“Lose your mind and come to your senses.”
- Frederick Salomon Perls
- Frederick Salomon Perls
Somatic Practices for Health, Well-Being, and Mindfulness
Soma, Body-Mind, Soma-Aesthetics
Somatics, Somatic Psychology and Philosophy, Somatic
Aesthetics
Feeling, Aliveness, The Living Human Body, Consciousness, Being/Becoming
Embodied Cognition, Situated Intelligence, Embodied Mind, Enactivism
Quotations
Bibliography
Links Notes
Information
Touching
Seeing
Hearing
Smelling
Tasting
Senses
Hands
The Five Senses Complexity Interdependence Medicine Virtues Pleasures Epicureanism
Human Experiences: Sensations, Feelings, Perceptions, Emotions, Habits, Thoughts
Psychology Tai Chi Chuan Chi Kung Yoga Walking Gardening Tantra A Philosopher's Notebooks
Research by Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.
Valley Spirit Center, Red Bluff, California
Bibliography, Links, Resources
Body, Soma, Somatics, Somatic
Psychology and Philosophy, Somaesthetics, The Human Body,
Medicine,
Senses
Embodied Cognition, Situated Intelligence, Embodied Mind, Enactivism
By Alva Noë. Cambridge, Masssachusetts, MIT Press, 2004. Representation and Mind Series.
Index, bibliography, notes, 277 pages. ISBN: 978-0262640633. VSCL.
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.
Alexander Technique.
A somaesthetic practice.
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.
The Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology. 
The Art of Somatic Coaching: Embodying Skillful Action, Wisdom, and Compassion
Anatomy of Hatha Yoga: A Manual for Students, Teachers and Practitioners. By
H. David Coulter, Ph.D. Foreword by Timothy McCall, M.D. Honesdale,
Pennsylvania, Body and Breath Inc., 2001. Index, glossary, bibliography,
appendices, 623 pages. VSCL. A somaesthetic practice.
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.
Athletics, Games, Play,
Sports. Various somaesthetic practices.
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."
By Risa F. Kaparo, Ph.D. Berkeley, California, North Atlantic Books, 2012.
Index, 368 pages. ISBN: 978-1583944172. Subtitle: Transform Pain,
Stress, Trauma, and Aging. VSCL.
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.
Gregory Bateson
(1904-1980) A mind-body theorist.
Body Building, Weightligting, Strength Training for Persons Over 55 Years of Age
By Mike Garofalo. A somaesthetic practice.
The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
Bodymind. By Ken Dychtwald, M.D. Tarcher, 1986. 320 pages.
ISBN: 978-0874773750.
Body Movement: Coping with the Environment
Bone, Breath, and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, Volume 1.
Breathing Practices:
Links, Bibliography, Resources A somaesthetic practice.
Celibacy, Chastity, Sexual
Taboos. A somaesthetic practice.
Center for Body-Mind and Culture,
Florida Atlantic University.
Chen Style of T'ai
Chi Ch'uan (Taijiquan).
A somaesthetic practice.
Chi
Kung (Qigong, Tao Yin,
Yangsheng Gong, Chinese Yoga): Lessons, History, Bibliography, Links, Quotes, Research
A somaesthetic practice.
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
Quotes, Sayings, Notes.
Complexity: A Guided Tour. 
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.
The Corporeal
Turn: An interdisciplinary Reader
Dancing, Rhythmic Movement
Arts, Movement Arts, Bodily Expression Arts. A somaesthetic practice.
The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice
Dewey, John
1859-1952
.
By John Dewey. Berkeley, CA, Publishing Group, Perigee Trade, 1934, 2005.
Index, 371 pages. ISBN: 9780399531972. "Based on John Dewey's
lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard
in 1931, Art as Experience
has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever
written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all
the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature." VSCL.
Commentary 1.
Dewey's Aesthetics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Experience and Nature.
Drug Usage (Coffee,
Tobacco, Alcohol, Marihuana, LSD, Psycho-tropics, Cocaine, Heroin, Psychedelics,
Crack, Amphetamines, Soma, etc.). A somaesthetic practice.
