Using Other People and Its Antidote
Trafficking Mindset, Origins and Healing Moves
Dear friends,
I’m laid up for a few days, letting some stitches heal from some excisions. It’s monsoon season, so the weather is conducive to resting and pondering. I’m feeling super grateful to my all-female care team, who, while meticulously prepping the surgery site, were playing the BeeGees Staying Alive, and seamlessly vibing together. And also grateful to John Shiva who showed up for moral support, coffee runs and co-working.
So, this is an insanely long essay. I wrote it coming off of the Deepak/Epstein thing, the murders in Minneapolis, the ICE for-profit-prison/ warehouse corruption scams… but it’s more than that. All of these are fruits come from the same tree.
The TL; DR version is pasted right at the beginning, but if you would like to drop into the nuance, the full essay is below and I’ve included a virtual voice version (28 minutes) so it can be listened to. I have also included at the end a set of questions you can use to play some self-inquiry games and the end and a list of resources if you want to go deeper.
My Living Tantra course starts March 10. Come with us on the journey. Returning students: Geneva sent you a code to come back again. We have a lot more couples joining this session than usual, so I will be including more partner content in the homework.
All love,
Christine
TL;DR
“The Trafficking Mindset argues that sexual trafficking, prison labor exploitation, predatory capitalism, and dehumanizing political systems aren’t separate problems. They arise from the same underlying consciousness: a habituated way of perceiving living beings as extractable resources whose value is determined by their usefulness. This “predator consciousness” is not only individual pathology. It is cultivated and rewarded by systems that incentivize dissociation, performance over interiority, and power without relational accountability. It is sustained by numbness, by severing the feedback loop between action and feeling.
From a tantric perspective, this mindset is a spiritual contraction: a failure to recognize the sacredness of the body, the aliveness of Shakti, and the interwoven nature of all beings. When we lose the capacity to feel, we lose the capacity to recognize the other as real. The antidote is not only policy reform but re-embodiment: practices that restore sensation, conscience as lived experience, the rehabilitation of pleasure, and the cultivation of fullness rather than grasping. Individual healing must be paired with collective reckoning—creating containers for grief, truth-telling, and systemic change.”
Article Full Audio
1: Predation Consciousness
The through-line is the same: human beings as extractable resource.
Whether it is a detained immigrant scrubbing toilets for one dollar a day so private prison executives can receive bonuses tied to cutting costs, or a prisoner manufacturing goods for pennies while a corporation bills the state full price. Whether it is a teenage boy or girl trafficked to an island where powerful men treat her as disposable. Whether it is a worker whose wages haven’t kept pace with productivity for fifty years while billionaire wealth has increased a thousandfold, or a family choosing between insulin and rent while pharmaceutical executives report record profits.
The logic is identical: some people exist to be used by other people.
And the system that enables it is the same: opacity, impunity, capture of the institutions meant to provide oversight, and a cultural story that naturalizes the arrangement. A story that says this is just how things work. That the people at the bottom deserve to be there. That asking questions makes you naive or dangerous.
The Epstein files are so clarifying because they make the arrangement visible in its most grotesque form. The trafficking wasn’t hidden from everyone. It was hidden from us. The powerful knew, participated and protected each other. The girls (mostly poor, always young) were disposable. The men and women enabling it were untouchable.
And yet: the files themselves exist because people inside the system fought to preserve them. Over years, across administrations and internal pressures, career prosecutors, investigators, and staff insisted that truth matters, that accountability is possible, that the powerful aren’t above the law. The system isn’t monolithic. Within every compromised institution, there are people who remember what it was supposed to be for. The documentation exists because of them. The same institutions that enable exploitation also contain people fighting against it. The question is always which tendency wins.
We must also hold another complexity: not everyone implicated is a sadist. I don’t say this to exonerate, still some are weak rather than monstrous. They wanted to be invited to the parties where the cool kids were. They wanted access, proximity, the feeling of being on the inside. They didn’t ask questions because asking questions would have meant losing the invitation. They looked away because looking directly would have required them to act, and acting would have cost them something they had traded their integrity to acquire.
