by Abigail Rose Clarke
North Atlantic Books
1/9/2024, paperback
SKU: 9781623179380
A body-based healing model that interrogates what we've been wrongly taught about hierarchies of nature and the body--and pushes back against the white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism embedded in modern embodiment practices.
Pushing back against a consumerist, pleasure-centric somatics industry that privileges product over process, Abigail Rose Clarke reminds us that truly meaningful embodiment practice nurtures our relationships among self, nature, and community.
Combining the rigor of the scientific method with the poetry and lyricism of movement and somatic studies, Clarke's somatic learning system--The Embodied Life Method--centers the body as a guide through today's most seemingly intractable social and environmental challenges, reclaiming the body as a source of liberatory comfort in times of great uncertainty and yet, possibility.
With tools and practices to help us better understand and dismantle the many ways our bodies are weaponized to serve domination systems, topics covered include:
- Harnessing the vitality of curiosity and experimentation
- Using nature as a guide to possibility
- Embracing the necessity of difference
- Exposing the lie of universal isolation
- Dismantling the fallacy of hierarchy
- Uncovering the truth of endless capacity
- Awe as a driving force for transformation
With methods honed over decades of inquiry, teaching, and practice, Returning Home to Our Bodies provides a lucid, body-based model of healing and restoration--one that imagines a world beyond systems of domination, marginalization, and isolation to nurture embodied, whole-community liberation.
Reviews:
"Returning Home to Our Bodies reveals a vision for a world beyond systems of domination and oppression, suggesting that somatic practice is a potent way to make that vision a reality. It is a book not just to read but to experience." -- Kristine Morris, Foreword Reviews
"If you find yourself picking up a book called Returning Home, it is perhaps because you might be feeling lost or unmoored. In a world of self-help books and media, Abigail Rose Clarke throws weary travelers a solid buoy to hold onto in a vast ocean of commodified wellness tactics. In doing so, she invites us to be held by the incredible healing and love that already exists all around us. By witnessing the miracle of our body, the breath in our lungs, the ongoing life cycle of all things, Abigail beautifully compiles a list of ancient healing practices we have known, and perhaps lost, but can come back to. When you feel like you can't turn anywhere else, you can return to your body, you can return to the world around you, and you can return home." -- Uzma Chowdhury, writer, teacher, and sociologist
About the Author:
Abigail Rose Clarke has an inordinate amount of love for octopuses, the moon, and her extensive collection of anatomy books. She is the creator of The Embodied Life Method and the GROW/L framework, which she has been teaching throughout the United States and internationally since 2014. Abigail holds a degree from Smith College in Health Behavior, and advanced training certificates in Embodyoga®. Abigail created The Somatic Tarot as her "quarantine project" - in those first weeks of fear and confusion of the quarantines of COVID-19, she devoted herself to the artwork and writing that has since turned into a beloved deck sold all over the world and selling out of multiple editions.