Customer Reviews

What Are You Afraid Of? A Body/Mind Guide to Courageous Living

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Once one has explored a bodywork-oriented fitness discipline -- Pilates, Yoga, Feldenkrais, Tai Chi, etc. -- in detail, you will begin to notice something interesting: there are certain exercises/postures/positions that are difficult where the difficulty has nothing to do with the mechanics of doing the exercise. You've got the strength, the flexibility, and the balance, but you still can't do it. Maybe the difficulties have to do with something that we are -- or were -- afraid of, and the fear is still embodied in our posture or our movement.

In our culture, we usually pay little to no attention to such issues. In other words, we have a fear of revealing our fears -- especially to ourselves. This book is about the courage to see those fears and, through awareness, to begin to have some mastery over them.

For me, understanding how I hold my fear in body is profound. It is the "juice" which keeps me practicing Pilates. While I most certainly appreciate the increased strength and flexibility I've achieved, this connection is what touches my heart. Courage is exactly what it takes to keep exploring this connection.

I suspect a desire to avoid the mind-body connection is also why many people stop pursuing such disciplines. Many instructors are afraid (!) to discuss such things in their classes; they may or may not have a powerful relationship with these concepts themselves. Ultimately, I think ignoring this topic is counterproductive; students will eventually stumble onto it themselves. I also suspect that this is why more women persue these disciplines -- they tend to intutitvely grasp both the existence and the value in exploring this particular mind/body connection.

To this end, this book is a great introduction to these concepts. I highly recommend it to anyone who regularly practices any of these disciplines. I also recommend it to anyone interested in gaining mastery of their fears -- this avenue is quite likely to produce profound results.

Lavinia writes with great clarity and illustrates her points with many stories from her Feldenkrais practice. Highly recommended.

I've only experienced a couple of the exercises in this book and am so glad I got it. This book is great. I was afraid to excersise after a car accident because simple movements hurt. I was deathly afraid of physical therapists and thier torture machines. Thankfully someone recommended Feldenkrais and someone else reccommended this book in particular. I was afraid my life was over but not anymore. One of the excerises in this book is from Anat Baniels joint pain series so I bought Anat Baniels neck pain exercises. Even though I never thought about what I was afraid, I had a lot of fears and still do. I have a lot less now. Lavinia Plonka thank you! Great book! Let your life begin! reviews over!!!!! but on side note, why not get an extra copy and carry it with you, it's compact enough, when you see someone with a no fear t-shirt or big sticker on thier vehicle, give them a copy. They may not look like they need it, but it could be best book they ever owned.

Lavinia Plonka's book What Are You Afraid of? is certainly a book for our times. It seems that fear is everywhere, in our political, social, and private lives. I found this book enormously insightful. The author is direct and honest in her approach to acknowledging fear and gaining mastery over it. What I particularly found helpful was the focus on ACTION - do this and help is on the way. Ms. Plonka's extensive background in the Feldenkrais Method and her years as a performer lend credence to the exercises she offers here. The illustrations were a delightful bonus.

As an underdog I read a lot of books on fear and on the body/mind connection respectively. This should be the first book I came across which devotes on both, and in particular how correct gestures/postures can help alleviate fear, especially those acquired during early lives. In this respect, the objective set per book title "What are you afraid of? A body/mind guide to courageous living" had been largely achieved, primarily by the first half of it. Sorry to say that the second half of it had been a little bit over stretched with theories. It would be better if the author can give more of the Feldenkrais Method and/or Yoga in fighting against fear/stress. Taking into consideration of the author's background (she's neither an M.D. nor a psychologist) I must express my heartfelt appreciation of her calibre of writing a book of such high quality. In short, recommended!

Below please find some of my favorite passages for your reference.

Checking on your tension spots: Stand quietly with your eyes closed. Imagine a line going down the center of your body. Where is your head in relation to that line? Is your neck in front of behind the line? What about your shoulders? Sometimes one shoulder is in front and one is behind. Is your chest thrust forward of the line, or somewhere behind it? Where is your pelvis? Is your lower back arched? Are your knees relaxed or are they locked? Do you feel the weight on your feet in the middle, front, or back? .....Chances are that if you feel yourself "out of line,' yiou are using tension to hold yourself in place. Take a fresh stance. Now notice: Are you really comfortable? pg 16

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world. - Ralph Waldo Emerson pg 17

Success is never final and faiure is never fatal. It's courage that counts. - Jules Ellinger pg 93