Weakness that enables atrocity is still culpable. But it is a different diagnosis than predatory pleasure, and it implicates far more of us than we want to admit. How many of us have looked away from something because seeing it clearly would have demanded too much? How many of us have stayed silent to keep our place at a table we suspected was corrupt?
This is the trafficking mindset: a habituated perception of living beings as usable units whose value is determined by their utility.
It doesn’t require that everyone be a predator. It only requires enough predators at the top and enough compliant people below: people who fear exclusion, who want to belong, who have learned that seeing too much is dangerous to their position. The system runs on silence. On the soft corruption of going along.
And once you see that, you start seeing the same pattern everywhere.
In quota-based enforcement regimes and profit-driven detention systems, the logic becomes unusually stark. Human beings are treated as inventory: beds filled, contracts justified, quarterly targets met, “wins” announced. Cruelty is not incidental. Cruelty is a signal. It demonstrates power, keeps people afraid, and teaches everyone who is disposable and who is not.
The same impunity shows up across domains: violence insulated by qualified immunity, brutalization protected by closed systems, wealth extracted at scale while consequences are dispersed and delayed.
The same opacity: shell companies, NDAs, proprietary algorithms deciding bail and loans and hiring, private facilities blocking inspections, dark money shaping policy far from public view.
The same captured institutions: regulators cycling into lobbying, politicians funded by industries they oversee, media ecosystems owned or influenced by concentrated wealth.
The same cultural story: they broke the law; they should have worked harder; they knew what they were getting into; that’s just business; both sides do it; what can you do.
It’s foundationally the same: The person who sees a detained immigrant as a unit of labor to be extracted from is operating from the same consciousness as the person who sees a teenage girl as a body to be used, as the person who sees a worker as a cost to be minimized, as the person who sees a community as a market to be captured.
It is a failure of recognition. A failure to see the other as a self, as sacred, as possessing inherent dignity that exists prior to any use-value they might have.
And that failure is cultivated, incentivized and built into the architecture of systems that reward extraction and punish solidarity.
2: The Interior of the Predator
We focus on policy, on accountability, on stopping the behavior. But rarely do we ask: what is the inner experience of someone who can do this? And I find it is worth asking, not to excuse, but to understand what we are up against, especially because the line between clinical pathology and culturally normalized dissociation is thinner than we like to think. Not everyone who participates in extraction is a sociopath. Many are simply trained, rewarded, and insulated until their capacity to feel is functionally disabled.
Dissociation from the Body
The person who can use another human being as a resource has first become disconnected from their own felt experience. They have learned to override sensation, to live from the neck up, to treat their own body as a machine to be managed rather than a living presence to be inhabited.
This isn’t always “weakness.” It is often trained. The executive who works hundred-hour weeks, the soldier who can kill without flinching, the trader who can bankrupt a pension fund without losing sleep: all have been rewarded for severing the feedback loop between action and feeling.
When you can’t feel yourself, you can’t feel the other. Empathy is not an idea. It is a resonance in the nervous system. If that system is shut down, the other person’s suffering simply doesn’t register as real.
The Collapse of Interiority into Image
The “inside” grows faint. The outside becomes everything: the presentation, the brand, the status markers, the curated proof of superiority.
When you collapse into image, other people become images too. The girl is no longer a being with her own terror, her own memories, her own future. She becomes an object that confers status, proof that you can possess because possessing is what powerful people do.
This is why that world is so often about display. The plane, the island, the famous friends. It seems to me that this is not primarily about embodied pleasure, but about the performance of impunity: look what I can do; look what I can take; look who protects me.
The Sealed System
The predatory interior is often characterized by a hermetic seal. A worldview constructed to justify everything:
I am special. The rules don’t apply to me. These people are lesser. They are objects. They wanted it. They are lucky to be near me. Anyone who challenges me is an enemy. I am never wrong.