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.
Eight Section Brocade Chi Kung (Qigong), Ba Duan Jin. A somaesthetic
practice.
Embodied Cognition Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Includes bibliography and references.
Embodied
Cognition Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Includes
bibliography and references.
Embodied Cognition
Wikipedia. Includes bibliography and references.
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience.
Embodied Wisdom: What
Our Anatomy Can Teach Us About the Art of Living.
Exploring Body-Mind Centering: An Anthology of Experience and Method
The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life
Eutony
Gerda Alexander (1908–1994) was a Danish teacher who devised a method of
self-development called Eutony. A somaesthetic practice.
Everyday Aesthetics
Fasting, Unique Diets, Eating
Practices, Food Choices, Food Taboos. A somaesthetic practice.
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
Feldenkrais, Moshe
(1904-1984)
.
By Moshe Feldenkrais. Harper One, 2009. 192 pages. ISBN:
978-0062503220. A somaesthetic practice.
Flexibility and
Stretching: Bibliography, Links, Resources.
A somaesthetic practice.
Franklin
Method A somaesthetic practice.
Gardening, The Spirit of
Gardening 3,800 quotations arranged by 250 topics. 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.
The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture
The Hand, Touch, Feeling:
Quotations, Bibliography, Resources, Links, Notes
Hanna, Thomas -1990
The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi: 12 Weeks to a Healthy Body, Strong Heart, and Sharp Mind
Hearing, Listening, Sound, Ear
How the Body Shapes the Mind.
Ideokinesis A
somaesthetic practice.
Integral Life Practices: A 21st Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional
Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening. By Ken Wilbur, Terry
Patten, Adam Leonard, and Marco Morelli. Integral Books, 2008.
Index, 416 pages. ISBN: 1590304675. A somaesthetic practice.
VSCL.
James, William
1842-1910
Philosophy
William James : Writings 1878-1899 : Psychology, Briefer Course, The Will to
Believe, Talks to Teachers and Students, and Essays
1212 pages.
ISBN: 9780940450721. VSCL.
The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation
By Robert E. Carter. State University of New York Press, 2007. 200
pages. ISBN: 978-0791472545.
Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork
Juice: Radical Taiji Energetics
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.
Making Connections: Total Body Integration Through Bartenieff Fundamentals. 
Martial Arts Training
(Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, Judo,
Taijiquan,
Kickboxing, Boxing, Wrestling, Weapons Training, etc.) Somaesthetic
practices.
Massage - Many Types.
A somaesthetic practice.
Mastering Movement: The Life and Work of Rudolf Laban.
By John Hodgson. Routledge Theatre Arts, 2001. 352 pages.
ISBN: 978-0878300808.
The Mastery of Movement
The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding.
Meditation, Introspection and Contemplation: Bibliography, Quotations,
Resources, Practices Somaesthetic practices.
Metaphors We Live By
Mindfulness Yoga: The Awakened Union of Breath, Body, and Mind.
By Frank Jude Boccio. Boston, MA, Wisdom Publications, 2004. Index,
bibliography, notes, 340 pages. ISBN: 0861713354. VSCL.
Moral Behavior, Ethical
Practices, Virtues, Living the Good Life. Somaesthetic practices in
individual, family, society, and nations.
Multiple
Intelligence Theory of John Gardner, 1983
Music, Singing, Chanting. Mantras. Somaesthetic practices.
A Natural History of the Senses
Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body: Qigong for Lifelong Health
Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
Perceptions -
Philosophy, Problems
A Philosopher's Notebooks by
Mike Garofalo
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
The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation.
Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.
Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy
A somaesthetic practice.
Play, Play Activities,
Playing. Various somaesthetic practices.
The Primacy of Movement.
The Psychology of the Body.
Pulling Onions. Quips
and sayings of Mike Garofalo, an old gardener.
Qigong (Chi Kung, Tao Yin,
Chinese Yoga): Lessons, History, Bibliography, Links, Quotes, Research
A somaesthetic practice.
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science
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.
Rosen Method Bodywork: Accessing the Unconscious through Touch. 
