Body Awareness: a phenomenological inquiry into the common ground of mind-body therapies

TLDR

Body awareness is considered a key mechanism of action in many mind‑body therapies, such as yoga, Tai Chi, and mindfulness‑based practices, which have shown benefits across diverse health conditions. The study aims to clarify how body awareness is conceptualized in mind‑body therapies by engaging practitioners, faculty, and patients in focus groups. The authors carried out focus groups with these stakeholders to explore the concept of body awareness within their therapeutic practices. Analysis revealed that body awareness is an inseparable aspect of embodied self‑awareness, an innate tendency toward self‑organization and wholeness, and that patients experience a progression toward greater unity between body and self, mirroring philosophical conceptions of embodiment as a dialectic of body and self across developmental levels.

Abstract

Enhancing body awareness has been described as a key element or a mechanism of action for therapeutic approaches often categorized as mind-body approaches, such as yoga, TaiChi, Body-Oriented Psychotherapy, Body Awareness Therapy, mindfulness based therapies/meditation, Feldenkrais, Alexander Method, Breath Therapy and others with reported benefits for a variety of health conditions. To better understand the conceptualization of body awareness in mind-body therapies, leading practitioners and teaching faculty of these approaches were invited as well as their patients to participate in focus groups. The qualitative analysis of these focus groups with representative practitioners of body awareness practices, and the perspectives of their patients, elucidated the common ground of their understanding of body awareness. For them body awareness is an inseparable aspect of embodied self awareness realized in action and interaction with the environment and world. It is the awareness of embodiment as an innate tendency of our organism for emergent self-organization and wholeness. The process that patients undergo in these therapies was seen as a progression towards greater unity between body and self, very similar to the conceptualization of embodiment as dialectic of body and self described by some philosophers as being experienced in distinct developmental levels.