Somatics, Somaesthetics, Body-Mind, Embodied Cognition: Quotations, Bibliography, Notes, Resources, Reflections

Soma, Soma-Aesthetics, Body-Mind, Mind-Body
Somatics, Somatic Psychology and Philosophy, Somatic Aesthetics
Feeling, Sensuality, Aliveness, The Living Human Body, Consciousness, Being/Becoming
Embodied Cognition, Situated Intelligence, Embodied Mind, Enactivism

Human Experiences: Sensations, Feelings, Perceptions, Emotions, Habits, Metaphors, Thoughts, Imagination

Research by Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.
Valley Spirit Center, Red Bluff, California, 2015-

Body, Soma, Somatics, Somatic Psychology and Philosophy, Somaesthetics, The Human Body, Medicine, Senses
Embodied Cognition, Situated Intelligence, Embodied Mind, Enactivism

Alexander, Frederick Matthias (1869–1955) An Australian actor and voice coach who developed the educational process that is today called the Alexander Technique: a form of education that is applied to recognize and overcome reactive, habitual limitations in movement and thinking. Strong emphasis upon upright posture and how best to position the head and neck.

Anatomy for Strength and Fitness Training: An Illustrated Guide to Your Muscles in Action. By Mark Vella. New York, McGraw Hill, 2006. Index, glossary, 144 pages. ISBN: 0071475338. A somaesthetic practice. VSCL.

Anatomy of Movement. By Blandine Calais-Germain. Seattle, Washington, Eastland Press, 1985, 1993. Translated from the French by Nicole Commarmond. Index, 289 pages. ISBN: 0939616173. VSCL.

The Art and Science of Raja Yoga. By Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters). Includes information on philosophy, meditation, postures, diet, breathing, routines, and health. Nevada City, CA, Crystal Clarity Publishers, c 2002. Includes audio CD disk. Index, glossary, 471 pages. This book is in a spiral binding so it can be used as a workbook/textbook. ISBN: 156589166X. VSCL.

J. L. Austin. Philosopher of language. Speech acts theory: statements are used to do something as well as to make assertions (propositions). "How to Do Things with Words."

Awareness Through Movement; Health Exercises for Personal Growth. Easy to Do Health Exercises to Improve Your Posture, Vision, Imagination and Personal Awareness. By Moshe Feldenkrais. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1972, 1977. 173 pages. ISBN: 0062503227. A somaesthetic practice. VSCL.

Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaaesthetics. By Richard Shusterman. Cambridge University Press, 2008, index, bibliography, 2398 pages. VSCL, paperback.

Bodymind. By Ken Dychtwald, M.D. New Yor, Tarcher, 1977, 1986. Index, bibliography, notes, 300 pages. ISBN: 978-0874773750. VSCL.

The Book of Skin By Steven Conner. Reaktion Books, 2009. 304 pages. ISBN: 978-1861891938.

Cloud Hands Blog. By Mike Garofalo. Online since 2005. A blog with reflections, notes, quotations, suggestions, references, questions and answers, links and quotations about Tai Chi Chuan, Qigong, Yoga, Mysticism, Gardening, Walking, Somaesthetics, Spirituality, and Philosophy.

Complexity: A Guided Tour. By Melanie Mitchell. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. Index, bibliography, notes, 349 pages. ISBN: 9780199798100. VSCL.

The Concept of Mind. By Gilbert Ryle. New York, Barnes and Noble Books, 1949. Index, 334 pages. ISBN: None. VSCL.

Conscious Breathing: Breathwork for Health, Stress Release, and Person Mastery. By Gay Hendricks. Bantam Books, 1995. 189 pages. ISBN: 0553374435. According to the author "Conscious Breathing: releases stress and tension, builds energy and endurance, contributes to emotional mastery, prevents and heals physical problems, contributes to graceful aging, manages pain, enhances mental concentration and physical performance, and facilitates psychospiritual transformation," pp. 5-31. VSCL.

Dancing, Rhythmic Movement Arts, Movement Arts, Bodily Expression Arts. A somaesthetic practice.

Experience and Nature. By John Dewey. Dover Publications, Revised Edition, 1958. 480 pages. ISBN: 9780486204710. VSCL.

Drug Usage (Coffee, Tobacco, Alcohol, Marihuana, LSD, Psycho-tropics, Cocaine, Heroin, Psychedelics, Crack, Amphetamines, Soma, etc.). A somaesthetic practice.

The Embodied Mind: Understanding the Mysteries of Cellular Memory, Consciousness, and Our Bodies. By Thomas R. Verny, M.D. Pegasus Books, 2021, index, bibliography, glossary, references, notes, 258 pages. VSCL, hardbound.

Ecstatic Body Postures: An Alternate Reality Workbook. By Belinda Gore. Foreword by Felicitas Goodman. Santa Fe, New Mexico, Bear and Company, 1995. Endnotes, 284 pages. ISBN: 1879181223. VSCL. Theory and somaesthetic practices.

Embodied Cognition Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Includes bibliography and references.

Embodied Cognition Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Includes bibliography and references.

Exploring Body-Mind Centering: An Anthology of Experience and Method. Edited by Gill Wright Miller, Pat Ethridge, and Kate Tarlow Morgan. Berkeley, California, North Atlantic Books, 2011. Index, bibliography, notes, biographical, 470 pages. ISBN: 9781556439681. A somaesthetic practice. VSCL.

Eutony Gerda Alexander (1908–1994) was a Danish teacher who devised a method of self-development called Eutony. A somaesthetic practice.

Everyday Aesthetics By Yuriko Saito. Oxford University Press, 2010. 288 pages. ISBN: 978-0199575671.

Fasting, Unique Diets, Eating Practices, Food Choices, Food Taboos. A somaesthetic practice.

Gentle Yoga Through Somatic Exploration. By James Knight. 2 DVD Set, 102 minutes, 4 30 Minute sessions. Led by the certified Hanna Somatic Educator and E-RYT, James Knight. A somaesthetic practice.

Juice: Radical Taiji Energetics. By Scott Meredith. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012. 311 pages. ISBN: 978-1478260691. VSCL.

The Key Muscles of Yoga: A Guide to the Functional Anatomy of Yoga. By Ray Long, M.D., FRCSC. Illustrated by Chris Macivor. Scientific Keys, Volume 1. Bandha Yoga Publications, 2006. Third Edition, 2006; first edition, 2005. Index, 239 pages. ISBN: 1607432382. For the YogaFit® Level 4 class. A somaesthetic practice. VSCL.

Kinetic Awareness is a trademarked system of bodywork originated by the American choreographer Elaine Summers in the 1950s, Ball Work. A somaesthetic practice.

Heinz Kohut, Psychologist Self-psychology focus on relationships between people.

Laban, Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958) Dance artist and theorist. Developed notation used in dance movements and choregraphy. A somaesthetic practice.

Language in Thought and Action. By S. I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa. New York, Harcourt, Fifth Edition, 1990. Originally published in 1939. Index, bibliography 196 pages. ISBN: 978015648240. VSCL.

Martial Arts Training (Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, Judo, Taijiquan, Kickboxing, Boxing, Wrestling, Weapons Training, etc.) Somaesthetic practices.

The Mastery of Movement. By Rudolf Laban. Edited by Lisa Ullman. Pre Textos Edition, 2011. 210 pages. ISBN: 978-1852731458.

Metaphors We Live By By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. University of Chicago Press, 2nd Edition, 2003. 256 pages. ISBN: 978-0226468013. VSCL.

Moral Behavior, Ethical Practices, Virtues, Living the Good Life. Somaesthetic practices in individual, family, society, and nations.

Nature Mysticism. By John Edward Mercer (1857-1922). CreateSpace Independent Pub., 2016. 178 pages. ISBN: 9781536805895. VSCL. I have the Kindle edition.

Phenomenology of Perception. By Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). Translated by Donald Landes. Foreword by Taylor Carman. Routledge, 1st Edition, 2013. Originally published in French in 1945. 696 pages. ISBN: 978-0415834339. VSCL.

Philosophical Investigations. By Ludwig Wittgenstein. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. The English Text of the Third Edition. New York, Macmillan Co., 1953, 1958 (Third Edition). Reprint in 1968. Index, 250 pages. ISBN: None. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is associated with Cambridge University in England. Philosophical Investigations (1953). VSCL.

The Primacy of Movement. By Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2nd Edition 2011. "Advances in Consciousness Research." 606 pages. ISBN: 978-9027252197.

The Psychology of the Body. By Elliot Greene and Barbara Goodrich-Dunn. LWW Massage Therapy and Bodywork Educational Series, 2013. 304 pages. ISBN: 978-1608311569.

