Conscious Moving


Book Description

Conscious Moving extends from one transformative belief: we feel more human, more empowered, and more ourselves when we live from that place within us—and all around us—that simply moves. And when we examine and trust in the emerging and evolving movement of our minds and bodies, we can better harness the tools needed to expand our creativity, wellbeing, and learning. Body-based psychotherapist, movement specialist, and renowned author-educator Christine Caldwell (Oppression and the Body) offers a radically ambitious mode of somatic awareness and inquiry—and shows how designing our own conscious movement practices can improve not only our own lives, but our relationships, communities, and culture. This anthology explores how movement practices can help us be more present; more grounded and intentional in responding to and working with experiences in the moment; and claim our own bodily autonomy. Caldwell and contributors explore these key benefits and applications in four critical areas: Creativity Contemplation Healing Learning Rooted in both ancient and modern scientific ways of knowing, Conscious Moving imparts fundamental principles and tools applicable to a broad spectrum of fields and professions. Topics explored in partnership with conscious movement practice include: Trauma and Oppression, Isolation and Loneliness, Addiction, Group Therapy, Sexuality, Creative Arts, and Grief. Encouraging each reader to pay attention to—and honor—their own embodied intuition, Conscious Moving is a non-prescriptive guide to accessing body-based wisdom for personal growth, community impact, and widespread social change.




Mindful Movement


Book Description

In Mindful Movement, exercise physiologist, somatic therapist, and advocate Martha Eddy uses original interviews, case studies, and practice-led research to define the origins of a new holistic field--somatic movement education and therapy­--and its impact on fitness, ecology, politics, and performance. The book reveals the role dance has played in informing and inspiring the historical and cultural narrative of somatic arts. Providing an overview of the antecedents and recent advances in somatic study and with contributions by diverse experts, Eddy highlights the role of Asian movement, the European physical culture movement and its relationship to the performing arts, and female perspectives in developing somatic movement, somatic dance, social somatics, somatic fitness, somatic dance and spirituality, and ecosomatics.




Offering from the Conscious Body


Book Description

The exploration of the direct experience of healing and of the divine through the witnessing of movement becoming conscious. • Uses sample sessions and descriptive theory to explain the discipline. • Based on the author's 35 years of movement work. Offering from the Conscious Body reveals both the theory and practice of a unique body-based process that is cathartic, creative, healing, and mystical--as presented by Janet Adler, the presiding voice in the field. This Western awareness practice encourages the individual to experience the evolving relationship with oneself, another, the collective, and the divine through the natural impulses of conscious movement, compassionate witnessing, and clear articulation of experience. Through the vivid examples taken from her own practice, Adler demonstrates that physical movement can invite direct experience of spiritual truths. The reader is led through the multiple layers within the discipline--moving and witnessing in dyads and then groups, in the presence of a witnessing teacher--to develop a comprehensive and experiential understanding of this innovative way of work. Designed for professionals and laypersons interested in psychology, bodywork, mystic traditions, or personal transformation, the discipline of Authentic Movement is at the cutting edge of emerging Western healing practices.




The Conscious Enneagram


Book Description

The Enneagram is a powerful tool, with ancient roots and modern appeal, for detailing the human personality. It illuminates the painful truth of where we are and inspires us with the promise of where we could be. As the Enneagram has grown in popularity over the past 30 years, the insights offered have focused either on the present or the future, with little guidance on how to move from Point A to Point B. In the The Conscious Enneagram Abi Robins offers a rich, insightful guide for those seeking to move from patterns to promise. Through practical, easy-to-understand coaching, storytelling, and personal inquiry, Robins explores three main ways for getting from where we are to where we could be: Practice, Lineage, and Community. These make up the three-legged stool of the inner and outer work required to radically change the way we think, feel, and move through the world. This book will show you how to cultivate each of these legs in your life in meaningful, enriching ways that are tailored to your type.




Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance, Second Edition


Book Description

Franklin provides 583 imagery exercises to improve dance technique, artistic expression and performance. More than 160 illustrations highlight the images, and the exercises can be put to use in dance movement and choreography.




