Psychology Cannot Replace Lineage
Have a listen to our recent Mother of the Sword Podcast exploring these themes that feel fiery as I personally dive into a restructuring of my own body, heart, mind and body of work. Read on for an essay connected to the pod.
Most people I know right now want support making money. Given the economy, and how capitalism wires our sense safety to what we can get and produce alone…that makes complete sense.
We live inside a culture that tells us if we have enough money, we’ll finally feel safe, mentally, emotionally, and physiologically. There is truth in that. Financial stability matters. It’s one of the reasons I help people examine their relationship with money, create offerings that are sustainable, and move beyond constant hustle into a life that includes vision, planning, and meaningful action.
But alongside that work, I can’t ignore the deeper hunger I see everywhere. A hunger that money cannot touch.
A desire to relate to Truth within, to care that can touch the grief that does not go away. A path of admitting animism is just as real as accolades.
I believe we are arriving at a moment where pathology and psychology—particularly the pathology that emerges from a Western psychological framework—cannot replace lineage.
This isn’t a rejection of psychology. I’ve spent eleven years in Jungian analysis with the same therapist, and it has transformed my life. It gave language to experiences that otherwise would have remained unconscious. It taught me boundaries in relationship. It helped me survive. I’ve also witnessed medication and diagnosis save lives, helping people navigate unbearable suffering with greater choice and stability.
And yet there are experiences that psychology cannot fully translate.
There are moments of grief, ecstasy, devotion, trance, communion, and altered consciousness that become diminished the moment we reduce them solely to physiological or psychological events. Throughout most of human history, these experiences were never understood as isolated symptoms. They were held inside living traditions—supported by elders, songs, myths, initiation rites, cosmologies, and communities that knew how to accompany someone through mystery instead of immediately explaining it away.
Today we breathe together, dance together, regulate together, and something ancient wakes up. People remember belonging. They remember God. They remember their bodies. Something profoundly real happens.
But filtered through a culture obsessed with productivity, optimization, and individual achievement, these experiences are immediately translated into something else.
Instead of asking, How does this change my relationship to my community? we ask, How can I monetize this? Instead of wondering, Who can help me integrate this over the coming years? we ask, How do I recreate this feeling next weekend?
Ritual becomes another product. Transformation becomes another performance. The nervous system becomes another thing to perfect.
Just as yoga was extracted from thousands of years of devotional, philosophical, and communal context to become another wellness commodity, I believe somatics is now walking the same line. The practices themselves remain powerful, but without roots they become vulnerable to misunderstanding.
A healthy dissolution of the ego inside ritual can be mistaken for pathology. Pathology itself can become romanticized as spiritual awakening. Without mature cultural containers capable of distinguishing these experiences, we swing between over-pathologizing and over-spiritualizing, unable to hold the nuance that real transformation requires.
Healing communities that cannot survive conflict, grief, ambiguity, disappointment, repair, and longing often recreate the very childhood dynamics they hope to heal. Tenderness is essential, but initiation also asks something of us. Safety isn’t the absence of rupture. Sometimes safety is what is rebuilt because we have the capacity to stay present through it.
For centuries, women, queer people, mystics, and devotees who entered ecstatic states of prayer or grief were labeled irrational, hysterical, or possessed. Even now, there is discomfort around encounters with mystery that refuse rational explanation. We rush to interpret rather than participate. We diagnose instead of witnessing.
I’m not suggesting we abandon psychology. I’m not romanticizing the past. I’m asking us to remember that psychology cannot replace lineage. It cannot replace ritual. It cannot replace community. It cannot replace a cosmology that understands human beings as more than isolated individuals seeking symptom reduction.
Body Temple Dance™is a ritual pedagogy that understands the nervous system as inseparable from beauty, devotion, Goddess, relationship, creativity, ecology, and collective ritual. Ritual as the deliberate shaping of attention through embodied action in order to transform relationship. (We are leading an in person training in Spain September 1-8 and tonight the early rate ends - we have 3 more spaces.)
Many of the people carrying this work today are deeply intelligent, generous, and devoted. But gifts alone are not enough, just as love alone is not enough in an intimate relationship. When the roots beneath our work are no longer tended, we begin to feel the effects. That isn’t failure, it capitalism and caring in a sick world—it is an invitation to return.
Again and again, we are called back to the deeper threads of devotion. Back to practices that ask less about what we are producing and more about what we are becoming. Back to traditions that remind us that profound experiences require equally profound containers.
Because without context, we may awaken something ancient. But without lineage, community, and devotion, we may never fully learn how to live with what has awakened.
Trauma-informed research increasingly affirms what many contemplative traditions have carried for centuries: human behavior cannot be separated from the physiological, relational, and cultural conditions from which it emerges. We are not simply minds having experiences—we are embodied beings whose nervous systems, histories, communities, and environments shape how we perceive and move through the world. My father’s life and death invited me to witness these truths long before I encountered them in books.
His addiction was not simply happening in his mind. It was happening in his body. His shame was happening in his body. His loneliness was happening in his body. And my attempts to save him were happening in mine.
In many ways, Body Temple Dance began beside that hospital bed. Not because I suddenly understood what healing meant. But because I understood what healing could not be.
Healing could not mean erasing pain. It could not mean avoiding death. It could not mean transcending grief. It could not mean becoming untouched by loss.
Healing had to include our humanity.
