How You Stand How You Move How You Live or Field Guide to Wilderness Medicine

How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning the Alexander Technique to Explore Your Mind-Body Connection and Achieve Self-Mastery

Author: Missy Vineyard

The Alexander Technique (AT) is a remarkably simple but powerful method for learning to skillfully control how your brain and body interact, allowing you to better coordinate your movements while increasing the accuracy of your mind’s thoughts and perceptions. Now, in How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live, leading Alexander Technique master teacher Missy Vineyard sheds a completely fresh light on this revolutionary method and, in the process, offers path-breaking insight into the mind-body connection. Vineyard thoroughly explains and teaches the central skills of the AT through simple self-experiments, and she offers engaging stories of students in their lessons to show its effective application across a range of disciplines, including the performing arts, athletics, health, psychology, and education. How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live introduces us to a world within ourselves that we know surprisingly little about—and thereby helps us to understand why we often cannot do what we should be able to do, why we harm ourselves with chronic tension and anxiety, and why our thoughts often seem beyond our control. Vineyard is also the first AT teacher to draw on cutting-edge research in neuroscience and to synthesize those findings with AT theories and techniques. She fully illuminates the benefits to be reaped by mastery of the Alexander Technique, which include: Release from acute or chronic physical pain Enhanced mental attention and focus Reduced anxiety Improved balance and coordination Relief from tension and stress Increased ease and efficiency performing precise movement skills

Blanche Angelo - Library Journal

Vineyard (founder & director, Alexander Technique Sch. of New England) provides a clear introduction to the Alexander Technique, guiding readers through a series of self-experiments centered on compelling case studies from her practice. In an especially powerful lesson on conscious inhibition (a core Alexander Technique skill), Vineyard teaches readers to activate the prefrontal cortex in order to learn the difference between feeling and thinking. Because she effectively builds the reader's skills during the course of the book, rather abstract ideas about space and direction seem natural and accessible when they are introduced. Although this comprehensive guide could replicate the experience of sessions with a certified instructor, some readers may be overwhelmed by its text-heavy format and focus on neuroscience. Those who wish to dispense with the philosophy (at least initially) and just hit the mat might be better served by Richard Craze's Teach Yourself Alexander Techniqueor Robert M. Rickover's Fitness Without Stress. Recommended for large alternative-health collections.

Interesting textbook: Promises to Keep or The Leaders We Deserved

Field Guide to Wilderness Medicine

Author: Paul S Auerbach

Completely revised and updated, the new edition of this portable guide offers fast-access solutions to all of the medical situations that can occur in non-traditional settings. Based on Dr. Auerbach's critically acclaimed text Wilderness Medicine, 5th Edition, this handbook is packed with how-to step-by-step explanations and the latest practical advice on diagnosis and treatment—emphasizing ways of improvising care with whatever materials you have available. It's small enough to be carried in a car's glove compartment or in your backpack—yet detailed enough to cover the clinical presentation and treatment of a full range of emergencies!

• Offers appendices that address everything from environment-specific situations to lists of essential supplies, medicines, and many additional topics of care, enabling you to meet a full-range of emergency situations with the utmost effectiveness.
  
• Includes line drawings—along with a section of color plates—that aid in the identification of skin rashes, plants, snakes, insects, and more.
  
• Provides Signs and Symptoms and Treatment sections in most chapters—combined with bulleted lists and text boxes—that facilitate quick and easy retrieval of information.
  
• Presents full chapter coverage of both animal attacks and zoonoses for handling life-threatening situations.
  
• Features peerless guidance in a portable format for consultation anywhere from the office setting to the open outdoors.

• Features a new appendix on jungle travel and survival, and new chapters on forest fires, bandaging and taping techniques, mental health, hydration anddehydration, malaria—and more—equipping you to handle any emergency you might encounter in the wilderness.
  
• Includes more tips for improvisational care (eg, how to make a rigid litter using skis, poles, snowshoes, canoe paddles, or tree branches) to help you respond to wilderness and nontraditional emergencies with the materials that you have on hand.
  
• Presents thorough revisions to all previously existing chapters—ensuring that you have the latest knowledge at your fingertips.