Douglas
Robinson A somatic theorist.
Rolfing Structural Integration
A somaesthetic practice.
Running, Jogging,
Marathons, Racing, and
Walking Training and Practices. A somaesthetic practice.
Running and Being: The Total Experience. By George Sheehan.
Rodale Books, Reprint, 2014. 272 pages. ISBN: 978-1623362539.
A somaesthetic practice.
Schusterman, Richard
1949- Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic
University.
Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics
239 pages. ISBN:
9780521858908. Theory. VSCL.
Center for
Body-Mind and Culture, Florida Atlantic University.
Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life
ISBN: 978-0415913959.
VSCL.
By Richard Schusterman. Rowman and Littlefield Pub., 2nd Edition, 2000.
368 pages.
Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics
Self-Massage
Techniques, Practices, Theories: Bibliography, Links, Resources, Quotations
By Mike Garofalo. A somaesthetic practice.
Sensation, Perception,
The Five Senses
The Senses: Classic and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives.
Edited by Fiona Macpherson. Oxford University Press, 2011. 432
pages. Philosophy of Mind Series. ISBN: 0195385969.
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture: A Sociology of the Senses.
Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering
Sexual Neo-Tantric Practices.
A somaesthetic practice.
Sexual Sadomasochism, Bondage,
Discipline, BDSM, Fetishism, Erotic
Humiliation. A somaesthetic practice.
The Situated Body in Janus,
2007, Vol. 9.2
Somatic Psychology: Body, Mind and Meaning.
Somatics: Reawakening The Mind's Control Of Movement, Flexibility, And Health.
Sports, Athletics,
Games, Play. Various somaesthetic practices.
Strength Training for
Persons Over 55 Years of Age By Mike Garofalo. A somaesthetic
practice.
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.
T'ai Chi Ch'uan
(Taijiquan): A Chinese Mind-Body Movement Art and Martial Art. Theory,
Practices, Art, Lessons, Bibliography. A somaesthetic practice.
Tantra. A
somaesthetic practice.
Tantra: Path of Ecstasy.
Taoism, Tao Te Ching,
Chi Kung
Tasting Quotes, Bibliography, Links, Facts
The Thinking Body
Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin.
Touching, Touch, Hands,
Fingers Quotations, Bibliography, Links, Resources.
Toward a Psychology of Being. By Abraham Maslow. Reprint of 1962
First Edition. Martino Fine Books, 2011. 228 pages. ISBN:
978-1614270676. VSCL.
Trager, Milton, M.D., 1908-1997
.
United States Trager Association, 2013. 74 pages. A somaesthetic
practice.
Trager for Self-Healing: A Practical Guide for Living in the Present Moment
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.
VSCL = Valley Spirit Center Library, Red Bluff, California
Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma
Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses In Society
Ways of Walking:
Quotes, Poems, Sayings, Lore. A somaesthetic practice.
Virtues, Character, Moral Behavior, Right Actions
Walking, Hiking, Climbing,
Trekking, Backpacking: Quotations, Facts, Information, Poems, Lore
A somaesthetic practice.
The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems
Well Being: Bibliography,
Links, Resources, Fitness A somaesthetic practice.
Willpower, Behavioral
Change: Quotes, Sayings, Notes
Wisdom of the Body Moving: An Introduction to Body-Mind
Centering. By Linda Hartley.
Berkeley, California, North Atlantic Books, 1989, 1995. Index,
bibliography, 346 pages. ISBN: 1556431740. A somaesthetic
practice.
VSCL.
Yang Style of
T'ai Chi Ch'aun (Taijiquan)
A somaesthetic practice.
Yoga: Bibliography, Links,
Resources, Fitness. Dictionary of Asanas (Postures), Philosophy,
Practices by Mike Garofalo. A somaesthetic practice.
VSCL = Valley Spirit Center Library, Red Bluff, California
Index to A Philosopher's Notebooks
Quotations, Sayings, Notes
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
“We live on the leash of our senses.”
