Description
An indispensible resource for those interested in all forms of movement education, including yoga, pilates, dance, and more
Somatic educator and writer Liz Koch has spent decades studying the principles of Core Awareness—a body-based approach to movement that utilizes attention to inner sensation as the key to increasing strength, gaining flexibility, preventing injury, and improving resilience. In this book, she shares her vast knowledge of Core Awareness with readers, providing movements, stretches, and mindfulness explorations that she developed herself. Her exercises are designed to enhance sensory development and shift readers from the standard paradigm of the body as an "isolated object" to a holistic paradigm of the human being as part of a living process of dynamic expression. This shift in perspective offers practitioners and teachers of movement, yoga, pilates, bodywork, exercise, and dance an empowering model for self-healing and the key to becoming stronger, more flexible, and more resilient.
As Koch describes the practice of moving from one's core, she highlights the importance of engaging the psoas muscle—located on either side of the spine—to integrate the body, mind, emotion, and spirit. Koch also discusses how the pelvis is the foundation of our physical core, the vital connection with our bones, and crucial in gaining a sense of support, nourishment, joint integrity, skeletal balance, and healthy muscle tone.
Rewritten with updated information, this revised edition includes 247 new photos and 25 new Core Awareness explorations—with 64 in total. A suggested reading list at the end of the book provides resources for continuing the development of the ideas presented within the book.
About the Author
Emilie Conrad, the founder of Continuum, was born and raised in New York City where she studied ballet and Afro-Haitian dance. After moving to Los Angeles in 1963, she began teaching at the Actors Studio, where her novel approach to movement helped performing artists and led to her choreographing and directing numerous plays and performance works. In 1974, Conrad pioneered a protocol for spinal cord injury, and from 1974 to 1979 she was Movement Specialist in a research study conducted by Dr. Valerie Hunt at UCLA. This groundbreaking study demonstrated that fluid, primary movement is essential in our ability to innovate. Enhancing these fundamental movements has a potential to create a rich intrinsic environment that brings forth new insights in our understanding of the human body and its potential to create alternate systems.Considered a visionary in movement education, Conrad’s inspiring work has been incorporated by an international audience of professionals from fields such as Rolfing, Zero balancing, Hellerwork, Craniosacral therapy, Osteopathy, physical therapy, dance, Psychoneuroimmunology, and physical fitness. She teaches Continuum workshops around the world.
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