my mind on books

Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics by Richard Shusterman, Cambridge University Press, 2008. (“Search Inside the Book” available from Amazon).

From the book description:

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one’s knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticized as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness.

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(My New Year’s Resolution is to post something every day, which so far has meant lots of short posts! )