all about peace of cake
This blog is the unfolding tale of a young woman’s quest for peace, health and organismic wholeness. Currently employed as a full time job-seeker, book-reader, day-dreamer and bedroom traveler, she aspires to be a writer, yoga teacher, world-traveler, massage therapist, somatic psychologist*, cultural anthropologist, linguist, nutritionist, artist, philanthropist, gourmande, continuing student, and present-moment-dweller. With a belief in and enthusiasm for eastern philosophy and spirituality as well as body-centered therapies, she seeks inner peace as well as world peace; health for the whole self; and personal as well as societal integration of the body, mind and spirit. Her day to day search often leads her to the kitchen, where she is learning to create whole, natural, plant-based meals (and to bake the occasional whole-grain cake!), to her yoga mat, to meditation centers, or to the stacks of books that are headily striving to take over her tiny apartment.
a poem to guide the way
I Got Kin
Plant
So that your own heart
Will grow.
Love
So God will think,
“Ahhhhh,
I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul over
For coffee and
Rolls.”
Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs.
Laugh
Because that is the purest
Sound.
-Hafiz
*Somatic psychology:
“Soma simply means body. Psyche typically refers to the mind. Somatic psychology, then, is the study of the body/mind interface, the relationship between our physical matter and our energy, the interaction of our body structures with our thoughts and actions. It draws upon philosophy, medicine, physics, existing psychologies, and countless thousands of hours of human observation and clinical experience to unify human beings into an organic and inseparable whole for the purpose of healing, growth, and transformation. As a somatic discipline, it values the physical body as a structural blueprint for our consciousness and our essential aliveness. It seeks to rectify a historical overemphasis on cognitive processes as central to human experience. It looks at physical states and symptoms as expressive of the central themes of our existence.
The splitting apart of the body and the mind, in which the body is the domain of physicians and the mind and emotions that of psychotherapists, has been so pronounced in Western thought in the last few centuries that the current idea of unity of the body and the mind felt like a somewhat odd and suspicious hypothesis when it was first introduced. Of course, in most traditional cultures, this splitting up of the human into parts is seen as laughable and as a symptom of Western craziness. It has only been in the last twenty-five years that the concept of the correspondence between physiological and psychological processes has been popularized and that many different forms of somatically-based psychotherapies have flourished. These forms seek to resensitize us to our birthright of healthy and optimal functioning by using the direct physical experience of the body as a healing tool. These systems also advocate our continued growth and transformation as humans through reclaiming our integrative being.”
-Christine Caldwell; Getting in Touch: The Guide to New Body-Centered Therapies; 1997
* * *
If you have any questions, feel free to email me at:
ktaileen @ yahoo . co . uk
