The Watch: Time to Witness the Beauty of It All (Paperback or Softback)

Sometimes the most ordinary object can open a door to life's greatest mysteries. For Paula Sager, it's a wristwatch-one that takes on a life of its own after her father's death, prompting questions concerning synchronicity and the nature of relationship. Paula walks alongside her father to the threshold of life, bearing witness to every step. Time is the landscape. Contemplative practice spreads out the crumpled map. The Watch delves into the mystery of time as lived experience, and to the possibility that every moment can be a portal to the invisible realm beyond time.

Insights from the author's own well-developed paths of practice shed light on new ways of perceiving, new ways of knowing and being. Cultivating embodied presence, intuitive insight, and the capacity to bear witness can enhance our most essential relationships: that of parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient, and even our human bond with nature and the numinous.

The twelve chapters of the book are framed by a prologue and an epilogue. At the end of each chapter, the reader finds a place to pause and reflect. Here, in poetic form, Paula Sager invites the reader to enter their own contemplative experience and inquiry.

With the aperture of the lens keenly focused on the final year of a life well-lived, The Watch offers a compelling perspective, bringing new questions to important conversations about life, death, and relationship beyond death.

Paula Sager is a writer and teacher of somatic and contemplative practices. Beginning her career as a dancer and choreographer, she became certified as a teacher of the Alexander Technique, followed by decades of immersive work with Janet Adler, a revered pioneer of embodied witness consciousness. Paula is a faculty member of Circles of Four, a teacher training program in the Discipline of Authentic Movement. She holds a BA in Dance from Bennington College and an MA from the Barfield School at Sunbridge College, where her research focused on the development of the inner witness. Paula served as founding co-editor of A Moving Journal from 1994-2006 and is co-author with Lizbeth Hamlin of Red Thread, Two Women (Pacific Editions), a long-distance experiment in moving, witnessing, and word, designed by book artist Charles Hobson. In collaboration with Janet Adler, Paula Sager and Bonnie Morrissey coedited Janet's collected writings, Intimacy in Emptiness: An Evolution of Embodied Consciousness (Inner Traditions).