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FC2O Episode 19 - Sasha Chaitow
43 Plays5 years ago
A tale of two legends - from one dynasty. Sasha Chaitow leads us through not only her father, Leon's, unparalleled achievements, but also her quite exceptional journey so far spanning art, culture and medicine.
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Transcript
Introduction to Sasha Chato's Background
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Speaker
My original background was in art and art history and the history of culture and ended up getting a PhD in cultural history, which essentially looks at the way that ideas travel through history and how impact various aspects of culture, of society.
00:00:27
Speaker
I look at the way that ideas that might have been born 3,000 years ago end up impacting a particular, perhaps, social movement. So it crisscrosses all sorts of areas into the history of medicine, quite a lot of the history of science, actually, and some of the principles underlying it. So that's one of the points of contact really with my father's world. Alchemy is an interesting
00:00:56
Speaker
Again, I'll call it a framework for perceiving actually what we're talking about as well. Jung's interpretation of alchemy did something very interesting for his area of work, did something very, very bad for the accurate historical understanding of alchemy.
00:01:30
Speaker
We
Sasha's Academic and Professional Journey
00:01:50
Speaker
Today we are joined by Sasha Cheto, who may be best known as the daughter of Leon Cheto. I didn't want to make this episode all about Leon, because as you'll hear, Sasha is highly accomplished in her own right. That said, I know Sasha through Leon, who sadly moved on in September 2018, and although any loss is sad, Leon's phenomenal legacy and positive impact he made would without doubt have him as one of the most influential promoters of health and integration the world has ever known.
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Speaker
ask to order
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Speaker
With more than 80 books published, including many bestsellers and a mix of medical texts and guidebooks for more general consumption, Leon has helped millions of people on the planet, not just through the books sold, but through the medical professionals he has helped to help others.
00:02:33
Speaker
Beyond his books, he set up one of the most popular medical journals in his field, which again has helped so many professionals and the people they serve. There's so much to say about Leon and his truly outstanding contribution to humanity, and you'll get a glimpse of that as you hear Sasha explain a bit about her father and his family line.
00:02:49
Speaker
And speaking of family lines, it will come as no surprise that Sasha is also razor-sharp, ambitious, accomplished and multi-talented in her own right. With a PhD and two masters degrees under her belt and a third masters degree on its way, Sasha is now heading up the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies alongside Geraldine Cambron, holding the torch for Leon while still maintaining a strong presence in the world of art and the transcendence of cultural ideas across time.
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Speaker
Here we get to sample just a touch of Sasha's and her father's brilliance. And I suspect in both instances, you'll find it inspirational. Enjoy the show. Here we go.
00:03:36
Speaker
Welcome to another edition of FT2O with me, Matt Walden, and today I have Sasha Chato with me. Now, Sasha, before we move on, how do I pronounce your surname? Because I've always said Chato. I've heard people say Chaitao. Chaitou. There's all kinds of different pronunciations. How do you pronounce your surname? You've got it absolutely right, Matt. It's Chato.
00:03:56
Speaker
It's traveled a long way, but yeah, Chato is the preferred. Yeah. Okay. Excellent. Excellent. That's good. Good start. Okay. So, well, Sasha, I've only known you, I guess really, for a couple of years. And of course, that's been related to my role with the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies. I was aware of you for several years prior to that, because of course, your father, Leon,
00:04:24
Speaker
had presented at several conferences where I was there as well. He'd quite often have a picture of you on his slides and your mum. And so, you know, it was always lovely to see the sort of family background, but we've only met about a year ago. And yeah, so I'd like to sort of know a bit more about you. Obviously, I know a fair bit about Leon, but could you give us a brief introduction into
00:04:48
Speaker
your own backgrounds and then I think what we're going to do today, if you're happy, is that we'll do a bit of a discussion around Leon and his work and then we'll move back into your work and how that's now integrated to some degree and also probably not integrated, probably quite separate also to what you're doing with the Journal of Body Work. Sure, absolutely.
00:05:10
Speaker
Yes, I'm well aware most people from my father's world will know me as a photo on the slide at the end of a presentation. He loved doing that.
00:05:25
Speaker
It's quite poignant, but also not thoroughly accurate. You know, most people know the proud father's version, but I've had a fair journey of my own.
00:05:43
Speaker
My original background was in art and art history and the history of culture and I did parallel studies for a number of years so I trained in fine art and I also
00:06:03
Speaker
studied communication. So I came through the social sciences and ended up getting a PhD in cultural history, which essentially looks at the way that ideas travel through history.
00:06:21
Speaker
and to help impact various aspects of culture, of society, so it can be anything from... I'm not an art historian, in fact. I look at the way that ideas that might have been born 3,000 years ago end up impacting a particular, perhaps, social movement in, you know, 100 years ago or something like that.
00:06:45
Speaker
So it crisscrosses all sorts of areas into the history of medicine, quite a lot of the history of students actually, and some of the principles underlying it. So that's one of the points of contact really with my father's world. And I ended up specialising in
00:07:06
Speaker
quite a niche area which, again, related to the history of religion, history of culture, and was part of a sort of academic community, well, still am part of an academic community, which
00:07:26
Speaker
fought very hard, in fact, to have certain neglected aspects of cultural history acknowledged in academia. So there were parallels there with some of my father's work in terms of trying to build the evidence base and trying to build the documentation for certain lesser understood, if you like, areas. Well, of science and of therapeutic techniques in this case,
00:07:56
Speaker
And this was something that we shared and discussed quite a lot. So that's basically the backstory. I've always had lots of irons in the fire at any one time. So I'll be, well, up until two years ago, you know, I'd be painting and researching and putting on events. I've got quite a long
00:08:22
Speaker
quite a long sort of backstory in education and also event management and things like that. Yeah, yeah, fantastic and I know you've, is it two master's degree and one PhD that you've got? That's right, that's right, yes. Yeah, so you've been pretty busy.
00:08:44
Speaker
Well, I've just gone back to school, I'm now, I'm on to my third, as it seems, yes, in public health, which is basically to
00:08:56
Speaker
consolidate the area that I now find myself more active in. Yes, exactly. Well, that's fantastic.
Leon's Journey and Contributions
00:09:05
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I really want to get into a lot of your own work, but I think we said that we would start out by talking a bit about Leon and his background.
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Speaker
And of course, your role, because you've really had to step into Leon's shoes to some degree with the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies, which we'll also talk about. But can we start out with a bit of the sort of family history and the chateau lineage, as it were? Yes. Yeah, I think we're moving to the fifth generation now. Well, yeah, so my father almost became an accountant, actually.
00:09:42
Speaker
Yes, as a young man in South Africa, not quite sure what he wanted to do. He was very strongly and fortunately, fortunately for himself and fortunately, I think, for everybody whose work has sort of given them something. He was very strongly influenced by his father's cousin, Stanley Leaf.
00:10:06
Speaker
I think he's a very well known name in the world of bodywork and osteopathy, especially. And he was privileged. And in fact, the inspiration, the connection didn't come through Stanley Leaf directly. It came through his uncle, my father's uncle Boris Chato, who had studied under Stanley and with Peter Leaf, his Stanley son.
00:10:32
Speaker
in the States and then trained as an osteopath and was working in England in the 1950s, which is when 1956 Leon went over from South Africa
00:10:47
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to study osteopathy, having had one horrible year training as an accountant, as he remembered it. Can I just jump in to say, because so Stanley Lee, for people who don't know, my understanding of Stanley was that he was the sort of innovator, the person that developed neuromuscular technique. Yes, inspired by Janda's work and
00:11:11
Speaker
Yes, developed various aspects of the technique. And this was something that was literally passed down from one to the other. So from Stanley to Peter to Boris.
00:11:23
Speaker
to Leon and on Leon's blog there's even a little history there he's in his own words of how he simply saw himself as somebody who hung around and documented the work that these great men were doing he never saw himself as somebody who would carry the torch although of course he did
00:11:44
Speaker
He did very much so. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And where does Champlainese fit into that story? That is part of the story, isn't it? It is part of the story indeed. My memory is a little sketchy on this one, I'm afraid, but I think the background is actually also on Leon's website.
00:12:04
Speaker
So, Champneys was a health, what's the correct word for this? Spa. No spa. It's a commerce spa, but back in the day, it was more like a sanatorium, more like someone who was desperately ill would go to either recover or try, if everything else had failed, they would try to get well.
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Speaker
and Stanley Leaf in his day, I'm not sure if he was one of the founders or if he was simply one of the more, he certainly ran the place for a time and Leon worked with him there in the 60s
00:12:48
Speaker
and even stories to tell of his own of how he had been very very unwell as a young man sort of graduating and of how the treatments their naturopathic approach diet and various other techniques that Stanley used brought him to perfect health he had struggled with chronic he did struggle with chronic illness all his life and
00:13:18
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a lot of what they did at Chapman, he's helped him. Yeah. Wow. Excellent. Excellent. Good stuff. So Leon did his training, in which decade was it?