This is a fortress against shame. The grandiosity is precisely proportional to the buried terror of worthlessness underneath. The more monstrous the behavior, the more elaborate the justification system required to keep the truth from breaking through.
The Absence of Witness
Perhaps most importantly: the abuser has no internal witness. No part of themselves that stands outside the action and says this is wrong, this is not who I want to be, this person is suffering because of me.
In healthy development, we internalize the caring gaze of those who loved us. We develop a conscience, as a felt sense of being in relationship, of mattering to others and others mattering to us- not because there are rules or commandments- but because we feel.
When that doesn’t develop, or when it is crushed, there is no one “home” to feel guilt or remorse. There is only strategy, appetite, and the endless management of image.
What Lives There
Underneath it all, in the abuser’s interiority:
Emptiness. A void where a self should be. The compulsive taking is an attempt to fill what can’t be filled from outside.
Terror. Buried so deep it may never be consciously felt. The terror of being nothing, of being found out, of being as helpless as they once were.
Rage. At what was done to them. At the world that allowed it. Displaced onto those they now have power over.
Loneliness. The most profound kind. Because you can’t be truly known by anyone if you can’t know yourself. And you can’t be loved for who you are if you have abandoned who you are for the performance of power.
3: The Origin Pathways
There are two common pathways, which overlap far more often than we like to admit, but distinguishing them helps us see the architecture.
Traumatized Abuser
Almost universally, people who abuse were themselves subjected to experiences that taught them the world is not safe, that vulnerability is punished, that power is the only protection.
The child learns their needs don’t matter, their body can be violated, adults are either predators or absent. That child adapts. They may identify with the aggressor. They may split off the vulnerable parts of themselves entirely. They may develop a grandiose self that is “above” human limitation.
And later they often recreate the dynamic, this time from the position of power because they are compulsively trying to master what happened to them.
Cultivated Hollow
Some people aren’t numb because they shut down. They are numb because there was never enough there to shut down, as a result of a more subtle absence. A childhood where performance was rewarded and interiority was irrelevant. Where love was transactional. Where the question how do you feel? was never asked, or was asked and the answer did not matter.
These children learn early: the inside is not important. Only the outside counts. Only what produces results.
So they develop outward. They become exquisitely attuned to what works, what wins, what gets approval. They develop strategic empathy—the ability to read people in order to manipulate them—without developing actual empathy, the felt resonance with another’s experience.
This person is underdeveloped in feeling, the muscle was never built- a bit different than suppressing. And the system selects for these people. They rise and are rewarded: the corporation that treats workers as extractable resources outcompetes the one that does not. The politician willing to lie wins against the one who is not. The fund manager who can ignore the human cost of his bets makes more money than the one who can’t.
Some parts of our world incentivize the development of exactly this interior structure. And then we act surprised when the people who rise to power are hollow. When they can’t feel the suffering they cause. When they treat the world as an object to be exploited.
A culture of families where children are achievements to be optimized rather than souls to be nurtured. Schools that measure everything except what matters. Workplaces that reward sociopathy. Media that models surface over depth. A whole civilization oriented toward having rather than being.
We selected for them. We created them. They are us.
What Opens the Sealed System
The honest answer: it is difficult, and rarer than we wish, but possible.
Here are some access points:
Crisis: A health scare, a loss, a failure so complete that the performing self struggles to maintain itself. The façade cracks. Something vulnerable is glimpsed underneath.
Love: A child, a partner, a friend who keeps seeing them until something in them begins to respond. The experience of being loved for what and who you are, not as a productive asset.
Practice: Therapy, meditation, contemplative discipline, sometimes plant medicine—some technology of inner exploration that introduces them to an inner world they never developed or abandoned.
When it happens, people often describe it as being born. As if they had been living as a kind of ghost and suddenly became real. The reports are of overwhelming emotion: grief for the unlived life, wonder at the simple fact of being, connection to others that feels like a miracle.
