You know how it is when you try to back out of a relationship - it keeps coming at you until you make peace with it. Diane Tegtmeier
Relationships that Heal: Skillful Practice within Nature's Web. Natural Ethics for Today's Health Practitioner. Diane Tegtmeier, October 2009. See below for how to buy.
If I were the kind of person who underlined 'aha' moments in books, my copy of this one would be thoroughly marked up. For Diane is taking me on a rewarding hike through a familiar and challenging terrain. Every step - every word - has the weight of experience behind it.Although she has made this book very accessible to someone new to what she inclusively calls the 'helping profession', I think it is likely to speak most to those who have bravely battled their way through some of the slings-and-arrows of a few years in healing practice and in life.Since bringing all her many skills to the water in the practice of aquatic bodywork is a central passion for Diane, there are numerous references to this particular healing modality. However, setting it in a wider context and collaboration as she does here, is especially effective.
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This extract from Mirka Knaster's valuable book on body-oriented practices, Discovering the Body's Wisdom, uses water as its metaphor for the constant change and movement (circulatory and interrelating) that characterizes the life of a human body. Mirka writes:
There's a lot of name-calling in the field of body practices. It's not mud-slinging, but a habit of differentiating and labeling. Some practitioners are engaged in bodywork. Others consider their approaches therapy. Still others say they're neither, but rather somatic education, movement awareness, structural integration, or even emotional integration. ...
To get around the divisions in the field, I created the term bodyways. It broadly incorporates therapy and education as well as relaxation, while still allowing for each separate category of practice and its distinguishing characteristics. I chose way (from the Old English wegan, "to move") because it suggests a pathway or process, as in waterway.
Think of the many different waterways through which water moves: creeks, streams, rivulets, rivers, channels, brooks, rills, seas, oceans, bays, sounds, and lakes. All of the bodyways involve movement, and often the least effortful way can bring about the most ease. Life is, after all, movement. We are living bodies, always in process. As 70 percent water, we are in constant flux, just like a stream. And just like a stream receives water from various sources, so too do we take in new information from a variety of bodyways.
From Discovering the Body's Wisdom: A Comprehensive Guide to More than Fifty Mind-Body Practices that can Relieve Pain, Reduce Stress, and Foster Health, Spiritual Growth, and Inner Peace by Mirka Knaster, p. xv-xvi (Bantam Books, 1996).
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