Ramblemuse^SM Annotated Bibliography for Massage Practitioners

For a thousand generations human beings viewed themselves a part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationship not only with other people but with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patterns) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate". How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it takes for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In "The Spell of the Sensuous" David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language which — even at its most abstract — echoes the calls and cries of the earth.

"One of the real tests of writers," notes Ackerman in this liveliest of nature books, "is how well they write about smells. If they can't describe the scent of sanctity in a church, can you trust them to describe the suburbs of the heart?" Ackerman passes the test, writing with ease and fluency about the five senses. Did you know that bat guano smells like stale Wheat Thins? That Bach's music can quell anger around the world? That the leaves that shimmer so beautifully in fall have "no adaptive purpose"? Ackerman does, and she guides us through questions of sensation with an eye for the amusingly arcane reference and just the right phrase.

Are you an HSP? Are you easily overwhelmed by stimuli? Affected by other people's moods? Easily startled? Do you need to withdraw during busy times to a private, quiet place? Do you get nervous or shaky if someone is observing you or competing with you? HSP, shorthand for "highly sensitive person," describes 15 to 20 percent of the population. Being sensitive is a normal trait — nothing defective about it. But you may not realize that, because society rewards the outgoing personality and treats shyness and sensitivity as something to be overcome. According to author Elaine Aron (herself an HSP), sensitive people have the unusual ability to sense subtleties, spot or avoid errors, concentrate deeply, and delve deeply. This book helps HSPs to understand themselves and their sensitive trait and its impact on personal history, career, relationships, and inner life.

There is growing scientific evidence that somatic awareness — the ability to perceive, interpret, and act upon the basis of one's own internal bodily sensations — can be a powerful tool in maintaining health and facilitating recovery from illness. This book examines the nature of somatic awareness and evaluates its clinical utility across a wide range of medical conditions, including migraine, unexplained dizziness and shortness of breath, and immune system illnesses such as arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and cancer. Integrating holistic and traditional health care considerations, chapters describe how mental health and medical practitioners can help patients harness "the placebo effect" and other inner resources for healing.

Just as road maps represent interconnections across the landscape, your many body maps represent all aspects of your bodily self, inside and out. In concert, they create your physical and emotional awareness and your sense of being a whole, feeling self in a larger social world. Moreover, your body maps are profoundly elastic. Your self doesn’t begin and end with your physical body but extends into the space around you. This space morphs every time you put on or take off clothes, ride a bike, or wield a tool. When you drive a car, your personal body space grows to envelop it. When you play a video game, your body maps automatically track and emulate the actions of your character onscreen. When you watch a scary movie, your body maps put dread in your stomach and send chills down your spine. If your body maps fall out of sync, you may have an out-of-body experience or see auras around other people. The Body Has a Mind of Its Own explains how you can tap into the power of body maps to do almost anything better–whether it is playing tennis, strumming a guitar, riding a horse, dancing a waltz, empathizing with a friend, raising children, or coping with stress.

For babies to develop normally, they must be touched. Adults, too, thrive when touch is a normal part of their each day: a reassuring handshake, a sympathetic hug, a healing massage. But how often do we permit ourselves or others these simple forms of contact: physical touch, our emotional presence, spiritual communion? We need to get more in touch — closer to who we really are as a species, and in ways that support our highest human potential. Touching can be communication, friendship, kindness, service, or love for God. Topics include: the highest human need, the roots of violence and abuse, acquisitions as a substitute for touch, healing through touch, a healthy model of sexuality, and touch as a context for our lives. The foreword is by Ashley Montagu.

This useful guide to palpation for musculoskeletal diagnosis and assessment describes and illustrates the skills needed to increase sophistication of palpatory assessment skills and practice. A companion CD-ROM supports the skills with video clips, and each technique is reinforced with practical exercises and self-assessment questions.

In the revised edition of her book, "The Power of Touch", Phyllis K. Davis explores the human need to touch and be touched — and how America's cultural taboos have made us a touch-starved nation. Phyllis shares important insights on physical contact, not only as a biological need, but also as a language that communicates love more powerfully than words.

This book examines the research base of touch in massage therapy while linking the implications of these results to massage practice. It was written by the director of the world-renowned Touch Research Institute. Each chapter gives a clear and authoritative review of what is known about the effects of touch in a variety of clinical conditions. It specifically addresses the areas of stress reduction, pain reduction, growth and development, immune functions, and auto-immune disorders.

The first sensory input in life comes from the sense of touch while a baby is still in the womb, and touch continues to be the primary means of learning about the world throughout infancy, well into childhood. Touch is critical for children's growth, development, and health, as well as for adults' physical and mental well-being. Yet American society, claims Tiffany Field, is dangerously touch-deprived. Field, a leading authority on touch and touch therapy, begins this accessible book with an overview of the sociology and anthropology of touching and the basic psychophysical properties of touch. She then reports recent research results on the value of touch therapies, such as massage therapy, for various conditions, including asthma, cancer, autism, and eating disorders. She emphasizes the need for a change in societal attitudes toward touching, particularly among those who work with children.