It can be hard to find the space and environment to do this, because the system that selects for numbing keeps feeding it, rewarding the performance. Keeps surrounding them with people who want something from them rather than people who love them. Keeps them so busy they never have to stop and feel the void.
Healing requires stillness, reflection, honest feedback, the willingness to not-know. Everything the system actively prevents.
Individual healing is necessary but insufficient, so we take a turn toward unwinding the systems that produce and reward predatory interiority. We stop rewarding extraction. Stop selecting for hollowness. Stop treating children as achievements. Stop measuring only what can be counted. Stop building institutions that require the amputation of feeling to succeed.
And also: create containers for feeling. For grief. For collective metabolization of trauma. Face the shadows we have been running from—the genocides, the enslavements, the ongoing exploitation that comfort has depended on.
The United States of America, as one example, was founded amid vast, unmetabolized trauma. These aren’t historical facts that ended; they are wounds living in bodies, institutions, and unconscious patterns. There have always been counter-traditions too (indigenous survivance, Black resistance and spiritual genius, communities of repair) yet the national story has often tried to move on without reckoning. When a wound isn’t faced, it repeats itself.
4: The Trafficking Mindset as Spiritual Illness and the Tantric Cure
From a tantric view, the trafficking mindset is a specific form of spiritual illness, a patterned contraction of consciousness.
Failure to recognize Shakti. The life force—the animating presence in all things—is no longer recognized. The world becomes dead matter to be manipulated rather than living presence to be in relationship with.
Collapse into the contracted self. Ahamkāra, the I-maker, becomes the whole of identity. Terrified of mortality and inner emptiness, the small self grasps endlessly for more.
Denial of the sacred body. The body—one’s own and others’—is no longer experienced as temple, as manifestation of consciousness, as the place where the divine tastes itself. It becomes object. Resource. Meat.
Severance from spanda. The subtle pulsation of reality, the vibratory intimacy connecting everything, is no longer felt. Without spanda, there is no felt interconnection. My action doesn’t ripple. Your suffering doesn’t touch me.
Loss of rasa. The juices of life—genuine feeling, aesthetic rapture, the nectar of aliveness—dry up. What remains is compulsive consumption that never satisfies. The trafficking mindset takes and takes because it can’t taste, or receive.
What Tantra Can Offer
Everything is alive, conscious, sacred. This isn’t a metaphor. In the tantric worldview, consciousness is the fundamental substrate of reality. Matter isn’t dead—it is consciousness in a contracted state. The body is spirit in manifest form.
When you truly see this, exploitation becomes impossible, because you can no longer unsee the divine in the other. The girl is Shakti. The detained father is Shiva. The prisoner scrubbing toilets is the Goddess cleaning her own temple.
The body is the path. Much of Western culture has inherited a body-denying tradition, where the body is fallen, sinful, to be transcended, to be disciplined, to be used. Tantra inverts this completely. The body is the vehicle of liberation. Sensation is the doorway to the sacred. Pleasure, rightly understood, is a form of worship.
This is why the trafficking mindset requires disembodiment. You can’t treat bodies as objects if you are fully inhabiting your own body, feeling your own sensation, alive to the current of energy that runs through all flesh.
The other is not other. In Kashmir Shaivism, one of the core recognitions that the Self you are is the same Self that is looking out of every pair of eyes. This is unity that includes and celebrates difference. You and I are distinct waves, but we are the same ocean.
The trafficking mindset depends on a fundamental othering. Those people aren’t like me. Their suffering isn’t my suffering. Their bodies exist for my use. Tantric practice dissolves this through direct experience.
Power is in service to life. Tantra works extensively with power…with Shakti, with kundalini, with the fierce goddess forms, with energy that can create and destroy. But power in tantra is never for accumulation. It is for liberation. For the awakening of self and other. For the increase of life.
Liberation is embodied, relational, and collective. Tantra is devoted to waking up within the world, as the world, for the world. And liberation is only complete when it is shared. One can’t be fully liberated while others suffer, because their suffering is your suffering, their bondage is your bondage.
