Paula Derry, PhD
Ruscombe Associate, Shiatsu Practitioner
Body awareness is self-awareness. Further, body sensation and body awareness are of fundamental importance to how we organize our experience and how we function.
The neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote a book called “Leg to Stand On” about his experiences after fracturing his leg in a traumatic accident. He was surprised to find that he couldn’t feel the leg encased in a cast, or move it voluntarily, yet his leg could spontaneously move when he heard music. The explanation, he wrote, is that the brain relies on sensations from the leg as part of creating voluntary movement. That is, the brain isn’t an executive that barks orders to the rest of the body; it’s part of a larger, holistic system.
This idea is fundamental to many body therapies, that body sensation is an important part of our experience, and also of our body’s organization and self-regulation. In Feldenkrais work, consciously making subtle movements allows the nervous system to engage in a process of self-correction to, for example, increase spontaneity, range of motion, etc. Suzanne Scurlock Durana writes that conscious sensory awareness of our body is a starting point for experiencing oneself fully. Pat Ogden, and many other body-oriented psychotherapists, write that deadening awareness of parts of our body, and maintaining this deadness by restricting movement or breathing, or having habitual postures that prevent certain sensations, helps to avoid conscious awareness of troubling experiences. Being aware of our bodies is part of, and expands, our sense of ourselves, our awareness of what we are thinking and feeling, sometimes surprising us, and in addition can facilitate our ability to change.
The idea is not that body awareness is important simply because we can dive down into troubling experiences, although that may be something we carefully do at some point. Rather, body awareness can be a nourishing way of experiencing a sense of the fullness of ourselves, of the richness of experience, of safety, and of our connection to what surrounds us, and also can enable our ability to self-correct and change.
Paula Derry, PhD is a Ruscombe Associate who practices Shiatsu and Integrative Bodywork. There is information about her on the Ruscombe practitioner webpages and at her website pauladerry.com.