Religion and Spiritual Practices: Organized Religions, Spirituality, Buddhism, Neo-Paganism, Taoism. Somaesthetic practices: Chanting, Praying, Rituals, Prayers, Liturgy, Dress, Fasting, Diet, Singing, Meditation, Bowing, Pilgrimages, Retreats, Sacred Spaces, Conduct.

Relaxation Techniques, Sung, Calming and Centering, Stilling, Softening. A somaesthetic practice. Quotations, notes, and bibliography prepared by Mike Garofalo.

Running, Jogging, Marathons, Racing, and Walking Training and Practices. A somaesthetic practice.

Schusterman, Richard 1949- Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.

Secrets to Living Younger Longer: The Self-Healing Path of Qigong Standing Meditation and Tai Chi. By Michael Mayer, Ph.D.. Orinda, California, Body Mind Healing Publications, 2004. Index, bibliography, 281 pages. ISBN: 0970431066. This book has a companion instructional video/DVD called "Body Mind Healing Qigong." Website: Body Mind Healing. VSCL.

Skin: A Natural History. By Nina G. Jablonski. University of California Press, 2013. 288 pages. ISBN: 978-0520275898.

Strength Training Anatomy. By Frederic Delavier. Champaign, Illinois, Human Kinetics, 2001. 124 pages. ISBN: 0736041850. Revised edition of "Guide des mouvements de musculation" Paris, Ditions Bigot, 1998. An outstanding illustrated guide to muscles at work. Both male and female models are used. A somaesthetic practice. VSCL.

Tantra: Path of Ecstasy. By Georg Feuerstein. Boston, Shambhala, 1998. Index, bibliography, notes, 314 pages. ISBN: 157062304X. VSCL.

The Thinking Body By Mabel Ellsworth Todd. Gestalt Journal Press, 2008. 342 pages. ISBN: 978-0939266548.

Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. By Ashley Montague. William Morrow, 3rd Edition, 1986. First Edition 1971. Detailed References, index, 493 pages. ISBN: 9780060960285. VSCL.

Toward a Psychology of Being. By Abraham Maslow. Reprint of 1962 First Edition. Martino Fine Books, 2011. 228 pages. ISBN: 978-1614270676. VSCL.

The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. By Maturana, Humberto R. and Varela, Francisco J. Boston, Shambhala, 1987. Revised Edition, 1998. Index, glossary, 269 pages. ISBN: 9780877736424. VSCL.

Trail Guide to the Body: How to Locate Muscles, Bones and More. By Andrew Biel, LMP. Illustrations by Robin Dorn, LMP. Boulder, Colorado, Books of Discovery, 1997, 2005, 3rd Edition. Index, glossary, 422 pages. ISBN: 9780965853453. A very good resource and reference tool written by an experienced massage therapist. A good book for learning palpatory and anatomy skills. A somaesthetic practice. VSCL.

Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. By Peter A. Levine. North Atlantic Books, 1997. 288 pages. ISBN: 978-1556432330. A somaesthetic practice.

Body, Soma, Somatics, Somaesthetics, Body-Mind, Somatic Psychology and Philosophy, Medicine, Senses, Self-Improvement
Embodied Cognition, Situated Intelligence, Embodied Mind, Enactivism

"Somaaesthetics can be provisionally defined a the critical meliorative study of one's experience and use of one's body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning. It is therefore also devoted to the knowledge, discourses, and disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it."
- Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness, 2008, p. 19

“Senses empower limitations, senses expand vision within borders, senses promote understanding through pleasure.”
- Dejan Stojanovic

“All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.”
- Neil Gaiman

“A very slight change in our habits is sufficient to destroy our sense of our daily reality, and the reality of the world about us; the moment we pass out of our habits we lose all sense of permanency and routine.”
- George Moore

“Seeing, hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.”
- Walt Whitman

“The ultimate change one can ever seek for is a change in thought. A change in thought is a change in body”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“Seek a sanctuary,
Respect it, as it is holy,
Walk into it with a bare mind, bare feet and plain clothing,
Nurture your body, mind and spirit through a healing ritual,
Leave it with a pure heart until you find your way to it again.”
- Master Jin Kwon

“It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson

“It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”
- Anais Nin

“We are enslaved by anything we do not consciously see. We are freed by conscious perception.”
- Vernon Howard

“If you nurture your mind, body, and spirit, your time will expand. You will gain a new perspective that will allow you to accomplish much more.”
- Brian Koslow

“I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know. There we go beyond those limited and limiting patterns of body, emotions, volition, and understanding that have been keeping us in dry-dock. Instead we become available to our capacity for a larger life in body, mind, and spirit. In this state we know great torrents of delight.”
- Jean Houston

"If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.”
- Ray Bradbury

“Studies have shown that 90% of error in thinking is due to error in perception. If you can change your perception, you can change your emotion and this can lead to new ideas.”
- Edward de Bono

“We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility.”
- Malcolm Gladwell

"We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, put patterns that perpetuate themselves."
- Norbet Weiner, 1950

“The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.”
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

"Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity. Once again, there is only the dance."
- George Leonard

“We cannot sense without acting and we cannot act without sensing."
- Thomas Hanna

"Improved perception of our somatic feelings not only gives us greater knowledge of ourselves but also enables greater somatic skill, facility, and range of movement that can afford our sensory organs greater scope in giving us knowledge of the world. Besides augmenting our own possibilities of pleasure , such improved somatic functioning and awareness can give us greater power in performing virtuous acts for the benefit of others, since all action somehow depends on the efficacy of our bodily instrument."
- Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness, 2008, p. 126.

“Monks, one thing, if practiced and made much of, conduces to great thrill, great profit, great security after the toil, to mindfulness and self-possession, to the winning of knowledge and insight, to pleasant living in this very life, to the realization of the fruit of release by knowledge. What is that one thing: It is mindfulness centered on the body.”
- The Buddha, Auguttara Nikaya Sutra

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
- Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder

“You must learn to heed your senses. Humans use but a tiny percentage of theirs. They barely look, they rarely listen, they never smell, and they think that they can only experience feelings through their skin. But they talk, oh, do they talk.”
- Michael Scott, The Alchemyst

"The Church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta."
- Eduardo Galeano

"The Trager approach is a form of movement education and mind/body integration. Proponents claim the Trager Approach helps release deep-seated physical and mental patterns and facilitates deep relaxation, increased physical mobility, and mental clarity. The founder, Milton Trager, called his work Psychophysical Integration. He was an athlete, dancer, and bodybuilder. He began doing bodywork with no training and later worked under a variety of practitioner licenses. Late in life, at Esalen Institute, he was encouraged to begin teaching, which he did for the last 22 years of his life. At the beginning of a session, the practitioner enters into a state of awareness that Milton Trager termed "hook-up," a state similar to meditation.From this state of mind, the practitioner uses gentle touch and a combination of passive and active movement to teach the body how to move with less effort."
- Trager Method

Six Illusions About the Body
By Larry Dossey, M.D.
1. The body is solid.
2. The body is stable.
3. The body is individuated.
4. The body belongs to the Earth.
5. The body is stationary.
6. The body is mindless.

"The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Somatic psychology is an interdisciplinary field involving the study of the body, somatic experience, and the embodied self, including therapeutic and holistic approaches to body. The word somatic comes from the ancient Greek root σωματ- somat- (body). The word psychology comes from the ancient Greek psyche (breath, soul hence mind) and -logia (study). Body Psychotherapy is a general branch of this subject, while Somatherapy, Eco-somatics and Dance therapy, for example, are specific branches of the subject. Somatic psychology is a field of study that bridges the Mind-body dichotomy. While Pierre Janet can perhaps be considered the first Somatic Psychologist due to his extensive psychotherapeutic studies and writings with significant reference to the body (some of which pre-date Freud), it was actually Wilhelm Reich who was the first person to bring body awareness systematically into psychoanalysis, and also the first psychotherapist to touch clients physically, working with their bodies. Reich was a significant influence in the founding of Body Psychotherapy (or Somatic Psychology as it is often known in the USA & Australia) - though he called his early work "Character Analysis" and "Character-Analytic Vegetotherapy"). Several types of body-oriented psychotherapies trace their origins back to Reich, though there have been many subsequent developments and other influences (ref: entry on Body Psychotherapy and Somatic Psychology is of particular interest in trauma work. There is increasing use of body-oriented therapeutic techniques within mainstream psychology (like EMDR, EFT, and Mindfulness practice) and psychoanalysis has recognized the use of somatic resonance, embodied trauma, and similar concepts, for many years. Historically, there are early practitioners, for example, the Persian physician Avicenna (980 to 1037 CE) who performed psychotherapy only by observing the movement of the patient's pulse as he listened to their anguish. This is reminiscent of both traditional Tibetan medicine and current energy therapies that employ tapping points on a meridian. As a contrast to the Western separation of body/mind, some writers describe the "body as a slow mind" and this re-examination of the fundamental mind-body dichotomy has coincided with research into neuroscience, embodiment and consciousness, and an unconscious mind that 'speaks' through the language of body. Dance therapy or (Dance Movement Psychotherapy) also reflect something of this approach and are considered a study and practice within the field of somatic psychology. A wide variety of techniques are used in somatic psychotherapy including sound, touch, mirroring, movement and breath. An individual records life experience during a pre- and nonverbal periods differently than during a verbalized and personal narrative period. Working with the client's implicit knowing of these early experiences, somatic psychology includes the non-verbal qualities that mark most human communication, especially in the first years of life. This understanding of consciousness, communication and mind-body language challenges some traditional applications of the talking cure. Practitioners in this field believe psychological, social, cultural and political forces support the splitting and fragmentation of the mind-body unity. These pressures affect an individual’s mental, biological, and relational health."
- Somatic Psychology in Wikipedia

