Writings
Here, you will find a collection of my writings over the years, on Body, Soul and Depth Work.
I am currently sharing my longer, deeper writing on the Substack platform, through my publication, The Yellowing Therapist. I invite you to join me and a community of fellow seekers, there -you can simply read my posts or subscribe by email to receive them in your inbox as soon as they are published.
The Blog
The Journey of Life through the Lens of Alchemy
IMAGINING LIFE PERIODS AS ALCHEMICAL STAGES
Alchemy, as a symbolic language, offers a lens through which we can explore and deeply understand many -if not all- aspects of life. Carl Jung recognised in Alchemy a map and metaphor for the process of analysis/psychotherapy and the journey of Individuation; the alchemical tradition became the historical basis for his depth psychology.
What if we look at Life itself through the lens of Alchemy?
Plutonian Initiations
A PERSONAL REFLECTION ON PLUTO’S 16-YEAR TRANSIT THROUGH CAPRICORN.
When Pluto first entered Capricorn in late January of 2008,
I was on a flight back from Thailand,
barely alive.
At the heights (or depths) of my eating disorder,
having completely exhausted my physical body,
through my addiction to disembodied ascension,
I had to leave the yoga teacher training I had travelled across the world to take,
less than halfway through,
to save my life.
Healing the Split between the Artist and the Scientist
REFLECTIONS ON ATTENDING AN ALCHEMY CONFERENCE
Last weekend, I got to attend a conference offered by the London Arts-Based Research Centre on the topic of “Alchemy: Exploring Metaphorical Transformations and Arts-Based Research”.
Yes -an entire conference dedicated to Alchemy! You can imagine my joy and enthusiasm, when I found out about it, which only grew as I fully immersed myself in the alchemical field (quite palpable, even via the internet) for hours on end.
What images are asking to be composted in your life?
Living fully a l i v e asks that we are willing to sacrifice (shred, recycle, compost) images of ourselves and versions of our future we have held onto, often, so very tightly and for the longest time, to allow those that truly carry Z o e ; life force, libido, Shakti energy, to emerge.
If the last couple of years has taught me anything, this is it.
Alchemy; making Gold, making Soul
MY 20-YEAR JOURNEY WITH THE ART OF TRANSFORMATION
There are certain teachings, systems, places and people that we meet time and again on our spiral human journey…until eventually we know -they are not just an integral part of our myth, they make up its very backbone.
Alchemy has been a major part of mine.
Dance is medicine
I’ve danced more in the last six months than I had in years.
Not because I wanted to, but because I had to.
Not because these have been the greatest, happiest months of my life, but because they have been the toughest I’ve ever lived through.
Reimagining Manifestation
I believe that the popular teachings on manifestation and the law of attraction can often be more of a detour than a path toward real psychospiritual growth.
The overly simplistic version of reality they present fails to meet the complexity and nuance of life, and of ourselves as humans in so many ways.
And -I don’t think that we are meant to dismiss them altogether as ‘magical thinking’ either.
Embodied writing as a gateway to Self
I have had a writing practice since I was in elementary school.
During my undergraduate years in university, when I had ample free time, I must have filled about 30 journals, all of which I still keep in my home in Greece. I wrote *a lot*.
And then…life got busy. I kept writing, but found it progressively harder to prioritise it.
Who are you becoming?
An invitation to reflect on the identities, roles and patterns that you are personally releasing, under the influence of the eclipse, and to intuit what part of yourself life is calling to be claimed, embodied, stepped into.
My work through the years; a trip down memory lane
Join me on a trip down the memory lane of my work over the past decade, accompanied by pictures from the different time periods.
Honouring what has been, making space for what wants to be.
Shedding the layers of the false self
In Jungian psychology, we call it persona. In my somatic therapy tradition of SomaSoul, we call it role. In Alchemical Spirituality, we speak about the masks we wear to hide our essence.
Different terms, with slightly different meanings, dancing around the same core theme; that of authenticity and what prevents us from truly embodying it.
Profound loss and identity release
2022 turned out to be a ‘tower year’ for me; a year of profound loss and cataclysmic change, very different than what I had envisioned, which stripped away so many of the layers (roles, identities, coping strategies…) that had been previously standing between myself and the world.
I’m still in the early days of an experience I will be processing for a very long time, but one thing has become very clear:
Profound loss breaks us. And it can often, also, break us open.
{Story Time} Ecstasy Embodied
It’s 2011…I’m at Kripalu in Massachusetts, training in SomaSoul somatic expressive therapy with Dan Leven.
At every single one of our year-long trainings, I move through a very specific sequence of states; I start from a place of feeling ‘fine’ (=not feeling much)…
after a couple days of intensive work, my defences melt and I dive deep into feeling -what in Gestalt Psychology we call- the ‘death layer’ (=my painful emotions, shadow, challenges -all that I have been unconsciously keeping away from)…
and then, something interesting happens.
The Dawn of a New Chapter
Announcing the completion of a decade-long phase of this work and the opening of a brand-new chapter.
My Journey back into my Body
My journey back into my body started about 13 years ago.
In late 2006, I was halfway through my bachelor’s degree in Psychology and deep in my struggle with an eating disorder. I spent my days counting calories and compulsively exercising. I loved moving my body -I did contemporary dance almost every day- but was deeply disconnected from it. I had no concept of what living in-the-body meant, nor why it was important.
My Lineage: Psyche - Soma - Soul
I deeply believe that our background says so much about who we are and what we do, so, today I want to name the three major traditions that I bring together in my work and honour the teachers I have been blessed to study with and be formed by.
Food and Body-Image Difficulties are an Initiation
Our lives are full of initiations. Life is an ongoing initiation in itself. There are doors waiting to be opened and walked through, leading into new spaces we haven’t experienced before -and that can feel scary. We don’t know where we’re going and what we’re going to meet on the other side. More importantly, we don’t know who we are going to be, coming out that other side.
The nature of my work: embodied, alchemical soul work
In my practice, I bring together a number of elements from different traditions and modalities, so it hasn’t always been easy to accurately describe and define the nature of it. Recently though, through exploration, I have landed in these words: Embodied, Alchemical Soul Work, which I really feel encapsulate the core and essence of it.
On the Alchemical Process of Dissolution
D i s s o l u t i o n
…is the stage in alchemy in which a solid substance turns into liquid.
At a psyche/soul level, it is the process of letting those parts of ourselves that have served their purpose and now cause more harm than good be released, “melt”, dissolve into their original substance -the ‘prima materia’.