Authors Reflections

Moshe Feldenkrais (1977), who developed the Feldenkrais method, considered walking as a series of controlled fallings. With each step we lose our balance and retrieve it. With each step we fall forward and block the fall with yet another step. Instead of perceiving falling as an undesired process, it becomes a prerequisite for moving forwards. Movement necessitates falling.

When Dennis first approached me to write a chapter on ‘Deep Play’, I experienced a gamut of emotions from my initial feelings of delight and I must admit some pride, which very quickly gave way to apprehension and concern that my writing style may give me away as being neither an academic, nor a story-teller. Once I managed to recognise these feelings as my own childhood scripts I was able to harness them and regulate my growing unease, which allowed the feelings to abate; this was old-stuff. Relieved of these constraints I set about the task for which I had been assigned; to consider the notion of ‘Deep Play’.

I read, I review. I rarely comment. The difference? I offer glimpses into a book, noting the content, the writing style, the potential impact on a reader, often sharing my personal reactions to the material with a familiar first person writing style. An academic commentary proposes both a different tone and approach. One that offered a challenge until I realized that a commentary is just that, a personal reaction pinpointing part of the material that potentially impacts either me personally or my field of study and interest, in this instance psychotherapeutic interventions that offer clients and ourselves a way forward. I read Ryan Niemiec’s newest publication, Character Strengths Interventions: A Field Guide for Practitioners, with no background experience in positive psychology, no concept of what character strengths are or how to integrate them into my life or my professional work. I quickly learned that character strengths are positive traits that are core to our being—our identity—and our doing, aka our behavior (pg. 2).

Stanley wrote his landmark text, Emotional Anatomy: The Structure of Experience, to map the geometry of somatic experience in 1985. As founder and director of the Center for Energetic Studies in Berkeley, California (1971-today), Stanley developed his therapeutic and educational approach, trademarked as Formative Psychology, based on his methodology and conceptual framework for the life of the body. He has spent the past 50 plus years creating, teaching, researching, writing, presenting. He shared that it was time to bring his seminal text to life in a virtual way.

We’re committed to spread information to parents that the unborn baby’s personality and development can be impacted during pregnancy. Today we have solid research to support that the mother’s stress during pregnancy may indeed impact a child’s personality. Thus, an intervention to help parents know ways to engage with their unborn baby, whether in a low risk pregnancy or one that follows a perinatal loss is an important goal. Our book outlines specific interventions to use at each stage of pregnancy that facilitates prenatal parenting to connect with the unborn baby. We hope that you find it useful resource, and we thank you for your work with bereaved families.

One thing I have learned about myself is that I am intuitive. An idea appears to spring forth from the depth of my unconscious, without much form but with enough felt sense conviction to pursue it one way or the other. It acquires shape and clarity and is reality tested in the process of expressing it, teaching it, or writing about it. It is not unlike the process that a painter might undergo in bringing an inspired image in one’s mind’s eye to the canvas. I now understand and accept this as my creative process

In her new book, The Body Remembers Volume 2: Revolutionizing Trauma Treatment, Babette Rothschild includes what she calls a new ‘tool’, which is, in effect, a table and chart that identify the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the effects of ANS arousal in the therapeutic setting. It is designed to help therapists better monitor, evaluate, and regulate client ANS arousal states thus making trauma treatment safer through observation and modulation. The information as graphically depicted in this book represents what I call a ‘map’. Babette and I have been colleagues for many years in the same professional field, and we share a common passion—we like making maps. Furthermore, we like to keep working with them until they have reached a level of precision that is helpful not only to ourselves but also to other trained trauma therapists – and to clients.

There was a time when I couldn’t imagine how to integrate my spiritual path and my Western training as a psychotherapist. I was traveling down to Peru periodically over a 10-year period, stepping into the mystical non-ordinary world of the shaman, while working as a clinical supervisor in a psychiatric hospital. I felt hurled down to South America, as if literally picked up and thrown down there by the circumstances and synchronicities in my life. I knew I had a choice, but not really. Destiny was calling to a tradition so foreign from my upbringing, but it activated a deep knowing and memory of ancient wisdom and truth. My first book, Eyes of the Jaguar, was about the beginning of this mystical journey. I didn’t consider myself to be a writer and felt as if this book wrote itself through me. The words of the book refused to stop moving through my thoughts until I put them down on paper. It felt as if it was part of my spiritual initiation process, with a life of its own and an impact that I could not have known. I believed strongly in a holistic interrelated paradigm of body/mind/spirit, as taught in the shamanic tradition. I meditated on how to integrate it all, and the inner wisdom of my soul whispered back, “It will integrate.” I learned to trust my inner guidance, and as time went on, I was able to see the integration within myself. As the therapist and the shaman became one within me, my work became more integrated.

When her father was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer in 1994, Helayne Waldman knew it was lethal. She researched ways to support his health and did the best she could considering she was a layperson, not a practicing nutritionist. A single mom at the time, Waldman worked as a trainer in field-readiness and marketing for a database firm. Her father died in four months, planting a seed that Waldman later nurtured into a healing profession for people living with and dying from cancer.

The germ of the idea for the book arose from an article on the topic of Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in Body Psychotherapy, which was published in the journal Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy. One of the blind peer reviewers commented that the article was very intense and passionate with a lot of material, and that the paragraphs were more like chapter summaries for a book. I am grateful to this anonymous person. It made me realise how much I was trying to convey in a short article. I duly reworked the article; it was published and it has consistently been in the top 10 most read articles in the journal for the last 6 years. I felt that I was on to something and that non-verbal communication had a wider appeal than the body psychotherapy community.