00:13:31
Speaker
Yes, so he came to England in 1956, graduated as was BCNO in 1960. And then he later did some training in acupuncture and cranial techniques and so on. But he graduated, his main graduation was in 1960. Sure, sure. OK. And then where did his career go from there?
00:13:59
Speaker
So he practiced as an osteopath. Well, he did work at Champneys for some years. He practiced as an osteopath under his uncle Boris Chato in London, in Marrowbone for a number of years, and then eventually opened his own practice down on the south coast in Worthing, which is where I was born.
00:14:22
Speaker
And then we actually moved to Greece as a family for a time, my mother's Greek. One of the key reasons for that was for me to learn Greek and actually absorb some culture. And in Greece, Leon wasn't allowed to practice. So it was the law at the time that Greek law was quite strict about foreign
00:14:51
Speaker
foreign acquired degrees and also osteopathy wasn't even recognized as a real passion here at the time, although it is now to a degree.
00:15:04
Speaker
That's when he turned all his focus to writing, and he'd already written a few books, but writing both articles and books became essentially our livelihood. And he was, well, very successful. He also put out this newsletter, which this is back in the days before computers. He had an ancient Amstrad.
00:15:31
Speaker
In fact, he would put together this newsletter, which consisted of cut-out print-outs of articles that he'd formatted on this ancient Amstrad. This isn't in the mid-1980s.
00:15:46
Speaker
And it was my job, after he got those photocopies, it was my job to stuff the envelopes, put all the pages together and get them out to his readership. So quite a fun way to have. And this grew and grew. I mean, he was an incredibly popular writer even then. And one day, again, I'm not quite sure of which book it was or which particular
00:16:16
Speaker
connection it was, but a chiropractic student from Los Angeles wrote to him and asked him if he would come to the States to teach. Yes, I think I know who you're talking about. And that student, as was then, was Dr. Craig Leibenson, who has been one of the
00:16:41
Speaker
Leon's closest colleagues ever since. This was in 1985, 1986. And this was what essentially launched him in the US. And Craig, of course, is one of the very, very good friends of the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies. He's written an editorial for every single issue since
00:17:04
Speaker
inception since 1996. The journal started. Amazing. Yes, he's a good friend to Leon. And they also, he was very inspired by the techniques that Leon could teach. And that's really how he got started in teaching practical techniques and lecturing in the States. So that's where that's where it really took from the 1980s.
00:17:31
Speaker
Right, fantastic. Yeah and then we returned to England in 1990. On my side it was time for secondary school, on Leon's side there was more demand for him to be more present and more active in terms of teaching and
00:17:55
Speaker
well and also practicing because before that he would fly back and forth to see patients at set times and it was all a bit messy. So yeah, so in the 1990s we moved back to the UK permanently and that led to a series of synchronicities. He ended up
00:18:20
Speaker
for being the first osteopath to be appointed to an NHS practice in Maralbone. I forget the date, I think it's 94, 95, thereabouts anyway.
00:18:33
Speaker
So the first practice where, as were called complementary therapies, there was a push to integrate them further into mainstream medicine. That was an incredible, incredible time. He was very excited about that because there was this opportunity for physicians from various
00:19:02
Speaker
what we would call complementary or integrative backgrounds to work side by side with GPs and conventional
00:19:13
Speaker
if you like specialists. And he would talk about how amazing it was really to be able to sit down in a room with three or four other practitioners and discuss a case and really all of them together find an integrated way of treating their patients. And apparently very, very good work was done during these years.
00:19:44
Speaker
Off the back of that, he was also appointed to develop bachelor's and master's courses in integrative health at the University of Westminster.
00:19:57
Speaker
again from the mid-90s on. And again, he ran several very successful programs there for several years. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. And until retirement, and unfortunately, he just reached retirement age and was obliged to stop. There was no other reason. Oh, really? Yeah. He was furious. He hit 65 and they told him, sorry, no choice.
00:20:29
Speaker
The laws change now, I think they've relaxed that a little, although the general idea is that the old guard should make way for younger
00:20:42
Speaker
professor now on but at the time it was enforced so he was pretty unhappy about that but I mean he carried on with his uh uh independent teaching writing his within that time he'd produced again this is all in the 90s and then moving into the early 2000s uh he'd produced numerous textbooks on his practical techniques and so his his energy then went more into that into um
00:21:11
Speaker
conferences into developing the journal as well. The journal was
00:21:20
Speaker
Well, that's what I wanted to ask a bit about was how the journal came about, because obviously, you know, as you say, Craig was a key contributor. And I remember in those early days, Thomas Myers was heavily involved. And there was James Oshman seemed to be writing a lot. There was certainly a core team of people that seemed to have quite a hand in the whole process. But how did that emerge?
Journal's Influence and Leon's Legacy
00:21:43
Speaker
Well, Leon's vision can really be boiled down to the two for the journal. I mean, really be boiled down to two main things, one of which was this idea of integrating techniques and methods from the various bodywork and what I suppose what we would today call allied health professions. He
00:22:13
Speaker
could have felt that there was something to be gained and something to be learned from everybody and that we could all essentially learn from each other, the professions could learn from each other. There should not be barriers, disciplinary boundaries between them or if there needed to be for practical reasons
00:22:34
Speaker
that there should be ways of overcoming them, that there should be channels of communication. So one key element was that. And the second key element was to have a venue, to have a home for the developing research into the therapies and methods and techniques that did not have sufficient evidence behind them. So as
00:23:03
Speaker
as evidence-based medicine became more and more sort of a buzzword and the norm in various practices, he saw the need for this evidence-based to develop. And it was only going to develop in terms of research if you have a home to go to because mainstream
00:23:25
Speaker
academic journals wouldn't necessarily see the value of that. So the journal essentially was born out of that. At the time this was, I believe, and I may be inaccurate in some of my
00:23:46
Speaker
way I remember these things because, of course, I was in my teens at this point, so not really much attention, I have to say. But this was with Churchill Livingston under Mary Law, who has worked with Leon in relation to his publishing for many years and has been very, very
00:24:13
Speaker
a good friend, I would say, to him, the books, to us. And so the journal was born under Churchill Livingston originally and then moved to Elsevier. And since then, Mary had moved through Elsevier and now owns Handspring Publishing along with Andrew Deeben. And so Handspring, which is also a very
00:24:42
Speaker
important, I would say, doing important work as an independent publisher now. So the journal moved to Elsevier and one of Leon's proudest moments, in fact, was in 2009, eight or nine, I believe it was either eight or nine, when it finally became Medline Indexed. So the approval that
00:25:07
Speaker
it had reached a standard where it was obviously beginning to do exactly what he'd hoped it would.
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's a really important point that you bring up. I've spoken about it a few times before that Leon's vision, even though I was unaware of it, it was clear through the way the journal was being published and constructed that he was looking for the best of everyone and wasn't close minded to anyone. Obviously, he had a level and a standard that he needed to adhere to, which obviously resulted in the Medline
00:25:45
Speaker
indexing ultimately. But one of the things that strikes me looking back on my own career is that when I got that very first issue of the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies which was handed out at one of the osteopathic conferences in 2006
00:26:03
Speaker
and I got given this free copy. And I remember reading it and A, it just being so refreshing because it was actually highly digestible, you know, compared to a lot of other research journals. This was stuff you could take away and apply in clinic the next day. And so first of all, that was the first thing that struck me, but also what really kind of almost initially created a bit of shock in me was that different
00:26:33
Speaker
practitioners were often invited to comment on a case history or case study that Leon presumably would put together and send to these different people of different disciplines and so frequently the people that I would expect to be most resonant with for example another osteopath
00:26:48
Speaker
were completely, you know, on a different tangent to where I was. And, you know, I might be much more on the tangent of, say, the chiropractor or the physio. And so I was looking at this game, well, this is interesting, because that osteopath is doing nothing like what I would consider to be the right approach, you know. And yet I was just about to qualify as an osteopath at that point. So I was thinking, this is kind of fascinating, whereas the chiropractor might be doing exactly or thinking about it exactly the way I was thinking about it.
00:27:14
Speaker
And then I remember reading also, like, you know, massage therapists, and one of them had come back with their interpretation of the case history. And to me, it was just mind blowing, it was so full of new information and new insights and new ways to look at the body, that right around that point where you're kind of building your professional barriers, because you're about to qualify as this discrete entity, for me, an osteopath, and a naturopath. And that was these are my qualifications. And, and we, you know, felt that somehow we would be better than
00:27:44
Speaker
other professions because we have our unique approaches and our unique philosophies and so on. And it made me realise right at that point that actually this has got nothing to do with the qualification and everything to do with the individual and what they go on to study and how they understand the body and how they work with it. So I thought it was such a huge gift that I was given from the journal, which I think was part of Leon's objective.
