Body Awareness: a phenomenological inquiry into the common ground of mind-body therapies

A variety of therapeutic approaches often categorized as mind-body approaches claim to enhance body awareness[1] including yoga[2,3], TaiChi, Body-Oriented Psychotherapy[4], mindfulness based therapies/meditation[5], Feldenkrais[6], Alexander Method[7], Breath Therapy[8], and even massage[4,9,10] and mental training for athletic exercise and sport performance[11-13]. These approaches enjoy a growing popularity in the Western world[14]. Enhancing body awareness may not be the main objective for all of these approaches, but it has been described as a key element or a mechanism of action by which they may provide health benefits. Related therapeutic approaches offered by physical therapists in Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands explicitly carry names such as Body Awareness Therapy (BAT) or Body Awareness Program (BAP)[15,16]. These approaches aim to cultivate a particular quality of body awareness characterized by non-judgmental 'mindfulness', "a quality of non-elaborative awareness to current experience and a quality of relating to one's experience with an orientation of curiosity, experiential openness, and acceptance"[17] They have been studied to a preliminary degree for their effects in patients with a variety of medical conditions including chronic low back pain[18-22], pelvic pain[23,24], fibromyalgia[25-27], musculoskeletal pain[28,29], chronic pain in general[29,30], disordered eating and obesity[3,31,32], irritable bowel syndrome[33], sexual abuse trauma[4,34], coronary artery disease[35,36], congestive heart failure[37], chronic renal failure[38], falls in the elderly[39], anxiety[40-42] and depression[43].Body awareness involves an attentional focus on and awareness of internal body sensations. Body awareness, as we define it here, is the subjective, phenomenological aspect of proprioception and interoception that enters conscious awareness, and is modifiable by mental processes including attention, interpretation, appraisal, beliefs, memories, conditioning