From the Introduction:
This book reveals little-known but powerful techniques that have helped countless people improve their body, enliven their mind, and spark their spirit. These techniques have caused a life-long limp to disappear, allowed a frightened and stiffening body to turn with abandon, and enabled one woman to discover how to move with the delicacy she'd always imagined but that her body continually undermined.
Fundamentally, this book is about reclaiming our naturally given capacity for sensation through sensing tactile motion - the sensation of motion through the interplay of muscles. Everything we are and everything we experience, including the quality of our experience, is affected by our musculature and the way we move, sit, stand, or walk.
Muscular misalignments are the patterned, narrowing, habit-forming paths to aches, recurring pain and eventual illness. It happens slowly, unconsciously, seemingly naturally, a silent behavioral virus. But the power that is contained in our muscular misalignments rests in how they are the quintessential unconscious psychic defense. And like all psychological defenses, they are a splitting-off from feelings. We are born with a sensate processing body before we ever form a cognitive self.
Following the techniques that I've developed over many years can give you a way to address damaging habits and divisions that have become ingrained and that remain mostly unnoticed. As your attention from within the continuity of motion through the musculature becomes established, you will begin to notice a subtle difference in your interactions with family, with friends, at work and throughout your life.
Jack Wiener Studied dance techniques with all the modern-dance luminaries, music and aesthetic principles at the American Dance Festival six-week summer program 1957-1958, and Juilliard 1958-1959, including ballet and composition. Danced: Fred Berk's modern/folk dance company for three years, plus concerts with Yemima Ben-Gal, Charles Weidman, and Felix Fibich. Final cut for West Side Story movie, with Jerry Robbins deciding. Instructor: Movement for actors, and theater directing at Richmond College, CUNY, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Acted: Folksbiene Yiddish Theater for two seasons. Only actor in Bruce Davidson's documentary film, "Isaac Singer's Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko's Beard." Directed: world premieres: Gimple, the Fool, by Nobel Laureate I. B. Singer; Elijah, by Martin Buber, for reviewed by Walter Kerr, "professional theater comes to Westchester." Solomon and Ashmedai, for the 92nd "Y" Children Theater Program.
