| Our awareness of the bodily level of our existence as sentient beings is often limited, marginalized and exclusionary. This manifestation of our lineage of duality, otherwise known as the psyche/matter split, along with the widespread cultural famine of a lived experience of aliveness, presented themselves as the entry points to this study, which explores the subtle body model of healing and its potential contributions to depth psychology. This dissertation asks: What is the current lived experience of the subtle body?;Review of the literature was explored in three key categories: Jungian theory and the East, yogic thought and practice, and alchemical writings on the subtle body. The question was approached primarily through a qualitative mixed-methodology, primarily utilizing a heuristic method of self-inquiry and self-dialogical discovery of the researchers' own embodied experiences with the subtle body and secondarily through specifically utilizing alchemical hermeneutics layered on a foundation of philosophical hermeneutics. This included widely varying intellectual and spiritual traditions that examined the subtle body to be brought into dialogue.;The study found that subtle body experiences are ones of a unique inner awareness, understood as not merely physical and yet not exclusively imagined, which may be attained for example, through various aspects of yoga such as breathing (pranayama), meditation (dhyana), or physical poses (asana) and are often imaged through the chakras' subtle anatomy or Kundalini awakenings.;Through using Tantric principles to expand depth psychology, the study revealed a method to approach the subtle body as a hosting container for jivanmukti or liberation experiences rather than through the currently limiting ways in which our bodies serve as containers of cultural symptoms---stress, anxiety, chronic pain, and emotional discomfort. This expansion of depth psychology can create a sacred mutual space within the therapist-patient field for the exploration of subtle realms and subtle body experiences serving to honor the importance of ritual and of the divine/human conuinctio in the process of both individuation and liberation.;Key Words: subtle body, cultural body, alchemy, yoga, Tantra, jivanmukti, chakras. |
