Reimagining the Body

Reimagining the Body offers an innovative exploration of embodiment and somatics, allowing us to understand our bodies in a grounded and holistic way. With over 40 years of practice and teaching, Aline Newton offers an engaging blend of client-based storytelling, scientific research, and embodiment practices that will fascinate anyone working with the mind and body, including yoga teachers, massage therapists, Rolfers, psychologists, social workers, dancers and movement therapists.

Through these accounts, the book also provides the first comprehensive overview of esteemed French somatic practitioner, dancer and researcher, Hubert Godard’s seminal work. Godard is a highly influential leader in the overlapping communities of Rolfing, Alexander, dance and rehabilitative medicine.

Insights from physics, robotics, neuroscience, and movement science reveal a refreshing, evidence-based perspective on how our bodies are not just objects, they are dynamic, living systems deeply intertwined with the environment around us. Section one unravels the prevailing idea of the body as an object through robotics and neuroscience. Section two invites us to reimagine our understanding of the body through a new framework of thinking. Section three focuses on our psychologies, exploring the intricate connection between emotion, perception, and the body.

In weaving together the concepts of movement, self, and the world, Reimagining the Body allows us to nurture a more profound and interconnected understanding of ourselves.

• Caryn McHose and Kevin Frank, Certified Advanced Rolfers™, authors of How Life Moves Explorations in Meaning and Body Awareness and collaborator for Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy; Body and Earth; and The Place of Dance.

  Meticulously crafted and documented; deeply inspired. Aline Newton presents a timely milestone to foster understanding and embody lasting change in human motor patterns. Reimagining the Body is both a story of discovery regarding somatic movement research, and an essential reference for students of Hubert Godard’s gravity orientation model.

• Mary Bond, author of Body Mandala and The New Rules of Posture

  Share the author’s excitement as she chronicles Hubert Godard’s insights about optimal organization for human movement-for life itself-through being in relationship with our surroundings. Readers are invited to suspend the mechanistic model of bodily organization inherited from the Renaissance, and, through perceptual experiments supported by research from surprisingly diverse academic fields, sample the experience of living fully in and through their bodies. Should Reimagining the Body reach the broad audience it deserves, this transformative somatic philosophy could become a fulcrum supporting humans’ survival on this planet.

• Lael Katharine Keen, Rolf Movement® Instructor, Advanced Rolfing® faculty for the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute, Senior Faculty for the Somatic Experiencing® International Institute

  This book is a gem for anyone who wants to understand the human body/mind and human movement. Aline Newton has taken Hubert Godard’s complex and multifaceted approach to movement and brought it to the reader in such a way that explains the science and connects the psycho-biological clearly and simply to what we see in our clients and feel in our own body. Above and beyond that, it is an easy read, flowing from one topic to the next in a way that engages the reader and leaves them wanting more. I consider it a must read for anyone involved in Somatic Therapy, Movement therapy, Rolfing®, Manual Therapy, Yoga Therapy or Somatic Experiencing®.

• Gil Hedley, Ph.D., Director of Integral Anatomy Productions, LLC

  With Reimagining the Body, Aline Newton and Rebecca Carli-Mills have managed to take on complex questions regarding the interplay between movement and environment, perception and motion, and the means by which we “manage instability” in the field of gravity. They do so in a manner remarkably accessible to their readers, whom they engage with embodiment exercises that make the book and its concepts not merely intellectually stimulating, which it very much is, but also an experience to navigate. They also open windows to the wisdom and insights of a host of influential teachers from whom every movement explorer would benefit to learn. This book brings forward a deeply considered, compelling and useful perspective on the nature of human movement. I wholly recommend it, not only to bodyworkers and movement educators, but also to engineers, bio-mechanists, and anyone who is curious to explore embodiment more deeply.

• Chris Aiken, Professor and Chair, Smith College Department of Dance

  Reimagining the Body introduces readers to the work of Hubert Godard, one of the most important movement researchers in the world. Godard’s work which is presented so clearly alongside Newton’s own research studies from the science of movement, dance, somatic practice, and physical rehabilitation, is valuable for dancers, athletes, those who are recovering from injuries or surgeries, and those seeking a more healthy relationship to their body. The book offers practical applications for those seeking freedom from pain and the effects of trauma, and those who want a deeper awareness of their body and their environment, or who wish to move more gracefully. For those engaged in fitness and longevity training, this book provides complementary information that can provide deeper meaning to their practice and ways to avoid chronic injuries. This book is filled with profound insights about movement, perception and the imagination.