Trust Your Senses: Embodied Wisdom for the Modern Age

Do you feel you live in a sea of words swimming around in your head that leads to overwhelm, confusion, anxiety and alienation?

Do you seem to repeat the same habits in relationships and attract the same kind of partner, friends or work colleagues, which end up in conflict or withdrawal?

Do you think life and work is a very serious business, but sense there is another way that would create more ease, freedom and creativity, but you don't know how?

If you are asking any of these questions, this book is for you. This book asks the question whether much of the anxiety, conflict and unhappiness experienced by many people, are a result of the artificial split that is so pervasive across society between thinking and our body. When we live our lives as if we are walking heads without bodies, we alienate ourselves from sensing our aliveness, our peace, creativity and wellbeing.

Our brain is a part of our body and our whole body has intelligence. The mind body split was created when Rene Descartes declared thinking had nothing to do with our body and emotions hundreds of years ago. This belief and the consequent preoccupation with objectivity, logic and rationality have resulted in many technological advances where reductionism has been relevant. But, reductionist rational thinking does not provide us with the answers to complex inter-dependent issues that require a conscience, understanding of our humanity, and our inter-connected nature with life on our earth. We now know thinking is connected to the body, but even though scientists and researchers have uncovered this knowledge, it takes a long time for new beliefs to be embodied in our practical every day lives. Deborah says, "How often do we hear people saying such things as; let's collaborate, yet what is embodied is individualism; or we are asked to cooperate, but what is embodied is competition; or someone speaks of trust, but they embody fear; or we hear talk of transparency, but sense secrecy being embodied."

We are so disconnected we cannot even sense we are saying one thing and embodying another. Deborah says the good news is we can reclaim this connection. Once we have the visceral experience of re-igniting the connection between thought and our body we have access to new sources of wisdom from our whole bodied intelligence. We not only have insights, we also experience "sense sights," that arise from the intelligence in our body that we have been ignoring. Deborah suggests we can design and embody methodologies that by their very nature allow us to experience our connectedness. She shares practical stories from the people and organisations she has worked with who have discovered ways to notice, sense and reclaim a connection between what we think, our body, our emotions, our physicality and our intuition that results in the inner peace, resilience and creativity so many of us seek.

In this book are new navigation tools, that arise from holistic educational methodologies, play for adults, connecting with nature, and include noticing, sensing, emoting, and intuiting patterns in self, others and the systems in which we live, work and play. Deborah believes we are at the tipping point of another exciting Renaissance in the opening to an exponential spike in our evolution of human nature. We are learning new ways to create our lives interdependently with one another and our natural world. She says, it is as if we have been attempting to solve our challenges from only a part of ourselves, and when we open up to our whole bodied intelligence who knows what creative ways of being will be imagined. She says this is like discovering a lost world. A world full of delight, surprise, being comfortable with the unknown and of playfully discovering new territory as we evolve the ways we create better relationships with ourselves, others and the world we inhabit.

Deborah Lange, is an Author, Advisor and Master of The Fine Art of Designing whole bodied learning experiences to evoke human potential. She has over 35 years experience working in, advocating for and learning how to engage through embodied experience. From corporate corridors to the red earth of the outback, buddhist monastery's to African fire ceremonies, Deb has learned from and lead with some of the world's most innovative minds. Deb has designed many openings, and plenaries for conferences to generate engagement, facilitated executive retreats, leadership development, face to face feedback programs, and practised process consultancy to coach both teams and individuals in action. Deb has an M.Ap.Sc (Hons) in Social Ecology, Degrees in Business and Education, Certificates in Social Artistry, InterPlay, Equine Facilitation, NLP, and much more. Deborah works with the social system to help people feel safe to experiment, express, connect, work and learn together creatively. Deborah works globally, speaking, mentoring individual and teams, and facilitating workshops on such topics as, Trust Your Senses, The Power of Play, Leadership and Followship and Feedback Flow.