it is the body is a metaphor. So where the poses, I’m sorry, the poses, the Asana poses are a metaphor. So we’re looking, you know, for balance. Right, left, in, out, up, down. We’re looking to find, as the Buddha succinctly said, the middle way, so psychologically, you know, physically and so when we get on our mat and do the Asana, that’s what we’re doing is we’re living out sort of the metaphor of what we’re attempting also psychologically, to get our mind balanced and therefore in alignment with what perhaps we could say, pure consciousness and we could go deeper in this conversation also about the archetype of levels. But that’s the way I frame the Asana and the pranayama component, the breathing component is just so critically important because the breath helps us understand where the fear is located, where the binds are, where the blocks are in experience, you know. If this moment in time is about the realization that the body keeps the score, I would say, this moment in time is also about the realization that it’s imperative that we begin to eradicate fear. Alex Tsakiris: [00:13:07] That’s awesome and you kind of laid it out only slightly differently but actually, than I would, although you kind of came back around to exactly where my kind of accumulated intuitive, limited intuitive, very, very limited, intuitive feel of it is that it is about releasing, it’s about breathing and releasing and that the poses the asanas, the physical positions, can help release the blockages. But that’s what it’s really all about. Because my experience is that anyone who does five minutes of meditation, realizes that the shift that’s coming up is, you know, of their creation and that the only way to get rid of it, is to release it, to allow it to be and to allow it to release itself. Because you’ve kind of created the mess, you got to kind of clean it up and I think I love your idea of the of the metaphor. But it’s almost like the first part of what you said is kind of true to, the body is a metaphor. The poses are a metaphor, but the body is also a metaphor for what we’re experiencing, you know at this time, so God there’s so many different ways we could go there. But I love this conversation because in my experience, yoga is so misunderstood and so up taught so poorly. Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:14:40] I would say capitalism will devour anything in its path. I mean, it’s like a giant Pac Man. I mean, it just, it has an insatiable predatory capitalism seems to have an insatiable appetite. So it certainly has gobbled up yoga, at least in America, you know, Euro American culture. I probably can say and.. Alex Tsakiris: [00:15:04] Let me interject, because I don’t know that we’re on the same page there necessarily and staying out of it, because I don’t think capitalism comes into it. You know, I have a really interesting dialogue a year ago when I was writing this book with a woman named Annika Lucas and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her. But she’s started something in New York, upstate New York called Prison Liberation Yoga. She does yoga for inmates and primarily women who are incarcerated and it’s dealing with all that kind of stuff. But the reason I contacted to her is she was a victim of that satanic ritual abuse cult in Belgium, back in the 80s and just horrible experience. Sometimes she was six years old. But where the story really gets interesting, so we’re talking about all that she goes, yeah and then I met Pattabhi Jois and he sexually assaulted me and then you go on and you look for Pattabhi Jois, there’s hundreds of women that have come forward and said, Yeah he did that and you look at Iyengar. So I started with Iyengar in Dallas and, you know, he was the the slap guy, you know, come around he’s just rude and obnoxious and would slap people but everyone had to go, you know, that’s part of his, you know, thing or, you don’t know what he’s been through with his brown skin and all the rest and it’s like, oh, no, but if that’s the fruits of this work it doesn’t seem right and then there’s the same kind of sexual misconduct going on there. So that, you got to take capitalism out of the thing there and it starts looking like all these other cults, it looks like every other cult we’ve run into and when power is concentrated and you know, particularly with, in this case, men who are great who are raised in one culture, India, who are kind of thrust into this other culture and they can’t deal with some of the stuff that comes with that culture. It’s very human, it ain’t very complicated on a deep psychology level, it’s just, they’re working out their shit and they haven’t done it and in that respect, that doesn’t have anything to do with capitalism. But I think that is the root cause of the problem with yoga. The problem with yoga is it needs a serious disinter-mediation. It needs ,you don’t need me to show you the fucking poses, you can just..that’s not the hard part, what you need me to do is help create an experience through which you can understand who you are by a combination of these very simple poses and breathing which aren’t magical but you just kind of do them and they kind of help. Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:17:58] Yeah, I’m so with you with the guru culture,were actually talking about two different things where I was going with capitalism was this idea of, you know, buying $150 yoga pants and having a T shirt and there’s a lot of money, there’s $6 billion, I think i lost count or something like that. There’s a lot of money in the yoga industry so that the money that gets exchanged between all the products and I don’t know about the studios but again, there’s money out there to be had and I think that’s part of the corruption but also for sure the guru culture is part of the corruption as well. Alex Tsakiris: [00:18:38] And if we could go into that just a little bit further because I think it ties, it does tie in, we’ll eventually get to your awesome book and all the rest that stuff. It’s not just the guru culture because I think the guru culture is a reflection of the coltish way that we’ve approached spirituality through religion. So what they’re doing is they’re just replicating the hierarchy, right. So you go to the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church says, God is awesome and all powerful and we will be your intermediary, your sole intermediary to experiencing that divine consciousness and then the Yogi’s are doing the same thing, whether they realize it or not, they’re saying, we will inter mediate that for you. There’s no way you could directly access that. Well, of course, you could do it. If you can’t directly access it, then it isn’t real and I think yoga runs the risk of making that same mistake, has made that same. Yoga in West is built on those same principles and they need to be ripped out of it. Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:19:44] To the extent that it is yes, I wouldn’t make such a big statement, but it’s there. It’s definitely there. There’s no doubt about it. Is it everywhere? I’m not sure about that. But it’s definitely there. Yeah and I agree with you, ultimately yoga, like Jung is pointing us towards direct experience. I mean, that’s what, you know what the vision is, the vision is not mediated by a another person that you’re working to clear the distortions from your lens, which goes back to what you were talking about, you know, on the mat, that’s what we’re doing here, if consciousness is all there is, this is a big letting go. This is a big clearing of blocks, this isn’t about gaining anything, this is about letting go of a lot of things which has to do with, you know, distorted thought patterns and yeah confused tendencies in the mind and then pure consciousness is right there to show itself. It was either hidden inside, you know, there wasn’t good vagal tone or it was, you know, hidden down in the nervous system somewhere and we were clenched in fight flight or fear for long periods of time and then those nerve endings, those noughties, those channels begin to open and then that material becomes more available to us to process and integrate and, you know, stand stronger in the body because of. Alex Tsakiris: [00:21:08] So how does this relate to Jung and Patanjali? What sent you down that path, what needed to be explored and exposed in that kind of juxtaposition? Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:21:24] So I was in a yoga room when I had that pure consciousness event and again, I, you know, I’ve said this in other interviews, I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t even know at that point, I hadn’t even studied the philosophy, I had been turned on to yoga because I was sick in my 20s, I was looking to feel better and to heal but I hadn’t, in any way explored the philosophy or the psychology. But I had that event and then I started to look deeper into the first text, actually. I went to was the Tibetan Book of the Dead, thankfully and that was a big relief to read that text and realize that the pure awareness that I had been, you know, if you could, if I could loosely say awakened into that that was already existing and being talked about and then I began to study Patanjali, somebody introduced me to Jung and you know, for the next eight years prior to going to the academy, I studied Jung and Patanjali and I just studied them both consecutively. Alex Tsakiris: [00:22:35] So tell us, tell us, tell us, what what do you find in that, you know, kind of interesting interplay? you just did it with your hands, tell us. Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:22:48] You know, there’s a lot of places where they meet, they have a lot of similarities, right? They’re both interested in the healing of human suffering. They’re both interested in religious function of the psyche, we could say, effect as an empirical means of entering the psyche. But ultimately, after studying them for a long period of time and it really ended up being looking like, you know, a needle in a haystack was finding that where Jung used capital as self, this term, the self, the archetype of the self and he was pulling from the eastern traditions from the wisdom traditions from yoga because he himself going up in Protestantism, he didn’t want to use the term God, we borrowed this term. But when you really look at it, Jung’s self has both conscious and unconscious components. He’s mostly talking about the contents of consciousness and what Patanjali is ultimately pointing to is this ontic reality of pure consciousness, not