Today on I’ll Follow You, I’m super excited to share my recent conversation with author and journalist Saga Briggs.
(You can stream our chat via the embed here or pretty much anywhere else you source your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and Google Podcasts.)
If you’re listening to the episode on the day it initially goes live, Saga’s first book will be officially published tomorrow, Tuesday, September 19, 2023. It’s called How to Change Your Body: The Science of Interoception and Healing Through Connection to Yourself and Others and, as you’ll hear me enthusiastically state at the top of our chat, I really think everyone should read it.
Beyond the book, she’s written articles for Scientific American, Aeon+Psyche, and DoubleBlind magazine and has worked as an editor for both the MIND European Foundation for Psychedelic Science and the digital magazine InformED. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest but is currently based in Berlin.
In our chat today, we talk about the fact that her book secretly functions as a document of living through the early days of the COVID pandemic; truth-seeking and how language sometimes gets in the way of that; nerding out about our shared love of Annie Dillard; enhanced body trust through learning to give and and receive Reiki; being non-judgmental toward our own emotions; and what it might look like if we as a society get to a point where we’re asking each other “what are you feeling?” rather than “how are you feeling?”
SHOW NOTES
Saga on Twitter
Saga on LinkedIn
Psychedelic Science 2023 / Saga at the Synergetic Press bookstore / A quick glimpse of Michael Pollan signing books in the Synergetic Press bookstore
Researchers Karen Dobkins and Andrew J. Arnold
Saga’s article for the MIND Foundation, “Social Interoception: The Case for Treating Mental Illnesses Through the Body, in a Social Setting”
Kelly Mahler, OTD, as quoted on page 72 of How to Change Your Body: “I’m excited about your book. We all have to work together. My one main goal is that when I’m texting, my phone will recognize the word interoception, or when you’re emailing someone, it won’t keep changing it to reception. So we all need to work together to get it accepted by spell-check. I feel like we’ll have made it then.”
Stanislav Grof’s books published by Synergetic Press
Sasha Shulgin’s books published by Synergetic Press
Rachel Nuwer’s book I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World
Ann Shulgin’s obituary in the New York Times
A basic overview of Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
Saga’s interview with Kelsey Blackwell begins on page 107 of How to Change Your Body.
The quote “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire” comes from Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic,” which can be read in her collection Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.
Queen of Peaches 