The science and practice of feeling our movements, sensations, and emotions. When we are first born, before we can speak or use language to express ourselves, we use our physical sensations, our “body sense,” to guide us toward what makes us feel safe and fulfilled and away from what makes us feel bad. As we develop into adults, it becomes easy to lose touch with these crucial mind-body communication channels, but they are essential to our ability to navigate social interactions and deal with psychological stress, physical injury, and trauma. Combining a ground-up explanation of the anatomical and neurological sources of embodied self-awareness with practical exercises in touch and movement, Body Sense provides therapists and their clients with the tools to attain mind-body equilibrium and cultivate healthy body sense throughout their lives.

The practice and science of feeling our movements, sensations, and emotions. Embodied self-awareness is the practice and science of our ability to feel our movements, sensations, and emotions. As infants, before we can speak or conceptualize, we learn to move toward what makes us feel good and away from what makes us feel bad. Our ability to continue to develop and cultivate awareness of such body-based feelings and understanding is essential for learning how to successfully navigate in the physical and social world, as well as for avoiding injury and stress. Embodied self-awareness is made possible by neuromotor and neurohormonal pathways between the brain and the rest of the body, pathways that serve the function of using information about body state to maintain optimal health and well being. When these pathways become compromised, primarily as a result of physical injury or psychological stress and trauma, we lose our ability to monitor and regulate our basic body functions. This book explains the neurological basis of embodied self-awareness, how to enhance self-awareness, and how to regain it after injury or trauma.

Biofeedback training is a research methodology and training procedure through which people can learn voluntary control over their internal physiological systems. It is a merger of mUltiple disciplines with interest deriving from many sources-from basic understanding of psychophysiology to a desire for enhanced self-awareness. The goals of biofeedback are to develop an increased awareness of relevant internal physiological functions, to establish control over these functions, to generalize control from an experimental or clinical setting to everyday life, and to focus attention on mind/body integration. Biofeedback is explored in many different settings. In the university, biofeed back equipment and applications can be found in the departments of experi mental and clinical psychology, counseling, physiology, biology, education, and the theater arts, as well as in the health service (student infirmary). Outside the university, biofeedback may be found in different departments of hospitals (such as physical medicine), private clinics, education and self-awareness groups, psychotherapy practices, and elsewhere. Its growth is still expanding, and excite ment is still rising as a result of biofeedback's demonstration that autonomic functions can be brought under voluntary control and that the long-standing arti ficial separation between mind, body, and consciousness can be disproven.

For both clinicians and their clients there is tremendous value in understanding the psychophysiology of trauma and knowing what to do about its manifestations. This book illuminates that physiology, shining a bright light on the impact of trauma on the body and the phenomenon of somatic memory. It is now thought that people who have been traumatized hold an implicit memory of traumatic events in their brains and bodies. That memory is often expressed in the symptomatology of posttraumatic stress disorder-nightmares, flashbacks, startle responses, and dissociative behaviors. In essence, the body of the traumatized individual refuses to be ignored. While reducing the chasm between scientific theory and clinical practice and bridging the gap between talk therapy and body therapy, Rothschild presents principles and non-touch techniques for giving the body its due. With an eye to its relevance for clinicians, she consolidates current knowledge about the psychobiology of the stress response both in normally challenging situations and during extreme and prolonged trauma. This gives clinicians from all disciplines a foundation for speculating about the origins of their clients' symptoms and incorporating regard for the body into their practice. The somatic techniques are chosen with an eye to making trauma therapy safer while increasing mind-body integration. Packed with engaging case studies, The Body Remembers integrates body and mind in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. It will appeal to clinicians, researchers, students, and general readers.

Yoga has evolved into a popular fitness practice across the globe. With the various schools of practice, it is imperative for practitioners to study both traditional texts and emerging scientific research in this area. Research-Based Perspectives on the Psychophysiology of Yoga is a unique reference source for the latest academic material on the physiological effects of yoga and cultivating a deeper understanding of yoga practice through the intersection of traditional texts and contemporary research. Including a range of topics such as occupational health, neurobiology, and women’s health, this book is ideally designed for professionals, practitioners, students, educators, and academics interested in the effects, challenges, and benefits of yoga practice.

In recent years the clinical and cognitive sciences and neuroscience have contributed important insights to understanding the self. The neuroscientific study of the self and self-consciousness is in its infancy in terms of established models, available data and even vocabulary. However, there are neuropsychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia, in which the self becomes disordered and this aspect can be studied against healthy controls through experiment, building cognitive models of how the mind works, and imaging brain states. In this 2003 book, the first to address the scientific contribution to an understanding of the self, an eminent, international team focuses on current models of self-consciousness from the neurosciences and psychiatry. These are set against introductory essays describing the philosophical, historical and psychological approaches, making this a uniquely inclusive overview. It will appeal to a wide audience of scientists, clinicians and scholars concerned with the phenomenology and psychopathology of the self.

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