Recommended Read

“Everybody

needs

a rock.

I’m sorry for kids

who don’t have

a rock

for a friend.

I’m sorry for kids

who only have

TRICYCLES

BICYCLES

HORSES

ELEPHANTS

GOLDFISH

THREE-ROOM PLAYHOUSES

FIRE ENGINES

WIND-UP DRAGONS

AND THINGS LIKE THAT —

if

they don’t have

a

rock

for a friend.”

-- Byrd Baylor

Everybody Needs A Rock by Byrd Baylor, illustrated by Peter Parnall, is not just for kids. Follow her simple but insightfull tips on searching for the perfect rock to the letter and you'll find yourself moving and looking in all the ways nature intended. Priceless.

recommended read

This is not just an amazing dance book, it's an amazing book! Deep and profound, I highly recommend this record of an amazing woman and artist and her process.

recommended read

this journey is very good indeed...

Recommended Read

Body Intelligence Meditation by Ged Sumner
 This is the sentence that attracted me to this book “Biology is just another subject taught in school, but when you take away our beliefs, all we are is our biology.”

Ged Sumners book was driven into being by the idea that the more conventional forms of meditation can be seen to encourage an escape or "rise above" the body and a desire to stop thoughts, which he considers anti-body and something that lends itself to dissociation from the body....something I would agree holds a gem of truth...

This vivid and well thought through book includes a good number of meditations that show you how to tune into the subtle states that lie within the body. I really enjoyed the clearly guided visualisations that help create an easy and deeply felt connection with the physical body.

If you are interested in exploring the universe that is your body in a very simple and deeply felt way then I highly recommend this book (or the audio downloads). It's a brilliant tool to add too your embodied thinking box.

Recommended Read: A Guide to Better Movement

I'm currently working my way through A Guide to Better Movement by Todd Hargrove, and even though I'm not done yet I highly recommend it! Todd presents recent work in neuroscience, and his extensive background in a variety of sports and movement practices, to guide an understanding of the psychological and physiological whys behind movement patterns and habits. Once your brain has finished digesting there are lots of practical puzzles and 'exercises' to try out for yourself, which I have personally found very usesfull when teaching my students how to map basic movement patterns. 

If you want to know more then check out Todd's Better Movement Blog (which the book consolidates) and have a listen to this interview over at Liberated Bodies. 

Happy learning!

Katy Bowman

This woman is brilliant.
Go directly to her blog to read everything she has to say, or listen to the many inspiring podcasts she is firing out, or better yet add Move Your DNA to your online bookbuying wish-list.
It is a must read if you move (i.e. if you are human). I cannot recommend it highly enough. In it Katy forms a brilliantly written, scientifically based alternative way of thinking about movement and exercise, which maybe, just maybe, will change the way you see the whole damn universe. Revolutionary and a truly beautiful thing.

 

However, there's no point in starting a revolution if you're hungry. So why not add this mighty fine cook book to your (NOT AMAZON) basket while you are at it.

women in clothes

Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton have created a book entitled Women in Clothes, which is about women’s relationship to style and why women wear what they wear. For the book, Gus Powell photographed Zosia Mamet reenacting memorable fashion poses that Shapton pulled from magazines.

I'm really enjoying this book!
I love dressing up, but clearing out my wardrobe this week got me thinking...for someone so interested in 'moving well' I have an awful lot of stuff that restricts natural movment, from shoes to skirts to bras!
I'm now weeding out the stuff that makes me move more like a robot then a human being.
Except for the gold shoes with a mini disco balls on the heel that I can't walk in (taxi shoes!) they are staying...

 

Recommended Read

John Berger: And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photo

I have just finished reading this, for the second time, and i recommend it highly!

It is a very sensitive, poetic book. A reflection on time and space, in relation to love, pulled together by poetry, essays, reviews and philosophy...it's so hard to describe you need to read it!

It's definitely the most beautiful meditation on love I've come across thus far.

images from here.

Shapeshifter

Shapeshifter 2008
Handbound book, 44 pages

by Caroline Gaedechens

Recommended Read: Swimming Studies

I picked up Leanne Shapton's Swimming Studies purely because I liked the cover (and the collection of swimming costumes inside) shallow, I know, but it turned out to be a lucky pick.

As I have mentioned before I've been swimming since I was a tiny, one of the only things my parents were adamant me and my brothers stuck with, and Shapton’s vivid description of a moment during a swim practice brought me back to my own child hood experience: the soupy chorine-thick smell, the familiar feeling of sweating while in water, and the refreshing wave of winter cold hitting me as I made a flip turn at the far end of the pool. In evocatively describing things familiar and unknown, Swimming Studies brings the solitary activity of swimming into everyday life.  It isn’t a sports book, more of a place for athlete and artist to coexist. Right up my street and something i'll be dipping back into i'm sure!

I would read it if I were you...

micro-moments of positivity resonance

In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love ... It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a "micro-moment of positivity resonance." She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in "It's a Wonderful World" when he sang, "I see friends shaking hands, sayin 'how do you do?' / They're really sayin', 'I love you.'"

Emily Esfahani Smith, The Atlantic 1/24/2013. Full text here.

Wishing you many micro-moments of positivity resonance on this rainy day.

(Found here)

Upside Down Day

An ode to those times when everything seems backwards.

Upside Down Day (public library), 1968
Illustrations by artist Kelly Oechsli and written by Julian Scheer (the head of NASA’s Public Affairs Office, responsible for enchanting Americans with the space program)
If you like this then check out  Weight and Weightlessness, another spacetastic illustrated gem from the same era, and the story of how Scheer and his team marketed the moon.

(Found via brainpickings)

The Infinite

The Made Shop - The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories (2012)

(Source: suckybl0g)

Neuroplasticity

"...It was discovered that if you stuck a pin in one area of a person's cortex and his finger twitched, if you then stuck a pin in the exact are of another person's motor cortex, his finger might not twitch but his lip would. This is proof that each person is not created equally. Your cortical maps are all different sizes depending on which part of your body you use the most and the least; the more developed parts have a larger corresponding brain regions. 

The man who discovered this was a real hero of neuroplasticity:  Michael Merzenich, a post-doctorate fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

He found that if you're a pianist and you practice moving your fingers up and down scales, hour after hour, day and night, more neurons would grow in the motor cortex of the finger area of the brain and expand its typography. I used to have a piano teacher who slammed the lid down while I was playing if I made a mistake, which is probably why I confess to war crimes when I see a piano. if you were a flamenco dancer you'd have more real estate in your toe area of your brain. Someone who licked stamps for a living would obviously have a larger tongue terrain. Do you see where i'm going with this?

When you're building up clusters of neurons by habitually moving certain parts of the body, it's like building muscles when you pump iron. In both cases the movement gets easier and and more automatic because that area gets stronger."

-- Ruby Wax From Sane New World

Illustration by Serge Seidlitz

Recommended Read: You are not so smart

Currently reading this by David McRaney and it's very smart. I recommend you read it too!

You probably already have everything you need RIGHT NOW.

A Notebook for Pessimists

Recommended read

The Gift. A must read!

Langston Hughes: The First Book Of Rhythms

Found here.
To read the complete The First Book of Rhythms see this Flickr set.

(Found here)