the reality of our being, it’s pure consciousness. So it can never go unconscious. Jung’s making a representation in other words. Alex Tsakiris: [00:24:06] Yes, I’m interested in this middle ground. Because if you think about this very deeply and again, you have you’re an extremely deep thinker, and it’s so awesome to encounter somebody who is relatable and can speak on so many different levels but this book, I mean, I don’t want to like steer people away from it but look inside Amazon and make sure you’re up for it because it’s not like just the kind of quick breezy read, you know, which everything shouldn’t be a quick breezy read, you know, but the bottom line for me, is the middle ground, the middle territory, you know and Jung stopped there. In my read of it, is Jung is all about that, Jung is all about, okay, where are we? Where are we with the shadows? Where are we with the angels and demons? I mean, young is about, you know, I thought hypothesized spirit entities that are interacting with us, you know, whatever and Patanjali is kind of the traditional Yogi, like, why would you want to stop there? Just go pass that, keep asking what’s next? What’s fundamental? What’s at the base of all this? And one, I guess I want to know if that’s your read of it. And then what you make of that? Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:25:38] Well, I would say what Patanjali does, what Patanjali’s view does and potentially can do, is it therefore, it changes the perception, the field of perception, the paradigm. Reality ends up looking quite holographic, which as I say, in my book, right, we know Kyle Pribrim was pointing towards that, we know David Bohm was pointing towards that, Mount Sedona, I think his name is, there’s definitely quantum physicists currently who are pointing towards that and no, you know, Jung points towards synchronicity. There’s, he doesn’t comprehensively put all his phenomenology together all his theory and phenomenology together, to him, you know, the psyche is this ongoing dynamic and, you know, rightly so. But what Patanjali’s outlook does, is it allows us to take a comfortable seat more so in the body. I don’t think we can ever take a comfortable seat in Jung’s middle path because suffering always remains and you know Patanjali’s continuing to see through all that phenomenon, not get caught in it and that’s why I’m saying, is 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. Yeah, Jung helps for sure. The Shadow Work is beautiful and amazing and right in alignment with the self inquiry of Patanjali yoga, no doubt about it. Alex Tsakiris: [ 00:27:22] Awesome. I mean, there’s like, we could spend an hour talking about all that. But I’m just gonna ask you to keep going with this because I don’t know if everyone’s understanding, I don’t know, if I’m understanding. I think I’m understanding, I think we’re on the same page here. But 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. We may have to go through, it’s not perfect because the shadow, it’s not perfect because what entities are interacting with me? you know. So how do you see people who come to you for help? How are they dealing with that path towards Patanjali seat of awareness? Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:28:24]Well, if I can just say, look, in chapters one and chapter two, I think the title only makes it clear, we absolutely have to deal with this material. There’s no way to get to that comfortable seat without doing all that work. Both the growth phenomena on the front of our eyes, but also the more subtle phenomena, all feelings, all subtle thought forms on the interior of our eyes, that this all has to be looked at and Patanjali is very clear on that, I think. Alex Tsakiris: [00:28:53] Right ,right. But hold on, because there’s a bunch of people in the non dual community or whatever you want to call it. Readers and you know, thinkers about Patanjali, who kind of spin it a different way which has merit, which is, as soon as you realize that as soon as you read chapters one and two, it is kind of over, right? Because I have to work through that. Okay, that’s done. I didn’t, you know. All I need to do is wake up to the reality that that is the reality and then there really is no work to do right? I mean, there is that interpretation of it. That is, you know, I’m not saying it’s, a lot of people wake up to, you know, there’s no me here, there’s no anything, you know and I’m not saying I’m in that camp but I do see a certain escapable you know, reality to that too you know, it’s like how long you can play the game. Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:29:53] I think I hear what you’re saying. It’s so interesting, right? Like talking to, you know, because again, everybody’s interpretation of Jung and Patanjali are different, I really set myself up for a challenge picking these two scholars, because it’s like a hornet’s nest, no matter what way you turn, you know, if you look at like all the Jungians in societies now in England and Chicago, they all end up breaking apart because even the Jungians can’t agree on what Jung’s saying, right and then everybody reads Patanjali differently. So, but you know, both the scholars maybe we could say are so broad in a way, so everybody puts their read into it. Alex Tsakiris: [00:30:28] If I were to present to you and say, Leanne you’re not talking to Alex, you’re talking to what is being presented as Alex now to you, but the real me is, you know, that I realize is beyond that and is always with me and I can play this game here, this egoic game of Alex, but I am so aware that that’s not who I am, I kind of move in and out of even being able to play that game. Alex Tsakiris: [00:45:00] And then we need to grab it back and say, okay, what what we really, really meant by giving up control is, we have to make sure that this happens and that social justice happens in this way that I define a social justice and that these people are penalised in this way as I understand it. Then I go back to my story with my friend Annika Lucas, right. So she’s sold into a satanic ritual abuse cult at six years old. I can’t tell you how many people cannot accept that ,deal with that. They turn off tonight. I go, we’ll just go. They have the photos of the guy who was arrested in Belgium. They have pictures of the kids in cages. They have kids who died because while he was in prison awaiting trial, he wasn’t able to go and feed the kids that he was peddling to elites, right and people are still like, no, no, no, no, no. I wouldn’t to believe it even if it was true, because it doesn’t fit into their thing. But then here’s the problem with Annika, is go talk to people are doing between life research and between life regressions and they say, well her soul chose that, her soul chose that as part of this experience for whatever lesson she was going to get out of that. Now I can’t wrap my head around that but I can’t dismiss that either and that just sends us in a whole different direction in terms of how this stuff is supposed to play out, not only on an individual level, but on a, you know, global level on a national level on a cultural level. Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:46:36] Really, I mean, that’s where the deep, the depth comes in, right? Because it really is it’s so complex and there’s so many elements to it. But that’s why, I mean, at least through the lineages of Jung and Patanjali this turn, that we each have to make the turn within to find where that evil is within us. Where any of that aggression, where any of that power over is within us. Because when we understand how it’s playing out within us, then we have a better understanding of then how it’s playing out in other people. So I hear you but really until, I don’t know what enough of us would be, but it’s, if there is strength in numbers, then it’s taking that deep, deep turn within to process our own deep levels of,like we’re talking about either evil. But I also like to say fear for sure. Because the fear ends up manifesting as a power over as some kind of aggression, that I can somehow alleviate my own internal fear by controlling people in my external world and again, when we do that work within we have a better understanding of why people, other people are doing it. Alex Tsakiris: [00:47:58] Yeah, really.. Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:47:59] That makes sense? Alex Tsakiris: [00:48:00] Oh, absolutely and I really like the way that the way that you put that. So, Leanne, how is the best way for people to connect with you? Is it through this book, I see that you actually, I said the book is pretty dense, you’ve actually put together like a training course that people can kind of go through, but is that the material that people are finding most useful? And I love the way you say making that turn, you know, what’s, what’s the best way for people to connect with what you’re doing? Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:48:31] Well my book is definitely academic you know. It’s definitely academic so it’s definitely for people who want a deep dive but through an academic lens into both Jung and Patanjali. I do hope to write a book that’s more, it has more mass appeal to it in short order, but I do, I teach yoga online often. I have an upcoming course in January. I have some events with the young society coming up. But overall the best way to, if they wanted to reach out to me directly is to my website, Leanne Whitney.com Alex Tsakiris: [00:49:07] Great, Leann Whitney.com, easy you got the URL, Surprise. You must have gotten it a long time ago,that’s good. Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:49:15] I did. Alex Tsakiris: [00:49:17] Well, it’s been absolutely super connecting with you, really fun conversation. I hope somebody out there has an interest enough in this kind of deep deep dive, but there’s so much meat there, so. But awesome having you on. Thanks for joining me. Dr. Leanne Whitney: [00:49:36] Thanks for having me Alex, nice to be with you. Alex Tsakiris: [00:49:40] Thanks again to Dr. Leanne Whitney for joining me today on Skeptiko. I really enjoyed the conversation and the way we were able to really bring this back to some of the fundamental questions about spirituality. So the natural question to tee up from this interview is ,which superhero do you choose? Jung or Patanjali? I’d like to hear your thoughts on that the place to do that is Skeptical forum. Check it out and do stick around. I have a lot of great shows coming up. Until next time, take care. Bye for now. . [box]