00:28:08
Speaker
It was, and I'm really glad you brought that up, actually. I mean, I'm really glad to hear that story because, one, I mean, what you just described there of how he would have different approaches to a case history, that is exactly the kind of thing that would happen at the Maryland Clinic, you see. That would be him transferring that four or five practitioners in a room into writing.
00:28:34
Speaker
And that would, I guess, demonstrated in a very hands-on way how that could work for the benefit of the patient. And also the point you make about sort of building those professional boundaries or not. This is a thorny issue. This is a conversation that needs to be had, I guess, at some point.
00:29:00
Speaker
where of course we all define ourselves to a degree by our sort of professions, but in the end does that sometimes, can that sometimes lead to forgetting the what's really important and what's really important is the patient. And so you're absolutely right that JBMT has always been oriented to
00:29:27
Speaker
having strong clinical relevance and that even though extremely important research is being done at more theoretical levels or more sort of more microscopic levels, if you like, focus has always been what can the clinician take away from this in order to benefit, improve, develop their practice and their understanding of what they're doing.
00:29:55
Speaker
That has always, that's the kind of the third, there's four main pylons really as I see it, support that EMT represents, that's the third one. So the first being integration, the second, the idea of integrating the various professions, the second being to build an evidence base, the third being
00:30:17
Speaker
clinical relevance, and the fourth also being, of course, to support early career research, to support the new generations, as well as currently active clinicians, all of whom are able to contribute to this. That's basically what it is.
00:30:40
Speaker
what it does. Yeah, fantastic. Fantastic. And so, you know, you've obviously alluded to the books that Leon has written, not just through Churchill Livingston, but Elsevier and then with Handspring as well, because he obviously published, I believe, several of his later books with Handspring. Yeah.
00:31:00
Speaker
And he hit, I believe, over 70 books published. Is that the right figure? Do you know roughly what it was? You know what? It's hard even for me to say. I know it's over 80. They weren't all textbooks. He did a lot of writing for the general public as well. Self-help books for the lay person.
00:31:28
Speaker
He was a very firm believer of educating the patient and allowing them to take their health or their recovery or their
00:31:39
Speaker
rehabilitation into their own hands. And he was always very emphatic that if you can empower the patient, then you have an ally and you have a lot less trouble with it. So a good number of his books were also oriented to the lay person. Some of those were wildly successful and sort of went through several
00:32:05
Speaker
revisions. And then the, of course, we have the textbooks and the sort of the collection, if you like, the muscle, for clinicians, so the muscle energy techniques, neuromuscular techniques, positional release, all of those books that were designed to, in a very accessible way, allow clinicians to develop their techniques that way as well.
00:32:35
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So cool. He had, well, I had books from him on things as diverse as Candida, which I think was one that he did for the general public and was one of the more popular ones. And that's the runaway, actually. Was it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had hydrotherapy, as you say, all the neuromuscular techniques and muscle energy techniques. But also I wanted to ask about the breathing pattern disorders direction that he went to, because I know there's a story behind that. I've heard Leon
00:33:05
Speaker
tell the story. Could you give us a brief version of that story? Yes, so he was doing the videos for one of his other books, because many of them come with videos, short videos accompanying the techniques, and he'd had too much coffee, hadn't eaten, hadn't slept properly, had been traveling from London to Edinburgh or wherever on a very tight schedule,
00:33:33
Speaker
And he returned, this was 1996, he returned to London. And within the same night, I think it was, he suddenly had a series of symptoms that looked very much like a seizure or a stroke. And obviously, we were very, very concerned, got him to a hospital.
00:33:56
Speaker
neurological ward, and they couldn't find anything wrong with him. And he'd briefly had what seemed like a focal seizure and temporary paralysis of his left side.
00:34:10
Speaker
but it came back and it wasn't a stroke or a temporary stroke. It didn't appear to be anything like that and they couldn't find anything wrong with him. So after a couple of weeks of during which he grew more and more frustrated, they kept him and couldn't find anything, they were about to discharge him. And this one young neurologist who was going to check him over before signing the discharge did a hyperventilation test on him.
00:34:40
Speaker
and the hyperventilation test brought all the symptoms right back there and then. Wow. Okay. And that essentially led to the diagnosis that it was mainly hyperventiline breathing related. And that set Leon off on a quest to discover more about breathing and how it affects the body both generally and specifically. And he always, always said,
00:35:10
Speaker
if you want to know more about a subject, write a book.
00:35:15
Speaker
because you'll turn on the library as you do so, and you'll come out the other end. That's it, that's it. So, yeah, that's the backstory, too. Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, and I know a story. I don't know if you know this story, you probably do, but I was talking with Diane Lee, who, you know, of course, is a very famous physiotherapist, and she's also going to be a guest on FC2O in a couple of weeks' time, actually, which I'm excited about. Wonderful.
00:35:41
Speaker
and she's written a editorial for the general bodywork so there's lots of lots of connections there um but she
00:35:48
Speaker
Yeah, I believe she knew Leon already, and you may be able to fill in some gaps here, but she certainly was aware of his work and had said to the organizing board of the World Congress of Low Back and Pelvic Pain, which is this very elite group of medical professionals, that she really felt that he ought to be on the board and that certainly he should present at the next Congress.
00:36:13
Speaker
And I'm pretty sure it was Diane that told me this story. Well, in fact, I know it was because what she said was that there was some skepticism from other board members because Leon was an osteopath and a naturopath and wasn't a bit alternative and left the field. And she said, well, why don't we just ask him to submit a paper that he's going to present on? And sure enough, he wrote his paper. I actually don't have the title in front of me, but it was something like
00:36:42
Speaker
breathing pattern disorder and motor control, something like that, or low back pain maybe. And so he wrote this and it actually is available for those people that have access. It's available in, I think it's the International Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, but you can actually Google it and it will come up as, if you just Google breathing pattern disorder, Leon Chato and motor control, it will come up.
00:37:10
Speaker
But fantastic little paper. It's about five or six pages long. And Diane said to me that when he submitted it, not only did they the whole board say, yes, of course, he can come and present, but they actually invited him onto the board. And he was then a regular fixture from that point onwards. But they were just so impressed with it. I don't know. Were you aware of that story?
00:37:29
Speaker
I've heard the story before, but I'm not sure who from, I may even have got it from you. Or if not, I've heard that one a couple of times, not from Leon himself, truth be told. But the fact, I mean, you know,
00:37:44
Speaker
That's that's that's just typical because that's that's just typical because This is the essence of what he tried to do where he didn't try to convince people in any other ways And this is something he taught me very very early on which was simply don't be a flake if you want to be all in a given field and that given field has its rules learn the rules of
00:38:10
Speaker
play by the rules. Play by the rules, of course, in this sense means back yourself up with the research, do the job properly. And so, yeah, I'm not surprised. And I think he did that in several different situations. And that is partly what earned him the respect that he had. He really did put the work in.
00:38:37
Speaker
For sure, and of course his 80 plus textbooks and the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapy is quite a legacy to leave and one of the things that we talk about in the check system is the idea that a very healthy thing to do in terms of motivating people that are in pain or people that have health issues or challenges
00:39:02
Speaker
It's for them to really consider what is their life purpose and what's their legacy that they're going to leave. And it seems like Leon had that wrapped up pretty early on in terms of like he left an amazing legacy. But do you have any sense that whether or not he had ever almost written down, this is what I'm going to achieve, or it was just an evolving process as he worked through his life? He never thought of it that way. I can tell you that.
00:39:30
Speaker
about. He never thought of it that way. And to be honest, he thought he would live forever. That's the sad part. No.
00:39:41
Speaker
none of this was planned. He was somebody who was very much open to kind of letting the universe take you where it was going to take you. And he was a firm believer in synchronicity. When one thing wasn't working out, it just, okay, fine. One door closes, a window will open. And he was very philosophical about these things. So
00:40:10
Speaker
didn't set out to create a legacy, he just set out to help people in pain and that just developed as it developed very very organically. I think the only time that I ever got a sense that the notion of legacy was in his mind was in the last five years when he had me
00:40:33
Speaker
build and set up and organize his website and I sensed a kind of urgency in the way that he was very insistent that I don't miss anything, that all of this has to be here, all of this has to be accessible. There was almost a sense there that he was kind, I had this
00:40:55
Speaker
actually very sort of dark premonition a couple of times when we were working on that website where he's preparing legacy that's what this is and unfortunately it turned out to be true but he didn't live his life to that plan I think even up to his last day it was what can I do next
00:41:21
Speaker
And that's really, I think, it's also the way he taught me to think, to be honest, to where you don't get too fixed on one path or another. If something's working out, don't be afraid to just, you know, double back and take a new path.
