Come To Your Senses

In this newly revised edition of the award-winning Come to Your Senses: Demystifying the Mind-Body Connection, Dr. Stanley Block offers his Ten-Day Plan to optimize your life -- a breakthrough program that has helped people all over the world heal from post-traumatic stress syndrome, combat trauma, substance abuse, mental illness, pain, and depression. The easy-to-apply method uses Identity System "resting" techniques that enable you to recognize and defuse the self-defeating mental tug-of-war that exists in all of us. Learn how stress, fear, and thought activate the sympathetic nervous system with increased tension, pain, insomnia, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. By literally "coming to your senses" of taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound, you begin to control negative responses, free yourself from a paralyzed state of mind, and live a happy, balanced life. The response is amazing because the results are immediate -- ten days is all it takes -- Dr. Block's techniques take no time out of a busy schedule, they are simply incorporated into whatever activity you are engaged. Bridging the Identity System empowers you to work from your own strength and wisdom to deal with situations that arise in your life.

From the sense of sight to the sense of peace and from the sense of humor to the sense of loss, the wealth of all you have within your own self is unimaginable. Explore how you can complete each day by filling the hours with your own life experiences. This book will inspire you to... -Travel through a world that will challenge you to examine and study insights from your own life experiences -Utilize the food for thought provided from the perspective of a woman who has been to the deepest depths of loss and has climbed back up from those valleys of despair -Evaluate your own insights to be able to put life in its proper perspective, thus heading you in a positive, productive direction -Complete the whole picture to reach your full potential and thus achieve true happiness in life

For readers of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Redeployment, a searing debut exploring the lives of veterans returning to their homes in the South. Lacerating and lyrical, We Come to Our Senses centers on men and women affected by combat directly and tangentially, and the peculiar legacies of war. The story “Evie M.” is about a vet turned office clerk whose petty neuroses derail even her suicide; in “We Come to Our Senses,” a hip young couple leaves the city for the sticks, trading film festivals for firearms; in “Colleen” a woman redeploys to her Mississippi hometown, and confronts the superior who abused her at war; and in “11/19/98” a couple obsesses over sitcoms and retail catalogs, extracting joy and deeper meaning. The story “Hers” is about the sexual politics of a combat zone.

A sudden love affair with fragrance leads to sensual awakening, self-transformation, and an unexpected homecoming At thirty-six—earnest, bookish, terminally shopping averse—Alyssa Harad thinks she knows herself. Then one day she stumbles on a perfume review blog and, surprised by her seduction by such a girly extravagance, she reads in secret. But one trip to the mall and several dozen perfume samples later, she is happily obsessed with the seductive underworld of scent and the brilliant, quirky people she meets there. If only she could put off planning her wedding a little longer. . . . Thus begins a life-changing journey that takes Harad from a private perfume laboratory in Austin, Texas, to the glamorous fragrance showrooms of New York City and a homecoming in Boise, Idaho, with the women who watched her grow up. With warmth and humor, Harad traces the way her unexpected passion helps her open new frontiers and reclaim traditions she had rejected. Full of lush description, this intimate memoir celebrates the many ways there are to come to our senses.

The New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed memoir from cultural icon and culinary standard bearer Alice Waters recalls the circuitous road and tumultuous times leading to the opening of what is arguably America's most influential restaurant. When Alice Waters opened the doors of her "little French restaurant" in Berkeley, California in 1971 at the age of 27, no one ever anticipated the indelible mark it would leave on the culinary landscape—Alice least of all. Fueled in equal parts by naiveté and a relentless pursuit of beauty and pure flavor, she turned her passion project into an iconic institution that redefined American cuisine for generations of chefs and food lovers. In Coming to My Senses Alice retraces the events that led her to 1517 Shattuck Avenue and the tumultuous times that emboldened her to find her own voice as a cook when the prevailing food culture was embracing convenience and uniformity. Moving from a repressive suburban upbringing to Berkeley in 1964 at the height of the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest, she was drawn into a bohemian circle of charismatic figures whose views on design, politics, film, and food would ultimately inform the unique culture on which Chez Panisse was founded. Dotted with stories, recipes, photographs, and letters, Coming to My Senses is at once deeply personal and modestly understated, a quietly revealing look at one woman's evolution from a rebellious yet impressionable follower to a respected activist who effects social and political change on a global level through the common bond of food.

An ambitious and provocative analysis of the relationship between culture, mind, and body in the history of Western society, Morris Berman's influential classic Coming to our Senses has been engrossing audiences with its carefully-researched and thoughtful exploration of somatic experience for decades. Finally back in print for a new generation of readers, Berman's treatise on the West's historic denial of physicality is relevant as ever in a society increasingly plagued by addiction, depression, and distraction. Berman deftly weaves threads of history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis into an elegant and accessible argument about the ways our physical experience of the world relates to the culture in which we exist. To make his case, Berman draws on studies of infant behavior with mirrors; analyzes symbolic expressions of human-animal relationships ranging from cave-wall etchings to Disney cartoons; investigates esoteric breathing techniques and occult rituals; and examines the nature of creativity. Berman also illuminates Christianity's origins in early Jewish meditation techniques, explains how the notion of romantic love evolved out of medieval Christian heresy, how modern science grew out of Renaissance mysticism, and how Nazism was the most recent episode in a recurring cycle of orthodoxy and heresy. A demanding and radical work of history, social criticism, and philosophy, Coming to our Senses is a beautifully-written and vastly important book. Readers interested in related titles from Morris Berman will also want to see: Are We There Yet (ISBN: 9781635610567), Spinning Straw Into Gold (ISBN: 9781635610536).

In Coming to Our Senses, cognitive scientist Viki McCabe argues that prevailing theories of perception, cognition, and information cannot explain how we know the world around us. Using scientific studies and true stories, McCabe shows that the ecological disasters, political paralysis, and economic failures we now face originate in our tendency to privilege cognitive processes and products over the information we access with our perceptual systems. As a result, we typically default to making decisions using inaccurate information such as mechanistic theories that reduce the world to extractable, exploitable parts. But the world does not function as an assembly of parts; it functions as a coalition of complex systems--from cells to cities--that organize and sustain themselves and cannot be partitioned and retain their purpose. McCabe also argues that we cannot describe such systems using theories and words. Instead, each system reveals itself in fractal-like geometric configurations that emerge from and reflect the structural organization that brings it into existence and determines its functions--a veritable physics of information. Thus, we comprehend phenomena as disparate as neural networks, river deltas, and economies by perceiving the branching geometry that organizes them into distribution systems. McCabe's key point is that form not only follows function, it doubles as information. If we put our theories aside and focus on the information the world displays, our perceptions can block hostile mental takeovers, reconnect us to reality, and bring us back to our senses.

From the sense of sight to the sense of peace and from the sense of humor to the sense of loss, the wealth of all you have within your own self is unimaginable. Explore how you can complete each day by filling the hours with your own life experiences. This book will inspire you to... -Travel through a world that will challenge you to examine and study insights from your own life experiences -Utilize the food for thought provided from the perspective of a woman who has been to the deepest depths of loss and has climbed back up from those valleys of despair -Evaluate your own insights to be able to put life in its proper perspective, thus heading you in a positive, productive direction -Complete the whole picture to reach your full potential and thus achieve true happiness in life