The Visual (Un)Conscious and Its (Dis)Contents


Book Description

Visual control of our actions can be unconscious as well as conscious. For example, when a pedestrian steps onto a street and then suddenly steps back, to avoid being hit by an oncoming car, the pedestrian's visual system has been able to detect the car very rapidly. Since the registration of the approaching car in conscious vision could take a few hundreds of milliseconds - possibly too long to avoid being struck by it, the rapid injury-avoiding action has relied on the oncoming car being detected at unconscious levels in the visual system. So how, and at what level in the visual system is a stimulus processed unconsciously? This book explores unconscious and conscious vision, investigated using psychophysical and brain-recording methods. These methods allow microtemporal analyses of visual processing during the interval, ranging from a few 10s to a few 100s of milliseconds, between a stimulus's impinging on the retinae and its eliciting a behavioral response or a conscious percept. By tying these findings to well-known neuroanatomical and physiological substrates of vision, the book presents and discusses theoretical and empirical approaches to, and findings on, conscious and unconscious vision. In addition to presenting an in-depth, integrative review of recent and ongoing scientific and scholarly research, the book proposes several avenues for directing future research in these areas. It also provides a well articulated theoretical and a detailed empirical base that points to the special importance of the processing of surface properties of visual objects to their conscious vision. Aimed at scientists and scholars in visual cognition, visual neuroscience and, more broadly, cognitive science - including that part of the philosophical community that is currently occupied with the mind-brain problem, the book sheds new light on and advances experimental, philosophical, and scholarly research on visual consciousness.




New World New Mind


Book Description

Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich explain that we are causing our own problems because we have created a world where our basic mental functions are no longer suitable. We evolved over a period of millions of years to survive in small tribal families on the wild grassy plains of East Africa. Now the way we live has nothing to do with that time and place, but the mental tools that were developed to survive on the savanna have remained unchanged. These instincts were wonderfully adapted to the environment that shaped them. But that world, the world that made us, is gone. Now these same instincts are causing us to destroy the world that we made. The threats we face are of our own making, and we can unmake them. If people learn how we have come to this point, we can restore our hope for the future. NWNM describes the way our minds have evolved, and offers suggestions for how to cope with who we are in the world we live in now. Recent decades have seen remarkable progress in many areas. For example, while not overlooking the abject suffering of millions of people, it is nonetheless true that there has been unprecedented alleviation of poverty and disease for the world's poorest people. There are so many promising and astonishing advances in medicine, technology, and the social and physical sciences that if we give ourselves a chance to survive, our species could enter a golden age.




Mindful Movements


Book Description

Over the years, Thich Nhat Hanh and his monastic community in Plum Village, have developed more and more ways to integrate mindfulness practices into every aspect of their daily life. A few years back Thich Nhat Hanh began to develop gentle exercises based on Yoga and Tai Chi movements. Initially designed as mindful stretching breaks between long periods of sitting meditation, Mindful Movements became a popular tool to complement to sitting meditation extending Thich Nhat Hanh's trademark gentle approach to Buddhist teachings into a series of physical movements. These movements enjoy a growing popularity amongst his students and have become integral part of his retreats. These simple and effective practices are meant to reduce stress and tension to help the practitioner gain the serenity he needs to return to a state of mindfulness. When done as part of a full mediation practice, theses movements can address mental, emotional, and physical stress. Offered to the general public for the first time, the Mindful Movements have been lovingly illustrated by one of Thich Nhat Hanh's long-time practitioner, Wietske Vriezen. Drawn in a whimsical and immediately appealing style the booklet presents 10 routines that can be practiced by people of all ages and body types whether they are already familiar with mindfulness practices or not. The Mindful Movements are designed to be accessible to as many people as possible. Far from being another exercise program, Mindful Movements is for all those wanting to add a gentle but physical element to their meditation practice.They can be practiced before or after sitting meditation, at home, or at work - any time you have a few minutes to refresh your body and quiet your mind. For those new to meditation they are a great, non-threatening way to get acquainted with mindfulness as a complete and multi-faceted practice. For those who already have an established sitting practice Mindful Movements will come as a welcomed addition to their practice. With a foreword by Thich Nhat Hanh and Introduction by Jon Kabat-Zinn [TBC]







The Joy of Movement


Book Description

Now in paperback. The bestselling author of The Willpower Instinct introduces a surprising science-based book that doesn't tell us why we should exercise but instead shows us how to fall in love with movement. Exercise is health-enhancing and life-extending, yet many of us feel it's a chore. But, as Kelly McGonigal reveals, it doesn't have to be. Movement can and should be a source of joy. Through her trademark blend of science and storytelling, McGonigal draws on insights from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology, as well as memoirs, ethnographies, and philosophers. She shows how movement is intertwined with some of the most basic human joys, including self-expression, social connection, and mastery--and why it is a powerful antidote to the modern epidemics of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. McGonigal tells the stories of people who have found fulfillment and belonging through running, walking, dancing, swimming, weightlifting, and more, with examples that span the globe, from Tanzania, where one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes on the planet live, to a dance class at Juilliard for people with Parkinson's disease, to the streets of London, where volunteers combine fitness and community service, to races in the remote wilderness, where athletes push the limits of what a human can endure. Along the way, McGonigal paints a portrait of human nature that highlights our capacity for hope, cooperation, and self-transcendence. The result is a revolutionary narrative that goes beyond familiar arguments in favor of exercise, to illustrate why movement is integral to both our happiness and our humanity. Readers will learn what they can do in their own lives and communities to harness the power of movement to create happiness, meaning, and connection.