Simon Cox on the Subtle Body

Simon Cox on the Subtle Body

Simon Cox is a scholar and practitioner whose work traces the history of the subtle body across Taoist, Tibetan, medical, alchemical, and Western esoteric traditions. He studied history at Oxford, spent six years training in a Taoist context at Wudang Mountain, and later wrote his dissertation at Rice on the genealogy of the subtle body. In this conversation, we talk about internal maps of the body, Taoist and Tibetan somatic cartographies, the challenges of translating contemplative practice across cultures, and how different ways of inhabiting the body may open into different experiences of reality. Toward the end, we touch on the ontology of pain, cultural differences in interoception, and embodied cognition. Timestamps 00:00:00 – Intro and Background Context 00:03:50 – Development of Internal Maps 00:08:00 – The Neijing Tu and Practice-Based Internal Cartography 00:11:30 – Porting Taoist Practice to the West 00:14:00 – Qigong, Neigong, and Modern Chinese Practice Categories 00:17:20 – Taoist Diversity and Tibetan Subtle Body Maps 00:21:10 – Medical vs. Spiritual Maps 00:25:10 – Paradigms, Tibetan Medicine, and the Three Turnings 00:27:30 – Two Unsatisfying Views of the Subtle Body 00:32:20 – Novel and Inevitable Syncretisms 00:35:00 – Historicizing and Genealogies 00:38:10 – Reality, Truth, and Embodiment 00:40:00 – Awareness, Inhabiting the Body, and Taoist Theories of Mind 00:43:20 – The Mind Outside the Body 00:46:00 – Fate, Ancestors, Purpose, and Lines of Affinity 00:49:00 – Polyontology, Political vs. Policing, Frequency Resonance 00:54:20 – Esalen, Western Somatics, and Theory vs. Practice 00:56:50 – Paradigm Shift, New Materialisms, Distributed Agency/Intelligence 01:00:50 – Ontological Pluralism and Eurocentrism 01:05:30 – Mutual Vulnerable Knowing and Minds Knowing Minds 01:09:30 – How Scientists and Technologists Can Contribute, and The Ontological Turn 01:15:10 – Embodied Mathematicians 01:20:00 – Technology with Different Ontologies, Tsien Hsue-shen, Cybernetics 01:26:30 – A Genealogy of Pain 01:31:20 – Ontology of Pain, Christian Suffering vs. Buddhist Suffering 01:35:00 – Biocultural Disease and the Social Transmission of Pain 01:40:00 – Simon’s Current Projects: Esalen, Harvard, Energy, and Qi 01:43:10 – Eugene Gendlin and Therapeutic Process Excellent interview [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNlty7pppzE] with Simon Cox on The Integral Stage where they actually talk more about the subtle body as a term. The Subtle Body: A Genealogy [https://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Body-Genealogy-WESTERN-ESOTERICISM/dp/019758103X] by Simon Cox This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com [https://essays.debugyourpain.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Dr Thomas Pollak on Balinese witch doctors and therapeutic resets for chronic illness

A couple of months ago, I gave a presentation [https://essays.debugyourpain.com/p/the-set-point-theory-of-chronic-illness] the set point theory of chronic illness, it was an attempt to use a new language, the language of cybernetics to shift out of this mind body duality when talking about illness. The inspiration for this presentation was a paper by. Dr. Tom Pollock and Mike Levin. fter reading the paper and giving the presentation, I decided to reach out to the lead author, uh, Tom Pollock and have a chat. This conversation was the result. He’s a neuropsychiatrist based in the uk. We talk about his experience with a. Which doctor and how that partly inspired, uh, section in the paper. And more broadly on the role of, of experience and challenges when wading into this field where there’s a clear interface between the mind and the body. I hope you enjoy. Dr. Thomas Pollak is a neuropsychiatrist based in the UK who works at the interface of immunology and mental health. We talk about his encounter with a Balinese witch doctor, the cybernetics of chronic illness, and why psychiatry needs a more dynamic model of inflammation. Episode Outline — Dr. Thomas Pollak: Reboots, Resets, and the Immunopsychiatry of Stuck States 00:00:00 Introduction and the Set Point Theory of Chronic Illness 00:01:30 The Witch Doctor Story 00:08:00 Humiliation, Shame, and One-Pointedness as Therapeutic Tools 00:12:00 A Room With a Dead Body 00:15:30 Meditation Practice and the Constructionist Turn in Neuroscience 00:18:30 The Tantric Phase of Science 00:24:00 Reset vs. Learning vs. Unlearning 00:30:00 Safety Behaviors, Canalization, and Narrowing of State Space 00:37:00 Long COVID, Interface Disorders, and the Two-Camps Problem 00:43:00 The Role of Awareness in Healing 00:45:00 What Kind of Awareness Is Therapeutic? 00:49:00 Neurostimulation and Embodied Experience 00:50:00 Autoimmunity and Psychosis: The Main Research Thread You can find Dr Pollak’s substack here [https://drtompollak.substack.com/]. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com [https://essays.debugyourpain.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Elena Lake on Learning Subtle Bodywork

