This brief companion to Keleman's Emotional Anatomy approaches somatic-emotional reeducation lucidly and practically, without jargon. Keleman defines patterns that block us and ways to use awareness to discover these conditioned patterns of "embodying experience" along with new possibilities for creatively "forming a personal life" in more freedom.
The illustrations of Vincent Perez and the book's attractive layout and design educate while adding to the pleasure of reading.

In "self-reflection exercises," the reader engages in the actual self-dialogue wruch "involves the language of sensation, patterns of organ motility, heightened or lowered excitatory patterns, hormonal flows, and emotional patterns recognized as lusts and passions:' All exercises follow five steps: "What am I doing? How am I doing it? How do I stop doing it? What happens when I stop doing it? How do.. I use what I have learned?"

Answering the five questions requires a quality of awareness that embraces all embodied reality, not a merely intellectual endeavor. When Keleman affirms, "Because I am embodied, I exist," we hear his implicit alternative to the Cartesian dictum, "Cogito ergo sum" and the entire disastrous split between mind and body that it epitomizes.

In possibly the only polemic of the book, Keleman takes a stand against externally programmed images of human fulfillment. "Somatic process work is not interested in ideals or performances. This is an age of psychological fascism in which true individuality and natural order are distorted .... Few religions could dream up the many shoulds of the modem world. . . . The five steps deprogram these shoulds and uncover the dynamic organizing force which works in a person to create his own form" (emphasis added). Keleman's compassionate work is comparable to other contemporary approaches that respect individual awareness grounded in unique patterns, like Gendlin's focusing, Mindell's process science of the dreambody, the sensory awareness school of Gindler and Alexander's eutony.

This is a book to be read and worked with, not just once but often.
This book review was originally published in the AHP Perspective, May 1988. San Francisco: Association for Humanistic Psychology, p. 18.