Body Consciousness: East and West (original) (raw)
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Body and the Arts: The Need for Somaesthetics
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Somaesthetic Journal, 2024
describes fundamental idea-historical and philosophical-anthropological connections between the body and consciousness and how they still form the basis of the concept of "man" today. Through analyses of ancient body perspectives, a Hellenistic and a philosophical Taoist, a methodical philosophical practical approach to being human is outlined that aims at a philosophical involvement of all modalities of the individual. It is a view on knowledge in which the body exists as a central somaesthetic fixation point. Søberg’s analyses outline the potential for the place for the body and emotion and their role in educational philosophical practice, as more than a tool for health and learning and more than a medium for the self to express itself through but as a crucial part of the foundation of human knowledge
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Anthropology of Consciousness, 2000
The dominant notions of consciousness in the West are anchored in a peculiar matrix of dissociated sensibility held in place by unthematized body practices. It is misleading to evaluate spiritual and philosophical notions of consciousness simply from the point of view of verbal, logical analysis, when they are expressions of these deeply rooted experiential sensibilities, deliberately cultivated over long years of habituation. There is a dramatic difference between how the West thinks of body practices as irrelevant to analyzing states of consciousness and how other cultures make direct links between these practices and the shaping of consciousness. For at least the last 150 years in Europe and the United States a number of teachers have developed body practices in deliberate resistance to the dualistic structurings of mentalities and physicality. They constitute a cultural movement of resistance shaped by the recognition of the mistaken notions embodied in Western dualism. An example is given of the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the creator of the School of Body-Mind Centering.
Body Consciousness in the Healthcare Environment
Phenomenology & practice, 2023
Like the human mind, the human body is the medium by which we represent ourselves, whether we are patients or healthcare providers. This paper concerns the significance of understanding the existential phenomenological side of a patient's body within healthcare. To care for a patient's body, one needs to be aware of how the body appears to itself, to others, and in a larger environmental reality. We think and feel and observe the world with our body, especially with the brain and nervous system, but also with other dimensions of the body manifesting itself as a somatic tonus. The healthcare providers' body does not only represent a profession, but also who they are as a person and what kind of environment by which they are affected. The same applies to patients' bodies. As a medium for experiencing, a medium inseparable from our very being, our physical body functions as a surface open to and in contact with the healthcare environment that surrounds it. In the modern healthcare regime, the human body is nearly always visible and under constant surveillance. In the environment of control and visibility, bodies become medicalized, psychologized, and normalized to fit into sociocultural demands of economic and structural adaptations, social participation and communication, which in certain situations seem hostile to the ideology of care, freedom, and humanity. We should realize that our ethical concepts and norms, even the very notion of humanity, depend on social forms of life involving the ways we experience our bodies in different medical and sociocultural situations.