- Diane Ackerman
“I was walking down the street with my friend and he said 'I hear music,' as though there's any other way to take it in. 'You’re not special. That's how I receive it too... I tried to taste it, but it did not work.'”
“I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.”
“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
“Philosophy is common sense with big words.”
“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
“Perception is reality.”
“Our understanding is correlative to our perception.”
- Robert Delaunay
"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
“Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?”
"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
"I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment, endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect."
“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.”
"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
“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
"Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies."
- Frank Gillette Burgess
"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
“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
“Always focus on the front windshield and not the review mirror.”
- Colin Powell
"Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs."
- Aldous Huxley
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 optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.”
- Oscar Wilde
”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
"Don't try to lose weight. Take delight in gaining
fitness."
- Alan Cohen
"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
"Energy is eternal delight."
- William Blake
“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
"Think with your whole body."
- Taisen Deshimaru
”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
"The best cure for the body is a quiet
mind."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
“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
"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 greatest wealth is health."
Virgil
-
"Well done is better than well said."
- Benjamin Franklin
"Actions speak louder than words."
- Proverb
"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
"I speak two languages, Body and English."
Mae West
-
”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
"Consciousness is something we do."
- Alva Noe
"When you are in vibrational harmony, your body produces
whatever it needs to remain in perfect balance."
- Abraham Hicks
"An emotion is your body's reaction to your mind."
- Eckhard Tolle
"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 Singerland
"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
"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
"The ego is the perception of the bodily self, and what one feels and knows
of the body is the skin."
- P. Lacombe
“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
“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
“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
"In
philosophy, the embodied mind thesis holds that the nature of the human
mind is largely
determined by the form of the human body.
Philosophers,
psychologists,
cognitive scientists, and
artificial intelligence researchers who study embodied cognition and the
embodied mind argue that all aspects of cognition are shaped by aspects of the
body. The aspects of cognition include high level mental constructs (such as
concepts and
categories) and human performance on various cognitive tasks (such as
reasoning or judgment). The aspects of the body include the
motor
system, the
perceptual system, the body's interactions with the environment (situatedness)
and the
ontological assumptions about the world that are built into the body and the
brain.
The embodied mind thesis is opposed to other theories of
cognition
such as
cognitivism,
computationalism, and
Cartesian dualism. The idea has roots in
Kant
and
20th century continental philosophy (such as
Merleau-Ponty). The modern version depends on insights drawn from recent
research in
psychology,
linguistics,
cognitive science,
dynamical systems,
artificial intelligence,
robotics
and
neurobiology.
Embodied cognition is a topic of research in
social and
cognitive psychology, covering issues such as
social interaction and
decision-making. Embodied cognition reflects the argument that the
motor
system influences our cognition, just as the mind influences bodily actions.
For example, when participants hold a pencil in their teeth engaging the muscles
of a smile, they comprehend pleasant sentences faster than unpleasant ones,
while holding a pencil between their nose and upper lip to engage the muscles of
a frown has the reverse effect.
George Lakoff (a
cognitive scientist and
linguist)
and his collaborators (including
Mark Johnson,
Mark Turner, and
Rafael E. Núñez) have written a series of books promoting and expanding the
thesis based on discoveries in
cognitive science, such as
conceptual metaphor and
image
schema.
Robotics researchers such as
Rodney Brooks,
Hans
Moravec and
Rolf
Pfeifer have argued that true
artificial intelligence can only be achieved by machines that have
sensory and
motor skills and are connected to the world through a body. The
insights of these robotics researchers have in turn inspired philosophers like
Andy Clark
and
Horst Hendriks-Jansen.
Neuroscientists
Gerald Edelman,
António Damásio and others have outlined the connection between the body,
individual structures in the brain and aspects of the mind such as
consciousness,
emotion,
self-awareness and
will.
Biology has also inspired
Gregory Bateson,
Humberto Maturana,
Francisco Varela,
Eleanor Rosch and
Evan
Thompson to develop a closely related version of the idea, which they call
enactivism.
The
motor theory of speech perception proposed by
Alvin Liberman and colleagues at the
Haskins Laboratories argues that the identification of words is embodied in
perception of the bodily movements by which spoken words are made."
