Core Awareness : Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise, and Dance

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.

An international somatic educator and author, Liz Koch has thirty years of experience working with and specializing in the psoas muscle. Educating both laypersons and professionals, Liz Koch is recognized by colleagues in the movement, wellness, and fitness professions as a connoisseur of the core muscle of the human body. The author of The Psoas Book and Core Awareness: Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise and Dance, Koch is the founder of Core Awareness, a somatic approach to deepening the experience of the human core in order to improve skeletal alignment, balance, and orientation. She conducts Core Awareness workshops thoughout the United States, Canada, and the UK.