The Body Has a Mind of Its Own

Author: Sandra Blakeslee
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812975278
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Your body has a mind of its own. You know it’s true. You can sense it, even though it may be hard to articulate. You know that your body is more than a vehicle for your brain to cruise around in, but how deeply are mind and body truly interwoven? Answers can be found in the emerging science of body maps. Just as road maps represent interconnections across the landscape, your many body maps represent all aspects of your bodily self. Your self doesn’t begin and end with your physical body but extends into the space around you. When you drive a car, your personal body space grows to envelop it. When you play a video game, your body maps automatically track and emulate the actions of your character onscreen. If your body maps fall out of sync, you may have an out-of-body experience or see auras around other people. The Body Has a Mind of Its Own explains how you can tap into the power of body maps to do almost anything better: play tennis, strum a guitar, ride a horse, dance a waltz, empathize with a friend, raise children, cope with stress. Filled with illustrations, wonderful anecdotes, and even parlor tricks that you can use to reconfigure your body sense, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own will change the way you think about what it takes to have a conscious mind inside a feeling body. Praise for The Body Has a Mind of Its Own NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD “You’ll never think about your body–or your mind–in the same way again.” –Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence “A fascinating exploration of senses we didn’t even know we had.” –Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Coming to Our Senses “A delightfully original, understandable, and mind-stretching work.” –William Safire, columnist, The New York Times Magazine “A marvelous book.” –V. S. Ramachandran, M.D., director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego “[An] accessible, practical overview of an important scientific story.” –Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes’ Error

When the Body Says No

Author: Gabor Maté, MD
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 030737470X
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER From renowned mental health expert and speaker Dr. Gabor Maté, this acclaimed, bestselling guide provides insight into the mind-body link between illness and health, and the critical role that stress and our emotional makeup play in an array of common diseases. In this accessible and groundbreaking book—filled with the moving stories of real people—medical doctor and bestselling author Gabor Maté shows that emotion and psychological stress play a powerful role in the onset of chronic illness, including breast cancer, prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and many others. An international bestseller translated into over thirty languages, When the Body Says No promotes learning and healing, providing transformative insights into how illlness can be the body's way of saying no to what the mind cannot or will not acknowledge. With great compassion and erudition, Dr. Maté demystifies medical science and empowers us all to be our own health advocates.

A Mind of Its Own

Author: David M. Friedman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439136084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
Whether enemy or ally, demon or god, the source of satisfaction or the root of all earthly troubles, the penis has forced humanity to wrestle with its enduring mysteries. Here, in an enlightening and entertaining cultural study, is a book that gives context to the central role of the penis in Western civilization. A man can hold his manhood in his hand, but who is really gripping whom? Is the penis the best in man -- or the beast? How is man supposed to use it? And when does that use become abuse? Of all the bodily organs, only the penis forces man to confront such contradictions: something insistent yet reluctant, a tool that creates but also destroys, a part of the body that often seems apart from the body. This is the conundrum that makes the penis both hero and villain in a drama that shapes every man -- and mankind along with it. In A Mind of Its Own, David M. Friedman shows that the penis is more than a body part. It is an idea, a conceptual but flesh-and-blood measuring stick of man's place in the world. That men have a penis is a scientific fact; how they think about it, feel about it, and use it is not. It is possible to identify the key moments in Western history when a new idea of the penis addressed the larger mystery of man's relationship with it and changed forever the way that organ was conceived of and put to use. A Mind of Its Own brilliantly distills this complex and largely unexamined story. Deified by the pagan cultures of the ancient world and demonized by the early Roman church, the organ was later secularized by pioneering anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci. After being measured "scientifically" in an effort to subjugate some races while elevating others, the organ was psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. As a result, the penis assumed a paradigmatic role in psychology -- whether the patient was equipped with the organ or envied those who were. Now, after being politicized by feminism and exploited in countless ways by pop culture, the penis has been medicalized. As no one has before him, Friedman shows how the arrival of erection industry products such as Viagra is more than a health or business story. It is the latest -- and perhaps final -- chapter in one of the longest sagas in human history: the story of man's relationship with his penis. A Mind of Its Own charts the vicissitudes of that relationship through its often amusing, occasionally alarming, and never boring course. With intellectual rigor and a healthy dose of wry humor, David M. Friedman serves up one of the most thought-provoking, significant, and readable cultural works in years.

