Discovering the Body's Wisdom: A Comprehensive Guide to More than Fifty Mind-Body Practices That Can Relieve Pa in, Reduce Stress, and Foster Health, Spiritual Growth, and Inner Peace

by Mirka Knaster

Overview

In an attractive, oversized format, enlivened with illustrations, sidebar quotes, personal accounts, techniques to try, and profiles of leaders in the field, Discovering the Body's Wisdom is a basic resource for well-being and natural health.

Body disciplines and therapies have enjoyed phenomenal growth in the past decade, becoming a major alternative to mainstream medicine and traditional psychotherapy. But with more than 100,000 practitioners and dozens of methods available in the United States alone, how can consumers choose the right one for themselves?

Mirka Knaster's richly informative guide provides an overview of the principles and theories underlying the major Eastern and Western body therapies, or "bodyways." It shows readers how to befriend their own bodies, getting back in touch with their internal sources of health and wisdom. It also describes more than 75 individual approaches, answering such questions as: How does each therapy work? What can we expect from one session or a series? What are the reasons for selecting this method? How do we find a qualified practitioner? What, if any, are the "consumer-bewares"?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307575500
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/29/2010
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	924,510
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Mirka Knaster was born in Europe and raised in New York City. Her life-long experience of living, traveling, and conducting research in different parts of the world have contributed to her cross-cultural perspective on how people view, take care of, and heal their bodies.

A licensed massage therapist who has trained in diverse body methods and disciplines, she has been involved in the alternative health field for more than twenty years. As a contributing editor of East/West (now Natural Health) and Massage Therapy Journal, she has interviewed many of the field’s luminaries and reported on the latest trends. Her writing on health and other subjects has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Washington Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Women’s Health Care: A Guide to Alternatives. She was a consultant, writer, and on-screen instructor for the best-selling video “Massage for Health,” hosted by Shari Belafonte.

Prior to her work in holistic health, Mirka was a Ford Foundation Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies and taught English in Colombia. She also did research and published academically in the field of women’s studies.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction:
The Journey of a Lifetime
 
People travel the whole wide world looking for novelty and adventure. They want to learn about other cultures, places, peoples, and languages. Yet the greatest territory of all to explore is right where you are—your own body. You don’t have to set aside time from work for a long vacation. You don’t have to get shots or a visa to go abroad. You don’t have to save up a heap of money. And you don’t need a special wardrobe or luggage. You just need yourself.
 
Discovering the Body’s Wisdom is a passport to begin your journey of exploration and discovery in the most fascinating, miraculous, and meaningful land you’ll ever traverse. Through such a voyage, I hope you will come to regard your body not as foreign territory but as home.
 
Take a moment to check in with your body right now. How comfortable are you? Are you curled up in an easy chair? Sitting at a desk or kitchen table? Standing at a bus stop or in a train station? Lying in bed on your side or propped up against pillows? In this moment, stop to observe how you feel in that position. Does your body tell you, “I feel at ease, supported”? Or does it say, “My shoulders and neck are tight,” “My lower back aches,” “My right foot hurts”? Are you slouching, hunching over, or pressing your weight down onto one leg and foot instead of standing on both?
 
Most of us go through the day without being aware of how we are in our bodies and what they are trying to communicate. We tune our bodies out in order to get our jobs done, finish our commutes home, and run our errands before we finally lie down and go to sleep, and we hope to wake up feeling good. Even when our bodies finally get our attention with excruciating sensations that we can’t ignore, do we listen as they tell us what they want, what they need? Do we know how to respond other than to shut them up by popping a pill, drinking alcohol, turning on the television, or getting overly busy?
 
What can you do for the tight neck and shoulders, the aching back, the painful foot? How about the recurring pain from an old running injury or the fact that you tire easily? Are you unable to bend over or turn your head fully right and left? Or maybe you’re pain-free, but you sense you can stretch your limits. You’re curious how much better you can perform, how much more gracefully you can move, how much more pleasure you can experience, how free and lithe you can feel. Instead of ignoring or anesthetizing your body, consider working with it in a cooperative way.
 
