Book Review: The Body is a Doorway

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The Body is a Doorway by Sophie Strand leads to the doorstep of self-empowerment. It starts with the recognition that the body is rich. Intricate, nature-based systems give us insight to the piece of the puzzle and through that, provide us a way to experience the nectar of interconnectedness that heals our existential longing, if only for a fleeting moment. There’s no need to give our individual power away to narratives of health that are fundamentally based on lack. The Earth is rich.  Our embodiment and beingness is already wealthy in riches regardless of physical status.

The originality of Sophie’s prose reads like a botanist’s journal had a love affair with a professor of postcolonial literature. What results is a perfectly sculpted body of work that takes a steady walk through a diverse ecosystem of healing potential. What struck me most is Sophie’s ability to give bitter medicine in the form of sweet milk. This memoir is autotheory, a format of feminist critique where the normative gaze is woven between information and story. It’s “power through knowledge” and Sophie successfully distances herself from masculine logic and meaning-making. (Fournier 2021) Sophie does bring a queerness to her experience, especially in the forest. The flora and fauna and death-rebirth ecosystem need nothing but themselves to keep on going. By extension, humans need reasons and things beyond themselves. 

The Body is a Doorway gives me a lasting love affair, generous, considering it started as a one-night stand (an evening of bed rotting and reading till 3am and suddenly, the book was done).  This book was an oblique take-down of health “wellness” as a concept and reframed it and self care and disability as differently-abled values. So generous.

Sophie refers so often to mythology, that one must wonder if she has coffee with all the cast of characters or if they are her marathon partners. She talks in myth as fluently and with integrity as a professor. In referring to Penelope’s myth, Sophie weaves and unweaves a death shroud– Death is never finished. This perpetuates the pain of being, which for Sophie seems to lie in the nebulous unknowing of what will set her body into a flare: her stomach to vomit or her nerves to freeze like a deer in headlights. Never escaping, she befriends the value of never-ending. The only story that ends here is her ability to escape pain. For Sophie, and for her readers, the light isn’t at the end of the tunnel; it’s already inside for you to step through.

Dragon Cairn on Overlook Mountain (Anastasia’s photo, June 2017)

There’s no trite mention of transcendence. And I know well the healing power of the Catskills (especially Overlook Mountain, mentioned several times in the book)–the right meadow or trailhead or glimpse of golden light at sunset will put you in an altered state. A deep connection to land can activate the transpersonal self–a wide, expansive, or field-like conception of self (Fox, 2017)–and this experience is duly and beautifully conveyed here: 

I ducked under a fringe of ivy trailing down from a stone entryway that had once held a door. Someone had camped on the mountain, setting a fire in the blown-out remains of a hearth. Peppery drafts of ash and pollen streaked through the roofless ballroom. Spiderwebs laced up the windows, long and glassless. Peppermint starbursts of mountain laurel hovered like pink clouds at the top of a staircase that led into open air. (Strand, p. 70)

Can you feel it? Can you be there? Can you step through the empty door or fly through the open window? I work with clients who explore the psycho-spiritual experience. In the years of this work, we do a lot of imagining. The scene  quoted above from The Body is a Doorway, is an invitation that I might use. Step out of your day to day. Step out of normal. Step out of the self that is limited by what you can only see around you. Can you expand into the smell of peppermint starbursts or feel the draft of ash? Where does this imagining take you?

I’ve encountered those who spiritually bypass, unable to drop into the embodiment of their bodies, unable to feel the pain or reaction to any experience. They often say, “It’s the Universe’s plan” or “Just go with the flow.” Dangerous detours. And there are others I’ve encountered who frequent a psychotherapist’s office, without resolve or meaningful progress in reframing their painful inner experience. To both of these individuals I’d recommend Sophie’s book because she does neither. She is able to find stable ground and then she digs deeper, just looking. Sometimes she encounters miniscule but alive ecosystems that remind her of life, and this is what brings her back, despite the spiritual and physical discomfort. A kaleidoscope of poetic descriptions awaits those who dare to drop into Sophie’s body of work. With Sophie, you’re in for a circular experience, a term artist Zara Kand used in a review of an unrelated Surrealist art show referring to the way the artist “negotiated the gallery space… how my mind moved from examination to inquiry to insight and back again.” The surreality of Sophie’s work provides a similar landscape to narrate.