Elena Lake was a math major at MIT who later transitioned from her software engineering career into bodywork. We talk about her journey, and the role of perception in bodywork. Episode Outline — Elena Lake: From Engineering to Regenerative Touch 00:00:00 Introduction and Early Background 00:01:00 Trauma, Mental Health, and Limits of Talk Therapy 00:02:00 First Encounters with Touch and Somatic Relief 00:03:30 Massage School as a Foundation, Not a Revelation 00:10:00 Qualities of Touch, Trance States, and Sensory Depth 00:12:00 Advanced Touch Perception 00:14:00 Lineages of Somatics and Extreme Sensitivity 00:18:00 Developing “Regenerative Touch” 00:21:00 Awareness, Attention, and Where People Live in Their Bodies 00:23:00 Practice as Research and the Role of Presence 00:25:00 Models of Pain: Continuity, Tangles, and the Camel’s Back You can find out more about Elena through her website [https://www.elenalakebodywork.com/]. If you’re convinced of the role of the nervous system in perpetuating pain and other symptoms but are having weak results pursuing it on your own, feel free to reach out to maxkshen@gmail.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com [https://essays.debugyourpain.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The Set Point Theory of Chronic Illness

This past weekend, inspired by a recent preprint [https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/9krz8_v1] from Thomas Pollak, Mike Levin, et al, I gave a talk on how cybernetic models (predictive processing, dynamical systems, homeostasis/allostasis) are a hugely powerful lens to understate the current epidemic of the recent rise in chronic illness. You can watch the video while looking at the slides here [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12g0WKKd_7s3SkBtOvhGrctaRFfT4W1swwHH7fxiU4uE/edit?slide=id.g3b054dfdafc_0_131#slide=id.g3b054dfdafc_0_131], or read the essay version below: Here’s the essay version (generated by Claude from my transcript). It is less good than the talk, but faster to read: Chronic Illness as a Stuck Set Point In 1910s Vienna, one in five young men had syphilis. The medical community was helpless—a deep nihilism pervaded as they watched patients die from this bacterial infection that would spread across the body with devastating mortality rates. Then a German psychiatrist noticed something strange: some of his late-stage syphilis patients got better after getting more sick. Specifically, after contracting malaria. In what seems like utter insanity in hindsight, Julius Wagner-Jauregg began drawing blood from his malaria patients and injecting it into those dying from syphilis. There was even a criminal investigation involved. But here’s the thing—it worked. Even though 10-15% died from the malaria, a larger fraction survived what was previously a death sentence. Wagner-Jauregg won the Nobel Prize in 1927. Nobody could explain why it worked. Medical research today still does not have a biomechanistic account. But it clearly worked. The Wrong Level of Abstraction This shouldn’t make sense within the biomedical model that dominated (and still dominates) medicine. How do you give someone something that makes them more sick, yet they become better? The biomedical reasoning is straightforward: diseases have specific causes, specific dysfunctions. Diphtheria —> Kill the bacterium. Clogged arteries —> Widen them. We find and fix the broken part of our biomechanical bodies. But the malaria example isn’t unique. If you look at long COVID and other post-viral syndromes, there are well-documented cases of secondary infections leading to resolution. In the case of MDMA trials for PTSD, the drug doesn’t remove some “PTSD toxin” but somehow resets the entire system. In my own research, we have increasingly hard to ignore evidence about the widespread efficacy of nervous system reprocessing resolving chronic pain. This is still the dominant approach In 2021, Congress gave NIH $1.5 billion to research long COVID—all focused on biochemical pathology, systematically excluding researchers studying nervous system approaches. Bodies as Problem-Solvers What if we stopped seeing the body as a collection of chemical pathways and started seeing it as a multi-scale collective intelligence solving problems at different layers—from cell to organ to your whole being? Your body wants to keep you in a range of safe values. Try this experiment—on your next exhale, stop yourself from inhaling. Feel that rising tension, that panic. Your throat tightens, blood vessels dilate, emotional systems activate. That’s the homeostatic impulse, happening across multiple scales simultaneously. Normally, you breathe at 13-15 breaths per minute. If you start jogging, that set point shifts higher. If you work a chronically stressful job, your breathing becomes shallow and fast, and paradoxically, tissue oxygen can decrease over time. The key insight here is that sometimes our bodies get stuck in these maladaptive states. Try clenching your abs like you’re bracing for impact. Notice how hard it is to breathe? Now relax. Feel the difference—the ease, the fuller breath, the sense that more of your body is available. If you walked around with clenched abs all the time (as many do under chronic stress), your breathing would be persistently altered. You might even forget you’re clenching at all. The Reset Mechanism Remember when your computer freezes and nothing works except turning it off and on again? That’s the metaphor driving this new understanding of chronic illness. We already use resets in medicine without calling them that. During a heart attack, emergency responders shock the heart with high voltage—not to teach it the proper rhythm, but to create a perturbation that allows the tissue to recalibrate. Fecal transplants work similarly—overwhelming the sick person’s microbiome with healthy bacteria, then allowing repopulation in better proportions. Think of it like this: imagine illness and health as valleys in a landscape. In chronic illness, the valley walls are steep—it takes enormous energy to climb out. But during a reset, those valleys flatten temporarily. The body can move between states with less resistance. Maybe that’s what happened with Wagner-Jauregg’s malaria cure. Maybe that’s what’s happening when a secondary infection resolves long COVID, or when MDMA allows PTSD to lift, or when nervous system work dissolves chronic pain. The perturbation creates a window of plasticity where the system can reconfigure. What This Changes This isn’t just semantic reshuffling. If our bodies are intelligent problem-solving systems that can get stuck, then treatment becomes about creating the right conditions for reset—understanding not just the magnitude of perturbation needed, but the context before and after. The questions now are practical: What variables actually define these states? How does conscious attention affect plasticity? (There’s something here about how becoming aware of your body’s defensive patterns might itself flatten the landscape.) What makes a helpful reset versus a harmful one? We’re at the beginning of something. The patterns are here for us to explore. And for someone who spent months unable to type, watching my own pain system reset through understanding and careful perturbation, I can tell you—this paradigm shift matters. In four images: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com [https://essays.debugyourpain.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Howard Schubiner on Therapies for Pain

