Emotional Anatomy

The first half of Emotional Anatomy introduces embryology, the creation of human shape. Molecules and cells organize into clusters which organize as layers, tubes, tunnels and pouches giving structure to liquid life and setting the stage for human consciousness. A given shape is changed by a person's emotional history, the marks made by love and disappointments, insults and assaults, the challenges and stresses of existence.
The remainder of the book illustrates four basic patterns of somatic distress-rigid, dense, swollen and collapsed - describes how they function, and offers possibilities for change. Life's challenges and individual's response to them creates the shape he uses to express feelings of excitement, assertion, love, caring, sexuality. These feelings are the basis of human relationship and community.
Emotional Anatomy, with 120 original drawings and accompanying text, is invaluable to anyone who works in the helping professions, or to those interested in the nature of their bodily shape and emotional experience.
 

Your Body Speaks Its Mind

"This has been a wonderful book for me. It makes myth biologically alive."
-- Joseph Campbell author of Masks of God

Your Body Speaks Its Mind is an important contribution to Bioenergetics... it is a very finely written book which I would recommend everyone interested in human behavior to read and study."
-- Alexander Lowen, M.D.

Executive Director Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis Your Body Speaks Its Mind is Stanley Keleman's provocative work on how to understand the language of the body and the nature of bodily experience. "We do not have bodies, we are our bodies. Emotional reality and biological ground are the same and cannot, in any way, be separated or distinguished," says Keleman. A key concept is what Keleman describes as the formative principle, how life shapes itself somatically according to subjective experience. He sees the body as an alive, kinetic, emotional form -- not an object in space but the embodiment of a person in the shape he acquires through living. It is this process of life incarnate -- individual human experience manifesting in flesh -- that he describes in a personal and original style.
 

Three recent reviews of  Myth & the Body: a colloquy with Joseph Campbell
Somatics Magazine
Grover E. Criswell
Dr. John Conger

Somatic Sanity: A Workshop by Stanley Keleman

Stanley Keleman has been practicing and developing somatic therapy for over 35 years and is a pioneer in his study of the body and its connection to the sexual, emotional, psychological and imaginative aspects of human experience. Through his writings and practice, he has developed a methodology and conceptual framework for the life of the body. He is the author of Emotional Anatomy, Embodying Experience, and Patterns of Distress. He maintains a private practice for individuals in Berkeley, California.

In this workshop, Keleman will discuss how a continuum of stress functions somatically, shifting back and forth among several emergency shapes. Prevalent images in society and demands for performance make us compete for our body's resources. Eventually, cells are depleted and we become estranged from our innate response patterns. High somatic arousal, like fear or expectation, inflames an emergency metabolism and can become a pattern of established behavior, such as obsessions, timidity or insomnia. Formative psychology teaches a method to influence and manage stress patterns. This is the foundation of somatic sanity.