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

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

Covering such techniques as Hakomi, Dreambodywork, and The Moving Cycle, the founders of body-centered psychotherapy explain how they developed their methods, what happens during a therapy session, and who can best benefit from them. Original. Tour. IP.

Weaving together somatic psychotherapy, dance/movement therapy, and sex therapy approaches, this uniquely interdisciplinary and practical book offers guidance on how to strengthen your connection with pleasure, receptivity, and ecstasy in an embodied way. Melissa Walker contextualizes the erotic body as being embedded in a sex-negative culture. Taking an experiential somatic approach, this book helps readers map the erotic self to establish a whole-body sexuality, becoming an important sexuality ally in a larger social movement toward erotic inclusiveness. This groundbreaking text illuminates how to shed the harmful messages that an individual has internalized about their sexuality, to learn the language of their somatic self, and begin to build a whole-body appreciation for their creative potential. Filled with questions, guided experientials, and map-building practices that help readers learn more about themselves, this book is essential reading for sex therapists to navigate the vast map of sexuality to create true health and sexual evolution.

A timely anthology that explores power, privilege, and oppression and their relationship to marginalized bodies Asserting that the body is the main site of oppression in Western society, the contributors to this pioneering volume explore the complex issue of embodiment and how it relates to social inclusion and marginalization. In a culture where bodies of people who are brown, black, female, transgender, disabled, fat, or queer are often shamed, sexualized, ignored, and oppressed, what does it mean to live in a marginalized body? Through theory, personal narrative, and artistic expression, this anthology explores how power, privilege, oppression, and attempted disembodiment play out on the bodies of disparaged individuals and what happens when the body’s expression is stereotyped and stunted. Bringing together a range of voices, this book offers strategies and practices for embodiment and activism and considers what it means to be an embodied ally to anyone experiencing bodily oppression.

Somatic Maternal Healing introduces a cutting-edge understanding of the body into the growing field of perinatal mental health. Chapters lay out a complete trauma treatment model for maternal mental health, integrating psychodynamic and somatic clinical techniques within a systemic perspective. The book applies a biopsychosocial conceptualization of mental health in the perinatal period with a special emphasis on trauma and somatic trauma treatment. Somatic Maternal Healing is for anyone working clinically with mothers and new families, specifically therapists, clinical social workers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, researchers, academics, clinical educators, and graduate students and trainees within these fields.

Spirituality & Practice "Best Books of 2021" Award Winner A highly practical and approachable guide to somatic meditation with easy practices for accessing the body's inherent mindfulness, from an expert in somatic meditation. Tap into the wisdom of the body with down-to-earth practices like "Surrendering to the Breath" and "Befriending Feelings" that allow the body to become the source of mindfulness. Willa Blythe Baker introduces meditation practice as the cultivation of a way of being, rather than a way of doing. It is a way of being that is self-aware, self-compassionate, and embodied. This way of being is not limited to practice on the cushion or on the yoga mat--somatic mindfulness is available at any moment, activated by attention to the body's wisdom and its teachings. Discover the three layers of embodiment, from the earth body of flesh and blood, the subtle body of sensory experience and emotion, and the awareness body of consciousness. The three parts of this book explore these layers through turning attention to the physical, energetic, and mental dimensions of human experience. By diving deep into the body, readers will find that they already have what they need. Concentration, wisdom, compassion, kindness, and joy are waiting there.