He who is afraid of a thing gives it power over him. - Moorish proverb pg 98

An inflexible spine undoubtedly creates limitations in changing direction, let alone the ability to move ahead (or anywhere, for that matter!). It compromises one's sense of safety: with limited range of motion, how can you respond effectively to life's stresses? ..... A frozen spine often results in a frozen pelvis. A frozen pelvis can indicate impotence, an inability to act, a lack of freedom. pg 132

Experience, in the hands of the talented and the hard working, begets both experts and expertise (this is the kind of word play which, I think, vibrates with similar excursuses in Lavinia Plonka's 2005 book, WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF? A BODY/MIND GUIDE TO COURAGEOUS LIVING). I salute one of our two daughters-in-law, mother of six sons, as "expert" in home-schooling. She has done it for 13 or 14 years, cooperated with peer parents, shared teaching duties, joined associations, read and debated books and on and on.

Similarly, I tip my hat to Asheville's Lavinia Plonka, expert in "somatic education." She has been at it a score more years than our daughter-in-law, has read more books, lectured in more countries. Most of Ms Plonka's hands-on clients, I infer, however, come to her referred by others. For them Lavinia Plonka is often their "last best hope" to free themselves from pain both physical, emotional and more deeply psychic.

Lavinia Plonka's nicely illustrated (by the author herself?) and indexed little book shares with readers cases of students with questions, clients in pain, excerpts from the author's wide reading and obiter dicta on this-worldly theories of wellness and the meaning of life.

The book can be skimmed in an hour. That should be enough for you to decide if second and third readings -- taking the time recommended to do the carefully selected "exercises" -- are in order. I myself have happily opted for second and third readings.

Debatably but ably, the author focuses on "fear" and "phobias" as the often unperceived underlying causes (or contributing factors) of pains and other problems for which her clients seek her coaching and counsel. We are all born, Ms Plonka asserts, with one innate fear: falling. For most others of our acquired fears and their kin, "insecurity, pride, anger, territorialism, to name a few" (Introduction), we need search no farther than our parents. Face those fears. Convert them (via aikido-like techniques) from foe to partner, and we shall go far!

When suddenly terrorized (a mother bear doesn't want us this close to her cubs; a mugger demands our money, etc.), we instinctively arch our backs and throw up our hands. Next we instinctively bend over and put our hands over our faces to protect our viscera and other vital parts. (Illustrations 1.1 and 1.2.) Many of Ms Plonka's clients had been mastered by fear very early in life and their adult postures still show (prior to mentoring) traces to this day of "The Startle Relex" or cowering or both.

Ms Plonka argues that bodily posture reflects emotions and internal values. It is possible, therefore, to learn what ails us deep inside if we first study our skins, muscles and skeletons while slowly doing Feldenkrais exercises, watching, paying attention to ourselves as we make minute adjustments to relieve our physical distress. The book goes on, exercise by exercise, to give us hope that, mirroring Aikido ("Way of Peace") techniques, we can draw out via external and combined external/internal exercises our inner pains and replace our fears by love.

This book is a notably better than average introduction to "somatic education." You soon sense that you are in the presence of a master. I give this book 3.6 stars, rounding up to 4.0. The more that you bring to a first reading of WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF? from eastern wisdom, martial arts, the writings of Moshe Feldenkrais, from familiarity with Alba Emoting Method, etc., the more easily and confidently you will draw closer to the core of the author's "wisdom." Coming, however, myself from a different background (Roman Catholic religious and ascetic practices, Greek and Scholastic philosophy), there are some larger "framing" things that I miss in Ms Plonka's tentatively stated world view.

--(1) For normal, healthy, morally adequate people, it seems to me, there is less fear and more of the virtue of (human) prudence than Ms Plonka gives us credit for. When we walk in snow we prudently not fearfully take small steps, plant our feet firmly and look for signs of black ice. Twice daily examination of conscience, as recommended by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, does some of what Ms Plonka advocates and can easily be adapted to do justice to some of her personal insights.

--(2) Ms Plonka refers only once to any of the classic philosophers of any era -- Rene Descartes -- and that stereotypically. She does not propose to readers any personal cosmic or overarching systematic philosophy or world religion. We find assertions, linkages (body posture/emotion), stresses on paying attention and on and on: stylistic ploys, it seems to me, reminding of Hebrew Scripture's "wisdom" literature. Yet it is also fairly obvious to me that Lavinia Plonka does in fact, move, without knowing it or at least acknowledging it, within the modern philosophical framework of academic "phenomenology" as articulated by Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938).

Bright and creative and expert in teaching and learning as Lavinia Plonka has proven herself, I predict that she will happily delve into Christian asceticism and moral theology as well as Husserl and phenomenology, as soon as someone that she trusts leads her to those fountainheads. And the new book that results will put us all deeper in her debt.

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