I was always a bit skeptical of all these vaguely new age-y fitness books. Then I reluctantly started doing Yoga after a car accident a few years back. Long story short, yoga really helped me a lot, so after that I read some books like these. I'm still a bit skeptical of these books, but it turns out some of these people are onto something - like the author of this book. Buy it. It's great. If you've been injured and you read it, there's a decent chance it'll help you recover better once you're done healing if you're anything like me.

A lot of the fitness field of late is nonsense about chakras and auras and whatnot that seems to be making it up as it goes along, but this book is the real deal. It has exercises and activities that work, it promotes bodily awareness and wonderful insight into ergonomics through real-life examples. No chakras (OK, a little about chakras, I think) or auras or Mayan 2012 anything here. The author is a dance instructor with a Master's degree who really seems to have a way with explaining this stuff and how to be more aware of your body. She is also very aware of anatomy and the book often has good pictures to show what she's talking about and which muscles are involved. Most importantly, her methods work.

I was running slower than usual and I wasn't doing very well on my squat. No clue why. Then I read this book. I realized that after an ankle sprain a few months ago, I'd still been holding on to the rails on stairs, ramps, etc even though the ankle on that side had healed. I consciously altered that behavior. Before, I hadn't even realized it.

Back to adding weight to my squat and jogging up and down the stairs (I didn't even notice I'd stopped doing that!). The closest analogy I can come up with is when I teach kids reading skills and they have that "uh-huh" moment where they finally comprehend what they read as they do it. That's how I felt after reading this and started to think about how I sit and stand and walk as I do it and how I could make it better. The wall exercise was really interesting in demonstrating the pelvic floor. This book teaches you body awareness skills. Simple, but really quite profound stuff.

Highly recommended to anyone who likes to stay fit. Helpful in setting up office ergonomics, too.

This book addresses posture as the primary premise, but from this education follows an entire perceptual shift. The transformation is invigorating and its introduction is as seamless as can be, given the substantial challenge of trying to get people to defy years of ineffective physical orientation. If followed methodically and consistently, patiently and deeply this book will alter your body, mind and heart.

From the first page, I realized I never "really" knew my own body.This was shocking after years of tai chi, chi gung, etc.It is so much more than "new rules of posture", it is a "new innerview of one's body" Buy it and buy copies for you friends. Peace...

I don't know how or why so many people have given this book a high rating. It has elaborate descriptions of exercises to do, but without photos, the descriptions are pretty useless. Trying to do the exercises based on the descriptions is sometimes okay but usually ridiculous. The description of the "Seated Sphinx" is impossible to follow, for example: based on this book's description, I have no idea what the exercise ought to look like or how to do it. For many of the exercises, the instructions are less about precisely what you're supposed to do than about how you ought to feel as you do the exercise, but the descriptions of how you ought to feel are often vague. And though often vague, the descriptions are incredibly long (often several pages), a fact that makes the described exercises hard to do (because how can you keep all that info in your head as you try to do the exercise?). For many exercises, you're supposed to be able to do the exercise just by "visualizing" it?!? But given that there aren't many illustrations in the book, I can't visualize anything (and I'm not sure that I believe that just visualizing something is going to make my body do it right automatically). Maybe these exercises work if you have a person who is giving you face-to-face, individual instruction as you do them, but reading from a book with hardly any photos doesn't work very well. A picture is worth a thousand words or, in this case, an entire book. There are a lot more helpful books out there with great descriptions and photos of exercises that really make a tremendous difference for your posture if you just do the exercise as instructed and shown (not with all sorts of pressure to feel the right sensations to get the exercise right). I recommend Anthony B. Carey's Pain-Free Program or Paul D'Arezzo's Posture Alignment or Janice Novak's Posture, Get It Straight! or even Perry Bonomo and Daniel Seidler's Why Does Working @ My Computer Hurt So Much? They're much, much, much, much better books than this one.

I like this idea of gentle exercises you can do to improve your body awareness.