The Liminalist # 63: The Lion’s Share of Living (with Mark Golding)

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Part one of a challenging (for me) conversation with Mark Golding on trauma release and yoga, Iyenga yoga and the precision of asanas, undoing the knots of trauma, clearing space in the body, placing attention of the trauma, death contemplation, Mark’s death simulations, Cern & the Hadron collider, 94% dark matter, the sacred geometry of yoga, representing the emptiness, the process of potential awakening, the psychology of trauma, the psyche’s defense, defining the psyche, diving into the 94%, the mind-body question, Reich’s body armor, the self-care system, cracks in the psyche, amnesia barriers, pre-identity existence, the prevalence of trauma, working on a mystery, indications of a traumatized culture, following one’s fascinations, creating an attractor for the future, purifying the inner environment, the birth and death of the universe, going deeper into the process, the yogas of the mind, Mark’s drive for perfection.

Mark’s site.

Songs: “El Mariachi” by The Freak Fandango Orchestra; “May We Die in Peace” & “You will Be Mine,” by Greg Houwer; “Death at Your Door,” by Short Hand.

15 thoughts on “The Liminalist # 63: The Lion’s Share of Living (with Mark Golding)”

  1. Good talk. I shall center myself and wait calmly for part two.
    I have been listening to your material ever since I caught you on crealm for your first appearance there. Anyways, in all that time I did not know you had a yoga practice. kind of funny that I had thought of recommending it to you a few times over the years, but…who am I? 😉 Since I don’t think you know, it seemed a bit rude. Alas! The cat is out!
    I also have a ( my adhd version) regular practice now for fifteen years. My learning begun at a yoga class during my spell in “higher education”. Two terms, then solo. Like you I also had my favorite recordings to practice with. I started, like most, I think, Americans anyways, as an exercise program, practicing Hatha. Eventually I found Kundalini yoga, and again formed my own version of a regular practice. Sometimes Hatha. Sometimes Kundalini. Sometimes both. I went this way for years and years, going through the expected array of experiences one has with such practices. Mini enlightenment’s? Something like that.
    Side note; I also became a student of B. K. S. Iyengar through his book Light on Yoga, and his youtube videos. Also Astanga primary series with Sri. K. Pattabahi Jois.
    What I’m getting to here is the idea of trauma released from the practice( or rather lifestyle) of yoga. I may have come across the mecca. Yin Yoga.
    This is the ultimate for letting go and breaking barriers. The beautiful part is that instead of physically strenuous poses, you hold stretching poses for 3 or more minutes, letting go constantly, and breathing yourself to deeper levels of release than you may have ever reached through other forms yoga. Since this is not an aerobically charged yoga, it can be fit in, and even compliment your ongoing more physically strenuous practice .
    Holding the poses for the long times not only releases mental barriers, but gets in where usually the muscles do not allow. This could have a positive effect on your sclerosis. I also have back issues, form being a worker bee all my life, and it has helped greatly.
    Anywho.. I dropped a link to the class I first came across after discovering it. Check it out. See if it works for you.

    Thanks again, and again…
    Travis

    p.s. what way can I buy your book(s) that will be the most financially rewarding for you?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sDPQyWZJi0

    Reply
  2. Nice of you to ask, Travis. To be honest I neither expect nor see any financial rewards for my books, except perhaps the self-published ones, Lucid View (new edition) and Paper Tiger since that’s a sizable royalty. I suppose if someone bought Seen & Not Seen from Zer0 Books at full price rather than via Amazon I might make a few pennies more, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone do that. Get it for what you can, then write a review!

    Re: Yoga, I feel as tho it’s all I can do just to make those two sessions a week and do the occasional stretch at home. Unlike Mark, I am not propelled to dive all the way into the yoga experience, not yet at any rate.