"There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it."
- Thomas Carlyle

"The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change."
- William James, Principles of Psychology

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
- C.S. Lewis

"The primary purpose of achieving human scale is not to help us apprehend a situation, but rather to help us to know how to feel about it. Especially in political and religious discourse--situations where speakers are attempting to influence their listeners' values and decision-making processes--I would like to argue that the achievement of human scale is intended primarily to import normativity to the blend, which is accomplished through the recruitment of human-scale emotional-somatic reactions. This argument is essentially an attempt to connect of conceptual blending theorists with those of neuroscientists who argue for the importance of somatic states and emotional reactions in human value-creation and decision-making."
- Edward Slingerland

“Proprioception is, literally, how we “sense ourselves.” There are three main sources of input into our proprioceptive system. One of them, kinesthesia, is the feeling of movement derived from all skeletal and muscular structures. Kinesthesia also includes the feeling of pain, our orientations in space, the passage of time, and rhythm. A second source, visceral feedback, consists of the miscellaneous impressions from our internal organ. Labyrinthine or vestibular feedback? The feeling of balance as related to our position in space is provided by the chochlea, and organ of the inner ear. The physiological term “proprioception” refers to the ability to evaluate, and respond to stimuli sensed by the proprioceptives, actual nerves imbedded in our tissues (muscles, joints and tendons). These cells constantly communicate with the brain, orienting the body to its movement, position, and tone. It is our sixth sense. The other five senses provide information about the outer world. Proprioception provides information about the inner world, which we alone inhabit. Physicist David Bohm used the term “proprioceptive intelligence” to describe an optimal state of self-sensing, self-correcting, and self-organizing awareness? allowing for coherent participation in life through the integral functioning of all modes of intelligence.”
- Risa Kaparo, Awakening Somatic Intelligence, 2012, p.25

"Play provides the emotional spark which activates our attention, problem solving and behavior response systems so we gain the skills necessary for cooperation, co-creativity, altruism and understanding."
- Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves

"All parts of the human body get tired eventually - except the tongue."
- Konrad Adenauer

“Besides, it is a shame to let yourself grow old through neglect before seeing how you can develop the maximum beauty and strength of body; and you can have this experience if your are negligent, because these things don’t normally happen by themselves.”
- Socrates, from Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates

"The three branches of somaesthetics: the analytic study of the body's role in perception, experience, and action and thus in our mental, moral, and social life; the pragmatic study of methodologies to improve our body-mind functioning and thus expand our capacities of self-fashioning; and the practical branch that investigates such pragmatic methods by testing them on our own flesh in concrete experience and practice."
- Richard Schusterman, Body Consciousness, p. 139

"Awareness is the function of isolating "new" sensory-motor phenomena in order to learn to recognize and control them. It is only through the exclusionary function of awareness that the involuntary is made voluntary, the unknown made known, and the never-done the doable. Awareness serves as a probe, recruiting new material for the repertoire of voluntary consciousness. The upshot of this is somatic learning begins by focusing awareness of the unknown. This active functioning identifies traits of the unknown that can be associated with traits already known in one's conscious repertoire. Through the process the unknown becomes known by the voluntary consciousness. In a word, the unlearned becomes learned."
- Thomas Hanna

"The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries."
- Iris Murdoch

“Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”
- Wayne W. Dyer

"Ultimately the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, cigarettes or medicine, it usually has the last word because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality."
- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies

"At present, I am mainly observing the physical motion of mountains, water, trees and flowers. One is everywhere reminded of similar movements in the human body, of similar impulses of joy and suffering in plants."
- Egon Schiele

“Always focus on the front windshield and not the review mirror.”
- Colin Powell

In psychology, sensation and perception are stages of processing of the senses in human and animal systems, such as vision, auditory, vestibular, and pain senses. Included in this topic is the study of illusions such as motion aftereffect, color constancy, auditory illusions, and depth perception. Sensation is the function of the low-level biochemical and neurological events that begin with the impinging of a stimulus upon the receptor cells of a sensory organ. It is the detection of the elementary properties of a stimulus. Perception is the mental process or state that is reflected in statements like "I see a uniformly blue wall", representing awareness or understanding of the real-world cause of the sensory input. The goal of sensation is detection, the goal of perception is to create useful information of the surroundings. In other words, sensations are the first stages in the functioning of senses to represent stimuli from the environment, and perception is a higher brain function about interpreting events and objects in the world.^[3] Stimuli from the environment are transformed into neural signals, which are then interpreted by the brain, through a process called transduction. Transduction is the physical process of converting stimuli into biological signals that may further influence the internal state of the organism, including the possible production of conscious awareness or perception. Gestalt theorists believe that with the two together a person experiences a personal reality that is other than the sum of the parts."
- Sensation in Psychology

"A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone."
- Robert Frost

”The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience. Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around…Throughout history, ‘tender loving care’ has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.”
- Larry Dossey

"Nothing, in all of the Universe is more delicious than to be in this physical body allowing the fullness that is you to be present in the moment."
- Abraham Hicks

“All changes in space which we see, hear, smell or taste are literally tactile impressions. All our senses are variations of our unique sense of touch. Two approaching objects touch one another when they finally meet without a noticeable space between them. … This is what happens in any condensing matter in which the outer aspects move towards a centre… Each single part of matter approaches its neighboring part until the two collide, causing an impact or a pressure. It is space, which appears and disappears between and round object and in the movements of the particles of the object.”
- Rudolf Laban, The Language of Movement, 1966, p. 29

“Most of us go through each day looking for what we saw yesterday. And, not surprisingly, that is what we find.”
- James A. Kitchens

"A habit (or wont) is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur unconsciously. In the American Journal of Psychology (1903) it is defined in this way: "A habit, from the standpoint of psychology, is a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience." Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habits are sometimes compulsory. The process by which new behaviours become automatic is habit formation. Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to form because the behavioural patterns we repeat are imprinted in our neural pathways, but it is possible to form new habits through repetition. As behaviors are repeated in a consistent context, there is an incremental increase in the link between the context and the action. This increases the automaticity of the behavior in that context. Features of an automatic behavior are all or some of: efficiency, lack of awareness, unintentionality, uncontrollability. Habit formation is the process by which a behaviour, through regular repetition, becomes automatic or habitual. This is modelled as an increase in automaticity with number of repetitions up to an asymptote. This process of habit formation can be slow. Lally et al. (2010) found the average time for participants to reach the asymptote of automaticity was 66 days with a range of 18–254 days. As the habit is forming, it can be analysed in three parts: the cue, the behavior, and the reward. The cue is the thing that causes your habit to come about, the trigger to your habitual behaviour. This could be anything that your mind associates with that habit and you will automatically let a habit come to the surface. The behavior is the actual habit that you are exhibiting and the reward, a positive feeling, therefore continues the “habit loop.” A habit may initially be triggered by a goal, but over time that goal becomes less necessary and the habit becomes more automatic."
- Habit Formation

”If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you’d best begin with the Little Answers about your body.”
- George Sheehan

"The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing."
- John Muir

“The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.”
- Deepak Chopra

"The higher your energy level, the more efficient your body The more efficient your body, the better you feel and the more you will use your talent to produce outstanding results."
- Tony Robbins

"John Bargh (1994), based on over a decade of research, suggested that four characteristics usually accompany automatic behavior: Awareness: A person may be unaware of the mental process that is occurring. Intentionality: A person may not be involved with the initiation of a mental process. Efficiency: Automatic mental processes tend to have a low cognitive load, requiring relatively low mental resources. Controllability: A person may not have the ability to stop or alter a process after initiation."
- Automaticity