- Embodied
Intelligence
"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
-
“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
-
“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
"My body is a bulletin board,
transmitting my condition."
- Terri Guillemets
"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
"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 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
"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
“Mr Duffy lived a short distance form his body” – James Joyce
"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
“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
"Temptation is an irresistible force at
work on a movable body."
- H. L Mencken
"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
"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
“Somaesthetics is a term coined by Richard Shusterman, a philosopher and
somatics practitioner following the pragmatist tradition of John Dewey and
William James. Shusterman has defined somaesthetics as the development of
sensory-aesthetic appreciation that can be cultivated through attention to our
bodily experience. He refers to critical practice within somatics and aesthesis
(perception) that can support self-agency of the soma. Shustermans’ stance has
much in common with philosophers such as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone who describes
how “self-movement structures knowledge of the world,” with Alva Noë, whose
enactive approach to perception suggests that our ability to perceive is
constituted directly by somatic sensorimotor knowledge, and with Mark Johnson
who explores aesthetics of human meaning as growing directly from our visceral
connections to the bodily conditions of life.”
- Thecla Schiphorst, The Somaesthetics of Touch
"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
“Values are visceral “
– Mark Walsh
"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
"Play is our brain's favorite way of learning."
- Dianne Ackerman
"The best and
- Robert C. Peale
“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
"The body never lies."
- Martha Graham
“The body learns through exaggeration and contrast”
– Wendy Palmer
"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
“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
“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 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
“The body is a bureaucracy of habit”
– Stuart Heller
“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
"Play is the highest form of research."
- Albert Einstein
“To touch is to be touched.”
- Stuart Heller
“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.
“Play like dreams serves the function of self realization.”
– Winnecott
“We are social relational animals only via the body. Minds are discerning,
bodies are connecting.”
- Mark Walsh
“ 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
“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
“The hands that help are better far than lips that pray.”
- Robert G. Ingersoll
“I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment,
endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its
wisdom aspect.”
- Alex Grey
"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
"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
-
"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
"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
"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
“One
can discriminate rock from flimsy tissue-paper by the surface alone, so
completely have the resistances of touch and the solidities due to stresses of
the entire muscular system been embodied in vision. The process does not stop
with incarnation of other sensory qualities that give depth to the meaning of
surface. Nothing that a man has ever reached by the highest flight of thought
or penetrated by any probing insight is inherently such that it may not become
the heart and core of sense.”
- John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1932, p. 30
"…sensory experiences are produced, enacted and perceived in
combination with each other, intertwined with emotion, meaning and memory."
- Elisabeth Hsu
"The legs are the wheels of creativity."
- Albert Einstein
“A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree,
one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.”
- Roman Payne
"And remember: the flesh is as sacred as it is profane.”
- Brian McGreevy
"Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, son of Hegesiboulos, held that the first
principles of things were the homoeomeries. For it seemed to him quite
impossible that anything should come into being from the non-existent or be
dissolved into it. Anyhow we take in nourishment which is simple and
homogeneous, such as bread or water, and by this are nourished hair, veins,
arteries, flesh, sinews, bones and all the other parts of the body. Which
being so, we must agree that everything that exists is in the nourishment we
take in, and that everything derives its growth from things that exist.
There must be in that nourishment some parts that are productive of blood,
some of sinews, some of bones, and so on-parts which reason alone can
apprehend. For there is no need to refer the fact that bread and water
produce all these things to sense-perception; rather, there are in bread and
water parts which only reason can apprehend."
- Aetius of Antioch
"Happiness is not being pained in body or
troubled in mind."
Thomas Jefferson
-
“My particular bodily form, my particular body feeling, is testimony to my
particular character, my particular way of behaving, both psychologically and
physically.”
– Stanley Keleman
“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
”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
"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
“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
“We are the first system we must learn to manage”
– Stuart Heller
"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
"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
“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 seem to myself, as in a dream,
An accidental guest in this dreadful body.”
- Anna Akhmatova
”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
“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
“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
The Human Body
Transforming Itself
Every Day
For an "average" person:
If your heart beats on the average at 80
beats per minute, then your heart beats 115,200 times each day.
