The MindThatEgo Podcast

Welcome to the MindThatEgo Podcast — hosted by Ricky Derisz. MindThatEgo's ethos is to explore nuances of mind, body and spirit by igniting challenging conversations with insightful thinkers, combined with deep reflection on subjective experience. Vulnerability and authenticity are guaranteed as Ricky talks to psychologists, spiritualists, philosophers, scientists, friends and fellow human beings during his quest to understand key questions — what's the key to wellbeing? How can we reduce suffering? What tools are most useful in managing mental health?

The MindThatEgo Podcast is a religion podcast hosted by Ricky Derisz, with 69 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Ricky Derisz hosts The MindThatEgo Podcast, a religion show with 69 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #68

  #68: Re-Souling Psychology via Art and Sacred Beauty with Nisha Gupta

  Aug 5, 20261h 13mS1

  Nisha Gupta PhD is a tenured psychology professor at the University of West Georgia, a trauma-informed relationship psychotherapist, phenomenological researcher, and artist. I discovered Nisha through her recent paper: Can Psychology Be An Art? A Journey from theHuman Sciences to the Psychological Humanities .Nisha explores what a more beautiful psychology might offer a wounded world. We discuss psychology’s origin as “the study of the soul”, beauty’s life-saving role in suicide prevention and offering hope amidst violence and injustice, and redemption amidst guilt and remorse.We look at artificial intelligence as a reckoning for humanity, reverence, grief, and rage as portals to God’s love, art’s role in transmuting both the sacred and the shadow, and why the anima, aesthetic sensibility, and divine feminine should sit on the throne of psychology’s future.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #67

  #67: Navigating the Pluripotency of Psychedelic Experiences with Eirini Argyri

  Jul 20, 20261h 14mS1

  Eirini K. Argyri is a researcher at the University of Exeter's Psychedelic Interdisciplinary Centre (EPIC) and research Associate with the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project. Her thesis developed the Ontologically Diversifying Experiences (ODE) framework, which examines pathways towards prosocial and holistic integration. We explore psychedelics’ developmental potential, their disruption to assumptions about selfhood, relationships, and reality, groundlessness and existential distress, boundlessness and experiences of unity, and the importance of trust architecture and access to educational resources.We also look at what contributes to healing communities, power dynamics and the risk of abuse, open-mindedness, agency, and cognitive liberty, and alternative modes of meaning-making, including the intuitive, the embodied, and the mythopoetic. Resources: Eirni's thesis.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #65

  #65: How the Philosophy of Subjective Experience Transforms Psychiatry with Jasper Feyaerts

  Jun 22, 20261h 27mS1

  Jasper Feyaerts is a philosopher and associate professor in clinical psychology at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He is co-founder of the Too Mad to be True conference, alongside previous guest, Wouter Kusters. Jasper’s research specialises phenomenology, self-disorders, psychosis, and delusions. Our conversation enquires into the elusive, difficult-to-define nature of selfhood. We begin comparing conventional psychiatric models of pathology with direct enquiry into the subjective experience. We look at the risks and the value of objectifying and conceptualising experience, interaction and knowledge as crucial to self-understanding, the self as it relates to so-called disorder, the view of Eastern spiritual traditions, such as Buddhist no-self, the illusion and necessity of control, flow and immersion versus self-reflection, primordial shame and ontological paranoia, the fear and joy of spontaneity, and what changes Jasper would like to see in the field of psychiatry.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #64

  #64: Transrationality and the Paradox of Divine Madness

  Jun 8, 202636 minS1

  This episode features my talk from the 2024 edition of Too Mad to be True on the theme of The Paradoxes of Madness. In exploring Transrationality and the Paradox of Divine Madness , I use philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language games to demonstrate how the models of reality directly influence how sanity and insanity is framed. If we change our model from conventional materialism to non-duality or pure consciousness, what changes? I explore the metaphor of “The Light,” that surfaces in all religious traditions and in the phrase en-light-en-ment ; the pathologising of spiritual experiences; non-duality as the ultimate paradox; what we can learn from Zen koans and no-mind, the three forms of spiritual blindness; the need to synthesise multiple perspectives; and the role of trans-rationality in human development.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #63

  #63: Symbols, Psychosis, and Common Ground: A Lacan-Jung Dialogue with Stijn Vanheule

  May 25, 20261h 16mS1

  Stijn Vanheule is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and professor at Ghent University, Belgium. Our conversation was inspired by his most recent book, Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy . Stijn overviews the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He explains Lacan’s three registers: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real; psychosis as a confrontation with the Real; the security and limitations of symbolic convention; how words and stories structure reality; logic versus artistic coherence; and the existential value of paranoia. We compare Lacanian and Jungian approaches on subjects such as the paradox of archetypal and individual, personal myth, and self-knowledge as a never-ending process. Underlying our conversation is the common ground of viewing psychosis not as an illness, but in Stijn’s words: “the subjective manifestation of a struggle that touches upon the fundamental aspects of human existence."

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on The MindThatEgo Podcast. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.