The normative narrative around health is the problem. Remember how I said I found The Body to be an oblique critique? Sophie effectively asks, “Is this a health problem?” When the body doesn’t work as it should, when it generates pain, adverse reaction to life, hemorrhaging function for an embodied and leashed-form of incarnation, of course—there’s a health problem. This is what Hygeia, the goddess of health, would be invoked for. When it’s a question of comfort, Venus is the main character. The journey must go below and beyond the workings of the mainstream narrative of white, cis embodiment. Sophie’s self care and allowing herself to be in flow with the nonhuman world–the spores, the plants, the animals, the collective unconscious–affords her the wealth of disability. There’s so much that lives between the cracks. Broken, breaking, crack, renew, recalibrate, regenerate. The circular experience of weaving a never-ending story in the fabric of ripped, patched, spun. The Body is a Doorway is an excellent manual for your own journey of being and becoming.

 

Email your local library. Have them order a copy. Once you read it, return it, put it back on the shelf like you were planting a seed. Let others discover their power through this work, too.

 

What I was referring to…

Fournier, L. (2002). Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. MIT Press.
Fox, W. (1990). Transpersonal ecology: “Psychologizing” ecophilosophy. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 22(1), 59–96.
Kand, Z. (2024, September 10). A Circular Experience: “With the Moon Under Our Feet” at the Hansell Gallery. https://dispatchesmag.com/review-with-the-moon-under-our-feet/

Strand, S. (2025). The Body is a Doorway: A Memoir. Running Press.

The writer behind The Conversation

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who wants to integrate transpersonal psychology into your practice, go here 
  • If you are a mid-life woman who wants to hold your own, let teach you about managing your light in a dark world here

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences

Psychospiritual Growth: Chiron and writing through the wounded healer

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Chiron is an easy energetic fantasy. Think about a romanticized version of someone that is damaged or troubled or haunted by past experiences, but this person brings insight and depth and with these, heals others through the very nature of their presence. The wounds have value. But Chiron as an archetype is difficult to embody and address in a group. No one wants to hear about your suffering, let alone be part of it, right? Arriving at the point of “healed,” where the wounds finally start shining their diamonds from the rough.

I’m at another turn of the spiral right now, and Chiron is still here. He’s the centaur in the room. I wrote about my experiences earlier in my journey with Chiron in another post. Different time, different place.

 

So let’s go deeper for a higher vibration.

The Story of Chiron

Chiron is both–animal and (wo)man. Chiron is never of this world but is yet in this world. His place in Greek mythology is solidified with being wounded by a poisoned arrow, and being immortal suffers through this pain for eternity. Ironically, he was unable to heal himself, but became a gifted teacher and healer of others. The gift of Chiron, is that we may become powerful healers for others who we share the same wound with. To end his own suffering, he gives up his immortality for Prometheus’s freedom. If you’re familiar with Prometheus’ myth, he was imprisoned and tortured for eternity by the Gods for giving fire and enlightenment to man. Chiron, even in death, served humanity. His ability to die, leave his body that was in anguish from a wound caused by an errant arrow. What couldn’t kill him made him in agony until he became human. 

In astrology, we take the metaphor that Chiron (the energy of) is the wounded healer. We say that where the wound is, the light gets in. Chiron speaks to the energy of emotional wounds acquired now or across time. Each moment is a good moment to embrace embodiment. This is how to recover from trauma.

This is where “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” turns into “what doesn’t kill you should have killed you, at least one version of you.” 

Breaking patterns

Death is what causes us to break a pattern. Christine Simmonds-Moore writes about the nature of reality as fractals in Paranormal Ruptures. She says that fractals (mathematical patterns or meta-patterns, patterns of patterns) are a good way to understand parapsychological experiences. (2023). When we consider that the nature of reality is light and information (information transfer), and the body is a material mediator of that spiritual nature, then looking at patterns can help the logical function of the mind to organize what may seem vast and overwhelming. The nature of fractals can be an organizing framework for phenomena that are pathologized and neglected. (Moore, 2023)

Healing is natural. Depression, the kaleidoscope of emotional energy within it, manifestations of bodily dis-ease, lapses into liminal states, and dysregulated engagement with shared reality are healthy during the healing process. 

My personality had, for years, been based on those terms. A constellation of traumatic events as a young child who experienced trauma, and later, my body’s tendency toward dysregulation due to atypical neurology, led me to disassociate easily. I had a vivid imagination, one that worked in overdrive to compensate for the world I didn’t understand how to survive in. A growing intellectual body is providing support for this idea. A child seeks to avoid the pain (traumatic experience) and thoughts, perceptions, and memories are put behind a sort of barrier. (2025, Wade) Disassociate tendencies provide a way to function in the world, that is, have a sense of self. (2025, Wade) The disinhibitory pattern has been called cognitive disorganization. It’s associated with positive traits such as a high capacity for creativity because of new and unique associations that can be made. (2025, Wade) In other words, my Chironic nature contributed to the sickness, even though it was also helping me. My creative thinking was breaking the pattern and pattern breaking. The poison and the medicine are one in the same.