A Guide to Body Wisdom

Author: Ann Todhunter Brode
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
ISBN: 0738757217
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
Your Body is Listening. Are You? Deepen your spirituality, heal old wounds, and enhance your emotional and physical wellness by engaging in a conversation with your body. This innovative, down-to-earth guide teaches you how to listen to, understand, and work with your body's innate wisdom in everyday living. A Guide to Body Wisdom provides step-by-step instruction on how to create a personalized self-care regimen that works. You'll learn to quiet your mind and live consciously in your body through a variety of practices, including breathwork, mindful eating, meditation, affirmation, and positive habit building. Featuring simple exercises and techniques, as well as a Body IQ quiz, this valuable book helps you end negative thinking, develop intuition, improve relationships, boost creativity and personal power, and much more. Includes a foreword by Judith Aston-Linderoth, creator and director of Aston Kinetics Praise: "While we have learned during the past few decades the importance of emotions and beliefs in health, the body has too often been neglected, or regarded as a mechanical object that sooner or later is doomed to fail. In A Guide to Body Wisdom, Ann Brode gives the body its due by showing how it can function as a source of wisdom and strength in total harmony with the mind. Brode's perspective is long overdue, offering a holistic, balanced view of what it means to be human."—Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind "This book includes a myriad of everyday ways to awaken and experience the body's innate intelligence. It is full of interesting facts, intriguing exercises, and useful strategies."—Risa Kaparo, PhD, somatic psychotherapist, creator of Somatic Learning, and author of Awakening Somatic Intelligence

How the Body Knows Its Mind

Author: Sian Beilock
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145162669X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
"Takes you inside the amazing science of how the body affects the mind, and shows how to use that wisdom to live smarter and maximize what your body teaches your mind"--

Mind the Body

Author: Frédérique de Vignemont
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019873588X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature. Mind the Body is the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness. Fr�d�rique de Vignemont seeks to answer questions such as: how do I perceive my body? How do I perceive other people's bodies? Can I really feel your pain? What makes me feel this specific body is my own? Why do I care about it? To what extent can I feel an avatar's body as my own? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, their relation to action, and to self-defence. This volume combines philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science, leading us to question some of our most basic intuitions.

How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body

Author: David R. Hamilton, PHD
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
ISBN: 1788173112
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
‘This book will teach you that healing by thought alone is not only possible, but it is a reality.’ - Dr Joe Dispenza, New York Times bestselling author of Becoming Supernatural There is no longer any doubt that the way we think affects our bodies: countless scientific studies have shown this to be true. For former pharmaceutical scientist Dr David Hamilton, the testing of new drugs highlighted how profoundly the mind and body are connected. Time and time again, the control group of patients in drug trials improved at similar rates to those who actually received the medicines. Astounded, Dr Hamilton decided to change the direction of his work to explore the relationship between the mind and the body. This bestselling acclaimed book was first published 10 years ago. In it, Dr Hamilton explores the effect of visualization, belief and positive thinking on the body, and shows how using our imagination and mental processes can stimulate our own defences and healing systems to combat disease, pain and illness. In this new edition, Dr Hamilton has added four new chapters to discuss the latest cutting-edge information and extraordinary new techniques. These include using imagery to stimulate the immune system - a method that can benefit cancer patients undergoing conventional treatment - effectively using the mind to speed up rehabilitation from stroke, and powerful visualization strategies to help facilitate recovery from injury and illness.

How the Body Shapes the Mind

Author: Shaun Gallagher
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191622575
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 519

Book Description
How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way?

The Body Keeps the Score

Author: Bessel A. Van der Kolk
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143127748
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.

Body Mind Balancing

Author: Osho
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1466867086
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
Body Mind Balancing: Using Your Mind to Heal Your Body features meditation methods from one of the twentieth century’s greatest spiritual teachers. Many everyday discomforts and tensions arise from the fact that we are alienated from our bodies. With the help of Osho’s Body Mind Balancing, readers will learn to talk to and reconnect with their bodies. After just a short time, readers will begin to appreciate how much the body has been working for them and supporting them, and from this new perspective one can find new ways to work with the body and create a more harmonious balance of body and mind. Accompanying the book is a CD featuring the meditative therapy “Reminding Yourself of the Forgotten Language of Talking to Your BodyMind,” spoken by meditation teacher Anando Hefley. Developed by Osho, it guides the listener in reconnecting with his or her body and creating a new and greater sense of well-being. Osho challenges readers to examine and break free of the conditioned belief systems and prejudices that limit their capacity to enjoy life in all its richness. He has been described by the Sunday Times of London as one of the “1000 Makers of the 20th Century” and by Sunday Mid-Day (India) as one of the ten people—along with Gandhi, Nehru, and Buddha—who have changed the destiny of India. Since his death in 1990, the influence of his teachings continues to expand, reaching seekers of all ages in virtually every country of the world.