This is a book I read many times in the past for my practice as a psychotherapist and it was a joy to revisit it for my PgCert Self-initiated Project.
I am here summarising a part of the book that is vitally relevant to my research project. The body scan / Vipassana meditation technique I am using in my interventions is being employed in Crane’s Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). The emphasis here is on learning to be with direct experience as it arises in the body by paying attention to physical sensations in the body. Awareness is being brought to each part of the body, bit by bit, part by part, using the kinaesthetic sense of feeling sensations in the body.
This is the method to re-inhabit the body and in my research I examine that this could be essential to stay fully, authentically and honestly connected to your self and also to others, in the virtual space were we have a mostly disembodied experience, and a focus on verbal communication.
Rebecca Crane states: “All our thoughts, emotions, speech and action are (whether we are aware of it or not) guided by background felt meanings, which are expressed through our experiencing in our body. […] We had this ability to ‘know’ through our body before we were able to talk. The price we pay for being a language-based species is that labelling our experience offers us a means to objectify and separate from it. (Crane, 2009, pp. 49-50)”
Reference:
Crane, R. (2009) Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Hove: Routledge