    Reply
  3. In case anyone is interested, Bessel van der Kolk in “The Body Keeps the Score” has a section called “learning to inhabit your body: yoga”

    “…Yoga turned out to be a terrific way to (re)gain a relationship with the interior world & with it a caring, loving relationship to the self. …If you are not aware of your what body needs, you can’t take care of it. Most traditional therapies downplay or ignore the moment-to-moment shifts in our inner sensory world. But these shifts carry the essence of the organism’s responses: the emotional states that are imprinted in the body’s chemical profile, in the viscera, in the contraction of the striated muscles of the face, throat, trunk, and limbs”

    Reply
    • Most traditional therapies downplay or ignore the moment-to-moment shifts in our inner sensory world. But these shifts carry the essence of the organism’s responses: the emotional states that are imprinted in the body’s chemical profile, in the viscera, — Mollie B
      —————————————————————–

      Would you go as far as Robert Lipton and his perspective on epigenetics?

      or is he a nut job?
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqG5TagD0uU

      Reply
      • Hi Thwack.
        I was quoting Van der Kolk just to show that there are people in the trauma world looking at yoga. I’m not a scientist by any means but personally never bought into genetic determinism & from what I can recall the human genome project was an admitted failure (in the mainstream) as early as 2009 or 2010. I have no idea if Mr. Lipton is a nut job but I would agree that your environment should not be discounted.

        Reply
  4. Interesting interview so far. I was a little put off by the guest though. I suppose he experienced some form of triggering around the mention of fragmentation. In any case, I didn’t much appreciate the ways in which he carefully avoided the subjects you raised Jason, all the while creating a smoke screen of personal enlightenment (constructed on the identities and aspirations of others) to mask his apparent unwillingness to embody his own true nature. All in all he seemed a little uninformed and uninterested in gaining tangible knowledge beyond his own dissociative musings and inner dialogue. I will look forward to part 2!

    Reply
    • “Uninterested in gaining tangible knowledge” 😉

      And what would that look like? Tbh what jasun and Mark both demonstrated here with such succinct clarity was what an ego gone haywire looks like.
      The search for a deeper meaning, a healing of fractures yadda yadda yadda through incessant talking, thinking, mental imagery and concepts and ironically all the while believing the opposite.
      The loss of a worldly ego is often times replaced by a far more insidious one. One that has the person believing they are on a higher path to some form of purely conceptual liberation. This is what was perfectly displayed here amongst all the spiritual waffle that only underlined it further.
      A Wiseman once told me “you will never think your way out of a thinking problem” oh how true..how true.
      Hard to beleive this is the author of Matrix Warrior hosting the podcast.

      Come back to Zion jake

      Reply
      • I suppose there will always be those who prefer the empowerment fantasies of the constructed identity to the profoundly dis-empowering (to the ego) reality of embodiment. Life isn’t a movie, much as I tried to make it one. I guess there is still some dead skin clinging to me from my former “matrix” id that drifts into the comments section every now & then…

        Reply
        • “From the bath tub to the bath tub I have uttered utter nonsense. The bath tub used to wash the infant at birth is the bath tub used to wash the corpse at burial…all the time in-between I was going yakity yak”

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  5. This part of this episode that describes how trauma gets stored in the body reminds me of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps Score.

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  6. When you said you feel “more space in the body” during yoga, that instantly reminded me of A H Almaas. I recently started re-reading his “Diamond Mind” series because the approach Almaas takes for those three books resonated for me with Kalsched. In The Void,, Almaas uses the same depth psychology approach to help others re-integrate the pysche, which results in this same feeling of space.

    Reply
  7. Your talk about releasing trauma reminds me of the Feldenkrais method. It’s basically where a practitioner helps you recognize your bad habits of motion and figure out more efficient ways to move. The goal is better overall awareness of your body and gaining a neutral spine, but some report the release of negative emotions which can become locked into patterns of motion in the body sort of as the guest describes.

    I actually had a severe posture problem based on my own bad habits, and over many years formed a curve into my spine that was not there when I was born. I tried yoga, but in retrospect I realize that my great limitation in flexibility and occasional pain during yoga was because I was moving my body in a totally incorrect way. I’m not sure if you still have pain during yoga and feel you lack flexibility (I just came across the podcast and am listening to random ones), but you may wanna try out the Feldenkrais method. It helped me gain awareness of my movements and as a result my posture has improved greatly. In this world of sitting at the computer and looking down at phone, a lot of people have some kind of posture problem, and as you say in the podcast, having one part of your body out of place throws the whole body off.

    Reply

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