Online Seminar: Foundational and Philosophical Roots in Yoga and Psychoanalysis

Description

Yoga and psychoanalysis are two methods, one ancient, one modern, for understanding how a human being develops, stays the same and changes. Both have changed enormously in how they are practised. But specialists in each field continue to draw on the same core principles first laid out in their foundational texts, because those principles still hold.

Reaching them, though, usually requires a guide: the language, the sources and the historical context are not something most people are ever handed access to. In these sessions, Lisa offers that access, showing what these traditions still have to teach us and how they continue to underpin the methods used today in yoga therapy and psychotherapy.

Yoga and psychotherapy both have theory and practice. Practice puts into action what theory seeks to explain, and understanding both, along with the relationship between them, deepens our ability to apply either with purpose. In the West, we often emphasise practice over theory. These sessions do the opposite: they emphasise theory in order to strengthen practice.

Yoga and psychoanalysis share many of the same underlying observations about the human condition, described in different words. Both emerged from sustained internal reflection and external observation over time, and both were motivated by a desire to understand human experience and to live more meaningful, harmonious lives.

In much the same way that modern science sometimes rediscovers, through its own methods, realities earlier yogis had already described, these sessions ask what remains true and useful in how yoga and psychoanalysis have each understood and worked with the human condition.

Yoga and Psychoanalysis Session One: Yoga Philosophy and Psychology

The first session builds the yogic foundation. Drawing on the Vedas, Upaniṣads, Yoga Sūtras and Bhagavad Gītā, Lisa introduces core concepts, including karma, saṃskāra, vāsanā, dharma, and Puruṣa and Prakṛti, as ways of thinking about perception, conditioning, suffering, agency and change. Both sessions are included and are not available to purchase separately.

What You’ll Learn

• Key concepts for understanding our relationship to the world, suffering and its relief, including Brahma, dharma, karma, saṃskāra, vāsanā, Puruṣa and Prakṛti—the evolutes, guṇas, elements and senses—as well as truth, reversal, pleasure and pain
• How this understanding builds agency and reduces obstacles, both for ourselves and in therapeutic work with clients
• Core principles describing how the mind develops, sustains stability and changes
• Life stages and the existential questions that come with them, preparing us to hold space for these questions with clients and in our own lives
• Textual sources including the Rig Veda, Upaniṣads, Yoga Sūtras and Bhagavad Gītā

Session Two: Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory

The second session turns to Freud’s foundational psychoanalytic theory: drives, defences, repetition compulsion, the pleasure and reality principles, transference, and the topographical and structural models of mind.

Rather than teaching this as a separate system, Lisa continually refers back to the yogic concepts from session one. The second session therefore builds a comparison as it progresses, showing where these two traditions describe similar ground in different language and where they genuinely diverge.

What You’ll Learn

• Key concepts including drives, defences, the topographical and structural models of the mind, transference, repetition compulsion, the reality and pleasure principles, and body-based stages of development
• Core principles including making the unconscious conscious, self-revelation and working with defences
• Intrapsychic and interpersonal development across the life stages
• The writings of Sigmund Freud as the session’s principal textual source
• How these concepts can be read alongside the yogic framework established in session one

What You’ll Gain

• A starting point if these ideas are new to you, or a deeper and more applied understanding if you already have some grounding in them
• A clearer sense of the concepts underlying both yoga practice and the psychotherapies that came after it

Specialist knowledge like this is only useful if it is reachable. Left in its original language and context, without a guide, it stays out of reach for most people, however sound it remains.

In these sessions, Lisa does as yogis have done across the millennia: she keeps this knowledge alive by showing its relevance to our own lives, so it can be passed on for the benefit of others.

Who Is This Yoga and Psychoanalysis Seminar For?

Anyone curious about these questions is welcome.

These lectures were originally developed for students on The Minded Institute’s Integrative Yoga Psychotherapy Diploma. This seminar opens up material that is normally restricted to that programme.

About Dr Lisa Kaley-Isley

Dr Lisa Kaley-Isley is a clinical psychologist, senior yoga teacher, certified yoga therapist, yoga therapy educator, and creative writing for therapeutic purposes facilitator. Lisa draws on all aspects of her study and experience to integrate yoga philosophy, psychology and practice in her teaching and provision of yoga therapy.