Wolf Mehling specialises in family and community medicine and has published on interoception and body awareness. In one study, Mehling and colleagues sought to understand the “conceptualisation of body awareness” in mind-body therapies like yoga, TaiChi, Body-Oriented Psychotherapy, Body Awareness Therapy, mindfulness based therapies/meditation, Feldenkrais, Alexander Method and Breath Therapy. They created a series of focus groups with experienced practitioners and their clients/patients.
The theoretical stance of the practitioners demonstrates a striking parallel to positions presented by phenomenological philosophers who, in the tradition of French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, attempt to transcend viewing persons in dualistic terms and focus not on “the body” as such but on what it means to be ‘embodied’. “Embodiment is the human experience of simultaneously having and being a body; the term conceptualizes the body as a dynamic, organic site of meaningful experience rather than as a physical object distinct from the self or mind”
– Mehling, W.E., Wrubel, J., Daubenmier, J.J., Price, C.J., Kerr, C.E., Silow, T., Gopisetty, V., and Stewart, A.L. (2011) ‘Body Awareness: A Phenomenological Inquiry into the Common Ground of Mind-Body Therapies’. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 6 (1), 6 http://peh-med.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1747-5341-6-6
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