NAYELI GARCI-CRESPO, PhD
I am a mind-body coach, a Havening Techniques practitioner, and a certified Realization Process meditation and embodiment teacher specializing in creative processes and high sensitivity. My interests include flow and liminal states, the subconscious, laughter, lucid dreaming, interpersonal neurobiology, somatic parts work, and art and play as processes for self discovery and healing. In addition to being a coach, I am also a writer, multidisciplinary artist, and creative consultant with a Ph.D. in cultural studies, film, and media from Duke University, an M.A. in Latin American literature from Columbia University, and a B.A. in creative writing and philosophy from the University of Southern California, where I took courses in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy of mind, and volunteered as an art therapist at a Los Angeles County Community Counseling Services halfway house. As a multipassionate wanderer, it took years of meandering through academia and working in the film and TV industry to refocus my career on the interface between art and psychology, but it was a calling from the start! I consider myself a lifelong learner and “dabbler” and am always eager to explore, invent, and combine methods and approaches that catalyze discovery and aid inner processes. I founded the artist/therapist/practitioner collective Feral Flow Lab in 2019 to create collaborative spaces for healing and transformation through expressive arts and the body.
¡P'aquí p'allá! (This Way That Way!)
(Intaglio drypoint/mixed media print on Canson cotton paper (8" x 8"))
Some years ago, in a rather reluctant incursion into online dating, I described myself as “a whole village of dissenting voices ruled by a benevolent, but somewhat frazzled, leader.” At the time, I had become progressively more aware of my inner multiplicity, which came to a head in a moment of synchronicity one afternoon while I was in the printmaking studio and university station Radio UNAM broadcast poet Juan Gelman reading the first couple of lines of one of his poems: “decir que esa mujer era dos mujeres es decir poquito, debía tener unas 12397 mujeres en su mujer…” (“to say that woman was two women is to say too little, she must have had 12397 women in her woman…”). This was well before my current career shift into coaching and meditation facilitation, but, looking back on those moments, it is of no surprise that I came to love parts work as a way of approaching our inner multiplicity. I recently have been training in Internal Family Systems, and whether it’s because of that or just because the sense of the manifold nature of the psyche has been percolating up from my subconscious, I’ve noticed a theme of many-headed and legged creatures creeping into my drawings and prints. I don’t quite know what these creatures are (goatish horned snail-eyed devils?), but this etching expresses for me the joyful rumpus of being multiple!