FEATURED ARTICLE HOME PAGE

This morning I felt a connective epiphany, a strong resonance, while reading Raja Selvam’s new book, The Practice of Embodying Emotions, chapter 9 specifically, I felt like someone in the driver’s seat actually knew where he was going, directed by an intuitive GPS taking him and me to an emotional place that made sense: sensorimotor emotions. I offer my review of his book in hopes it might shed light on clients you are working with or perhaps something within yourself as well.

Doctors generally begin their journey as eager medical students determined to change the world one patient at a time. With intelligence, compassion, and a desire to help others, medical students muster up enough drive to fight through medical school and residency, accepting the hours of work, sleepless nights, and giant holes left in their bank account in pursuit of what they believe to be a worthwhile, fulfilling profession both morally and economically. However, in Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician, Sandeep Jauhar suggests that it’s difficult to maintain this view within the current medical climate because it’s dominated by the government and large corporations set out to generate income, even if it’s at patients’ expense. In this powerful and thought-provoking memoir, Jauhar utilizes case studies and anecdotes as he reveals his journey as a doctor facing what he refers to as “the midlife crisis in American medicine” and his attempts to understand why “medicine today is as fraught as it’s ever been” (15).

Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy offers their call for papers and free access to several articles in their Spring 2021 issue: a Special Issue on Embodied psychotherapies in the digital age. According to Roz Carroll's introduction/editorial entitled, Embodied intersubjectivity as online psychotherapy becomes mainstream: Coronavirus measures have stimulated a re-organisation of the field of psychotherapy demanding a new level of technological skill, creativity and revision of established practice. This issue celebrates the resilience and adaptability of therapists and clients who have found new ways to stay connected, with contributions from Israel, Italy and Finland and the UK. It explores the new dimensions of online psychotherapy, offering vivid case studies of individuals and groups. The authors share their journeys of learning, re-thinking and reconnecting with sometimes unanticipated benefits for the work.

The drum is a powerful grounding tool with the resonance activated by the player seeping from the drum, through the body and connecting and aligning to the rhythms of the natural world. Both mindfulness and grounding exercises can be given additional efficacy through the use of the drum, usually played at a tempo that replicates the mothers heart-beat at rest; 60-80 beats per minute. This tempo is associated with the calm and security that accompanies our time in the womb and is also believed to be the primary stimuli under which the areas of the brain responsible for our stress response are formed.

Reviewed by Nancy Eichhorn   I recently received a copy of Susan’s newest book, Heart Open Body Awake: Four Steps To Embodied Spirituality, from Shambhala Publications,...

Beneath our “level of conscious awareness, our nervous system directs our movement toward and away from people, places, and experiences” (Dana & Rolfe, 2024, pg. 56). And this guidance is critical to our health and well-being. But we aren’t born knowing how to do it. Deb Dana, LCSW, and Courtney Rolfe, LCPC joined forces to write “Polyvagal Prompts: Finding Connection and Joy Through Guided Explorations.” They know we don’t innately know how to self-regulate our physiological and psychological states—we learn by co-regulating with attuned caregivers.

The central nervous system plays a critical role in the association between psychological factors and pain. The neural circuits that are involved in these bi-directional relationships include several systems that influence peripheral processes relevant to pain perception. It is possible that transient psychosocial factors as well as long-term consequences of developmental trajectories adversely affect these neurobehavioral pathways. Exploring the neuroscience of the biobehavioral and developmental mechanisms of pain is the goal of the upcoming Special Issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

The Mindfulness and Character Strengths Workbook is everything I hoped for and more. It is a well-written, easy-to-follow, detailed to the nth degree workbook with extensive, free online materials to support the process including audio-guided meditations. Congratulations Ryan on a much-needed workbook to support people exploring character strengths and their integration with mindfulness.

Increasing awareness and understanding of epigenetics and neuroplasticity in current research has resulted in a new perspective of psychotherapy that is integrated with neurobiological information. This information is at the root of an emerging paradigm shift in body psychotherapy that I call Evolutive Stage Neuromediator Vegetotherapy.

Living Toward Justice emerged from the Living Justice Project, a global ethnographic initiative carried out in 2022 and coordinated by Sonya Pritzker, an anthropologist and somatic practitioner. The collaborative project brought together more than fifty practitioners working at the intersections of embodiment, healing, and social justice (all of whom are named as co-authors). Pritzker and the collective worked collaboratively to produce an archive of collective memory: a curated collection of reflections, observations, images, practices, dreams, poetry, and inquiries. Rather than writing a how-to guide offering new solutions or a study demonstrating the outcomes of embodied social justice approaches, Pritzker frames the book as a shared time capsule of individual practitioner entries on the embodied ways they were living toward justice at a specific historical juncture.