Technologies of Feeling
Tantra offers technologies for transforming consciousness itself, actual practices that change how we perceive, feel, and relate. Practices that bring us back into the body, restore the feedback loop between action and sensation, and reconnect us to ourselves, to each other, to the living world.
Every person who learns to feel again is one less person available for the machinery of numbness.
Tantric practice makes you exquisitely sensitive to the effects of your actions—in your body, in your energy, in your capacity for presence. You feel the contraction when you act from greed. You feel the deadening when you treat another as object. The feedback loop becomes immediate and undeniable.
This is conscience as the felt consequence of alignment or misalignment with the way things actually are.
The Rehabilitation of Pleasure
The trafficking mindset corrupts pleasure. It seeks stimulation that never satisfies, intensity that requires escalation, sensation stripped of presence and relationship.
Tantra sanctifies pleasure. It slows it down. It brings full awareness to it. It teaches that real pleasure requires presence, requires relationship, requires the capacity to receive.
This is a direct teaching for a culture addicted to consumption that never satisfies. The answer is deeper pleasure, not more: pleasure that fills rather than empties. Pleasure that connects rather than isolates.
Fullness as Alternative to Grasping
The abuser is empty. The compulsive taking is an attempt to fill the void.
Tantra offers fullness. Real fullness. The experience of being so connected to the source of life that you overflow rather than grasp. You become a fountain of grace. Practitioners know this state. It is the result of specific practices done over time. And from this fullness, exploitation makes no sense. Why would you take from others when you have unlimited access to the source?
Staying Present to the Unbearable
This is the tantric discipline. Not turning away. Not collapsing. But staying with what is, fully, letting it move through us, letting it break us open rather than shut us down.
This isn’t masochism. It is the only path to being able to respond rather than react. When we are overwhelmed, we freeze or flail. When we can be with what is happening, we can actually meet it. We can act from presence rather than panic.
If you are identified only with the small self—with this body, this life, this set of preferences and attachments—then the scale of suffering in the world is literally unbearable. It will crush you.
But tantra offers expansion. Identification with something larger. Not escape from the personal, but inclusion of the personal in something vast enough to hold it all. From the perspective of the Self that is all selves, the suffering is still real, still felt: but it is held in a container large enough to bear it.
5: Welcoming A World That Can Feel
Numbing is adaptive, until it becomes the default. The child being abused dissociates because feeling is unbearable. The soldier killing shuts down to survive. But adaptive becomes pathological when it persists beyond the original threat, when we forget we are numb, when numbness is passed down as normal.
Systems select for numbness. You can’t run a factory farm if you feel the animals. You can’t run a detention center if you feel the people. You can’t extract at billionaire scale if you feel the families choosing between insulin and rent. The system needs people who do not feel. It rewards them, promotes them, selects for them.
And we lack containers for integration. Knowing intellectually that thousands are detained is not the same as knowing it. Integration requires space for grief, for rage, for emotional reality. Where are those spaces? Where do we weep together for what has been done, for what we have become?
How We Become People Who Feel
Practice feeling. Practices that bring us back into the body restore the feedback loop between action and sensation and reconnect us to ourselves, to each other, to the living world.
Create containers for grief. Spaces where we can weep without rushing to fix. Where grief is honored as a sane response to what is real. Where sorrow is not privatized but shared, witnessed, made metabolizable.
Tell the truth about the past. Wounds we refuse to face will keep reenacting themselves. Reckoning does not mean endless self-hatred. It means reality contact—so that repair is possible.
Refuse systems that require numbness. Every time we grow food instead of buy, repair instead of replace, build local economies of relationship rather than extraction, we withdraw participation from the machinery. Not purity. Not perfection. Direction—toward life.
Protect the sensitive ones. Children who feel too much. Artists who are overwhelmed. Mystics, weirdos, those who never developed calluses. They are not defective. They are canaries. Their inability to adapt is information about what we are asking them to adapt to.