00:41:39
Speaker
Amazing, I remember you saying that he was even finishing off dictating things to you from his hospital bed as to how to finish off his bachelor book and the journal of body work, editorials and all sorts. Quite literally, even on his last morning. He was very much bound by a sense of duty and a sense of
00:42:04
Speaker
a sense of wanting to keep his words and I will share this with the world. One of the very last things he said was, I hate letting people down. Thinking of the courses he'd had to cancel, of the
00:42:25
Speaker
journal, the journal issue that was actually, it was the special issue due to accompany the Fashion Congress last year. And how, well, he didn't get to finish off putting that issue together, but I did it for him. So yeah, so yeah, that was one of his very strong motivating forces to be to do the right thing.
00:42:51
Speaker
and to basically be an honourable person in all the ways that one can, really. Yeah, yeah, amazing, amazing. So he's now he died just over a year ago now, didn't he? It was September time. September last year, yes.
00:43:08
Speaker
Right, right. And I know that's put a lot of challenges onto you, onto your shoulders, or a responsibility onto your shoulders, to say the least. You've held it all together, which is amazing. And so, you know, do you want to just give us a brief overview of this last year, and then we can start to work into your whole background. But
00:43:33
Speaker
Obviously, this last year, it's been a bit of sort of all hands to the pump type scenario. And you've had to tomorrow. Sorry. Sorry.
Sasha's Role and Artistic Pursuits
00:43:42
Speaker
I was going to say, I think you've had to put your work on the back burner to some degree.
00:43:49
Speaker
Well, like I just said, Leon was very much somebody who was flexible when life threw things at him and I'm lucky in that I've learned to do the same thing.
00:44:04
Speaker
Otherwise, I don't think I'd have survived the last year, to be honest. The thing was that, again, in the previous five, six years or so, we had been discussing more and more that he
00:44:21
Speaker
And I mean, I was kind of behind the scenes already helping him out with admin stuff to do, you know, sort of technical stuff to do with the journal and to do with his work. So, you know, I was a bit of a silent secretary in a small way. And he said, you know, it's time to get you more involved simply because
00:44:45
Speaker
he knew he was getting older but because he was still very active right up until he became ill and because he always felt it was a bit of a chore to kind of
00:45:00
Speaker
Explain all the things he thought he had to explain to me in order to get me doing more for him. Yes It always just kind of got left left aside and of course the fact of the matter was then we suddenly ran out of time and
00:45:15
Speaker
And we had to work it out under extreme conditions with him very unwell, with me dealing with the emotional fallout of that as well as having to drop everything I'd been doing up to that point. But we got there and I was very fortunate for the time that, I mean, he was unwell but still with us, that he was able to talk me through a number of things. And the fact of the matter was, Matt, that
00:45:44
Speaker
Because he still functioned on a manual system, all the journal files were on his computer, everything was in his hands. There wasn't a sort of central system that anybody else had access. I had to step in or there would have been no journal.
00:46:05
Speaker
the whole thing would have come. He really did run the whole thing didn't he from his computer? He did and he had a system in place and because I think very much the same way I file things the same way I function the same way I was able to follow the breadcrumb trail when he was no longer there to tell me what to do next or what was where. So I was fortunate enough to kind of already be in it
00:46:33
Speaker
But of course then I found myself in a situation of having to contact everybody and try to coordinate everything going forward, deal with the fallout of the period while he was ill.
00:46:46
Speaker
and of course sort of basically bring order back to what was essentially chaos. So yeah, it has been difficult because obviously crisis management is always difficult. On the other hand, I was fortunate enough to sort of know what needed doing.
00:47:15
Speaker
Where were you at in your own work at that point? Because I know you had obviously done your two master's degrees and your PhD, and you have or had your own gallery, is that right? Yeah, so I was basically at the time, when me and became ill, I was in the process of
00:47:42
Speaker
I mean, basically, as I said earlier, I had trained as a fine artist originally. And in fact, a lot of my academic work had gone into sort of philosophical and theoretical explorations of ideas that I wanted then to use to enrich my actual artwork. So when I finished my PhD, which I had left
00:48:08
Speaker
painting aside for a number of years to focus on academics. And in that time when I did, I actually did a lot of academic work and publications and presentations and became very, very active in that world.
00:48:21
Speaker
but I'd always intended to go back to painting. And so I did with a vengeance, as soon as I got my PhD. And I was basically, I did several exhibitions, one after the other in the UK, in Sweden, in Greece, and was basically in that process of planning. And I'd also opened a small gallery to basically showcase,
00:48:45
Speaker
local art work from Corfu, which is where my mother comes from, and was just in the process of launching a second gallery, a larger gallery stroke event venue.
00:49:01
Speaker
which was meant to have a far broader, which I did launch, actually. I launched it three months after Leon passed, along with the journal at the same time. Well, he told me to, he told me to go ahead with it. And he told me that just a few weeks before he passed. So I kind of, I did as I told. That's it.
00:49:27
Speaker
So I was, yeah, I was in the process of planning my art, sort of developing my artwork. I run these galleries with my partner. Essentially, he runs them. He's the business head. Otherwise, obviously, I would never sleep.
00:49:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's had to, they are still functional. As for my own research and writing and publication, that had already gone, I already kind of put that on the back burner to focus more on education because in the last several years I'd been developing teacher training courses and
00:50:15
Speaker
various educational courses focused around academic writing, getting graduate students up to a level where they could publish, but also very heavily focused on training teachers to instill a sense of critical thinking and
00:50:38
Speaker
initiative for students of all ages. That's something that I am continuing. I'm simply gearing it a little bit more now to the scientific community rather than the
00:50:57
Speaker
humanities community, which is where I most focused earlier. But like I said earlier in the conversation, I had a lot of irons in the fire anyway. It's just that in the past year I've had to kind of take stock and see what can stay, what can go, and how I can sort of streamline all of it.
00:51:22
Speaker
Right now the journal is front and center of everything. It's the absolute priority right now. Along with also managing Leon's books, coming up for revision and so forth. And then alongside that I'm slowly putting everything else in place as best as best I can essentially.
00:51:50
Speaker
Yes, excellent. Well, linking these two together somewhat. I know that you've been involved with and aware of a couple of papers that I've co-written with Paul Czech on the ghost in the machine. And we asked the question is muscular skeletal medicine lacking soul? And I think that there is certainly some common ground there between what we're
00:52:16
Speaker
posing in those papers and the kind of work you were already involved in with your art. And, you know, in particular, this kind of, I guess, what would be the right way to say it, perhaps, you know, looking at the numinous and the way that different beliefs around
00:52:39
Speaker
Well, in fact, I guess probably the best way to say is that many people have beliefs, in fact, everyone has beliefs, but it's understanding how those beliefs influence the way people behave. And I think certainly a lot of your studies, now, you studied a guy called Peledin, is that right? That's right. That's right. Yes. Yeah.
00:53:01
Speaker
Now, would he link in with this? I was listening to an interview you did about him and his work, and it sounded like there were some parallels with what we had discussed in those papers. So where would you go with that? Oh, I could go all sorts of places with that. Excellent. Well, I mean, you're right in that an individual's beliefs, whatever they may be,
00:53:31
Speaker
will ultimately govern how they face a given health problem or simply their own well-being, how they treat themselves. I've even been observing it with, I suppose, what you'd call the grieving process, which can sort of link into health issues as well.
00:54:01
Speaker
and observing how my own process is so very different to those of others and ultimately it comes back to
00:54:07
Speaker
this idea of a belief system. Are we more logic-bound? Are we more reason-bound? Or are we more spiritual creatures or something in between? Now, you asked about my friend, Peladan, for those who obviously have never heard of him before, which is most people, because he's not very famous outside a very small kind of niche area of cultural history. He was a very interesting
00:54:36
Speaker
French author in the 19th century and his whole life's work was dedicated to the idea that only art
00:54:49
Speaker
could raise the sort of spiritual and intellectual level of society, of individuals first in society later, to sort of ever have a hope of climbing out of the slum of decadence, the swamp of decadence that he saw society descending into in his time.
00:55:15
Speaker
Well, whether it did or didn't there's lots of people who say that about today's world as well. So It's always topical now the his his whole I suppose axiom can be summed up as seek to seek to do seek beauty in all things and before anything else start with yourself start by
00:55:43
Speaker
sort of applying the higher ideals and by ideals he meant virtues, he meant behavioral patterns and reflect them to reflect those in our external sort of behaviors out in society but also towards ourselves. So try to apply the ideal at all times and all things and he perceives the ideal
00:56:09
Speaker
as an objective value, not as a subjective value. He perceived it basically in the terms of ancient Greek philosophy, which would be, I'm sure many have heard the phrase pan-metron, aryston, which means, how do I translate that one? That all things in good measure, that one should seek a middle ground, no extremes. Right, yeah.