Transformation through writing

So I wrote. If you’ve read my work, you can immediately pick up on how introspective it is. In autofiction, I rarely interact with people around me. I meticulously characterize the sensory world. I have to write what I see around me to come back to this reality:

In my office: a hand-painted bench that my younger brother and I painted; our initials on it; our paint splotches in random drops. The cardboard carpet piece is half the size of the room, with random thoughts, and scribbles, and doodles. The scrap of red carpet on the other side, with lines of white and yellow… the floor length purple curtains that now, in the weak morning light, are casting a soft purple glow. A pink glittery hula hoop suspended from the ceiling with white ribbon and pink shower curtain hooks. The 3-foot-tall fake sunflower that was given to me by my older brother when I was 18, an item that has travelled the world and back—currently tied to black metal shelves with sparkly pipe cleaners: green, silver, blue.

 

In my fiction, I offer fantasy worlds. My current work in progress (a novella tentatively called High Voltage) offers an alternative reality, a mirror of the current world, in which the most fucked up around IRL are actually the ones to create safe spaces. Here’s how I made the world safe; written to mirror what I wanted to see in the world: 

 

Mithras brought his hands together, bowed, and said, “Step back,” to everyone else. A ball of light floated up out of the ground, then broke into four, which floated out horizontally above Orestes. Mithras laid his pack down and kneeled next to the man, placed his hands at the bottom of the spine. A whirring sound began. Orestes’ frame vibrated and lifted from the dirt, shimmering and floating and twisting and turning into air, then fell back down to the ground, the sudden levitation over. The body started to twitch. Hands reached up, the legs kicked. Torso and legs stood and folded over. The balls of energy disappeared into Orestes. The air held still. His body radiated.

 

It’s the magical world that I fell into that made me heal. It’s where superpowers–mind-mind communication, encounters with magical beings, floating in the liminal space between lives, encounters with body and ego death–that free the spirit. Wade (2025) notes that functional dissociation is encouraged in cultures that value spiritual and anomalous experiences. 

Trauma and the difficulties of life can break the mind, cause disassociation, and linger. Traumatic childhood. Creative adult, right? It’s common knowledge in psychology that childhood experiences shape our adulthood experiences. That’s part of being human. 

And yet, we are also souls, and we bring into this incarnation lifetimes of those childhoods. The pain that accompanies the soul is existential. 

My pain has been just being on Earth.

If existential pain is pathologized, we’re invoking Chiron–the pattern of emotional wounding carried across lifetimes. The undying pain. 

“Who became my power, my essence?” Ask yourself that question. And listen –that person– is the doorway to step through. Become that person. Who is the Prometheus in you that Chiron will sacrifice his life for? How can you die in one way, to let your humanity shine through in another? This is a way of activating Chironic energy. This can be a series of tests that lead to portals where you ask, “Should I step through here?” and let the old version of you die. 

The wound is the medicine–and likewise, the repetitive stories. 

Patterns over incarnation is the karma we bring. It’s the repetition of actions. When we’re stuck in the pain, the patterns can’t break. For me, it’s being in the world. A dizzying influx of sounds and sight impressions. Existing as a single person in an inhuman government. A civilization so large that I am annihilated in small existence. Identifying the patterns, seeing where they break, is where your light comes in.

Light increases light. Sharing here, and as always, as my divine mission to bring my own journey to words to the world as medicine.

A text from a student who received a box of all my autofiction books.

 

What I was referring to…

Cameron, K and Wade, J. (2025) Childhood trauma and the emergence of precognitive abilities: a correlational study. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive. 108. https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/advance-archive/108

Simmonds-Moore, C. (2023). Parapsychological Experiences as a Fractalized System. In Paranormal Ruptures. essay, Beyond the Fray.

 

The writer behind The Conversation

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who wants to integrate transpersonal psychology into your practice, go here 
  • If you are a mid-life woman who wants to hold your own, let teach you about managing your light in a dark world here

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences

Performance Art: The Crown Cycle

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This piece titled The Crown Cycle was completed during the week that contained summer solstice, transition to Cancer season, Capricorn full moon. The energy is full of considerations of the masculine, feminine, emotions and permission to express, connections to patriarchy, the old identity structure that makes a woman’s identity only visible through a male’s gaze—his terms, his shapes, his boundaries.

