Body and Awareness - Paperback

by Sandra Reeve (Editor)

Our growing understanding of embodied awareness is one of the less known and most extraordinary areas of contemporary research and practice.

On one side (the left brain, as it were), neuroscience in all its forms is constantly shedding new light on subjects like embodied cognition, the distributed brain (brain-in-the-gut, brain-in the-heart), the workings of the left and right hemisphere of the brain (McGilchrist and others) and the processing of sensory and emotional data.

On the other side (the right hemisphere, as it were) our study and awareness of the experience of being in our bodies, moving, feeling pain, dreaming, meditating, growing, becoming ill and healing, is becoming increasingly nuanced.

Academic research is approaching the experience of consciousness and awareness 'from the inside' and making remarkable discoveries. The emerging field of 'body and awareness' is transdisciplinary and multifaceted - it has no subject listing in libraries and academia or in booksellers' metadata. But it is of central importance to those interested in understanding art, dance, the psychology of health, child learning and development, trauma, the psycho-ecology of extinction, loss and climate change, proprioception and enteroception, ecological awareness, meditation, and the need for societal transformation in an age of multiple convergent crises.

Author Biography

Sandra Reeve is a movement artist, director, teacher, and dance movement psychotherapist living in West Dorset, where her international 'Move into Life' programme of courses and events is based. She is known for her work on movement dynamics, ecological lenses, and ecological movement. She completed a PhD in Performance Practice at the University of Exeter in 2009 where she remains an Honorary Fellow. Her thesis was on 'The Ecological Body.' She writes for Routledge, Intellect, and others, is co-editor of Embodied Lives and Body & Performance, and author of Nine Ways of Seeing a Body.