The following is Part One of an interview conducted with Catherine Auman by Melissa Aberkane, a PhD student from the Sorbonne: Can you share what inspired you to engage in transpersonal psychology and how it has shaped your professional journey?After college I had been studying spirituality...
I have a close friend who works internationally as an ayahuasca shaman, facilitating groups and follow-up sessions. She told me a story of one time when a group she was leading was actively in the throes of the medicine, and some Native Americans showed up....
When we seek to carry the vision of Daniel’s “extending stream” forward in the field of transpersonal psychology, it is most important that we honor numerous voices as we have been doing in this class. It is also important that we continue to challenge the...
Work is a word I associate with the creative, because I experience the writing I do as more of a craft than an art. Maybe the first draft or outpouring is more of an art, as it is unformed and messy, but writing for me...
When I was in a bookstore in the 70s and first encountered a book on tantra and the concept that sex was spiritual, it stopped me dead in my tracks. “Of course,” I said out loud, under my breath, “what else could it be?” I...
Sexual mindfulness may be defined as an embodied state of consciousness similar to mindfulness meditation (Thouin-Savard, 2019), that is, a strategy to set aside mental activity and instead feel, act, and interact with one’s sexuality from an embodied state of attention. Sexual mindfulness has been...
Contemporary sex is defined in terms of behavior or biology (Barratt, 2019), and contemporary sexology is primarily concerned with correcting sexual behaviors it considers pathological. There is very little emphasis on emotional or spiritual connection, or on the quality of the relationship between the people...
I have been uncomfortable with the dominator-model of the takeover of the patriarchy because I don’t find men to have any more ill will or to be any more power-mad than women, and I don’t feel that an era where women were in charge would...
As I read Satprem and Van Vrekhem’s description of the yoga of the cells I felt conflicting feelings: an expansion of energy at the idea of physical immortality, and a disbelief that this is a possibility. I felt mistrust: Was The Mother’s description of the...
It appears that when Chinese Taoism and its sexual yoga practices made their appearance in the seventh through third centuries BCE, sex was seen as important not only for superior health but also for pleasure – as basic necessities of life as food and air...