This piece addresses my desire to redraw boundaries between for feminine energy. Often, those boundaries are drawn through what isn’t able to be expressed. We exist in constricted shapes created by heavy emotional burden. I need a ritual to honor the cycle of a woman’s experience—as a child full of vivaciousness, a woman full of vitality, a crone full of wisdom—in it’s pure unadulterated state.

The Child

As a young girl, I spent hours planning what I would wear. Time was forever and planning outfits was the most important thing because I wanted to make sure to express who I was through the way I dressed. My mom drew pictures of my clothes on small cards so I could have an inventory. She was incredibly creative and had a talent for art and drawing. This is a cherished memory of mother-daughter bonding. But vivaciousness turned into internal turmoil. There painful memories reflect that the household in I grew up in was unstable. I didn’t receive the emotional nurture I needed. My dad implied her problems were all in her head. She was never really seen by her husband, my dad.

The Woman

I’m named after my maternal grandmother Anastasia. I seen pictures of her from her early twenties, wearing fashionable clothing and hanging out in Branch Brook Park in Newark and posing in photo shoots at a studio on Newark Avenue in Jersey City. With those images, I conjure up a zest-filled woman. These are cherished imaginations. But my mom didn’t know her mom like that. The vitality of womanhood was snuffed into depression–my mom remembers her as a fearful woman who wouldn’t leave the house. Anastasia lived in the shadow of my grandfather’s mercurial moods and bursts of rage. It was best not to be seen. She grew old, never learning to drive and being allowed to manage her money. The potential for wisdom from a life well-lived became a subtle bitterness.

Anastasia died in her early 60s; my mom was mid thirties. I was 7. Child, woman, crone.

When do we change from the carefree child to women with too much burden? When does my grandmother’s problem not be my mom’s problem, and when does my mom’s problem not be mine? We pass them along to each other in body and mind. The crone came to the woman and the child before her time.

When I was in my mid thirties, I recognized a pattern. I dated men from hetero culture who had expectations of who I was supposed to be. The inability to express myself, or, the lack of permission that they set up, was a huge burden to me. So, I set up strong boundaries. I ended or didn’t pursue relationships based on what I needed to feel seen and be expressive. I found myself more often single than in partnership. It was the lived experience of just how strongly the patriarchy has a hold on how women are seen—women’s identities are seen through men’s reflection, that is, what they see as permittable and valid.

The Crown Cycle: I am inside

I created the piece “The Crown Cycle” to honor the cycle of child-woman-crone, the stages of a female experience. Who we are (and were), how available we were to each other, how we took care of ourselves and beyond that, each other. The transition of child-woman-crone has not been straightforward. I wanted to see us clearly. 

I just entered my woman full-moon, mid-life stage. My mom has entered her crone stage. I have watched her heal, and become young again in her older age. I have healed and grown up into a woman that I am proud to be: happy, healthy, and free from thinking that I should be anybody but myself.

My mom and I worked on this project as an exploration of healing across generations. Mom painted the paper-mâché heads, and I attached flowers that are reminiscent of spring, summer, fall/winter, symbolic of child, mother, crone. Anastasia, my grandmother, was always with her rosary. I added one, plus 3 silver-painted quartz shards to evoke a cemetery-stone image, at the end of life. The eyes are absent from the skull heads but are present. Anastasia is absent in form, but always watching; I as a child was always watching the adults; my mom is always watching memory. And we are all women who had different levels of visibility. I at times want to be unseen, like my mom, and Anastasia, through her agoraphobia, was literally unseen—a far cry from the smiling face of her youth that was always posing for cameras.

The candle is reflected in the mirror; it is lighting the way to transformation.

I asked my mom why she made skulls with half hair, half skeletal attributes. She said the “the skull is the vessel of the brain, the part of us that perceives and translates the exterior stimuli. Hair is so visible and SO much an exterior judgement factor.”

The performance was done in front of a mirror as I wore the child-mother-crone crown and reflect. I reflected on the image in the mirror and also memories of me, my mom, and my grandmother. I recited “I am me, I am she, I am her” and rotated the heads, passing through the stage of child, woman, crone.

My mom and I are not in current geographical proximity, so I offered the performance to her online. I share it now with you. The performance is a healing transmission across my matrilineage and honors the cycle for all women who constellate the seen/unseen child-mother-crone.

***