Body and Awareness

20 contemporary approaches to the study and experience of embodied awareness.

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Our growing understanding of embodied awareness is one of the less known and most extraordinary areas of contemporary research and practice.

On one side (the left brain, as it were), neuroscience in all its forms is constantly shedding new light on subjects like embodied cognition, the distributed brain (brain-in-the-gut, brain-in the-heart), the workings of the left and right hemisphere of the brain (McGilchrist and others) and the processing of sensory and emotional data.

On the other side (the right hemisphere, as it were) our study and awareness of the experience of being in our bodies, moving, feeling pain, dreaming, meditating, growing, becoming ill and healing, is becoming increasingly nuanced. Academic research is approaching the experience of consciousness and awareness 'from the inside' and making remarkable discoveries.

The emerging field of 'body and awareness' is transdisciplinary and multifaceted - it has no subject listing in libraries and academia or in booksellers' metadata. But it is of central importance to those interested in understanding art, dance, the psychology of health, child learning and development, trauma, the psycho-ecology of extinction, loss and climate change, proprioception and enteroception, ecological awareness, meditation, and the need for societal transformation in an age of multiple convergent crises.