Stay present to the unbearable. Not as heroism, but as devotion. As discipline. As refusal to abandon the real.
Believing in the More Beautiful World
Maybe there is no collective solution, and it happens one nervous system at a time. One person at a time coming back into their body, refusing to participate in the forgetting.
For me, I sense the critical mass may be closer than we think. Something is happening when people pour into streets in bitter cold, when they refuse to let neighbors be taken, when they choose presence over numbness even though numbness is easier.
And maybe we won’t learn fast enough. Maybe patterns repeat. Maybe unresolved energies survive from one generation to the next.
But even then, we can create islands of sanity. Communities of remembering. Lifeboats of presence in a sea of forgetting.
We can teach presence. We can model fullness. We can create containers for recognition. We can remain embodied. This is the counterpoint to the trafficking mindset: A world that can feel each other. A world where the other is not other. A world where every body is sacred, every being a manifestation of consciousness, every encounter an opportunity for recognition.
That world is here, evident, in plain sight if we choose to look and amplify it, hidden inside this one, waiting for us to remember.
The Trafficking and Predation Mindset: Questions for Self-Inquiry
The trafficking mindset is not only “out there.” It lives, to varying degrees, in all of us who were raised in this culture. These questions are offered not for self-condemnation but for honest seeing—the first step toward any real change.
On Using Others
When I interact with people who serve me—baristas, drivers, cleaners, assistants—do I see them? Do I feel them as beings with inner lives as rich as mine? Or do they become functions, means to my ends?
In my intimate relationships, do I ever treat the other person as existing for my gratification—emotional, sexual, practical—rather than as a sovereign being with their own needs and boundaries?
When I consume—food, products, content—do I feel the labor, the lives, the costs embedded in what I take? Or has that awareness been severed?
Do I use people for access, status, or connection to power? Have I ever stayed close to someone not because I loved them but because of what proximity to them gave me?
On Looking Away
What do I choose not to see because seeing would require me to change? What suffering have I made invisible to myself because feeling it would be too costly?
When have I stayed silent to keep my place at a table I knew was corrupt? When did belonging feel more important than integrity?
What questions do I not ask because the answers would implicate me? What would I have to give up if I let myself fully know what I already half-know?
Am I willing to be uncomfortable, to lose position, to be excluded—if that is the cost of seeing clearly?
On Feeling
How much am I actually in my body right now? Can I feel my feet, my belly, my heart? Or have I drifted into the disembodied space of thought?
When did I last let myself fully feel grief? Rage? Heartbreak? Or do I manage these emotions, keep them at a distance, stay functional?
What am I using to numb—substances, screens, busyness, consumption? What would I have to feel if I stopped?
Can I be with another person’s pain without trying to fix it, explain it, or turn away? Can I simply witness?
On Power
Where do I have power over others—in my work, my home, my relationships? How do I use it? Do I use it for their flourishing or primarily for my own benefit?
When I am in a position of power, do I create conditions where people can tell me the truth? Or have I made it costly to challenge me?
Do I believe, somewhere deep, that I am special? That the rules don’t quite apply to me? That my needs are more important than others’?
What would it mean to hold power in service to life rather than extraction from it?
On Complicity
What systems of exploitation does my lifestyle depend on? Whose labor, whose land, whose suffering makes my comfort possible?
If I benefit from systems I know are unjust, what is my responsibility? What am I actually doing about it—not in theory, but in practice?
Am I waiting for someone else to change things? Am I waiting until it is convenient, safe, or without cost?
What would it mean to live as if the other were truly not other?
On Possibility
Where in my life have I already woken up—where do I already feel, already see, already refuse to participate in the machinery? What made that possible?
What practices, relationships, or experiences help me stay connected to my own aliveness? To my capacity for feeling?
What would it look like to build my life around presence rather than accumulation? Around relationship rather than extraction?
What is one thing I could do today—one way I could be different, one place I could stop looking away—that would move me toward a world that can feel?
