Renowned dance and Husserlian phenomenologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone has just published a book on everyday movement.
Book can be pre-purchased at Amazon for RRP 12.95 USD
Putting Movement into Your Life: A Beyond Fitness Primer is both
playful and serious, bridging both popular and scholarly texts. It is engagingly written with two Ponderabilia inserts per chapter that offer slow food for thought on a diversity of topics related to the
immediate topic in the text. The book is definitely not an exercise
book or a typical self-help book, but a book about movement that breaks new ground in lively and creative ways while remaining anchored in everyday life. In so doing, it answers to the growing attempt by numerous individuals, organizations, and businesses to promote health by promoting movement.
Endorsements
Sheets-Johnstone says, “Feeling your aliveness is not a matter of learning a new set of movements but of re-discovering your own. You reclaim something that’s been there all along but which you’ve been too busy to notice.” As ‘putting movement into your life’ shows, we can surprise ourselves. We can, as it were, edit our dynamics such that what we do has a new felt verve and sense about it. We readily have the option of doing so.” We can, as her chapter subtopics indicate, have “adventures in outer space,” “kick up our heels,” have “directional possibilities” and, my favorite, realize that “waiting was never so comfortable.” Throughout the book in special fold out
sections, Sheets-Johnstone references philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and educators, among others, who have focused their research and/or practice on understanding why and how bodies move.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is the voice of reconstituted
wisdom and the pied piper of fun.
Jamie Ross,
Professor of Philosophy,
Portland State University
As my consciousness makes room for the felt sense
of this alive feeling in me, my body seems to awaken
even more to its experience of itself. When I go along
with this awakened experience from inside more
comes. I become the observer of what is happening
rather than the doer. That is the shift! It is as though
my body takes on a life of its own and begins to move
me in its own wisdom that is clearly not of my own
making. I find this relationship between consciousness
and bodily awakening very exciting in its possibilities.
I begin to have a sense of myself in a completely
new way. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s style of
writing from her own direct experience makes it so
easy to invite this experience offering simple steps
that build on one another.
Kevin McEvenue,
Alexander Technique teacher and
Wholebody Focusing trainer
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, a renowned and prolific
dance scholar, has distilled a lifetime of research
and wisdom into this highly accessible book. Her
writing style is clear, simple and festive as she invites
her readers to rethink who they are as bodies. She
injects a much-needed humanistic voice into the
fitness marketplace, asking us to perceive our daily
movement as a dance that can satisfy our needs for
physical participation with life – just like the Buddhist
teacher Thich Nhat Hahn proposes that we
can bring mindfulness of our breathing off of the
meditation cushion and into our daily activities.
Sheets-Johnstone offers simple points of awareness
and concepts that will be of interest to anyone who
wishes to have a more literate and fulfilling relationship
with their own body – and with the everyday
dances that the body is already expressing! I highly
recommend this book for both the professional and
the novice, especially for people who were turned off
by the drudgery of exercise.
Jamie McHugh,
Somatic Movement Therapist
available print-on-demand Amazon.com in May 2014
NEW BOOK INFORMATION
Ponderabilia 1
On Movement
and Feeling Alive
Ponderabilia 2
It’s Amazing!
Ponderabilia 3
On Behavior and Movement
Ponderabilia 4
Pulsing with Life!
Ponderabilia 5
How Common
Misunderstandings
of Movement Occlude Its
Qualitative Realities
Ponderabilia 6
Kinesthetic Memory
Ponderabilia 7
The Gift of Play
Ponderabilia 8
On Creativity, Wonder, and
The Unsung Kinetic Imagination
Ponderabilia 9
Thoughts About Space,
Motors—and More!
Ponderabilia 10
In The Beginning…
Ponderabilia 11
Synergies of Meaningful Movement
Ponderabilia 12
On The Temporality of Our Aliveness
Ponderabilia 13
Thinking in Movement
Ponderabilia 14
On Unsteady Souls, The Fleetingness
of Movement, And The Imaginative
Consciousness of Movement
Chapter 1
Feeling Your Aliveness:
An Experience Not to be Missed
Chapter 2
Opening Up to Movement:
Your Movement Pulse
and How to Take It
Chapter 3
Transforming Your Habits
Chapter 4
Maximizing Your Awareness of
and Capacity for Movement
Chapter 5
Surprising Yourself:
Making More Differences
Chapter 6
Turning Time on Your
Hands into Movement
Chapter 7
The Joys Of Moving Now
and Then or Knowing
The Source of Your Aliveness
From The Inside Out
Available as an ebook • $9.95
or print-on-demand • $12.95
