This review appeared in “Somatics; Magazine-Journal of the Mind/Body Arts and Sciences” Volume X Number 4 Spring/Summer 1996
Physical therapy developed as a field that is enormously helpful for physical rehabilitation. Physical therapists have been trained to stay with the physical experience and to refer psychological issues to appropriate persons within the treatment team or back to the referring professionals. This book is an expression of a fuller sense of physical therapy, one that begins to bring in the somatic dimensions.
Barrett Dorko writes that “those of us who have chosen to enter a kind of work that not only requires that we touch others, but touch them in a way that they cannot ignore, are doing something that requires courage. Doing this, we must remain steady in our resolve to remain present with the changes that inevitably occur, and this requires an endurance and intellectual strength only study and some passion for the work itself can supply.”
Sections include “Making Sense,” “Assessment,” “Telling the Tale,” “Treatment,” and “Focusing on the Therapist.”
Dorko says his “essays are about what it is like to spend each day with the task of manual caring and what might happen if we attended to the stories we heard and told ourselves.” Written as a series of reflections and essays, this book gives you a sense of the poetry of this practice. We need to share more of the poetics in our practices; we need more reflections on our somatic experiences. There is great wisdom in the somatic realm.