WORKING WITH THE BODY
 
Techniques of working with the body existed long before anyone began to keep records on papyri and clay tablets. As soon as someone noticed that relief came with pressing, rubbing, or moving in a certain way, bodyways—the term I’ve coined to refer to body practices ranging from Acupressure to Zero Balancing®—were born. People have used them for millennia to deal with all kinds of ailments, soothe tensions, boost athletic prowess, gain pleasure, and even deepen spiritual practice. Indigenous cultures in every part of the world have long had specialists who know how to massage. Shamans, curanderos, balians, and other native healers generally include it in healing ceremonies. In ancient Egypt, masseurs were special assistants to physicians, surgeons, and veterinarians. In some traditional communities, the skills are still passed from generation to generation. In others, a person may be destined for this role because of an early sign, such as a breech birth. Or a health crisis and near-death experience may precipitate becoming a hands-on healer.
 
Today, beyond the countless testimonials of successful outcomes, we are better able to measure the results of body practices and explain how and why they are effective. For example, a computer search in Index Medicus reveals hundreds of research articles in international journals on massage procedures for humans, and animals as well.2 The Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM), established in 1992 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded grants for further research in various kinds of massage therapy, T’ai Chi Chuan, Therapeutic Touch, Yoga, Chi Kung, and other alternative health-care approaches. In the same year, the Touch Research Institute was founded at the University of Miami School of Medicine as the world’s first research center devoted solely to understanding the role of touch therapy in human health and development. Ongoing research studies there continue to prove scientifically what the ancient and indigenous cultures knew instinctively. Wherever possible, I cite research findings that support the use of bodyways.
 
WHAT ARE BODYWAYS?
 
There’s a lot of name-calling in the field of body practices. It’s not mud-slinging, but a habit of differentiating and labeling. Some practitioners are engaged in bodywork.3 Others consider their approaches therapy. Still others say they’re neither, but rather somatic education, movement awareness, structural integration, or even emotional integration.
 
No system, school, or approach defines the range of body disciplines in the same way. For some, it is manual medicine to fix parts of the body that have been injured, cause pain, or are capable only of limited movement. For others, it is emotional as well as physical work. Some see it not as manipulation but as a neuromuscular learning process. Still others view it as the premier vehicle for experiencing relaxation and pleasure. However, whether they’re focused on one aspect of your body or on the unity of your body, mind, emotions, and spirit, all bodyways start from three basic assumptions:
 
Something is constricting, restricted, blocked, misused, or out of balance—generally because of excessive muscle tension and habit.
 
The body is not set in stone; it is plastic and moldable, repairable and educable—you can always do something.
 
The body is the place for transformation.
 
They also all share the same goal of changing a person’s life for the better. The change could be the immediate relief of discomfort and distress or the longer-range modification of chronic patterns that results in overall improved function. Where approaches differ is on what needs to be changed and how to change it. Does the practitioner repair and improve your structure to affect function or improve function to modify your structure? Is the goal to cure your symptoms or to educate you—draw out self-knowledge and self-control—through conscious awareness?
 
To get around all the divisions in the field, I created the term bodyways. It broadly incorporates both therapy and education as well as relaxation, while still allowing for each separate category of practice and its distinguishing characteristics. I chose way (from the Old English wegan, “to move”) because it suggests a pathway or process, as in waterway.
 
Think of the many different waterways through which water moves: creeks, streams, rivulets, rivers, channels, brooks, rills, seas, oceans, bays, sounds, and lakes. All of the bodyways involve movement, and often the least effortful way can bring about the most ease. Life is, after all, movement. We are living bodies, always in process. As 70 percent water, we are in constant flux, just like a stream. And just as a stream receives new water from various sources, so too do we take in new information from a variety of bodyways.
 
Which bodyway will help you move along is another question.
 
WHICH BODYWAY?
 
In 1973, when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I bought my first massage book and practiced on a friend. I also showed him the Yoga postures I was doing. At the time, those were two of only a handful of body practices in North America, none of which was widespread, but concentrated mostly in pockets on the East and West coasts. Some of them were popular only among dancers and performers who were interested in body awareness and in taking care of themselves.
 