00:56:40
Speaker
this sort of balance, advices and virtues. And I think that can be taken and applied to all sorts of things. So for example, there's nothing wrong with having an occasional sort of, for example, alcoholic drink, or there's nothing really with having an occasional sort of
00:56:59
Speaker
a really rich dessert, but if you do it every day, yeah, it's going to make you sick. It's very much common sense, but it's common sense expressed in a much more sort of aesthetic way. And so that may not be a bad thing because ultimately if we surround ourselves by ugliness or if we
00:57:23
Speaker
live a life in the fast lane and in the rat race in big concrete cities where they're filled with exhaust fumes where we barely ever come up for air and then we you know after burning the midnight oil for several weeks we suddenly crash and wonder why well yeah maybe taking time off to go and look at something beautiful go see a play not don't just crash on the couch and watch Netflix you know if
00:57:53
Speaker
go do something that actually has something of a higher value or some kind of aesthetic value. I shouldn't say a higher value, but it's an aesthetic value. I'm trying to avoid saying it's good for the soul.
00:58:09
Speaker
because there are those who don't believe in that. And I really want to know that as well, actually. But that's a kind of connection through some of the things. Well, that brings up a few things for me. One of the things it brings up is just the phrase that we say everything in moderation, but that should include moderation. Right.
00:58:37
Speaker
So there's that. But I think a nice link to Leon's work into the whole naturopathic side of things is the naturopathic triad, which has in each corner biochemistry, biomechanics and emotions or psychology, you could say. And I think this is where one of the
00:58:56
Speaker
challenges with being two reductionists can occur is if you just look at something biochemically like the example you gave of alcohol or a sweet dessert
Health Philosophy and Alchemy
00:59:05
Speaker
or it could be any number of things that have a biochemical effect. If you just evaluate it biochemically, you probably say, well, alcohol just really isn't a good idea. There's no
00:59:17
Speaker
nutritional benefit to that. But from an emotional or social perspective, you know, if it's if it's the chosen way that your society relaxes and socializes, and that it helps you to relax and, and, you know, aside from that, your biochemical health is good. And this is this what I was explained to patients is that, you know, if you've already got a leaky gut, and you've already got blood sugar, dysregulation, and you've already got, you know, adrenal stress, and then you want to add alcohol to that mix,
00:59:44
Speaker
then that's probably not a really, it's gonna be very difficult to justify that. But if you are looking after yourself well enough that having a few beers on a Friday night is what you'd like to do emotionally to relax or a glass of wine with your meal is what you do to supplement the meal and to relax with your partner or whatever. I think that's where the naturopathic triad says so much more than if you just looked down the microscope at the alcohol.
01:00:12
Speaker
It's really important to keep that in mind because, like I said, I was trying very hard to avoid the phrase, it's good for the soul because I'm...
01:00:22
Speaker
I am thinking of those people who really do perceive things in far more... Again, I'm struggling to find the right words right now, but perhaps... I think just use the words that come to you. No, precision's important here. But in far more rationalist terms. Now, rationalism is a good thing. It's an important thing. But again, it needs moderation because
01:00:52
Speaker
as you said very correctly, if all you're looking at is biochemistry, then we're all going to die anyway. And even if there are those who do not, I mean, I saw this, unfortunately, I saw this up close and personal in situations where
01:01:16
Speaker
doctors of conventional medicine would only look at the biochemistry of a situation, would only look at the protocols governing a situation, and that was all in black and white. They would forget they had a real person in front of them.
01:01:34
Speaker
And that was compounded by the narrow specialization of whichever field they were specialized in. So you get a neurologist and a gastroenterologist to communicate over something. Well, they can't do it unless they have a general practitioner translating. Or at least that's unfortunately a situation that we encountered
01:01:58
Speaker
last year, time and time and time again. That in itself points out some of the shortcomings of the absolutely rationalistic approach to human health. You've got a real person there and if you don't look at the psychological dimension or what you would call the biopsychosocial dimension as well, if people who are
01:02:27
Speaker
even people who are desperately ill are not given a bit of respite and a bit of beauty, I'll say, then, well, I don't know if saving the body is much good because what you'll have left is broken. Or at least that's the way it seems trying to take a sort of overview position.
01:02:51
Speaker
Now, okay, there are those who don't believe in the soul, who think that that's secondary, who think that first you need to save the body, then you can worry about the rest. And there are situations, there are emergency situations where that is true. But when you're looking at chronic situations, long-term sort of supporting well-being and so forth, I don't think, I don't think it's sustainable really to do it in that way. Yeah.
01:03:16
Speaker
Well, and I think also, of course, the soul has as many definitions probably as there are people talking about it. But what we tried to convey in our paper was the idea that, and this is why we call it the ghost in the machine, is that, of course, there's many unseen factors that influence us as individuals and subjective things that influence us, which are not measurable. For example, love.
01:03:44
Speaker
This is one of the things that Paul Chekhov says when people question, you know, get someone who's very objective or very rationalist and, you know, he says, well, you know, if
01:03:57
Speaker
the subjective is so meaningless. How would life be without love? Could you function without love? And if you couldn't, which most people say no, that would be a real challenge and it would make life really not worth living. Then so how do you measure that? And how do you objectify that? And of course, the reality is that you can't do that. You can't measure love. Actually, if I may interrupt right there, you can, because if you look at studies on, for example,
01:04:27
Speaker
premature babies and affection and touch, that might go some way towards a type of measurement or studies on children brought up in isolation or in the past, the terrible methods they had for
01:04:45
Speaker
children with learning disabilities or various mental health disorders, and you see quite plainly that being raised or living in an environment without affection, which is as measurable a thing we have for love, the damage it wreaks, therefore I think it can be objectified.
01:05:12
Speaker
in that sense. Yes, I can see that. I think where I was going with my original comments before I started talking about love per se was that there's many different facets to life which are
01:05:28
Speaker
so complex and I think this is another aspect of what we talked about there's so many interacting factors and so this is where the biopsychosocial view is so important is that you know you've got the individual within their within their own context within their family within their social group and then you've got the social groups within a community in that communities within a broader society and all of those things are affecting the individual in
01:05:57
Speaker
pretty much unmeasurable ways because the complexity is so high and so what we were suggesting in the papers was that certainly in chaos theory and in complexity theory then what seems to happen is that order can emerge from chaos and it normally emerges in entities which can be termed attractors or attractor states
01:06:24
Speaker
And so, you know, I've written about this a little bit in the Journal of Body Work in other areas as well. But where I'm taking this too is that we talked when we met a few months ago, we talked about archetypes and Jung and alchemy. And, you know, one of the things that strikes me about Jung's archetypes is that they're a form of attractor in the psychological domain.
01:06:54
Speaker
So, so they, you know, if you say hero, everyone has a sense for that is, you know, you might not be able to specifically define it, because it's going to be context dependent, you know, it's, and there's, there's cultural influences and all sorts. So there's this kind of ghost like, or, you know,
01:07:11
Speaker
hidden aspects behind what that actually means. But it is an attractor of sorts. And so, you know, I started talking with you about Jung and alchemy because alchemy has been a part of your work, but you had some interesting insights there. I was wondering how you're going to weave that one in.
01:07:39
Speaker
So, yeah, a couple of things. Just in terms of mentioning the archetypes before I jump to alchemy, these are symbolic, these are symbolic vocabularies that we share as sort of culture-specific communities, absolutely. And yes, they'll be different for each individual, but they are also some, it's the kind of thing that binds and binds a culture together, that binds a community together.
01:08:05
Speaker
And so, yes, it is important and you can't really uproot someone from their belief system that easily, not in the wild. Within academics you're supposed to, but that's not what we're talking about. So, yes, that is, I think, very important to take into consideration.
01:08:25
Speaker
when you're dealing with someone, especially someone who's vulnerable, who's in pain, who's been through chronic illness, anything like that. These are touch points of a larger framework that if it's ignored,
01:08:42
Speaker
Basically, you're not actually helping the person, you're helping some bones and some muscles or something. And that doesn't quite seem right. Now, alchemy is an interesting, again, I'll call it a framework for perceiving actually what we're talking about as well. I did say when we spoke, and I'll say it again,
01:09:10
Speaker
Jung's interpretation of alchemy did something very interesting for his area of work, did something very, very bad for the accurate historical understanding of alchemy because alchemy was never meant to be used, there was never a mind-body divide
01:09:37
Speaker
in the original historical perception of alchemy. Jung kind of cut away the physical or the practical, the tangible side of it all, and focused only on the symbolic and then psychologized that. And that was completely ahistorical. So to a historian, it's anathema. It was a thing, it was useful, but to a historian, it's actually all wrong. And
01:10:04
Speaker
What's sad about it from my perspective is that actually if you look at what alchemy really was historically it's so and it's no it's not about turning legend to gold that's meant to be symbolic. Can I just also sort of flag that up right now?
01:10:18
Speaker
Okay, yeah. That was the sort of archetypal, forgive, no pun intended, the archetypal concept of some half-crazed magician in a laboratory desperately trying to get rich by turning lead to gold. It's pop culture, it's a misunderstanding that's hundreds of years old actually, but it's not actually what alchemy was ever all about. It began
01:10:48
Speaker
It was born out of tribal type religious practices that grew up around early metalworking. This is right back at the beginning of the Bronze Age, before the Bronze Age.