“Recognition of somatic training as an essential means towards philosophical enlightenment and virtue lies at the heart of the Asian practices of hatha yoga, Zen meditation, and T’ai Chi Ch’uan. As Japanese philosopher Yuasa Yasuo insists, the concept of “personal cultivation,” or shugyō (an obvious analogue of “care of the self’), is presupposed in Eastern thought as “the philosophical foundation” because “true knowledge” cannot be obtained simply by means of theoretical thinking, but only through ‘bodily recognition or realization’ (tainin or taitoku). From its very beginnings, East-Asian philosophy has insisted on the bodily dimension of self-knowledge and self-cultivation. When the Confucian Analects advocate daily examining one’s person in the quest for self-improvement, the word translated as “person” is actually the Chinese word for body (shen 身). Arguing that care of the body is the basic task and responsibility without which we cannot successfully perform all our other tasks and duties, Mencius claims, “The functions of the body are the endowment of Heaven. But it is only a Sage who can properly manipulate them.” The classic Daoist thinkers Laozi and Zhuangzi similarly urge the special importance of somatic care: “He who loves his body more than dominion over the empire can be given the custody of the empire [Laozi, C17].” “You have only to take care and guard your own body .. and other things will of themselves grow sturdy;” the Sage is concerned with the means by which to keep the body whole and to care for life”; “being complete in body, he is complete in spirit; and to be complete in spirit is the Way of the Sage (Zhuangzi).”
- Richard Schusterman, Body Consciousness, 2008, p.18

"Health is a large word. It embraces not the body only, but the mind and spirit as well;... and not today's pain or pleasure alone, but the whole being and outlook of a man."
- James H. West

“All we have to believe is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted.”
- Neil Gaiman

“There is no reality except the one contained within us; that is why so many people live an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”
- Herman Hesse

"What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera."
- Aldous Huxley

"The human body and mind are tremendous forces that are continually amazing scientists and society. Therefore, we have no choice but to keep an open mind as to what the human being can achieve."
- Evely Glennie

"Neural adaptation or sensory adaptation is a change over time in the responsiveness of the sensory system to a constant stimulus. It is usually experienced as a change in the stimulus. For example, if one rests one's hand on a table, one immediately feels the table's surface on one's skin. Within a few seconds, however, one ceases to feel the table's surface. The sensory neurons stimulated by the table's surface respond immediately, but then respond less and less until they may not respond at all; this is an example of neural adaptation. Neural adaptation is also thought to happen at a more central level such as the cortex."
- Neural Adaptation

"The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical."
- George Lakeoff

"You must know for yourself, directly, the truth of yourself and you cannot realize it through another, however great. There is no authority that can reveal it."
- J. Krishnamurti

“The experience of touch is basic to discovering who we are and who is other and how we dance this life together."
- B. B. Cohyen

"Perception (from the Latin perceptio, percipio) is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sense organs. For example, vision involves light striking the retina of the eye, smell is mediated by odor molecules, and hearing involves pressure waves. Perception is not the passive receipt of these signals, but is shaped by learning, memory, expectation, and attention. Perception involves these "top-down" effects as well as the "bottom-up" process of processing sensory input. The "bottom-up" processing transforms low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition). The "top-down" processing refers to a person's concept and expectations (knowledge), and selective mechanisms (attention) that influence perception. Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness. Since the rise of experimental psychology in the 19th Century, psychology's understanding of perception has progressed by combining a variety of techniques. Psychophysics quantitatively describes the relationships between the physical qualities of the sensory input and perception. Sensory neuroscience studies the brain mechanisms underlying perception. Perceptual systems can also be studied computationally, in terms of the information they process. Perceptual issues in philosophy include the extent to which sensory qualities such as sound, smell or color exist in objective reality rather than in the mind of the perceiver. Although the senses were traditionally viewed as passive receptors, the study of illusions and ambiguous images has demonstrated that the brain's perceptual systems actively and pre-consciously attempt to make sense of their input. There is still active debate about the extent to which perception is an active process of hypothesis testing, analogous to science, or whether realistic sensory information is rich enough to make this process unnecessary. The perceptual systems of the brain enable individuals to see the world around them as stable, even though the sensory information is typically incomplete and rapidly varying. Human and animal brains are structured in a modular way, with different areas processing different kinds of sensory information. Some of these modules take the form of sensory maps, mapping some aspect of the world across part of the brain's surface. These different modules are interconnected and influence each other. For instance, taste is strongly influenced by smell."
- Perception

"I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me."
- Herman Hesse

“Somaesthetics can be defined as the critical study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning.”
- Richard Shusterman

"There is a great probability that our loss of capacity for enjoying the positive joys of life is largely due to the decreased sensibility of our senses and our lack of full use of them. All human happiness is sensuous happiness."
- Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1937, p. 126.

"We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one."
- Aristotle

"The theory of multiple intelligences is a theory of intelligence that differentiates it into specific (primarily sensory) "modalities", rather than seeing intelligence as dominated by a single general ability. This model was proposed by Howard Gardner in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Gardner articulated seven criteria for a behavior to be considered an intelligence. These were that the intelligences showed: potential for brain isolation by brain damage, place in evolutionary history, presence of core operations, susceptibility to encoding (symbolic expression), a distinct developmental progression, the existence of savants, prodigies and other exceptional people, and support from experimental psychology and psychometric findings. Gardner chose eight abilities that he held to meet these criteria: musical–rhythmic, visual–spatial, verbal–linguistic, logical–mathematical, bodily–kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. He later suggested that existential and moral intelligence may also be worthy of inclusion. Although the distinction between intelligences has been set out in great detail, Gardner opposes the idea of labeling learners to a specific intelligence. Each individual possesses a unique blend of all the intelligences. Gardner firmly maintains that his theory of multiple intelligences should "empower learners", not restrict them to one modality of learning. Gardner argues intelligence is categorized into three primary or overarching categories, those of which are formulated by the abilities. According to Gardner, intelligence is: 1) The ability to create an effective product or offer a service that is valued in a culture, 2) a set of skills that make it possible for a person to solve problems in life, and 3) the potential for finding or creating solutions for problems, which involves gathering new knowledge."
- Multiple Intelligence Theory of John Gardner, 1983

”It’s also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that’s sitting right here right now…with its aches and its pleasures…is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive.”
- Pema Chodron

”While it is obvious that a good-feeling body makes for a more pleasant physical experience, we want you to understand that finding pleasant things to focus upon also makes for a good-feeling body. However, most humans are approaching the subject of their physical well-being in a backward manner. Most people who are experiencing physical ailments let their physical condition dictate their mental attitude. In other words, their emotions are responsive to their physical condition. When they are in pain, they offer emotions of frustration, worry, anger, or fear. They want the condition to improve so that their emotional state can improve. Any illness, or departure from physical well-being, begins at a cellular level — but the overwhelming propensity of your cells is that of thriving. All day, every day, your cells are reclaiming balance at such refined and subtle levels that most people are completely unaware of the power and intelligence of their cellular bodies. Focusing upon good-feeling objects of attention is the most effective way of providing the optimum environment for allowing unhindered cellular communication and the ultimate thriving of your physical body.”
- Abraham Hicks

"The moment you change your perception, is the moment you rewrite the chemistry of your body."
- Bruce Lipton

"The fork is the most powerful tool ever placed in our hands."
- John Robbins, Diet for a Small Planet

”Within my body are all the sacred places of the world, and the most profound pilgrimage I can ever make is within my own body.”
- Saraha

"We human beings have bodies. We are "rational animals," but we are also "rational animals," which means that our rationality is embodied. The centrality of human embodiment directly influences what and how things can be meaningful to us, the ways in which these meanings can be developed and articulated, the ways we are able to comprehend and reason about our experience, and the actions we take. Our reality is shaped by the patterns of our bodily movement, the contours of our spatial and temporal orientation, and the forms of our interaction with objects."
- Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 1987, xix

"When you are in vibrational harmony, your body produces whatever it needs to remain in perfect balance."
- Abraham Hicks

"The word 'ass' is as much good as the word 'face.' It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at the waist.
- D.H. Lawrence

"Stimulation or excitation is the action of various agents (stimuli) on nerves, muscles, or a sensory end organ, by which activity is evoked; especially, the nervous impulse produced by various agents on nerves, or a sensory end organ, by which the part connected with the nerve is thrown into a state of activity, whether everyday general physical activity or sexual stimulation. Stimulation is often connected with psychological stimulation, which concerns how a stimulus affects a person's thinking process. The word is also often used metaphorically. For example, an interesting or fun activity can be described as "stimulating", regardless of its physical effects on nerves. Stimulate means to act as a stimulus to; stimulus means things that rouse to activity. Stimulation in general refers to how organisms perceive incoming stimuli. As such it is part of the stimulus-response mechanism. Simple organisms broadly react in three ways to stimulation: too little stimulation causes them to stagnate, too much to die from stress or inability to adapt, and a medium amount causes them to adapt and grow as they overcome it. Similar categories or effects are noted with psychological stress with people. Thus, stimulation may be described as how external events provoke a response by an individual in the attempt to cope."
- Stimulation

