As I prepare for the next training session in Nonverbal Communication for Caregivers of People with Dementia at Friends Village in Woodstown, NJ, I am finding some of my old favorite quotations. Here is one about body awareness from George Dowling's 1998 The Massage Book.
"Most of us are, in actual fact, largely cut off from the body; ordinarily we are in contact with only a fraction of its inner richness. And it is exactly about this that you must do something. Change the manner and degree to which you are aware of your own body, and you will radically change. . . Far more than we realize, the very feel and texture of our lives is shaped by the way we live and experience our bodies.
How does one go about increasing his awareness of his own body? There are many ways, fortunately. I have mine; you will have yours . . .
Let's look first at a few ideas about the body. Take them on a purely intellectual level, and, far from helping, they will only get in your way. Take them, however, as signposts for feeling, as ideas to be lived - and you may discover in them a key to many things within yourself.
~ You are your body. . . another familiar way of putting it is that mind and body are one and the same. Our emotions, our outer perceptions, our spiritual life, and even our conceptual understanding of the world around us all begin and end within this intimate shadowy mass which is our being. Our body, its possibilities of movement, and its relation to gravity and the earth are the background from which everything else must emerge. To come to terms with this on a real emotional level is perhaps the most important kind of self-encounter a person can have. As Alexander Lowen puts it: 'When the ego roots itself in the body, an individual gains insight into himself. The deeper the roots, the deeper the insight.'"
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