01:11:08
Speaker
That's how far back it goes. It had a religious, it had a spiritual dimension because it began through discovering or seeing meteorites fall and discovering the way to get the metal ore out of the rocks. This became a very
01:11:36
Speaker
spiritual spiritually connected practice because obviously at the time it was perceived as this was a gift from the gods so it needed it was a sacred now this became refined down down the centuries and it's far too complex to go into in any detail but the essence was that anybody working with natural substances because this also extended to textiles it also extended to
01:12:04
Speaker
creating the pigments that would be used for colouring clothes, again, as I say, down the centuries, or indeed refining ore to get metals and precious metals. All of this was seen as a sacred process that could only be conducted correctly, could only be successful
01:12:31
Speaker
if the individual doing it was also performing a similar type of purification within themselves as they were attempting to also refine the natural substance that they were working with. At the heart of the alchemical sort of process is very much this idea that you don't
01:12:58
Speaker
work against nature. It's not an attempt to control nature, to overpower nature. It's about working, observing very, very carefully and patiently and working with nature, but simply speeding up the process a little bit with the help of fire and help of distilling and then allowing something to cool and then all the various practical processes
01:13:27
Speaker
And this had to be something that the alchemical practitioner would also be undergoing on an internal level because they had to learn to think this way in order to be able to do it right.
01:13:39
Speaker
So one of the people I interviewed a couple of weeks back was a lady called Monica Galliano and she wrote a book called Thus Spoke the Plants and essentially she spent time so she's a post-grad university professor and she is
01:14:04
Speaker
doing research currently and historically with plants from all around the world. But she has essentially established that she's got the objective side of her plant work, and then she's got the subjective side, which is where she kind of goes more inward. And these are not necessarily psychedelic plants. These are plants that she does what's called the dieta, which is a traditional practice.
01:14:28
Speaker
where you just eat a small amount of the plant, but you're in seclusion and you wait to see what the plant teaches you subjectively. And then she uses that to inform her objective experiments, which she does back in the lab in Sydney. So it's a very interesting mix of two worlds, but she has to be doing the, in her view, she has to be doing the inner work.
01:14:49
Speaker
to be able to inform the outer work and indeed many of the indigenous cultures talk about how the plants themselves give the kind of instructions or the information
01:15:02
Speaker
in order that we can go away and do the objective work after that. And indeed, that's what many medicine men, medicine women and shamans have said across eons is that it's the plants that tell them how to make the medicines and so on. So it's a very, it's very foreign to our kind of scientific materialist
01:15:21
Speaker
upbringing if you like, but it sounds like there's a parallel there with what you're talking about with our chemical processes. It does and I think it can be translated to the scientific by simple, but all it is is extremely detailed and careful observation. What you're describing with this process of sort of maybe ingesting a little of the plant, I'm sure they don't just do that, I'm sure they watch it as well and they watch how it behaves in
01:15:50
Speaker
in under given environmental conditions and different conditions. I was quite surprised. I've got this huge Swiss cheese plant in my studio, which is conservatory, so it's glass on two sides. And I had never realized, but I watch this plant every day and it actually swivels, the whole thing swivels. And because the leaves are so large, I can't miss it. And it's that kind of, if you do that consciously,
01:16:20
Speaker
after a time, you're going to attune to it. And there's nothing magical or mumbo jumbo about it. It's about the stillness that allows that one to be open to learning from observation itself. And then when you can take those observations, and then you can apply the scientific method by recording it and using whatever tools we have,
01:16:40
Speaker
in our arsenal to record these things. That's how alchemy became chemistry. Alchemy only became chemistry because at some point methods were developed to try to control for confounding factors and so on and so forth. And therefore it became more organized. We forget this in the present day. We're taught the other way around. So we're taught this is the method, cut out everything except that. And we forget that it's about observe first.
01:17:11
Speaker
just observe, just observe everything, note everything down. So with the plants you're talking about, okay, taste it as well, see if it does anything. Is there a sort of something in the taste that will lead you in a certain direction and raise certain questions that will then lead to research questions and things like that? So I don't think, you know, you're quite right. We are taught to think differently because we're taught backwards.
01:17:38
Speaker
Whereas observation is the mother of science. And I doubt that anybody would disagree with that because, well, that's how mathematics and science started. Ask Aristotle.
01:17:51
Speaker
Yes, yes. So this, this, as you say, so this is pre Bronze Age, so therefore pre Cartesian or before Descartes said, describe the my body split. And so really, it was taken as a given that this alchemical process was, you know, both
01:18:11
Speaker
mind and body were as one. They were involved in the process as a kind of engagement. And externally, if you were doing it for greed, said the alchemists of the medieval alchemists, if you were doing it for greed, you were going to fail. End of story. There was no way you could succeed because you had to have this self-discipline, this inner
01:18:37
Speaker
Silence, if you like, to give the space to your substance to show you whatever it was going to show you.
01:18:45
Speaker
So would this be somewhat animistic in its way? Did people imagine that there was, like you said, that the metals were gifts from the gods within the rocks? Did people sense that these different substances were somehow animated, as it were? They certainly gave them characterisations like that. You know, if we're going to talk about sort of prehistoric
01:19:14
Speaker
sacred practices. Yes, there would have been an animistic dimension to that. Later on, that kind of became the symbolic mythology that actually personified the elements and the substances, became a symbolic vehicle for communicating alchemical
01:19:37
Speaker
secrets or the actual process itself. So if you wanted the recipe to, I don't know, refine iron ore into something of a higher quality, then you would have to understand and be able to read the symbolic language through the language of myth
01:20:04
Speaker
and later through the language of image. So it wasn't even put down in words, it was put down in images. Because until the Enlightenment, until basically the 18th century, this was more common, the language of symbol and image was far more common.
01:20:24
Speaker
than the sort of black and white lessons on a page. Because it was felt that this could communicate things all at once, it was a process of realisation and being able to think in that way, which was during the Renaissance was, I mean, it was an absolute art form.
01:20:49
Speaker
the more complex the image that you were able to decode, like Renaissance painters played with these ideas, they played with symbolic language, and the more complex the painting, the more intelligent and the more well-educated the owner. So in fact, it was a very different way of thinking, but it did require intellectual refinements, mental refinements, spiritual refinements,
01:21:18
Speaker
And as for the physical side, well, if you were unhealthy, you weren't going to get very far with any of it. So you had to, all things had to be in balance, you see. So how did this link with your own work as an artist? So, alchemy is the reason I got into the studies I got into in the first place, because
01:21:41
Speaker
I've always been, I think in pictures and I have an idea. Yes, so it's in anesthesia, right, as well. I have an idiotic memory and I think in pictures. All of that, yeah, all of that's pretty interesting. It's a weird way of seeing the world because I can also perceive it in a more rational way, but I've had to sort of, that's the training.
01:22:06
Speaker
I picked up a book on alchemy one day and I was blown away by the imagery.
01:22:13
Speaker
And I'd picked up bits and pieces, I suppose, here and there. And I was trying with my art. I always, when I paint, I like to tell stories. I like to build whole, whole symbolic narratives.
Art as a Precursor to Science
01:22:26
Speaker
And I realized that I wasn't very good at finding the symbols I wanted, and that I had great big gaps in my knowledge. So essentially, when I went off to study cultural history, I did so.
01:22:40
Speaker
because I wanted to learn and understand these symbolic vocabularies so that I could then take them back and use them in my own work. And not just by copying them, but understanding the dynamics between them and how I could build these symbolic narratives with various layers of imagery. And all of that was inspired initially by alchemy and by alchemical images. So I took a focus route.
01:23:10
Speaker
Yeah, amazing. So now, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that some of what you've been describing there around symbology is related into things like logos in modern day, you know, you spot an Apple logo and straight away it conjures
01:23:27
Speaker
much more information than the logo itself. So it gives you a whole sort of raft of information. It's instantaneous. So it's like you say, it's kind of an instant download, you know what that means. Whereas the written word obviously is detail oriented, and you have to go into each word and put that into context. And it can take a lot longer to explain
01:23:52
Speaker
the same thing, like the old phrase, pictures worth a thousand works. So if that's right. Now, also you alluded to the fact that a really well put together painting will be sort of laced with symbology and will be reflective. The owner's intelligence, let's say, is reflected in the detail of the symbology. But is there something innate in human consciousness about symbols and symbology? So would a painting that's
01:24:21
Speaker
packed with symbology like what you've been describing. Would that say a lot more to us on a level that perhaps we're not even conscious of, even if we haven't studied symbology? I think it probably would, but we've forgotten how to think that way because we're taught differently now, we're conditioned differently now.