Using case histories and examples from sessions and workshops, Clyde Ford describes his approach to healing physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. Showing the correlation between physical ailments and emotional trauma, he includes exercises that may be done individually or with a trusted partner.

This book is designed to provide massage therapists and bodyworkers with a greater understanding of the psychological issues that can arise from using touch in their therapy sessions. The book describes the connection between the body and the mind, how touch affects this connection, the client's emotional reaction and release, and how to respond to the client in an appropriate manner. The purpose of the book is to clearly define the scope of practice in this area for massage therapists, and bodyworkers.

This prescriptive book by a developmental psychologist and sufferer of Sensory Defensive Disorder (SD) sheds light on a little known but common affliction in which sufferers react to harmless stimuli as irritating, distracting or dangerous. We all know what it feels like to be irritated by loud music, accosted by lights that are too bright, or overwhelmed by a world that moves too quickly. But millions of people suffer from Sensory Defensive Disorder (SD), a common affliction in which people react to harmless stimuli not just as a distracting hindrance, but a potentially dangerous threat. Sharon Heller, Ph. D. is not only a trained psychologist, she is sensory defensive herself. Bringing both personal and professional perspectives, Dr. Heller is the ideal person to tell the world about this problem that will only increase as technology and processed environments take over our lives. In addition to heightening public awareness of this prevalent issue, Dr. Heller provides tools and therapies for alleviating and, in some cases, even eliminating defensiveness altogether. Until now, the treatment for sensory defensiveness has been successfully implemented in Learning Disabled children in whom defensiveness tends to be extreme. However, the disorder has generally been unidentified in adults who think they are either overstimulated, stressed, weird, or crazy. These sensory defensive sufferers live out their lives stressed and unhappy, never knowing why or what they can do about it. Now, with "Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight", they have a compassionate spokesperson and a solution-oriented book of advice.

We expose it, cover it, paint it, tattoo it, scar it, and pierce it. Our intimate connection with the world, skin protects us while advertising our health, our identity, and our individuality. This dazzling synthetic overview, written with a poetic touch and taking many intriguing side excursions, is a complete guidebook to the pliable covering that makes us who we are. "Skin: A Natural History" celebrates the evolution of three unique attributes of human skin: its naked sweatiness, its distinctive sepia rainbow of colors, and its remarkable range of decorations. Jablonski begins with a look at skin's structure and functions and then tours its three-hundred-million-year evolution, delving into such topics as the importance of touch and how the skin reflects and affects emotions. She examines the modern human obsession with age-related changes in skin, especially wrinkles. She then turns to skin as a canvas for self-expression, exploring our use of cosmetics, body paint, tattooing, and scarification. "Skin: A Natural History" places the rich cultural canvas of skin within its broader biological context for the first time, and the result is a tremendously engaging look at ourselves.

This book is a collection of writings on principles and techniques by the pioneers of bodywork and body awareness disciplines. Together, they represent a historical record of the field of somatics. Ranging from hands-on workers like Ida Rolf to phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke, their lives span this century. In these lectures, writings, and interviews, editor Don Hanlon Johnson has sought to revel the unbroken lineage, theoretical differences, and major similarities of these originators.

The Body in Psychotherapy explores the life of the body as a basis of psychological understanding. Its chapters describe the use of movement, awareness exercises, and bodily imagination in work with various populations and life situations. It chronicles somatic work with childhood trauma, political torture, and life transitions such as aging, the loss of parents, and the emergence of a sense of self.

Touched by the Goddess takes on the difficult and critical issues facing therapeutic touch. What happens to children when no distinction is made between beneficial and harmful touching? Why do we continue to fear pleasurable contact, despite the proven necessity of touch to human survival? Could it be that learning to touch each other in healing, positive ways is indispensable to productive change in society as a whole? On the sociological as well as the biological lever, this book is a primer for conscious living by the author of the world-renowned Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork.

Possibly the most famous and widely used resource in therapeutic bodywork (required for national massage therapy certification), this beautifully written, detailed, and reader-friendly picture of how and why the body responds to touch is both scientifically reliable and inspiring. Furthering the presentation of recent research in biochemistry, cell biology, and energy medicine in the second edition, this new update includes advances in neurophysiology and physics, reconfiguring knowledge of mind and body, from "microgenesis" to "quantum consciousness". A rare book that fits general reader as much as professional and student.

The real crisis in medicine today is not about economics, insurance, or managed care — it's about the loss of the fundamental human relationship between doctor and patient. In this wise and passionate book, one of our most eminent physicians reacquaints us with a classic notion often overlooked in modern medicine: health care with a human face, in which the time-honored art of healing guides doctors in their approach to patient care and their use of medical technology. Drawing on four decades of practice as a cardiologist and a vast knowledge of literature and medical history, Dr. Lown probes the heart and soul of the doctor-patient relationship. Insightful and accessible to all, The Lost Art of Healing describes how true healers use sympathetic listening and touch to hone their diagnostic skills, how language affects the perception of illness, how doctors and patients can cultivate a relationship of trust, and how patients can obtain the most complete and beneficial care through a combination of healing techniques and conventional practices. Lown explains, the art of healing does not mean abandoning the spectacular advances of modern science, but rather incorporating them into a sensitive, humane, enlightened approach to medical care. With its urgent message and poignant, fascinating vignettes, The Lost Art of Healing is a book of vital, universal importance.