Walk with me
If these words stir something in you, I invite you to go deeper.
Spring Course: Living Tantra ~
Beginning March 10th, this six-week online immersion is for anyone who senses that the body isn’t the problem but the doorway - that spirit and sensuality were never meant to be split. We explore classical tantra, sacred sexuality, and what it means to live fully awake in a body, in relationship, in the world. Each cohort becomes a living community, and I offer personal connection along the way. Learn more and join us.
Hawaii Tantra Fest ~
At the end of March (March 27 – April 1), join me on the Big Island for an immersive gathering on the Puna coast - days of embodied practice, ritual, and celebration in the company of kindred spirits. I’ll be presenting on Shiva and Shakti are one. Learn more and join us.
The Mystic Heart of Easter ~
April 2–5 in Southern California. A four-day retreat that enters Holy Week as a living, universal initiatory path, and a felt experience in the body. Together we’ll move through the primordial arc of love, death, waiting, and rebirth. This is intimate work held at a private estate, with medicine ceremony, daily practice, and deep rest. Learn more and reserve your spot.
With love,
Christine
Thinkers and Lineages
This essay draws on many streams of thought. For those who wish to go deeper, see the list of recommended resources on the print site.
On Power, Predation, and Systems
Hannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. On the banality of evil, how ordinary people participate in atrocity, and how totalitarian systems function.
Michel Foucault — Discipline and Punish. On how modern institutions shape bodies, create docility, and normalize surveillance and control.
Silvia Federici — Caliban and the Witch. On the origins of capitalism in the persecution of women, the enclosure of commons, and the war against the body.
bell hooks — All About Love and The Will to Change. On dominator culture, the failure of love in patriarchy, and the possibility of transformation.
Riane Eisler — The Chalice and the Blade. On dominator vs. partnership models of civilization and the historical roots of extraction culture.
Judith Herman — Trauma and Recovery. On the psychology of perpetrators and victims, the dynamics of coercive control, and paths to healing.
Robert Jay Lifton — The Nazi Doctors. On how healers became killers, the psychology of “doubling,” and the interior life of those who commit atrocity.
On Trauma, Embodiment, and Healing
Bessel van der Kolk — The Body Keeps the Score. On how trauma lives in the body and how embodied practices are essential to healing.
Peter Levine — Waking the Tiger. On somatic experiencing and the body’s innate capacity to resolve trauma.
Resmaa Menakem — My Grandmother’s Hands. On racialized trauma in America, how it lives in bodies across generations, and somatic practices for healing.
Gabor Maté — In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal. On addiction, trauma, and how our culture creates the conditions for both.
Thomas Hübl — Healing Collective Trauma. On how trauma moves through cultures and generations, and collective practices for integration.
On Tantra and Nondual Wisdom
Abhinavagupta — The great synthesizer of Kashmir Shaivism. His Tantrāloka is the most comprehensive tantric text ever composed.
Christopher Wallis (Hareesh) — Tantra Illuminated. The most accessible scholarly introduction to classical tantra for Western readers.
Sally Kempton — Awakening Shakti. On the goddess traditions and practices for connecting with feminine divine power.
Daniel Odier — Yoga Spandakarika and Tantric Quest. On the philosophy of vibration (spanda) and direct transmission in the tantric tradition.
Paul Muller-Ortega — The Triadic Heart of Śiva. Scholarly exploration of the heart practices of Kashmir Shaivism.
Douglas Brooks — The Secret of the Three Cities. On South Indian Shakta tantra and the Srividya tradition.
On Conscience, Moral Development, and Recognition
Martha Nussbaum — Upheavals of Thought. On emotions as judgments of value and their role in ethical life.
Emmanuel Levinas — Totality and Infinity. On the face of the other as the foundation of ethics.
Martin Buber — I and Thou. On the difference between treating others as objects (I-It) versus subjects (I-Thou).
Simone Weil — Gravity and Grace and Waiting for God. On attention as the rarest form of generosity, and affliction as a spiritual teacher.