01:24:42
Speaker
So, and because it's a way of thinking that we are no longer used to, we have to either relearn or rediscover, at least in the West, because there are cultures where this is, I mean, even in Greek culture, for example, this is, this is easier to do because this kind of imagery is still part of the culture in a certain way. But in say, in Northern, for one,
01:25:10
Speaker
Central Europe onwards and westwards, say, it's not really in the conditioning or the culture as much. So often, often enough, one would look at a painting like that and either admire it for technique and begin to break it down in a much more rationalistic way.
01:25:31
Speaker
And those reactions I've seen, I've had, and I find them amusing. The thing is, you see, though, it's just a shift in thinking. Now, this was something that was normal when the
01:25:52
Speaker
classical system of education, which was the Trivium and the Quadrivium, which were basically the model for education all the way up to until the Enlightenment, which was when taxonomies took over the system we have today, and encyclopedic knowledge and categorizing everything took over.
01:26:12
Speaker
Um, but this is what I suppose you can call it. It's a different mode of perception altogether. So, um, the minute you mentioned the Apple logo and most people will say, oh, Apple computers, iPhone, and that's where they'll, that's where they'll stop. But if you were doing that, if you were looking at the equivalent 500 years ago, you would also see the.
01:26:39
Speaker
social dimension, several of the cultural dimensions. So, oh, this refers to people who have a particular preference in the way that they communicate because Apple computers work differently to PCs and
01:26:54
Speaker
they're probably slightly financially better off. And they probably like to be outside the norm and or don't mind being outside the norm and thinking outside the box because that's what Apple has positioned itself as. And you keep going on from there by associating one thing with another. And what was just an Apple loaded logo conjuring Apple computers suddenly becomes a sim or an actual symbol, a symbol hides layers upon layers upon layers. And so
01:27:24
Speaker
There are shifts in thinking, and that's a whole discussion in itself. There are shifts in thinking that occur, whether you're looking at a symbol or a painting or an emblem, which is, as you say, instant download that also influences perception permanently. You learn to see like that every time. And like this was the norm.
01:27:51
Speaker
up until about 400 years ago, but three, 400. And it's not, I firmly believe it's not incompatible with modern thinking, but each has its place. Each has its place. Each does a slightly different job. And I think they can complement each other rather than being at odds.
01:28:15
Speaker
Right, right, yeah, yeah. Now one of the things that I mentioned to you, and I'm sure you have a lot of already, you know, established thoughts and insights, is a book that I became aware of, actually, not through reading the book, but through seeing this guy's presentations on YouTube, called Art and Physics, Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light. And this is chap Leonard Schlane, really talks about how
01:28:42
Speaker
art seems to precede science in its expression. And I thought as an artist and someone who also has there in the scientific world as well, I'd be very interested to understand your take on that.
01:28:59
Speaker
Well, I haven't come across this speaker author. This is a raw reaction, but ultimately I think we need to remember that science is about asking questions and science is about uncertainty.
01:29:20
Speaker
And as I say, I think in education and in conditioning, we come at it backwards nowadays. So we just teach the bare bones of what somebody needs in order to graduate and get through a course and get their certification and get on with their lives. But we don't give a sort of full backdrop to the larger purpose. What is science for?
01:29:50
Speaker
sciences for answering questions. Okay. But when we don't know anything, how do we pose a question about something we don't know? Well, that's where art can come in. And art can come in because it can show us the impossible. And then it's possible to reverse engineer out of that and start posing sensible questions. Did that make sense?
01:30:12
Speaker
Maybe not. Well, yeah, I mean, I can certainly, I can certainly follow what you're saying. I'm just trying to think of a kind of real world, real world example of why art would be useful in that way. So how art could, because art is innately a process of, it's curiosity. Art
01:30:37
Speaker
Art is driven by curiosity. How can I use this colour? How can I depict X? So suddenly I've depicted, I'm just thinking of Marc Chagall for no particular reason. I've got a picture by Marc Chagall in my head. Okay. So multi-coloured floating woman over floating weirdly shaped objects. Okay, that's a vision straight from the imagination. Fantastic.
01:31:07
Speaker
So what questions can it lead us to ask? What questions could that just that image drive us to ask? It can drive us to ask questions about flight. What are the limits of the physical? That's one direction I could go with that. Now, another direction, I mean, again, talking about physics, we talk about the laws of physics as if they're set in stone.
01:31:37
Speaker
they're what we know so far. We talk about, I'm thinking astrophysics here, but looking for looking for life on other planets, I think it's now been established that is or it's now been agreed that well,
01:31:54
Speaker
we're looking for carbon-based life, but what if, silicon-based, it's those, that, art is the world of those what ifs, you see, whether it's flying or anything else. And so the language of myth and the language of art are sort of the free reign of those faculties that ask those questions. But if we begin with,
01:32:21
Speaker
where we are now which is okay gravity and yes the the world turning at a certain speed and just what I can see around me well we're not going to get very far in asking questions in asking the big questions or yes
01:32:41
Speaker
Right, yeah, because I think when we first started talking about Peledin, you know, you were saying about how art, well, one perception is that only art can can raise society's, I guess, level of consciousness or awareness is one perceived use for art or faculty.
01:33:05
Speaker
that in that case art isn't art is qualified though it's not art at all art any art because he he was very very strict on what true beauty and true harmony were and that art as he meant it had to be beautiful and beauty was defined by having
01:33:29
Speaker
a sense of truth and the truth, the good and the beautiful as the habit. So it had a deeper message. It had some kind of, again, layer that had to do with the idealized version of what humanity could be.
01:33:48
Speaker
and almost a divine humanity reconciled with, reconciled with whatever we consider to be, well, I hesitate to say fallen, but damaged or not quite imperfect, rather, within us. By showing images that, symbolic images that depicted what the ideal could look like,
01:34:17
Speaker
he believed that people could, first of all, aspire to it, and secondly, cultivate themselves to the level where they could try to embody that in themselves. Yes, yes, absolutely. But art had to be of a particular nature in order to do that. It couldn't be just anything. Right. Yeah, okay, I understand. Good, good.
01:34:39
Speaker
Yeah, he provides strict definitions for that. Right, right. Fascinating stuff. So one thing I wanted to ask you about before we start to wind up was that you wrote a paper on synesthesia. I did. Which I have a copy of
Time, Legacy, and Compassion
01:34:54
Speaker
here. And I remember reading through it. It's only a brief paper. But this is because you experience synesthesia yourself. And how has that
01:35:06
Speaker
influenced your own journey into artwork and you know where you find yourself at now? Well I mean first of all to say I explored synesthesia more deeply and I read up a lot on neuroscience I mean in another language I've gone in that direction from the start so I keep a close eye on research into that kind of thing and
01:35:30
Speaker
because it is developing. A lot of new research is coming out now in that area. So synesthesia. Before you go further, can I just explain what it is in case people don't know? I was out there helping, but go for it. Well, I was just reading actually the introduction. You were saying as an example, the number three may be perceived as red or as having a fluffy texture or a sour taste.
01:35:57
Speaker
So, I mean, is that something that you have personally experienced or you've got other examples that you would give? Yeah, so that's the most common type is graphene colour synesthesia. It's called where the letters of the alphabet, the numbers and maybe even whole words, days of the week, have their own colour. Even as we're speaking, every word you say,
01:36:22
Speaker
has a colour. I can see the words printed in my head in its colour, as you see, which is very odd. And other people have different types of synesthesia, where it's sound to colour, sound to flavour, or scent, or it could be a touch, and suddenly they get a burst of colour in their mind's eye. And all of this appears in the mind's eye.
01:36:47
Speaker
Now, this was, I mean, it's an anomaly. It's been called a condition which is a bit problematic. Scientists, researchers aren't yet certain whether it's the situation whereby some neural pathways simply do not separate fully as an infant brain develops. So some neural pathways
01:37:14
Speaker
related to the senses simply keep overlapping and that's why it happens. There is a slightly higher incidence among people on the autistic spectrum and they're still discovering a lot about synesthesia. In the main, it's just a harmless quirk that can be fun.
01:37:39
Speaker
I found, I've always been a synesthetic, my mother's synesthetic, it runs in families. And I would always, like I say, when you speak, I can see the words in my head in their color and then if I go drill deeper, each letter has its color and so on. I thought everybody saw this until I started talking about it as a child and discovered no, actually not everybody has this.
01:38:06
Speaker
And I think what it's given me most is the ability to see different layers to things and situations. So in a given sentence, I hear the meaning, I see the words, I see whether it's well put together as a sentence, I see the grammar, but then I also see the layers
01:38:29
Speaker
these random layers of color. And that it kind of helps me see a whole layers of things and their connections. I think that's the way I would put it.
01:38:45
Speaker
I know, I haven't personally used it artistically. It hasn't really interested me to do so. But I do know that there have been many artists that have, and poets like Joe Kandinsky used it in his art, obviously, in fact. But for me, it's more of an intellectual tool, I would say.
