Reclaiming Vitality and Presence

Author: Charlotte Selver
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1556436416
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
This book captures the essence of Charlotte Selver’s practice of Sensory Awareness like no other publication. It is an invitation to experience life firsthand again, as we did when we were children. In a culture where we have grown accustomed to accumulating knowledge from teachers and experts, it is rare to find a book that actually invites us to trust our own senses again. It is the authors’ intent to give back to the reader authority over his or her own experience and learning processes. Much of the book focuses on reviving the senses in order to open the mind and body to direct learning. The book imitates an actual Sensory Awareness class, involving the reader as a student, guiding him or her along a journey with and through the senses to a way of living that is in accordance with the natural functioning of the human organism in its environment. The range of explorations include a renewed connection to the support of the earth as a foundation for trust; the central role of gravity for our health and for finding orientation in life; a study of breathing that promotes health and vitality; and connecting and interacting with other people. A handbook to a more genuine and connected way of living, the work is also a beautifully crafted account of Sensory Awareness, showing these profound teachers at work with their students and with the reader.

Reclaiming Vitality and Presence

Author: Charles Van Wyck Brooks
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Awareness
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

Sensory Awareness

Author: Charles Van Wyck Brooks
Publisher: Viking
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description

Interoception, Contemplative Practice, and Health

Author: Norman Farb
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2889450945
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
There is an emergent movement of scientists and scholars working on somatic awareness, interoception and embodiment. This work cuts across studies of neurophysiology, somatic anthropology, contemplative practice, and mind-body medicine. Key questions include: How is body awareness cultivated? What role does interoception play for emotion and cognition in healthy adults and children as well as in different psychopathologies? What are the neurophysiological effects of this cultivation in practices such as Yoga, mindfulness meditation, Tai Chi and other embodied contemplative practices? What categories from other traditions might be useful as we explore embodiment? Does the cultivation of body awareness within contemplative practice offer a tool for coping with suffering from conditions, such as pain, addiction, and dysregulated emotion? This emergent field of research into somatic awareness and associated interoceptive processes, however, faces many obstacles. The principle obstacle lies in our 400-year Cartesian tradition that views sensory perception as epiphenomenal to cognition. The segregation of perception and cognition has enabled a broad program of cognitive science research, but may have also prevented researchers from developing paradigms for understanding how interoceptive awareness of sensations from inside the body influences cognition. The cognitive representation of interoceptive signals may play an active role in facilitating therapeutic transformation, e.g. by altering context in which cognitive appraisals of well-being occur. This topic has ramifications into disparate research fields: What is the role of interoceptive awareness in conscious presence? How do we distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive somatic awareness? How do we best measure somatic awareness? What are the consequences of dysregulated somatic/interoceptive awareness on cognition, emotion, and behavior? The complexity of these questions calls for the creative integration of perspectives and findings from related but often disparate research areas including clinical research, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, anthropology, religious/contemplative studies and philosophy.

Waking Up

Author: William C. Littlewood
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1468570765
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
Although the practice of Sensory Awareness, the rediscovery of experiencing, is nonverbal, its essence can be distilled from the tape-recorded words of its seminal teacher, Charlotte Selver, in response to her students’ actions and questions during her classes. This book is a lovingly selected and skillfully edited compilation of excerpts of more than two decades of Charlotte Selver’s profound teachings, colorful sayings, and rich insights, arranged topically. They represent the heart of her teaching. Using only her own words, the text of each experiment feels like Charlotte Selver herself speaking not only to her class but to the reader. The reader is invited to try out some of the suggested experiments.

Reclaiming Your Body

Author: Suzanne Scurlock-Durana
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1608684687
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
A guided tour through the body’s innate healing powers Many of us have learned to ignore, deny, or even mistrust the wise messages our bodies give us. The result is that when trauma strikes, a time when we need every aspect of our beings to master the challenge, we may find ourselves disconnected from our greatest strengths. Suzanne Scurlock-Durana, who has spent thirty years studying the gifts of the body and teaching thousands how to reclaim them, began to recognize this strength, which she likens to a GPS, when she herself experienced a life-threatening trauma. Here she walks readers through different areas of the body, revealing the wisdom they hold and how to reconnect with that wisdom. As she shows in this warm, compassionate book, the body’s abilities are always available; we must simply reconnect with them.

Integrative Psychiatry

Author: Daniel A. Monti
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195388372
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Book Description
In this volume in the Weil Integrative Medicine Library, the authors describe a rational and evidence-based approach to the integrative therapy of mental disorders, integrating the principles of alternative and complementary therapies into the principles and practice of conventional psychiatry and psychology. The authors will examine what works and what doesn't, and offer practical guidelines for physicians to incorporate integrative medicine into their practice and to advise patients on reasonable and effective therapies.

Bodyfulness

Author: Christine Caldwell
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 083484169X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
A somatic counselor offers tools for developing a deeper, more awakened relationship with your body through sensation, breath, and movement As a foundation for a contemplative life, the body can both literally and metaphorically help us wake up. Breathing, sensing, and moving—the ways we know our body—carry tremendous contemplative potential, and yet, we so often move through our days unaware of or in conflict with our physical selves. In Bodyfulness, renowned somatic counselor Christine Caldwell offers a practical guide for living an embodied contemplative life, embracing whatever body we are in. Each chapter offers insights and practices that help us recover our lost physical wisdom—to integrate our bodies with mindfulness, to deal with emotions, and to develop attuned relationships. Bodyfulness inspires us to reclaim a body-centered contemplative life and challenges us to harness our potential to effect social and personal transformation in this body now.

Breathing in Manhattan

Author: Christoph Ribbat
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839467098
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Book Description
In 1938 gymnastics instructor Carola Spitz escaped from Nazi Germany. In New York she turned into Carola Speads, revered teacher of mindfulness. She breathed with clients in her Central Park West studio until she was 97 years old. Now Christoph Ribbat combines her gripping biography with the histories of modern bodywork and breathing experiments. He illuminates the tension between self-help fads and 20th century catastrophes. Accessible and quirky, Breathing in Manhattan speaks to experts and non-experts alike: to readers of Jewish history, students of New York City, and to anyone attracted by - or skeptical of - the promises of mindfulness.

Body Psychotherapy

Author: Ulfried Geuter
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000962458
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Book Description
This book introduces body psychotherapy as one of the essential approaches in psychotherapy, reflecting the increasing integration of the body into clinical mental health practice. The book offers an entirely new view on body psychotherapy based upon advanced research on embodiment, memory, emotion regulation, developmental psychology and body communication and an experiential and relational understanding of psychotherapy. Accordingly, the author grounds the theory of body psychotherapy on the theoretical approach of enactivism, which regards experience as arising from meaningful living interaction with others and their environment. The book, fortified with clinical examples, shows the distinctiveness of body psychotherapy as compared with a traditional talking therapy approach. It also convincingly demonstrates that each form of psychotherapy should consider body experiences. This text will be a comprehensive foundation for psychotherapists of every orientation, scholars of the humanities and students and especially those wishing to integrate embodied experience into their understanding of their patients.