AHP Perspective is a magazine published bi-monthly for members of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. It includes interviews, articles, essays, updates on member activities, conference announcements, and book reviews. Members receive the complete AHP Perspective as part of their membership.

AHP PERSPECTIVE April/May 2001 Table of Contents

GETTING IN TOUCH: A Guide to the New Body-Centered Therapies

EDITED BY CHRISTINE CALDWELL, PH.D.
Theosophical Publishing House, 1997, $14, 245 pp., ISBN: 0-8356-09761-5.

Reviewed by Susan McNabb Cook

Christine Caldwell, Ph.D., founder of the Somatic Psychology Department, Naropa Institute, has given us a wonderful overview of Hakomi, Dreambody Work, The Moving Cycle, and other techniques that have been developed by leaders in the emerging field of somatic therapy. She gathers movement, breath, touch, and mindfulness under one umbrella and gives us an opportunity to see how the body is organized around the laws of mechanical physics. She indicates that the body behaves consonantly with the chaos and fractal theories.
Under Christine’s somatic umbrella, we see how "any event that occurs impacts our whole being—physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual." Indeed, any event must come through the sensory system, permeating our flesh in order to register in the rest of our organism. The only way that the mind becomes manifest is through the actions of the body in which it is imbedded.
Somatic psychology sees this body/mind as a feedback loop or continuum rather than as two separate or cooperative systems. It also regards the body as a template or blueprint for all experience.
Since our past is deeply embedded in our experience of the present and woven into our expectations of the future, the Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor teaches techniques which allow storage and retrieval of the influence of memories, allowing people to escape fate predicated by their history. This was one of the earliest systems in somatic psychology. As dancers, Albert Pesso and Diane Boyden Pesso were interested in the way movement and the psyche related, both within the individual and in a group. They specialize in creating experiential structures or activities that remediate past developmental deficits that are dysfunctionally driving one’s present life.
Hakomi (from the Hopi word meaning both, "Who are you?" and "How do you stand in relationship to these many realms?") is fascinating, with Spiritual underpinnings and an acknowledgement of the aliveness of the body with meaning and memory.
Amy and Arny Mindell work with the Dream Body, or altered states of consciousness, the non-linear associations in the body that often hold the key to our healing. Comparing the wave function in quantum physics to dreaming, they speak about following the wave-like function of the body as requiring "metaskills." These skills include an attitude and belief in following the flow of the unconscious, a sort of mystery school orientation we often find among shamans.
There is plenty of reference to energy bodies, our many bodies—as Christine would say in The Moving Cycle—and reference to energy blocks and disease as well, along with the physics behind it all. There is so much information in this book that I marked almost every page and turned down a great number of corners as well. It is just the kind of information that is needed to give language to this emerging therapy. I am impressed with the clarity, knowledge, and wisdom of the founders who have driven this movement, and with the ease of expression and often eloquence shown by the contributors. Clearly, somatic therapy adds a dimension often overlooked by traditional therapy. When psychological and physical issues are addressed concurrently through bodywork, physical changes are more lasting, with information being revealed that might remain unconscious in conventional therapy.
As this work grows and expands, softer techniques and less analytical methodology are developing. In a field that sorely needs literature to describe its fine works, Christine has assembled an outstanding group of representatives to articulate the major strands in the promising field of body-oriented therapies.

SUSAN MCNABB COOK, CMT, recently graduated from the California Institute of Integral Studies with an emphasis on the Human Energy Field, Energy as Medicine. She works part-time for the Research Dept. at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and devotes the balance of her time to writing about the transformational process of healing. Susan recently moved to Sonoma, California.

AHP PERSPECTIVE Apr/May 2001 Table of Contents

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