“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

"The body is sensitive. It registers every thought and feeling. Be tender with it."
- Brendan O'Regan

"Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos—the trees, the clouds, everything."
- Thích Nhất Hạnh

"Our metaphoric conceptions of inner life have a hierarchical structure. At the highest level, there is the general Subject-Self metaphor, which conceptualizes a person as bifurcated. The exact nature of this bifurcation is specified more precisely one level down, where there are five specific instances of the metaphor. These five special cases of the basic Subject-Self metaphor are grounded in four types of everyday experience: (1) manipulating objects, (2) being located in space, (3) entering into social relations, and (4) empathic projection─conceptually projecting yourself onto someone else, as when a child imitates a parent. The fifth special case comes from the Folk Theory of Essences: Each person is seen as having an Essence that is part of the Subject. The person may have more than one Self, but only one of those Selves is compatible with that Essence. This is called the "real" or "true" Self. Finally, each of these five special cases of the general Subject-Self metaphor has further special cases. It is at this level of specificity that the real richness of our metaphoric conceptions of Subject and Self emerges.
    In the general Subject-Self metaphor, a person is divided into a Subject an one or more Selves. The Subject is the target domain of that metaphor. The Subject is that aspect of a person that is experiencing consciousness and the locus of reason, will, and judgment, which, by its nature, exists only in the present. This is what the Subject is in most of the cases; however, there is a subsystem that is different in an important way. In this subsystem, the Subject is also the locus of a person's Essence─that enduring thing that makes us who we are. Metaphorically, the Subject is always conceptualized as a person.
    The Self is that part of a person this is not picked out by the Subject. This includes the body, social roles, past states, and actions in the world. There can be more than one Self. And each Self is conceptualized metaphorically as either a person, an object, or a location."
-   George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999, p.269

"Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun."
- Woody Allen

"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do."
- Alva Noë

"I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more."
- e. e. cummings

"Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist."
- Herman Ebbinghaus

"Enactivism argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that our environment is one which we selectively create through our capacities to interact with the world. "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world."
- Enactivism

"I find significance in all kinds of small details when I run; I'm hyper aware of my surroundings, the sensations in my body, and the thoughts running through my mind. Everything is clearer, heightened."
- Kristin Armstrong

"The essential attribute of a new sense is, not the perception of external objects or influences which ordinarily do not act upon the senses, but that external causes should excite in it a new and peculiar kind of sensation different from all the sensations of our five senses."
- Johannes P. Muller

"Psychology is still trying to explain the perception of the position of an object in space, along with its shape, size, and so on, and to understand the sensations of color."
- James J. Gibson

"The ego is the perception of the bodily self, and what one feels and knows of the body is the skin."
- P. Lacombe

"Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations."
- Ernst Mach

“Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”
- Vladimir Nabokov

“Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.”
- Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

"It was a great thing to be a human being. It was something tremendous. Suddenly I'm conscious of a million sensations buzzing in me like bees in a hive. Gentlemen, it was a great thing."
- Karel Capek

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

“Richard Perry, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, studied the influence of body movement on our thinking. He found that nodding our head “yes” or “no” not only sent body language to others, but to ourself. If we say something positive but nod our head “no,” testing showed we didn’t fully believe our own statements. The movement served as “self-validation,” confirming or negating our own thoughts. “If we nod our heads up and down, we gain confidence in what we are thinking. But when we shake our heads from side to side, we lose confidence in our own thoughts.” He notes that body movements can even affect our belief in deep issues important to us. In effect, the motor movement “wins out” and influences the brain more than the language we use, or even the thought itself.”
- Joy Colangelo, Embodied Wisdom, p. 180

"A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book."
- Irish Proverb

"Know, then, whatever cheerful and serene, supports the mind supports the body too."
- John Armstrong

"I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning. A brain without a body could not think ... the muscles themselves are part and parcel of our higher functions."
- Moshe Feldenkrais, Mind and Body, 1964

“When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on ice and gyrate crazily but do not fall, when I unconsciously counter-steer my way into a sharp bicycle turn, taking advantage of physics I do not understand using a technique I am not even aware of using, when I somehow catch the dropped oranges before I know I've dropped them, when my wounds heal in my ignorance, I realize how much bigger I am than I think I am. And how much more important, nine times out of ten, those lower-level processes are to my overall well-being than the higher-level ones that tend to be the ones getting me bent out of shape or making me feel disappointed or proud.”
- Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

"Joy and Temperance and Repose, slam the door on the doctor's nose."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"We conclude, then, that the study of mammal, monkey, ape, and human behaviors clearly shows that touch is a basic behavioral need, much as breathing is a basic physical need, that the dependent infant is designed to grow and develop socially through contact, tactile behavir, and throughout life to maintain contact with others. Furthermore, when the need for touch remains unsatisfied, abnormal behavior will result."
- Ashley Montague, Touching, 1971, p.46

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
- Victor Frankl

"Furthermore, the very notion that there are five senses is purely arbitrary (see Classen 1993; Geurts 2003). Why only five? If we wished to, it seems we could at least identify eight, and perhaps divide them into two categories. The taken-for-granted five senses belong to those sensory modes that provide information about the world external to the individual. Those are our exteroceptive senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. It is easy enough to identify at least three more senses that provide information about the internal world of the human body, our interoceptive senses: the sense of pain (nociception), thirst, and hunger. Yet, eight is not nearly enough. What about our sense of our own internal body’s muscles and organs (proprioception)? What about the sensations that mediate between conditions in the external world and internal body, such as our sense of balance (equilibrioception), movement (kinesthesia), temperature (thermoception), or even our sense of time (at least in terms of polychronicity and monochronicity, if not more)? Now our list has grown from five senses to thirteen, and still I experience senses that are not clearly accounted for in these categories. After all, which category accounts for the sensual experience of orgasm? Assuming I can come up with an answer, which is doubtful, it is unlikely that we would agree—especially considering that even within the experiences of one individual, not all orgasms are the same. Or perhaps we could even suggest that to divide the senses into categories is itself an arbitrary act that reproduces our cultural codes. In fact, why divide at all “external” from “internal” senses? Is that not, after all, an exercise in atomism and individualism so typical of Western culture? And because most of our sensations, and thus our senses, depend so heavily on the language that we use to make sense of their operation (Geurts 2003), should we then not treat the senses in their own cultural contexts and within “their own foundational schemas through which the world is… sensed as a continuous whole” (Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips 2006:6)? And finally, are we even so sure that sensations can be so clearly separated from emotions, or even from the material things that are the object of sensations (see Geurts 2003)? What we do know for sure is that to think of the senses as only confined to five exteroceptive sensory modes is to grossly oversimplify human sensual experience, both within anyone culture and across cultures. Maybe that is the key point: modes of sensing inevitably blend and blur into one another, thus making their alleged boundaries fuzzy and indistinct in experience. It is this ecology of sensual relations that should be the focus of our attention (see Howes 2003; Ingold 2000)."
- Somatic Work: Toward A Sociology of the Senses, Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul, and Simon Gottschalk

"Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his body?"
- Thomas Hardy

“For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.”
- George Lakoff

"Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies."
- Ernst Mach

"Many people can listen to their cat more intelligently than they can listen to their own despised body. Because they attend to their pet in a cherishing way, it returns their love. Their body, however, may have to let out an earth-shattering scream in order to be heard at all."
- Marion Woodman

"The structure of the human brain is enormously complex. It contains about 10 billion nerve cells (neurons), which are interlinked in a vast network through 1,000 billion junctions (synapses). The whole brain can be divided into subsections, or sub-networks, which communicate with each other in a network fashion. All this results in intricate patterns of intertwined webs, networks of nesting within larger networks."
- Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, 1996, p. 82

"Attention to the human body brings healing and regeneration. Through awareness of the body we remember who we really are."
- Jack Kornfield

"The body really is the engine of aliveness, of thought. As long as people don't feel their bodies, we're wasting our time and theirs trying to do talking psychotherapy.... Becoming comfortable in their bodies is the number one, paramount issue.... People need to learn to regulate their physical states in order to get their minds to work. Once they shift their physiological patterns, their thinking can change."
- Bessel Van Der Kolk, Psychiatrist

"The paved highway of belief through touch
And sight leads straightest into the human heart
And the precincts of the mind."
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, V. 105-107

“The human body is not an instrument to be used, but a realm of ones being to be experienced, explored and thereby educated”
- Thomas Hanna

“For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.”
- Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

