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”.
Timestamps
0:00:00 – Intro
0:01:05 – Tashi Lhunpo Monastery
0:03:30 – Buddhism: Tibetan, Theravada, TM
0:05:40 – Feldenkrais, Reich, and Rolf
0:08:30 – John Sarno and the anger-pain connection
0:14:10 – Working with sadness vs fear
0:16:00 – Tension in breathwork
0:18:35 – Reich vs Feldenkrais, grounded breathwork
0:23:05 – Live breathwork demonstration
0:29:55 – Thirty years of radiance
0:34:55 – Live body language reading
0:39:20 – Learning how to see
0:42:35 – Tuning your instrument
0:46:20 – Research, science, and learning from individual cases
0:50:20 – Wonder
0:54:20 – Getting into altered states of consciousness
You can find Gay Hendricks at his website and check out his books, Conscious Loving and The Big Leap.