If you take 20 respirations a minute, then your breathe in and out 28,800 times
each day.
Your body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6 liters of blood circulates through the body three times every minute. In one day your heart circulates 6,390 gallons (24192 liters). In one day, the blood travels a total of 12,000 miles. The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime - that's enough to fill more than 3 super tankers. If all arteries, veins, and capillaries of the human circulatory system were laid end to end, the total length would be 60,000 miles.
Urinates about 1.5 quarts a day (1500 ml).
The human body consists of about 60 trillion cells (6x10^13). There are about 60 trillion atoms in a human cell.
"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."Each human cell contains a nucleus with forty-six chromosomes. Each of these chromosomes are comprised of between 30,000 and 50,000 genes and intervening sequences.
Along with the common chimpanzee, the bonobo is the closest extant DNA relative to humans. The published chimpanzee genome differs from that of the human genome by 1.23% in direct sequence comparisons.
The human body is 60% water.
"Although people may think of their body as a fairly permanent structure, most of it is in a state of constant flux as old cells are discarded and new ones generated in their place. Each kind of tissue has its own turnover time, depending in part on the workload endured by its cells. The cells lining the stomach, as mentioned, last only five days. The red blood cells, bruised and battered after traveling nearly 1,000 miles through the maze of the body's circulatory system, last only 120 days or so on average before being dispatched to their graveyard in the spleen. White blood cells live on average more than a year.
The epidermis, or surface layer of the skin, is recycled every two weeks or so. The reason for the quick replacement is that "this is the body's saran wrap, and it can be easily damaged by scratching, solvents, wear and tear," said Elaine Fuchs, an expert on the skin's stem cells at the Rockefeller University.
As for the liver, the detoxifier of all the natural plant poisons and drugs that pass a person's lips, its life on the chemical-warfare front is quite short. An adult human liver probably has a turnover time of 300 to 500 days, said Markus Grompe, an expert on the liver's stem cells at the Oregon Health & Science University.
Other tissues have lifetimes measured in years, not days, but are still far from permanent. Even the bones endure nonstop makeover. The entire human skeleton is thought to be replaced every 10 years or so in adults, as twin construction crews of bone-dissolving and bone-rebuilding cells combine to remodel it.
About the only pieces of the body that last a lifetime, on present evidence,
seem to be the neurons of the cerebral cortex, the inner lens cells of the eye
and perhaps the muscle cells of the heart. The inner lens cells form in the
embryo and then lapse into such inertness for the rest of their owner's lifetime
that they dispense altogether with their nucleus and other cellular organelles."
- Nicholas Wade,
Your Body is Younger Than You Think
"The tongue is covered with around 9,000 taste buds that help us to detect
sweet, salty,
bitter or sour flavours, explains Professor Damian Walmsley,
scientific adviser to the British Dental Association. The taste buds
themselves are a collection of cells on the surface of the tongue, each housing
about 50 taste cells. The buds renew themselves every ten days to two weeks.
Most of our cells that last a lifetime are found in the brain, explains John
Wadley, consultant neurosurgeon at Barts and the London Hospital. "We
are born with all the brain cells we'll ever have - around 100 billion -
and most of the brain does not regenerate as it gets older."
The cells in
the lungs constantly renew themselves, explains Dr Keith Prowse,
vice-president of the British Lung Foundation. However, the lungs contain
different cells that renew at different rates. The alveoli or air sac cells
- needed for the exchange of oxygen and gases - deep in the lungs have a
steady progress of regeneration that takes about a year. Meanwhile, the
cells on the lung's surface have to renew every two or three weeks."
-
Believe It or Not
Index to A Philosopher's Notebooks
Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California
This webpage was last modified or updated on March
6,
2015.
This webpage was first distributed online on February 6, 2015.
Brief Biography of Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.
Index to A Philosopher's Notebooks
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
Mirror webpage, 3/6/2015, "Somatic Practices for Health, Well-Being, and Mindfulness": http://www.egreenway.com/reason/soma3.htm