Body Awareness: a phenomenological inquiry into the common ground of mind-body therapies

Enhancing body awareness has been described as a key element or a mechanism of action for therapeutic approaches often categorized as mind-body approaches, such as yoga, TaiChi, Body-Oriented Psychotherapy, Body Awareness Therapy, mindfulness based therapies/meditation, Feldenkrais, Alexander Method...

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Published in:Philosophy, ethics, and humanities in medicine : PEHM ethics, and humanities in medicine : PEHM, 2011-04, Vol.6 (1), p.6-6
Main Authors: Mehling, Wolf E, Wrubel, Judith, Daubenmier, Jennifer J, Price, Cynthia J, Kerr, Catherine E, Silow, Theresa, Gopisetty, Viranjini, Stewart, Anita L
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Body Image
Breathing exercises
Female
Focus Groups
Health aspects
Humans
Male
Meditation
Mind-Body Therapies - methods
Psychotherapy
San Francisco
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Summary:Enhancing body awareness has been described as a key element or a mechanism of action for therapeutic approaches often categorized as mind-body approaches, such as yoga, TaiChi, Body-Oriented Psychotherapy, Body Awareness Therapy, mindfulness based therapies/meditation, Feldenkrais, Alexander Method, Breath Therapy and others with reported benefits for a variety of health conditions. To better understand the conceptualization of body awareness in mind-body therapies, leading practitioners and teaching faculty of these approaches were invited as well as their patients to participate in focus groups. The qualitative analysis of these focus groups with representative practitioners of body awareness practices, and the perspectives of their patients, elucidated the common ground of their understanding of body awareness. For them body awareness is an inseparable aspect of embodied self awareness realized in action and interaction with the environment and world. It is the awareness of embodiment as an innate tendency of our organism for emergent self-organization and wholeness. The process that patients undergo in these therapies was seen as a progression towards greater unity between body and self, very similar to the conceptualization of embodiment as dialectic of body and self described by some philosophers as being experienced in distinct developmental levels.
ISSN:1747-5341
1747-5341
DOI:10.1186/1747-5341-6-6