"If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred."
- Walt Whitman

"Science has revealed that the human body is made up of millions and millions of atoms... For example, I am made up of 5.8x10^27 atoms."
- A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

"Before beginning this journey inward, we must clarify its nature. There is a frequent misunderstanding of the journey inward or the spiritual path, which suggests to most people a rejection of the natural world, the mundane, the practical, the pleasurable. On the contrary, to a yogi (or indeed a Taoist master or Zen monk) the path toward spirit lies entirely in the domain of nature. It is the exploration of nature from the world of appearances, or surface, into the subtlest heart of living matter. Spirituality is not some external goal that one must seek be a part of the divine core of each of us, which we must reveal. For the yogi, spirit is not separate from the body. Spirituality, as I have tried to make clear, is not ethereal and outside nature but accessible and palpable in our very own bodies."
- B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, 2005, p. 18

"We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything than when we are playing."
- Charles Schaefer

"Holding onto and manipulating physical objects is one of the things we learn earliest and do the most. It should not be surprising that object control is the basis of one of the five most fundamental metaphors for our inner life. To control objects, we must learn to control our bodies. We learn both forms of control together. Self-control and object control are inseparable experiences from earliest childhood. It is no surprise that we should have as a metaphor─a primary metaphor─Self Control is Object Control."
- George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999, p.270

"We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing."
- George Bernard Shaw

"Let the body receive an injury less than mortal, and what follows? Before the swiftest foot can bring the physician, Nature has begun her healing work. The physician is at best only her humble assistant. Medical science is learning more and more to trust to the vis medicatrix Naturæ—the healing power of Nature. It is she, whom we call stern and merciless, that knits together the broken bone that no artificer on earth could mend. It is she that deftly works out of the system the injurious matter which we in our ignorance have forced upon it. She is not only kind when we obey her: she repairs our mistakes and heals the hurts we have done ourselves."
- George S. Merriam

“I am the now of the then. My body is the embodiment of all my ancestors who came before me. They live on in me.”
- Jarod Kintz

"Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies."
- Ken Wilbur

"We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life."
- William Godwin

"Mindfulness of the body is awareness of... the taste and smell of this moment."
- Steve Hagen

“Engagement is the conscious inhabitation of your body and mind. Practice is happening when your open awareness is moving with, in and through your embodied activity. Intrinsic to practice is your conscious participation with your life. Engagement is the conduction of your free and open awareness through your activities, whatever they may be.”
- Rob McNamara, Strength to Awaken

“Embodiment is the way we are. It is how we do. The purpose of our bodies – specifically our posture, movement, tension and bodily awareness patterns is not just functional in terms of what transports the head around effectively, but is a partial solidification of a set of habits we call ourselves. The way we hold the body, move around, attend and intend through the body, is a way of managing and expressing who we are. The unconscious self, and potentially the consciously created self, is visceral. Our shaping is as much a solidification of past conditions and a way of shaping the future based on these, as an appropriate response to the present. Our physical form is our perceptual, cognitive, emotional, inspirational, relational and behavioural lens – it is how we see, think, feel, create, relate and act. How we move is how we are, and we literally “lean” towards one life or another. Embodiment is not just inhabitation – being aware of the body (implying a separate something that is aware of the body as “it”) but being aware AS a body – the body as I. Becoming conscious of our usually unconscious personal shaping, developing a range of options in this regard, and having the freedom of choice as a result, is what “embodiment” means to me. More poetically, when awareness and embodiment entwine, the body turns from a prison to a question – a question of spirit, of love and of meaning. More concisely, and in the fullest sense: embodiment is the subjective aspect of the body. If this is all been a bit verbose – “how we do” and “the way we are” are as good a definitions as any.”
- Mark Walsh

"Play produces feelings of pleasure which help you escape from two major creativity killers – stress and self-consciousness."
- Jordan Ayan

"Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself."
- Moshe Feldenkrais, Awareness Through Movement, 1973

“Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty commander, an unknown wise man— he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body. There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. ”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with.”
– Carl Jung

"A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little the better for anything else."
- John Locke

“The body is primarily mental. The mind is primarily physical.”
- Paul Linden

“Your body is the ground metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence. It is your Bible, your encyclopaedia, your life story.”
- Gabrielle Roth

"Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce."
- Michel de Montaigne

"Reason" causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses. To the extent that the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute."
- Wallace Stevens

"We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudimen ts of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. Every generation makes the discovery that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such groveling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?... But where is the instructed teacher? Where are the normal schools?"
- Henry David Thoreau

"The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his hear t to report what my dream was!"
- Shakespeare

"Philosophers have long pointed out that all human knowledge comes from sensuous experiences. We can no more attain knowledge of any kind without the senses of vision and touch and smell than a camera can take pictures with a lens and a sensitive plate. The difference between a clever man and a dull fellow is that the former has a finer set of lenses and perceiving apparatus by which he gets a sharper image of things and retains it longer. And to proceed from the knowledge of books to the knowledge of life, mere thinking or cognition is not enough; one has to feel one's way about─to sense things as they are and to get a correct impression of the myriad things in human life and human nature not as unrelated parts, but as a whole. In this matter of feeling about life and of gaining experience, all our senses cooperate, and it is through the cooperation of the senses, and of the heart with the head, that we can have intellectual warmth. Intellectual warmth, after all, is the thing, for it is the sign of life, like the color of green in a plant."
- Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1937, p. 139.

“We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.”
- George Lakoff

"What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself."
- Abraham Maslow

"Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself."
- Leo Tolstoy

"Favor comes because for a brief moment in the great space of human change and progress some general human purpose finds in him a satisfactory embodiment."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"We have a pharmacy inside us that is absolutely exquisite. It makes the right medicine, for the precise time, for the right target organ—with no side effects."
- Deepak Chopra

“This body of ours is a temple of the Divine.”
– Katha Upanishad, Hindu tradition, 200 BCE

“Your body is a temple of the holy spirit.”
– Corinthians 6:19-20, 100 CE

"Embodied Cognition is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes. The general theory contends that cognitive processes develop when a tightly coupled system emerges from real-time, goal-directed interactions between organisms and their environment; the nature of these interactions influences the formation and further specifies the nature of the developing cognitive capacities. Since embodied accounts of cognition have been formulated in a variety of different ways in each of the sub-fields comprising cognitive science (that is, developmental psychology, artificial life/robotics, linguistics, and philosophy of mind), a rich interdisciplinary research program continues to emerge. Yet, all of these different conceptions do maintain that one necessary condition for cognition is embodiment, where the basic notion of embodiment is broadly understood as the unique way an organism’s sensorimotor capacities enable it to successfully interact with its environmental niche. In addition, all of the different formulations of the general embodied cognition thesis share a common goal of developing cognitive explanations that capture the manner in which mind, body, and world mutually interact and influence one another to promote an organism’s adaptive success."
- Embodied Cognition, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"We cannot create observers by saying 'observe,' but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses."
- Maria Montessori

"The best and most efficient pharmacy is within your own system."
- Robert C. Peale

"Every decently-made object, from a house to a lamp post to a bridge, spoon or egg cup, is not just a piece of 'stuff' but a physical embodiment of human energy, testimony to the magical ability of our species to take raw materials and turn them into things of use, value and beauty."
- Kevin McCloud

“For Rudolf Laban, touch enables the relationship between movement and space to be discerned within bodily-experience. Laban viewed touch as the precursor to our sensory ability, describing touch as the perceived change in the relationship of our bodies to the space-time continuum. Laban describes all our senses as fundamentally tactile impressions perceiving changes in space: changes in air pressure, in the light spectrum, or in the chemical fluctuation of bodily fluid. Each of the senses and sensory receptors is tuned or ‘sensitive’ to change within a different range of vibrational frequencies. The modulation of frequency enables the body to perceive tactile impressions or differences in rhythmic changes in space. Laban refers to touch as a property of condensing matter, the displacement of space within the flux of time. Our body is always in contact with space even as it disappears between our self and another. Within our body, certain movements created by our muscular energy can create condensation (contraction) that generates both inner and outer tactile impressions. Rudolph Laban made an enormous contribution to the systematic application of movement analysis, notion and the symbolic models of movement language. His work combines biomechanics with the underlying qualities, meanings and interpretations of movement in space. Laban perceived all movement as following different rhythms, and the difference in these rhythms relate of varying effort qualities. For Laban effort, rhythm and space are interconnected, and touch is the unifying sensual property within all perception.”
- Thecla Schiphorst, The Somaesthetics of Touch

"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order."
- John Burroughs

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, ─that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
- John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

“Knowledge is only a rumor until it is in the muscles.”
– New Guinea Proverb

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
– Mary Oliver

"When you start using senses you've neglected, your reward is to see the world with completely fresh eyes."
- Barbara Sher

