My Spirituality & Psychology Conference Talk
Technology as Terrain, Temptation and Teacher + Like-Minded Connections
The International Conference on Spiritual and Psychology (ICSP2026) was a gathering I attended and spoke at in Bangkok, Thailand earlier this month. What an illuminating and enlivening gathering. A more intimate conference with about 30 participants of mostly women—I felt kinship and camaraderie with my fellow attendees. As seekers, experts in the field and self-identified healers. Women from all over the world: India, Indonesia, Iran, Australia, Ireland, Czech Republic and more. I was struck by these other self-made women who inspired me in so many ways:
Never have I had so many folks get my arcane and esoteric spiritual references!
Never have I met so many other mental health professionals who are “out of the closet” as spiritual seekers
Never have I met so many other women who are spiritually integrated entrepreneurs bursting with ideas and actualization
Never have I met so many folks who are truly global in their perspective and residencies
Great reminder to not wait for perfection, but just get going on your dream projects
Personally inspired to push on that comfort zone to go beyond text-based forms of media, such as posting quick videos with self-help techniques, words of wisdom and the like.
With that in mind, posting the audio of my talk I recorded on voice memo (as there was no official recording of our presentations). This definitely bumps up against my urge to only release highly polished media, but here goes…
Updating this post to also add that there was something wonderful about being at a gathering where women could be themselves in a way I hadn’t experienced before at a professional conference. Like being able to joke about forgetting your place in your talk or jumping around in your slides in your presentation, or even having a self-conscious moment of questioning if you knew what you were talking about (this is so normal. I equate it to the cognitive defusion trick of repeating a word over and over again until it sounds like nonsense, or getting so into the weeds of writing that a commonly used word suddenly seemed mispelled). Second wave-feminist conditioning used to have me galled by such displays (“Ladies, never apologize!” that kind of stuff), as if we constantly needed to be try-hards to prove that we belonged, that we were actually intelligent. I mean, it wasn’t imagined—how biased it used to be, believe me was it a shock when I entered undergrad in the ‘90s and saw the truth of it at the time. Now in this era, I find it refreshing and vindicating to see women simply inhabiting a space that transcends the old win-lose conquerer mentality. Not needing to “sound smart for men”—that how I think of it. I don’t mean that as an anti-male sentiment, but more of moving on from the Old Guard thinking. More of that, please!