01:39:09
Speaker
Right, right. I was going to say, you know, so rather than a picture painting a thousand words, it's a word painting a thousand pictures almost. Yes, yeah, yeah, that's quite right. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing that struck me is that I've read the figure that 96% of what we see is not coming from the eye. So essentially it's coming from the brain. So our brain is forming 96% of the images that we're seeing.
01:39:39
Speaker
And that's an average figure across the population. So, you know, it makes me wonder, obviously, with someone with synesthetic abilities, perhaps everyone has that to some degree, but they're perhaps, you know,
01:39:56
Speaker
less conscious of it or that it's just another aspect of putting our own spin onto what we're actually seeing or a kind of a lens that we're looking through. I don't know if that makes any sense. Well, I mean, again, based on the research so far, synesthesia is not thought to be something that can be cultivated.
01:40:22
Speaker
you've either got it or not. So in that sense it's a gift and some people do nothing with it, some people actually try to suppress it, some people revel in it and like I say for me personally it's a tool for, it's a gift which is quite useful because it helps me see something on several levels all at once which I can then take and do something with.
01:40:46
Speaker
For other people that I believe is a skill that can be cultivated in a sense through critical thought but I don't know what shape it would take and I don't know whether it would go to the same, develop to the same degree or whether it would have the same, again it's a mode of perception which one would have to consciously work on to cultivate if it's not already there, I think.
01:41:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. No, that makes a lot of sense. Great. Well, look, to, to, to wind up, one of the things that, um, that I've, I've written about a little bit, uh, various points and have presented on is, is this concept of what I call dimensional mastery. And, and this is really the idea that, um, if you look at different life forms and the standard evolutionary tree, if you like, then what you see is that across time different, uh,
01:41:44
Speaker
creatures emerge, and they have mastery of a specific spatial dimension. And as you move up that evolutionary tree, you see the spatial dimensions become mastered sequentially one by one until you reach humans, which in that model would be at the pinnacle. And they have mastered the transverse plane dimension. But also, they did so of the higher primates.
01:42:09
Speaker
where we differ from most other animals is that we seem to have this mastery of the fourth dimension, which is time. We're able to project forwards into a possible future and backwards into a past, certainly to a much larger degree than other creatures. And I believe it's that capacity that
01:42:31
Speaker
really almost enforces the requirement for us to ask what's known as the perennial questions and to make us consider that perhaps there is something after we die or there was something before we were born and looping it back in with the discussion of the soul.
01:42:50
Speaker
Also, if you were to take a much more rational stance on that, then one of the things that does transcend time is what we actually do with our lives and what we produce and things like books and when we teach others and when we invest time in others, which is exactly what, of course, Leon did so much in such a prolific way.
01:43:18
Speaker
And also, you know, it relates to your own work and what you started out early on saying about your fascination with how ideas travel through time. And I think that's part of what does transcend, you know, our own lifetimes and lives beyond our own lives is the ideas that we engage with and that we perpetuate in a kind of mimetic style almost. So I thought that linked it all together. And I wondered if you had anything to say on that front.
01:43:48
Speaker
Well, if you'd asked me a couple of years ago, I would have sort of said you've covered all bases and I have nothing to add. But where I am now, and this is very much coming out of a place of loss, this is an extremely painful loss, is that ultimately, I think, I mean, what we leave behind only matters
01:44:18
Speaker
if it's improved, if it's touched lives for the good. And when I say touched lives for the good, I mean helped people in some way, compassion. Life ultimately, or at least this is where I see things right now.
01:44:37
Speaker
there is a lot of pain, there is a lot of agony, there is a sense of futility to a lot of it, and ultimately what we leave behind is what is remembered well of us, and whether that's touching someone's life in healing, in compassion, in kindness,
01:45:01
Speaker
And whatever form that takes, it can be one-to-one, it can be Kindness to a Stranger, or it can be a book that will help somebody else heal somebody else 100 years from now. So that's where, and that actually,
01:45:21
Speaker
because you mentioned time and this idea of looking back, looking forward, looking for meaning. That is because I've had to rethink an awful lot, obviously, after the events.
01:45:38
Speaker
past year or so and I sort of say to myself well what on earth is the point of just painting more pictures to drag them halfway across the world and put them on show and just so that you know I can sell a few and some people can enjoy them and look at my stories what on earth is the point of that whereas
01:46:01
Speaker
The idea that those can could actually be imbued with some kind of quality that could either heal or comfort or bring a little bit of light, bring a little bit of beauty into someone's life or several someone's lives. Yes. Or on the flip side, books and research and helping that to grow in a way that, again,
01:46:30
Speaker
can bring wellbeing and less pain to people's lives. Yeah, that has meaning. That has meaning.
From Chaos to Order: Wisdom and Reflections
01:46:40
Speaker
And it isn't timeless because research evolves, we learn new things, things get outdated, they turn out to be wrong. We don't know what lies down the road. But at the very least, it will have touched and assisted and supported someone somewhere
01:46:59
Speaker
in the moment and I think that has to be enough because a few less people hurting perhaps means a few kinder people because they're able to have the space to do that.
01:47:15
Speaker
that's where I am with that right now. Yeah, that makes makes perfect sense. And it fits with the research that's out there as well. And when you look at persistent pain and how that draws people into themselves, and they care less about the world, and understandably, that the focus becomes their own challenges. But but if we can help people to hurt a little less and to love a little more and, you know, to enjoy life more than
01:47:42
Speaker
as you say, that that has its own legacy. So yeah, that's fantastic. Well, I think that's all ultimately hostility, unkindness, all the negatives, all the negative, jealousy, malice, all of that. It all comes from a place of pain, you know, wherever that pain comes from.
01:48:03
Speaker
So whatever it is, whether it's a piece of beautiful artwork or a beautiful sunrise or a healing touch, whatever it is that can alleviate that to any degree is surely doing something right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, fantastic.
01:48:21
Speaker
Well, Sasha, thank you so much for your time today. And I don't know if you have anything, any parting words of wisdom. You've mentioned it once already, but this podcast is called From Chaos to Order. And I don't know if you have any words of wisdom or from your own experiences through your artwork or life in general of how to
01:48:44
Speaker
help move from the chaos of everyday life into better order. I think we've more or less just summarized it in that last couple of minutes. But have you got anything that you would add? I would say, you know, don't take life too seriously because we're all going to die. Don't take yourself seriously because none of us is that important. Be open and be kind. And from there,
01:49:12
Speaker
we're all doing the best we can. Ultimately, ambition and ego and all the rest of that, they're pretty meaningless at the end. I don't know if they're words of wisdom, but I don't think we need to take ourselves quite so seriously sometimes, but we can
01:49:34
Speaker
um certainly try to better whatever's around us to touch the next person was nice beautiful fantastic that's fantastic that's great thank you so much for your time Sasha and and if people um would like to learn more about your your own work uh or indeed if if we have people out there that are looking to submit papers to the journal journal of body work and movement therapies then um then what i'll do is i'll um
Closing Remarks and Future Plans
01:50:02
Speaker
I'll put details relating back to the journal onto the show notes, but is there anything that you would share with people if they want to look at some of your work or to understand more about your art background?
01:50:15
Speaker
Well, right now my personal website is under reconstruction because it was all overdue. The website www.peladan.net has basically a lot of my older research work and some art work.
01:50:33
Speaker
is not totally representative, but it's all I've got right now. And yeah, other than that, what I'm, yeah, other than that, track me through the journal editorials, I'd say. Excellent. Okay. Fantastic. Fantastic. Brilliant. Well, thank you again for your time, Sasha. And we will be in touch, no doubt, but I'll let you know when this is out and about and ready for people to listen to. Terrific. Terrific. Well, thank you, Matt. That's a pleasure. All right. See you soon. All right. Take care.
01:51:06
Speaker
Well, what can I say? Sasha is a truly amazing and inspirational woman in the mould of her father before her. What amazing accomplishments she saw through her father, and has gone on to achieve already in such a short space of time. I haven't quite calculated it out, but I'm guessing Sasha's around 40 years of age if she was at secondary school in the 90s. So three master's degrees, one PhD, one journal managing editor role, and two galleries. Well, that certainly puts me to shame.
01:51:34
Speaker
In spite of our close working relationship, I only saw Leon present a few times live. Now the penultimate time I did that was when I was presenting at the Osteopaths New Zealand conference in 2014 in Toppo, or Taupo, as my old mouldy clinic manager used to tell me those dumb white guys say.
01:51:52
Speaker
At that same conference Phil Beach who I interviewed for episode 12 of FC2O was also there and I'm headed back to New Zealand in March 2020 to both put on a two-day seminar in Auckland and to do a two-day workshop with Phil Beach in Wellington. Details of both can be found at mattewaldon.com so to secure your ticket or to find out more information head over there. Thanks for listening, bye for now and see you on the next show.