Gay Hendricks on somatics, Sarno, and the Yes Breath

Gay Hendricks is a psychologist, somatic practitioner, and author of dozens of books including Conscious Loving and Conscious Breathing. After earning his PhD at Stanford and teaching psychology at the University of Colorado, Gay went on to develop his own approach integrating breathwork, movement, emotional awareness, and conscious relationship practice. In this conversation we talk about his entry into somatics through a painful Rolfing session, his connection to Sarno’s anger-pain model, how fear and sadness require different approaches than anger, and Gay even leads a live demonstration of the “yes breath”. Timestamps0:00:00 – Intro0:01:05 – Tashi Lhunpo Monastery0:03:30 – Buddhism: Tibetan, Theravada, TM0:05:40 – Feldenkrais, Reich, and Rolf0:08:30 – John Sarno and the anger-pain connection0:14:10 – Working with sadness vs fear0:16:00 – Tension in breathwork0:18:35 – Reich vs Feldenkrais, grounded breathwork0:23:05 – Live breathwork demonstration0:29:55 – Thirty years of radiance0:34:55 – Live body language reading0:39:20 – Learning how to see0:42:35 – Tuning your instrument0:46:20 – Research, science, and learning from individual cases0:50:20 – Wonder0:54:20 – Getting into altered states of consciousnessYou can find Gay Hendricks at his website and check out his books, Conscious Loving and The Big Leap. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com