Getting Our Bodies Back by Christine Caldwell
Posted by ~Ray @ 2008-10-14 04:38:25
What it is: A book about how to recover lost parts of yourself and become more whole by paying attention to somatics(tendencies of the body). There are fun and engaging tools to play along as well like the “which animal are you when you get defensive” cheat sheet (which I describe a little further down this review).
Description: It talks about how we “check out” of our bodies when things become too intense (the “cold approach,” for example). And how this becomes a habitual pattern that prevents us from being fully Present and in the world.
Christine talks about bringing awareness to habitual movements as common as nail-biting or toe-roots. These unconscious movement “tags” indicate the places where our bodies have become split off from our psyches. When brought to our consciousness and confronted they’ll often tell us very plainly where our psychological suffering originated showing us where to begin reclaiming more of ourselves and becoming more whole.
Another cool thing she discusses is how when things don’t go our way we adopt defense strategies…fight flee or freeze. Caldwell goes on to identify each of these defense strategies as characterized by particular animals. Which one best matches your defense?
FIGHTBadger: All-out attack - the person who sits quietly then explodes into rage…
Bear: Intimidation - gets into funks or “moods,” people learn to avoid them
Prairie Dog: Uses distraction and hiding out as tactics…hard to pin down
Christine goes on to talk about how to establish physical emotional and cognitive boundaries so you don’t need these reactive patterns to survive. Good stuff.
Anecdote: Before we started AMP. Decker and I were into learning all kinds of body-oriented healing methodologies… massage breathwork. Reiki and Chi Gong…some of them were wackier than others (DNA Activation anyone?) but all of them focused on clearing out old patterns stuck emotion becoming more whole in ourselves etc…Anyway several of the most bad-ass body workers and practitioners who we were studying under at the time all recommended this book.
Potential Turn-Offs: It’s a pretty dogma-free unassuming piece of work. Not much here for me. It’s basically somatic psychology 101 and focused more on the dynamics than hands-on exercises.
What I Got out of it: I can personally trace breakthroughs I got around becoming less needy to practices I learned from this book. It has helped me to understand and embrace more of myself. I’m more whole as a result of this book. I also use a LOT of what I learned in here to work with clients and when facilitating the AMP course.
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> [ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.growthpop.com/getting-our-bodies-back-by-christine-caldwell
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