There were reasons for these limitations. Medical technology had superseded less-prestigious, time-consuming hands-on work. And massage, if not automatically associated with sex, was often suspect as “touchy-feely” stuff from California, while Yoga was “devil’s work” from the Far East. A story in the April 1971 issue of Newsweek focused not on healing massage but on thinly disguised houses of prostitution called “massage parlors.” Between that year and 1980, the American Massage Therapy Association, the oldest and largest national organization representing the profession, had barely two thousand members. By 1995 that figure jumped to more than twenty-three thousand and is still growing. The state of Florida alone had five thousand licensed massage therapists that year. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine (January 28, 1993) reported that massage was the third most commonly used of sixteen alternative health practices.
 
More than a hundred body-oriented approaches are now available. I’ve given up counting because each year new ones spring up like mushrooms after a drenching rain. Other associations, such as the American Oriental Body Therapies Association and Associated Professional Massage Therapists and Allied Health Practitioners International, have been organized to represent the diverse groups of practitioners, now surpassing a hundred thousand. In addition, many health-care professionals such as nurses, doctors, dentists, and psychotherapists have also incorporated some of these practices in their work. According to the American Business Institute, massage was one of the three fastest-growing businesses in 1991. In 1995 there were already more than five hundred massage schools, plus the many other kinds of similar training institutes that exist from Maine to Hawaii and in Canada.
 

Editorial Reviews

If ever a book could have used a subtitle, this is one. An explanatory phrase like "Bodywork Therapies Old and New" would go far to alerting readers to the scope and purpose of this comprehensive consumer guide to the myriad bodywork disciplines currently available. After explaining the purpose of bodywork and the psychological and physical benefits ascribed to it, Knaster, a licensed massage therapist and former Ford Foundation Fellow, suggests how best to choose a therapeutic approach and what to expect from it, and how to find and evaluate bodywork practitioners. Knaster considers Western systems, with their emphasis on structure, function and movement, and Eastern approaches, which emphasize energy, or the life force. Each section concludes with information on training. The margins of the pages are distractingly busy with quotations, which, while relevant, make the necessarily complex explanations more difficult to follow. Long paragraphs set off by shading offer valuable first-person accounts or do-it-yourself exercises by which a reader can sample the practice of a therapy, but these too are interruptive. Despite its design flaws, Knaster's comprehensive study will be of considerable help to those who want to know the differences between the Alexander Technique and the Rosen Method or between Shiatsu and Aikido. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is one of the most complete books available on bodywork. The author, a licensed massage therapist, uses the term bodyways to describe any technique that involves movement to improve the structure, function, and feeling of the human body. More than 75 different types of therapies are discussed, ranging from the different kinds of massage therapy to those with a more philosophical bent, like postural integration or t'ai chi chuan. Readers are also told how to "befriend" their own body and how to choose and work with a bodyworks practitioner, and they can dip into the book to study just one particular therapy. A useful appendix tells "How To Deal with Sexual Misconduct." The book's extensive bibliography should be useful to those doing further research. This book will appeal to both the practitioner and the consumer and is recommended for medical and public libraries.Natalie Kupferberg, Ferris State Univ. Lib., Big Rapids, Mich.

Library Journal

Media attention to alternative treatments grows apace with public skepticism toward traditional Western medical practices, but current and potential consumers of alternative body disciplines and therapies find themselves confused and overwhelmed by a sea of choices. Into the breach steps Knaster with a much needed compendium of the principles and theories that underlie the major Eastern and Western body therapies, or "bodyways." She begins by thoroughly examining the mind-body-spirit disjunction and its attendant ills and alienations and proceeds to advice on choosing among bodyways and practitioners. She discusses massage therapies; rolfing; myofascial release; sensory awareness; contact improvisation; shiatsu; reiki; t'ai chi chuan; and yoga--to name just a few. The book is attractively illustrated with useful diagrams and boasts sidebar quotes and shaded boxes on special topics. With its reader-friendly organization, which includes personal accounts and profiles of pioneers in this field, its resource list, and detailed endnotes, Knaster's overview should find an enthusiastic audience.

Whitney Scott