In Spacious Body, Jeffrey Maitland brings his knowledge and personal experience of Buddhism, phenomenology, alchemy, psychoanalysis, and the bodywork system of Rolfing to bear in forging concepts adequate to an understanding of embodied experience.

Impressive in both scope and imagination, this book uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.

Why is some therapy effective and some disappointing? Amy Mindell says it has to do with the subtle atmosphere created by therapists' unconscious feelings and attitudes. By tapping into their deepest beliefs about spirit, nature, and human development (metaskills), they can become more effective healers and spiritual teachers. Through years of researching Arnold Mindell's work with individuals, couples, and groups, Amy Mindell has identified a number of feeling attitudes which she amplifies here through analogies to Eastern traditions, the teachings of Don Juan, and/or modern physics. She approaches the question of learning metaskills: Is it possible? How is it done? She postulates that the therapist, not unlike the client, is on a path of spiritual development, and she explains how the concept could revolutionize the vast field of psychotherapy. The book has numerous verbatim transcripts, as well as detailed theoretical and poetic explanations.

With more than 300,000 copies sold, this landmark book is an impressive examination of the importance of touching. "All professionals concerned with human behavior will find something of value.

There is much interest among those who practice manual therapy techniques, as well as among those who question their validity, in the therapeutic significance of touch. In "Touch and Emotion in Manual Therapy", the author sets out to examine both the psychological and physiological effects and influences of touch as part of therapy.

Detailing the power of touch in caregiving, this book offers readers a way of relating to the elderly and the ill through gentle, age-appropriate massage, and sensitive physical contact. It expands the possible applications of touch and highlights both the importance and the efficancy of incorporating compassionte touch into care plans for the frail elderly and the ill, providing a much needed counterpoint to the medical model of care.

This book is for people who feel comfortable communicating through their hands and for those who wish to feel more ease in transmitting care through touch. It is for people whose responsibility or job or gift is to oversee or to help take care of the elderly and ill members of our society. It is for sons and daughters caring for aging parents with physical impairments that effect a role reversal in a lifetime of relating. It is for the courageous men and women who continue caring for spouses or mothers or fathers with dementia related diseases such as Alzheimer's after such a disease has robbed that loved one of the ability to remember the relationship he or she once shared with the caregiver. It is for companions and family members struggling and sometimes sacrificing to provide care for their loved ones at home. This book is for health professionals who have forgotten or never learned that touch is medicine and for those who are wise enough to know that a five-second hug, offered as a gesture of shared humanity, can often do more to assuage fear and anxiety than a five-minute lecture.

The Somatosensory System: Deciphering the Brain's Own Body Image presents new research in the understanding of how the brain deals with its own body image. It provides a review of pertinent literature and offers comprehensive descriptions of state-of-the-art technical approaches. The material includes new frameworks for the conceptualization of the representation system, scientific and clinical applications that stem from these approaches based on the new concepts, and a discussion of new directions for the study of the interface of the brain and the body.

"Body is our first environment," writes Andrea Olsen. "It is the medium through which we know the earth. " In a remarkable integration of environmental science, biology, meditation, and creative expression, Olsen, a dancer who teaches in the environmental studies program at Middlebury College, offers a guide to a holistic understanding of person and place. Part workbook, part exploration, Body and Earth considers the question of how we can best, most responsibly inhabit both our bodies and our planet.

"Senses Wide Open" shows readers how to be at ease with themselves, feel more balanced emotionally, think more clearly, and experience genuine pleasure in their physical connection to others and the world. Through illuminating personal stories, deep movement exploration, bodywork basics, and step-by-step exercises, author Johanna Putnoi shares the knowledge she has gained from her years of experience teaching people to develop a personal awareness of their body's natural intelligence. Senses Wide Open is designed to work on the spot. Several times in each chapter, Putnoi asks the reader to put the book down for a moment and "try this". The author's simple exercises are inspiring and accessible. Her unique synthesis integrates a variety of practices, including analytic psychology, body awareness, sensate awareness, meditation, and centering.

An inspiring collection of essays from a wide range of notable women, on the experience of being female. Sixty-seven original essays from celebrities and writers, including Meryl Streep, Kate Winslet, J. K. Rowling, Julia Stiles, Maya Angelou, Kate Spade, Helen Hunt, Zane, Patti LaBelle, Joyce Carol Oates, Lily Tomlin, and many more. Subjects covered include everything from how it felt for Vanessa Williams to be stripped of her Miss America crown to Meryl Streep's definition of real freedom. The essays are funny, poignant, indignant, nostalgic, and powerfully female.