BRUCE WOCHHOLZ

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WEB SIGHTS
AHPWEB SOMATICS SITES and NEW MEMBERLINKS
— Bruce Wochholz

WEB RESOURCES

BodyZone promotes integrating chiropractic, massage, posture exercise (Yoga, Pilates, PostureBall, Alexander, etc.), and other intelligent “LifeHabits” to restore normal, balanced motion patterns, to restore motion and reduce postural stress, to relieve pain and improve strength, balance, stability, and overall health.

Yoga for Everyone is a hatha yoga studio within the Movement Center of the Nityananda Institute. “Through yoga practice you can experience a part of you that is boundless and joyful. Everything that is focused on Total Well-Being is present in you right now: a healthy body, happiness, and a creative, full experiential life.”

The Trager Approach is movement education, created and developed over a period of 65 years. There are two aspects; during the table work session the client is passive and the practitioner moves the client in ways they naturally move. This quality of effortless movement is maintained and reinforced by “Mentastics.” These are simple, active, self-induced movements, which the client can do on their own, during their daily activities.

Polarity Therapy is a comprehensive health system involving energy based bodywork, diet, exercise, and self-awareness, developed over the course of 60 years. It works with the “Human Energy Field,” electromagnetic patterns expressed in mental, emotional, and physical experience. In Polarity Therapy, health is viewed as a reflection of the condition of the energy field, and therapeutic methods are designed to balance the field for health benefits.

Welcome to Somatics is an online resource center, featuring information on somatic education, health care, and science. The Somatics Web Ring , an “internetwork” of everything somatics on the web, and the Somatics Center www.somaticscenter.com, are companion sites that include links, a library, extensive resources, and a wide variety of somatics-related websites from around the world. The Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training was founded in 1975 by Thomas Hanna and Eleanor Criswell Hanna and is devoted to somatics theory, practice, and research.

Body Rolling is a therapeutic self-care practice for body therapy practitioners and an educational tool used by body therapists to empower clients to develop a deeper and more subtle relationship with their own bodies, which improves any type of bodyoriented practice, from massage and physical therapy to bodywork, yoga teaching, fitness training, and somatic therapies such as Feldenkrais and Alexander technique.

The founder of the Rubenfeld Synergy Method, Ilana Rubenfeld, has been called the “Great Mother” of the body-oriented therapy movement. A world-recognized pioneer in integrating psychotherapy, intuition, and bodywork, Ilana’s approach to personal development and healing the physical, emotional, and spiritual is a gentle, non-invasive therapy which views the individual as a whole being capable of self-healing, self-regulation, growth, and change.

From Germany, Robert Schleip practices both Rolfing and the Feldenkrais Method. His site has a variety of international links and resources for structural and functional Integrative Therapies. Guild for Structural Integration is dedicated to the traditional teachings of Dr. Ida P. Rolf. The product of her life’s work and teaching is the “Recipe”; a ten-session sequence of structural, fascial, and educational goals which establishes order in human structures. While Structural Integration is primarily concerned with physical changes in the body, it affects the whole person. We are made up of emotions, attitudes, belief systems and behavior patterns as well as the physical being. All are related. Align the physical structure and it will open up the individual’s potential.

The Feldenkrais Guild exemplifies functional integration. Established by Moshe Feldenkrais in 1977 to be the professional organization of practitioners and teachers of the Feldenkrais Method, it directly addresses the question of how to facilitate the learning that is necessary for organizing the whole self and recovering excluded and unconsidered movement patterns or actions; which is done by expanding the self-image through movement sequences that bring attention to the parts of the self that are out of awareness and uninvolved in functional actions. In Awareness Through Movement (ATM), the FELDENKRAIS practitioner verbally guides you through a sequence of movements: sitting or lying on the floor, standing or sitting in a chair. You discover how you do the movements and notice the quality of changes in your body. You learn to relax and to abandon habitual patterns.

Alexander Technique International is a worldwide organization of Alexander teachers, students, and supporters of the Alexander Technique created to promote and advance the work discovered by F. M. Alexander. The common factor in all aspects of life is that how we are using ourselves, the way we do things, affects the results we get. This is also essentially a preventive technique to improve and maintain our health.

The complete guide to the Alexander Technique Index homepage provides a wealth of international translations of resources and links. The Alexander Technique is a method that works to change (movement) habits in our everyday activities. It is a simple and practical method for improving ease and freedom of movement, balance, support and coordination. The technique teaches the use of the appropriate amount of effort for a particular activity, giving you more energy for all your activities. It is not a series of treatments or exercises, but rather a reeducation of the mind and body.

The Alexander Technique and Tai Chi Chuan website describes how Tai Chi principles point to, or describe, a state of being “how we would like to be.” The Alexander work provides directions with which we can move toward that state.

Reiki literally means “universal life force energy” and is a method of natural healing based on its application. “Ki” is the same word as Chi or Qi, the Chinese word for the energy which underlies everything. Reiki is a system for channeling that energy to someone for the purpose of healing. Because there is no time and space to limit spirit, Reiki can operate without regard to limitations of space and can bring healing to a recipient regardless of distance.

MEMBERLINKS — Mary Hendricks Gendlin’s site, the Focusing Institute , includes an extensive set of links to international “focusing sites.” In Focusing, small surprising steps come, shifts in how you see a situation. These lead to new possibilities of action, and new leads to look for information you did not know you needed. The possibilities go beyond the alreadygiven alternatives. The whole scene changes. An intricate territory of factors, events, conditions, and new questions emerges where there was only a slight bodily sense at the start. (I had Gene Gendlin in graduate school and this site contains one of my favorite pOmO (postmodernism) resources from the Conference on After Postmodernism at the U. of Chicago in 1997. The Conference posed a specific question: If we absorb postmodernism, if we recognize the variety and ungroundedness of grounds, but do not want to stop in arbitrariness, relativism, or aphoria, what comes after postmodernism?)

AHP Board Member-at-Large Cuf Ferguson’s site is from U. Mass. Boston’s College of Public and Community Service, where he teaches. Recently published is his “The Conscious Use of ‘The Mirror Effect’: Co-Creating a Utopian World” in Viable Utopian Ideas: Shaping a Better World, edited by Arthur B. Shostak. In the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center, unfolding corporate betrayals, and other devastating shocks, it is natural to search for practical lessons in utopian literature as we venture into an uncertain future.

All the sites listed above can be reached at ahpweb.org under WEB RESOURCES. AHP Members are encouraged to submit their web addresses to Web Sights columnist Bruce Wochholz at bwochholz@mac.com for review. Sites should be primarily educational or informational, and relate to AHP’s interests. Member sites may emphasize services, books, workshops, tapes, etc.