Excerpt from my introduction:
“These pioneers in embodiment are typically a feisty lot, unwilling to take at face value a poor medical prognosis, a dull exercise class, ordinary states of consciousness. Rejecting the bleakness of conventional wisdom, they have chosen to survive outside the mainstream, like artists often struggling to make a living by doing something other than their heart’s work. Marion Rosen and Carola Speads worked for years as physical therapists; Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen as an occupational therapist;Emilie Conrad Da’Oud as a fashion model and night club entertainer;Moshe Feldenkrais as a professor of engineering.Many of their students now live as quiet outlaws, neither psychologists, nor physical therapists, nor physicians, though bearing resemblances to all of those officially sanctioned professionals. Those few who, like Marion Rosen and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, have gone through the process of gaining an academic degree or a professional license typically do it not primarily for interest in the material itself — psychology, osteopathy, medicine — but for the sake of protecting their practices and giving their clients access to third party payments.”
“It is no surprise that the community represented in this volume is not well understood. Its principle teachers have worked hard to break the hold of supposedly rational verbosity on the quieter intelligence of flesh. With the exception of a few innovators and their heirs — Wilhelm Reich, Edmund Jacobson, and Walter Cannon, for example — they write little, and often in fragments, close to the logic of bones interlocking with each other without a proliferation of unnecessary adhesions. Identifying the harmony of voices of the tradition is similar to the tasks facing scholars of other traditions that have existed on the margins of the dominant culture. Feminists have had to ferret fragments of women’s wisdom out of diaries and bundles of old letters found in dusty attic trunks. Pre-colonial tribal Americans and African Americans have had to go into the nooks and crannies of small towns and remote areas to seek out living memories of the ancient wisdom traditions pulverized by the onrush of EuroAmerican development.”
People included in this volume:
- Elsa Gindler
- Charlotte Selver
- Carola Speads
- Marion Rosen
- Ilse Middendorf
- Matthias Alexander
- Moshe Feldenkrais
- Ida Rolf
- Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
- Judith Aston
- Irmgard Bartenieff
- Mary Whitehouse
- Gerda Alexander
- Emilie Conrad Da’oud
- Elizabeth A. Behnke
- Thomas Hanna
- Deane Juhan
In addition, there is a bibliography, a list of pilot research projects in various methods, and addresses for contacting the various training institutes.
