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The Power to Transform
Published in Mary Nolan, Shona Gore, Contemporary Issues in Perinatal Education, 2023
They learn to follow their breathing, discover gravity and turn their attention inwards as they release tension and experience ease and relaxation in its place. These ongoing classes have the effect of creating ‘body memory’ that will be there for them during labour.
Toward a Theory of Infra-Low Frequency Neurofeedback
Published in Hanno W. Kirk, Restoring the Brain, 2020
The clear implication is that our general health status—mental and physical wellbeing—are closely correlated with early emotional upbringing. That brings us, then, to the question of mechanisms. We distinguish between event trauma and a steady-state adverse living environment. Event trauma transiently heightens memory function. The salience of an event renders it state-stamped rather than date-stamped. It is registered as a whole-body memory, with cognitive, affective, autonomic, and somatic responses fused into a unitary configuration, bound together with the historical memory of the event. Irrespective of whether the individual is personally at risk or is a mere witness, the event alters the setpoint of the threat response, and it does so relatively permanently. This may well be protective of the individual, but it comes at a cost to the physiology over the longer term. It has implications for the subsequent development of neural network relations, and of neuroimmune and neuroendocrine system activation.
Body Maps
Published in Alan Bleakley, Routledge handbook of the medical humanities, 2019
Sometimes we inhabit our bodies in ways that may appear to have little or no connection to discourses of domination or subjugation. For example, religious doctrine that seeks to separate the sacred from the profane (Douglas 1966) may filter down into the secular world, determining that the majority of any given population is destined to use the right hand over the left (Holder 1997; Hertz 2007: 31). There are countless examples of how our collective body memory shapes the way we physically experience the world: Human Bodies are similar all over the world, but their habits, postures, and comportment are to a large extent shaped by culture. Cultures preordain and suggest certain ways of sitting, standing, walking, gazing, eating, praying, hugging, washing, and so on. In so doing, they induce certain dispositions and frames of mind associated with these bodily states and behaviors: for example, attitudes of dominance and submission, approximation and distance, appreciation and devaluation, benevolence and resentment, and the like. Cultural practices, rituals, roles, and rules shape the individual’s techniques of the body, as Mauss (1935) termed them, and the resulting way the body moves and comports itself is one of the main carriers of cultural tradition.(Fuchs 2017: 333)
Within moments of becoming—everyday citizenship in nursing homes
Published in Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 2023
Marianne Sund, Kirsten Jaeger Fjetland, Halvor Hanisch
Janne did not explicitly vocalize a desire or intent to help staff in everyday chores or tasks, she simply initiated doing in familiar situations that triggered situationally relevant embodied engagement. Fuchs [43] terms such embodied competence as ‘procedural memory’, in which our experiences throughout life sediments as sensorimotor habits and capabilities. As our performances are brought together as body memory, preserved as dispositions and potentialities, they become accessible through practical movements. Janne’s spontaneous doing may be interpreted as born from a sense of belonging in that moment, experiencing a familiarity with the occupations associated with meals. Such an embodied familiarity offers an opportunity for her to claim her place within the everyday occupations of that social context.
Anxiety management: Participants’ experiences of a physiotherapeutic group treatment in Swedish psychiatric outpatient care
Published in Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 2020
Helena Ölund, Louise Danielsson, Susanne Rosberg
Research on embodied neurocognition and phenomenological understanding of the body points out that the body is the medium of emotional perception. Inhibition of expressive movements in the body has been linked to difficulty in experiencing emotions and processing emotional information (Downing, 2015; Fuchs and Koch, 2014). In other words, physical motion and emotion are understood to be deeply connected and to affect each other in a circular pattern. A state of high muscular tension, restricted breath, and/or physical uneasiness can arise from an anxious feeling, but a physical experience or position can likewise be what triggers an emotion (Fuchs and Koch, 2014). Habitual patterns in the body such as how the body reacts in a situation that causes anxiety can be explored and understood in embodied therapies; that is, therapies using a somatic approach that focuses on body memory and emotional and mindful presence (Fuchs and Koch, 2014). This exploring of habitual patterns in the body is believed to be a central part in psychiatric physiotherapeutic treatment, enabling new possibilities to interpret and act on bodily sensations (Danielsson, Hansson Scherman, and Rosberg, 2013).
Expressions of Prayer in Residential Care Homes
Published in Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy, 2018
Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham, Sonya Sharma, Brenda Smith, Kelly Schutt, Kyla Janzen
The paradoxical intimate and public nature of life in residential care homes—where all aspects of daily living are shared with strangers (Boris & Parrenas, 2010)—brings these same qualities to prayer. The embodiment of prayer is well documented; as Giordan and Woodhead (2013) say, “it is the body itself that prays” (p. 2). With the findings of our study, we are tuning into how prayer might be part of the body memory for the recipients of prayer, especially those with dementia, where ritual and spiritual practices previously engaged were intentionally called out by the chaplains through prayer, with motivations of relational connection, affirmation of identity, and promotion of healing or wellbeing. Even frail bodies thus can serve as a “material site at the center of the production and consumption of religion” (Chidester in Valquez, 2011, p.11).