Access Today Giving The Body Its Due Created By Maxine Sheets-Johnstone Released As Kindle

mustread for anyone looking at understanding somatic work in psychology, These essays are thoughtful, provoking, and engaging, This was not an easy read, I spent more thanmonths in this book, MSJ really did incredible work in compiling these essays which bring a new validation to empirical somatic work, philosophical somatism New word, I made it up, I don't care, and understanding of the nondual interaction of the person.
I am so appreciative of this volume, These essays bring together disciplinary understandings of what it is to be the bodies we are, In its own way, each essay calls into question certain culturallyembedded ways of valuing the body which deride or ignore its role in making us human.
These ways have remained virtually unchanged since Descartes in the seventeenth century first sharply divided minda thinking substance, from the bodyan extended substance,

The legacy of this Cartesian metaphysics has been to reduce the

body by turns to a static assemblage of parts and to a dumb show of movement.
It has both divided the fundamental integrity of creaturely life and depreciated the role of the living body in knowing and making sense of the world, in learning, in the creative arts, and in self and interpersonal understandings.
The living sense of the body and its capacity for sensemaking have indeed been blotted out by topheavy concerns with brains, minds, and language, as if these existed without a body.


It is this conception of the body as mere handmaiden to the privileged that the contributors to this book challenge, By the evidence they bring forward, they help restore what is properly due the body since Descartes convinced us that mind and body are separate, and that mind is the primary value.
Moreover, they help to elucidate what is properly due the body since the more recent twentiethcentury western emphasis upon vision effectively reduced the richness of the affective and tactilekinesthetic bodythe body of felt experienceto a simple sum of sensations.


Dominant themes that run throughout the essays and that call our attention to the living sense of the body and its capacity for sensemaking are: wholeness, the capacity for selfhealing, cultural histories of the body, pancultural bodily invariants, thinking, emotions, and the body's wisdom.
In the end, these themes show that giving the body its due means forging a metaphysics that upholds the truths of experience, .