We’ve known for decades about culture-bound syndromes that just seem so weird and only occur in a small subculture. Like men in South Central Asia who get the idea that they have semen loss and their semen loss is making them weak and tired... and we go ‘that’s crazy’. But how do we know that back pain isn’t our culture-bound syndrome? Today I’m talking with Dr. Howard Schubiner, who’s one of the creators of Pain Reprocessing Therapy (one of the most important and exciting new modalities for addressing chronic pain). We met at a conference in Boulder, and this conversation was a chance for us to explore how he got into this space and his stance on where it’s going. Dr Schubiner is one of the pioneers of modern pain science. After being a professor at Wayne State University for 18 years, he now directs, advises, and supports many of the key initiatives around understanding pain through this neuroplastic lens. Timestamps 00:00:00 – Intro 00:02:00 – Meeting Dr. John Sarno 00:06:00 – From MBSR to Mind-Body Medicine 00:13:00 – The Evolution of Somatic Tracking 00:21:00 – Predictive Processing and the Brain’s Need for Certainty 00:35:00 – The Cultural Epidemic of Pain Syndromes 00:38:00 – Long COVID and Neuroplastic Conditions 00:43:00 – Healthcare System Reform Vision 00:47:00 – The Future of Neuroplastic Research Resources: * Howard’s book, Unlearn Your Pain, just had a Fourth Edition update [https://unlearnyourpain.com/unlearn-your-pain-book/]. * Effect of Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Patients With Chronic Back Pain [https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/articlepdf/2784694/jamapsychiatry_ashar_2021_oi_210060_1640022091.64193.pdf&hl=en&sa=T&oi=gsb-gga&ct=res&cd=0&d=11622972837269623338&ei=GJswabCOGY2v6rQP-rWV0QI&scisig=ABGrvjIbBkqSfzAhscNYXCye7Juo]. * Correction: I mentioned anorexia and The Geography of Madness, but the correct book is Crazy Like Us. Here [https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us] is a good book review. * All the Rage (Saved by Sarno) [https://www.alltheragedoc.com/] - documentary featuring Dr. Sarno * ATNS (Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms) [https://symptomatic.me/] Questions and comments welcome! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com [https://essays.debugyourpain.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]