“The purpose of today’s training is to defeat yesterday’s understanding.”
- Musashi

“You can’t change the mind with the mind alone, or we’d all be enlightened.”
- Wendy Palmer

"Acting for screen is very different from acting on stage, and then obviously when you dance... everything is a physical embodiment. But the discipline is the same approach. You have to take both things seriously; nothing well-crafted is by mistake."
- Amanda Schull

“In every physical action, unless it is purely mechanical, there is concealed some inner action, some feelings. This is how the two levels of life in a part are created, the inner and the outer. They are intertwined. A common purpose brings them together and reinforces the unbreakable bond."
- Konstantin Stanislavski

"The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others."
- Anton Chekhov

"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science."
- Edwin Powell Hubble

"We are mindful of desire when we experience it with an embodied awareness, recognizing the sensations and thoughts of wanting as arising and passing phenomena. While this isn't easy, as we cultivate the clear seeing and compassion of Radical Acceptance, we discover we can open fully to this natural force, and remain free in its midst."
- Tara Brach

"There is something very basic to the sense of listening. The sense of hearing is the only one that operates totally from vibrations, without other physical or chemical reactions to receive the sensations."
- Henry Reed

"How individuals of the same species surpass each other in these sensations and in other bodily faculties is universally known, but there is a limit to them, and their power cannot extend to every distance or to every degree."
- Maimonides

"The attitude of physiological psychology to sensations and feelings, considered as psychical elements, is, naturally, the attitude of psychology at large."
- Wilhelm Wundt

"The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way."
- Charles Jencks

“Anatomy is destiny.”
– Sigmund Freud

"Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert."
- William Osler

“The body is a bureaucracy of habit”
– Stuart Heller

"When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly."
- Vigrinia Woolf

“All the terrible things we do to ourselves and others from alcoholism to character assignation to abuse to murder come from one cause: the inability to stay present with an uncomfortable feeling in the body and seek short-term relief.”
– Pemma Chodron

"Mindfulness helps us freeze the frame so that we can become aware of our sensations and experiences as they are, without the distorting coloration of socially conditioned responses or habitual reactions."
- Henepola Gunaratana

"The task of physiological psychology remains the same in the analysis of ideas that it was in the investigation of sensations: to act as mediator between the neighbouring sciences of physiology and psychology."
- Wilhelm Wundt

"All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

“The experience of touch is basic to discovering who we are and who is other and how we dance this life together…”
- Bonnie B. Cohen, 1993.

“Somaesthetics can be defined as the critical study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (asthesis) and creative self-fashioning.”
- Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Asethetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 1992.

“We are social relational animals only via the body. Minds are discerning, bodies are connecting.”
- Mark Walsh

"The Learning Switch: Learning occurs in the brain. However, for the brain to do its job, the "learning switch" needs to be turned on. During childhood, the learning switch is turned on a lot. As we grow and take on the responsibilities of adulthood, we tend to develop habitual patterns, a set way of doing things, rigidity and resistance to change. Our learning switch turns off and learning slows way down. We can learn to turn the learning switch back on, regardless of age. When we do, everything in our lives becomes an opportunity, and miracles seem to pop up everywhere; our lives are filled with movement, new ideas, vivid memory, sensuality , and pleasure."
- Anat Baniel, "Move into Life: The Nine Essentials for Lifelong Vitality, p.18.

“ Embodied Wisdom: Stability, Creativity, Choice, Loyalty, Faith, Truth, Harmony."
- Joy Colangelo, Embodied Wisdom

"Most of us have become deaf to our own bodies, which is why we are out of tune."
- Terri Guillemets

"So long as we are in conflict with our body, we cannot find peace of mind."
- Georg Feuerstein

“Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.”
- C.S. Lewis

"I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips.”
- Christopher Vogler

"Once you appreciate one of your blessings, one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses."
- Maya Angelou

“However much you study, you cannot know without action. A donkey laden with books is neither an intellectual nor a wise man. Empty of essence, what learning has he whether upon him is firewood or book?”
- Saadi

"Recent studies of mindfulness practices reveal that they can result in profound improvements in a range of physiological, mental, and interpersonal domains in our lives. Cardiac, endocrine, and immune functions are improved with mindfulness practices. Empathy, compassion, and interpersonal sensivity seem to be improved. People who come to develop the capacity to pay attention in the present moment without grasping on to their inevitable judgments also develop a deeper sense of well-being and what can be considered a form of mental coherence."
- Daniel J. Siegel, M. D.

"Yet this is health: To have a body functioning so perfectly that when its few simple needs are met it never calls attention to its own existence."
- Bertha Stuart Dyment

"Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses."
- Hannah Arendt

"Most psychologists treat the mind as disembodied, a phenomenon with little or no connection to the physical body. Conversely physicians treat the body with no regard to the mind or the emotions. But the body and mind are not separate, and we cannot treat one without the other."
- Candace Pert

"Playology is about waking up our senses, infusing our organs of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting - and the higher cognitive senses as well, with the spirit of play. Play ignites creativity and spontaneity. Playing together leads to trust and cooperation."
- Ellie Katz

“Even before any visible movement manifestations, there were inner impulses towards these preparations. First, an inner impulse to attention to space around oneself and what it included. Second, to the sense of one’s own body weight and the intention of the force of its impact. Third, to awareness of time pressing for decision [choice or agency]. All of this inner participation interrelated with the flow of one’s movement whose inner impulses fluctuated between freedom and control [continuity]. Such innerparticipation is a combination of kinaesthetic and though processes that appear to be almost simultaneous at different levels of consciousness.”
- Irmgard Bartenieff

"Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind."
- Thomas Jefferson

"Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part."
- Claude Debussy

"Tantra's body-positive approach is the direct outcome of its integrative metaphysics according to which this world is not mere illusion but a manifestation of the supreme Reality. If the world is real, the body must be real as well. If the world is in essence divine, so must be the body. If we must honor the world as a creation or an aspect of the divine Power (shakti), we must likewise honor the body. The body is a piece of the world and, as we shall see, the world is a piece of the body. Or, rather, when we truly understand the body, we discover that it is the world, which in essence is divine."
- Georg Feuerstein, Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, p. 53

"Generally, about all perception, we can say that a sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet ring without the iron or gold."
- Aristotle

"The laying of fish on the embers,
the taste of the fish,
the feel of the texture of bread,
the round and the half-loaf,
the grain of a petal,
the rain-bow and the rain.
- Hilda Doolittle

"It is puzzling to me that otherwise sensitive people develop a real docility about the obvious necessity of eating, at least once a day, in order to stay alive. Often they lose their primal enjoyment of flavors and odors and textures to the point of complete unawareness. And if ever they question this progressive numbing-off, they shrug helplessly in the face of mediocrity everywhere. Bit by bit, hour by hour, they say, we are being forced to accept the not-so-good as the best, since there is little that is even good to compare it with."
- M. F. K. Fisher

"In psychophysics, the Weber–Fechner law combines two different laws of human perception, which both describe ways the resolution of perception diminishes for stimuli of greater magnitude. Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878) was one of the first people to approach the study of the human response to a physical stimulus in a quantitative fashion.^[1] Weber's law states that the just-noticeable difference between two stimuli is proportional to the magnitude of the stimuli, (and the subject's sensitivity), i.e. if you sense a change in weight of .5 lbs on a 5 pound dumbbell, you ought to feel the extra pound added to a ten pound dumbbell.^[2] Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), a scholar of Weber, later used Weber's findings to construct a psychophysical scale in which he described the relationship between the physical magnitude of a stimulus and its (subjectively) perceived intensity. Fechner's law (better referred to as Fechner's scale) states that subjective sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus intensity. Fechner scaling has been mathematically formalized. In fact, human perceptions of sight and sound work as follows: Perceived loudness/brightness is proportional to log of actual intensity measured with an accurate nonhuman instrument."
- Weber-Fechner Law

"Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence."
- Henry Fuseli

"Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity."
- Michel de Montaigne

"The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.”
- Norman O. Brown

"Slow: Slow gets the brain's attention and gives it time to distinguish and perceive small changes and form new connections. Fast, you can only do what you already know. To be aware and to create new patterns, you need to feel, and that requires slowing down. With slow, you will feel so much more, and with greater vibrancy and richness. You will immediately notice differences and have the opportunity to create new ways of moving, listening, communicating, smelling and tasting, and making love. In the words of Mae West, "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing slowly."
- Anat Baniel

“The body uses its skin and deeper fascia and flesh to record all that goes on around it. Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed. It is valued for its articulate ability to register immediate reaction, to feel profoundly, to sense ahead. The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heart of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction. It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes a-jitter, sometimes trembling. It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirit, the pit at the center, and rising of hope. The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched slightly, a memory may flow out in a stream. To confine the beauty and the value of the body to anything less than this magnificence is to force the body to live without its rightful spirit, its rightful form, its right to exultation. To be thought ugly or unacceptable because one’s beauty is outside the current fashion is deeply wounding to the natural joy that belongs to the wild nature.”
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, 1996

"If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped."
- Douglas Rushkoff

“A relaxed and aware body-mind is the conductor of creativity”
– Mark Walsh

"When we play, dopamine is released which induces elation, excitement, and orchestrates nerve net development and alignment all over the brain. When we are able to take in our fill of sensory stimuli, process and integrate it with richly developed base patterns, and express new insights in a creative way, both physically and verbally, we are then truly at play."
- Carla Hannaford, Smart Moves

"If we look beyond Platonic sources, we will be reminded that Socrates "took care to exercise his body and kept it in good condition" by regular dance training. "The body," he declared, "is valuable for all human activities, and in all its uses it is very important that it should be as fit as possible. Even in the act of thinking, which is supposed to require least assistance from the body, everyone knows that serious mistakes often happen through physical ill-health." Socrates was not the only ancient philosopher to celebrate physical health and advocate somatic training and refinement. Before him, Cleobulus, a sage "distinguished for strength and beauty, and acquainted with Egyptian philosophy, " "advised men to practice bodily exercise." Aristippus (hedonistic pupil of Socrates and founder of the Cyrenaic school) claimed "that bodily training contributes to the acquisition of virtue," while Zeno, founder of the Stoics, likewise urged regular bodily exercise, claiming that "proper care of health and one's organs of sense" are "unconditional duties." Though rating mental pleasures above bodily ones, Epicurus still affirmed "health of body and tranquility of mind" as the twin goals of philosophy's quest for "a blessed life.""
- Richard Schusterman, Body Consciousness, 2008, p 17

"We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves."
- Denis Diderot

”Any physical addiction, it doesn’t matter how long they’ve been taking it or how full of it their body is, and addiction, would, between three and thirty days, be completely cleared from the system. Usually closer to three days than thirty days. But it is the emotional craving that must be tended to.”
- Abraham Hicks

“At the heart of each of us, whatever our imperfections, there exists a silent pulse of perfect rhythm, a complex of wave forms and resonances, which is absolutely individual and unique, and yet which connects us to everything in the universe.”
- George Leonard

“But insensate Time is nothing if not cruel and heartless. It corrodes then destroys, so that the man you literally and figuratively looked up to with your chubby face, who scooped you up to cross the street and patted you on the head to laughter, will later look through you from a crooked hospital bed then blindly up at you while wearing makeup in a bargain casket. The people who now surround you generating warmth will disappear leaving only an empty chill; the body you own and the brain it houses will malfunction.”
- Sergio De La Pava, A Naked Singularity

"Touch is the mother of the senses. Not only are women more sensitive when they touch, but they're also more sensitive to being touched."
- Helen Fisher

"Do you know what an unwanted bodily condition is? It’s a freshly hatched energy-summoning life-giving desire!"
- Abraham Hicks

"I sing the body electric."
- Walt Whitman

"Sensual is everything that refers to the delight of the senses. And that's what artists do, is stimulate the senses in any possible way."
- Shakira

“We are the first system we must learn to manage”
– Stuart Heller

"What is always speaking silently is the body."
- Norman Brown

‘We have more experience of movement and more capacity for it than of feeling and thought… We know much more about movement than we do about anger, love, envy or even thought. It is relatively easy to learn to recognize the quality of movement than the quality of other factors.”
- Moshe Feldenkrais

“Embodied courage chooses not to wait until illness or notice of death demands attention.”
- Jack Kornfield

“What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?”
- Sam Keen

“Have an in-body experience”
– Lynne Forest

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

“I seem to myself, as in a dream,
An accidental guest in this dreadful body.”
- Anna Akhmatova

"You may search for Me
if you'd like
as though I were somewhere else

But I am Right Here
Right Now

It is you who are not always here."
- Martin Buber

"The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses."
- Ernst Mach

”It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our bodies that the ‘I Am,’ our real presence, can awaken.”
- G. I. Gurdjieff

”Every wish, longing, and unfulfilled want are taken into consideration in the formation of our body. This includes the kind of parents we need, not only to provide the right genes but also the experiences, environment, and opportunities that they will provide. The gift of the physical body is given to the human soul for its ultimate freedom and total realization of its own divinity.”
- Michael J. Tamura

"Your body is an absolute mirror of your mind. As you worry, your body shows it. As you love, your body shows it. As you are overwhelmed, your body shows it. As you are angry your body shows it. Every cell of your body is being allowed or resisted by the way you feel. 'My physical state is a direct reflection of how I feel', instead of
'How I feel is a direct reflection of my physical state'."
- Abraham Hicks

"Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity."
- John F. Kennedy

“Movement is what we are, not something we do”
– Emilie Conrad

"Old age, for instance, begins with the self-imposed restriction on forming new body patterns. First, one selects attitudes and postures to fit an assumed dignity and so rejects certain actions, such as sitting on the floor or jumping, which then soon become impossible to perform. The resumption and reintegration of even these simple actions has a marked rejuvenating effect not only of the mechanics of the body but also on the personality as a whole."
- Moshe Feldnekrais, Embodied Wisdom, p. 31

“We are human movings, not human beings”
- Mark Walsh

“We are the only animal that can chose how to move”
– Dylan Newcombe

“Nothing changes until something moves”
– Albert Einstein

"The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul."
- Alfred Austin

"True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are ever united."
- Wilhelm von Humboldt

“We are all students of the world; frail embodied consciousnesses struggling to understand, and be a meaningful part of this great, mysterious gift of life.”
- Bryant McGill

"Autopoiesis" (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-), meaning "self", and ποίησις (poiesis), meaning "creation, production") refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. The term was introduced in 1972 by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of systems theory and sociology. An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. Autopoiesis was originally presented as a system description that was said to define and explain the nature of living systems. A canonical example of an autopoietic system is the biological cell."
- Autopoiesis

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

“To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses.”
- Leonard da Vinci

“Rudolph Laban, one of the key movement theorist-practitioners to emerge from the somatics traditions of the twentieth century, states that all our senses are a variation of our unique sense of touch. For Laban, touch enables the relationship between movement and space to be discerned within bodily-experience. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone refer to this as our tactile-kinesthetic experience, a bodily attitude that enables us to know the world and make sense of it. Other somatics practitioners such as Sondra Fraleigh recognize that touch precedes and informs vision as well as movement through our bodies’ evolutionary development of somatic tactile-kinesthetic sensitivity. By attending to the sense of touch, we can develop discernment and skill in accessing our bodies’ knowledge. Touch is applied in many somatic techniques such as the work of F. M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais, Marion Rosen, Bonnie Bainbridge Choen’s Body-Mind Centering, and Sondra Fraleigh’s Somatic Movement Therapy.”
- Thecla Schiphorst, The Somaesthetics of Touch

"Sensory integration disorder or dysfunction (SID) / Sensory Processing disorder (SPD) is a neurological disorder that results from the brain's inability to integrate, process, and respond to certain information received from the body's five basic sensory systems. These sensory systems are responsible for detecting sights, sounds, smell, tastes, temperatures, pain and the position and movements of the body. The brain then forms a combined picture of this information in order for the body to make sense of its surroundings and react to them appropriately. The ongoing relationship between behavior and brain functioning is called sensory integration. Sensory integration provides a crucial foundation for later, more complex learning and behavior. Sensory experiences include touch, movement, body awareness, sight, sound, smell, taste, and the pull of gravity. Distinguishing between these is the process of sensory integration (SI). While the process of sensory integration occurs automatically and without effort for most, for some the process is inefficient. Extensive effort and attention are required in these individuals for sensory integration to occur, without a guarantee of it being accomplished. When this happens, goals are not easily completed, resulting in sensory integration disorder (SID) / sensory processing disorder (SPD). The normal process of sensory integration begins before birth and continues throughout life, with the majority of sensory development occurring before the early teenage years. For most children sensory integration develops in the course of ordinary childhood activities. But for some children, sensory integration does not develop as efficiently as it should. This is known as dysfunction in sensory integration (D.S.I.). When the process is disordered, a number of problems in learning, motor skills and behavior may be evident. The ability for sensory integration to become more refined and effective coincides with the development process as it determines how well motor and speech skills, and emotional stability develop."
- Sensory Integration Disorders

Original webpage, 2/22/2015-, Updated and Expanded on a Regular Basis, "Somatics, Somaesthetics, Body-Mind, Embodied Cognition: Quotations, Bibliography, Notes, Resources, Reflections,": http://www.egreenway.com/reason/soma.htm