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Lavinia
Plonka
WALKING YOUR TALK - CHANGING YOUR LIFE THROUGH THE MAGIC OF BODY LANGUAGE New York. Tarcher/Penguin. 2007. Paper. 208 pp. ISBN-10: 1585425427 reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 01/09/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. * * * * * Call it arguing. Call it dialoging. In either case, that is what I want to do while reading and pondering Lavinia Plonka's 2007 book, WALKING YOUR TALK: CHANGING YOUR LIFE THROUGH THE MAGIC OF BODY LANGUAGE. She declares that the human race has for millennia aimed its senses at everything but the human body. External world, yes! Body language, no! And that is a terrible mistake. Is she right? if so, why? Ms Plonka is convinced that the human body talks. It talks to other people who observe our bodies, as we walk, swivel, gesture, fall down, laugh. Most books about body language either teach us how to interpret the meaning of others' gestures or how to craft our own postures and gestures to make other people (e.g. personnel officers) do what we want (e.g., hire us). "I
propose a deeper study -- your own body language, wherein you will
discover the possibility of how to literally change your life" (Introduction).
Ms Plonka assumes (or cites the beliefs of others to the effect) that there are objectively right and wrong ways to stand, sit, dance, walk, hold our shoulders or run our tongues around our teeth. Drawing on thirty years of studying and teaching movement and "somatic education," Ms Plonka has developed a Feldenkrias practice that people turn to when in discomfort or pain. " ... I
received the desperate, the cynical, the hopeless" (Introduction).
Together students and mentor discovered linkages between pain -- physical or emotional -- and bad movement and posture habits that the students had developed. Much of WALKING YOUR TALK is an invitation to the reader to perform detailed limb by limb scanning of one body part after another: feet, legs, pelvis, spine, ribs, neck, head, arms. In Feldenkrais practice in Asheville, North Carolina and elsewhere, Ms Plonka has found that when students do such scanning, day in and day out, slowly, avoiding pain, methodically sensing small differences among related gentle movements, they then sometimes feel their way back to initial awful experiences that caused them to protect their faces, scrunch their shoulders or buttocks, clench their teeth and so on. Bad movement habits, in some cases, trace back to situations that caused students to embrace a trade or a course of university studies chosen by parents but loathed by themselves. Following Moshe Feldenkrais, Ms Plonka believes that behind bad posture there often lie dashed dreams. As students improve their posture, they develop the courage to remember their once upon a time "talk" (dream) and talk it again for the first time in decades. Suddenly they find that they have the option and the motivation to do what they have really wanted to do for years. Bodies talk. Lavinia Plonka teaches us to listen to what they are saying. If our body aches, what buried dreams launched the habits behind the aches? The author's enthusiasm for her liberating insights flashes out in every paragraph. That enthusiasm is infectious. But it need not blind us to the author's need to prove her hypotheses, possibly even anchor them in some major traditional religious or philosophical tradition. In any event, I recommend that you read WALKING YOUR TALK slowly, attentively and do the recommended exercises. You may not lift yourself from Clark Kent into Superman. You may not buy into the author's implicit metaphysics. But you will learn a lot and probably be more pain free, sit and walk better and learn how to disarm putdowns on the job or jibes at parties by people who want to cause you pain. And absorbing all that is a tall order. -OOO- review: http://www.biblio.com/books/223190693.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 01/09/2011 name of review: "Your body is talking all the time" rating: * * * * review: "Hello, reader. I am your body. I have
been busy helping you and your forebears for millennia to see, hear,
touch, taste and smell the stimuli of the external world. I now invite
you, metaphorically of course, to cast a loving glance, perhaps for the
first time, at me."
I made up the four sentences above. For me they go to the heart of WALKING YOUR TALK: CHANGING YOUR LIFE THROUGH THE MAGIC OF BODY LANGUAGE (2007) by Asheville, North Carolina's Livinia Plonka. The book is so rich in content that it is easy to get lost as we move systematically page after page, "noticing"- exercise after "noticing"- exercise, through all the major organs, postures and gestures of the human body. And we do not simply and by rote work through a ho-hum checklist of feet, stance, posture, pelvis, spine, shoulders, hands, head and other body parts. Rather Ms Plonka teaches us to sense them "kinesthetically" within several unifying frameworks taken from movement science or "somatic education." These framing devices are primarily Feldenkrais exercises, Aikido mirroring techniques and the adapted 19th Century physiological views of Francois Delsarte. But behind all this minute, well explained detail there is always the simple, recurring invitation from your very own body to start noticing it, relaxing it and using it as a gateway to your emotions and to your soul. In the West we are not conditioned to do this. We are said to be influenced by old anti-Christian and anti-Incarnationalist heresies that see the human body as material, therefore evil. In our thoughts linger the stereotypical so called "Cartesian" belief that the human person is a "ghost in a machine." WALKING YOUR TALK invites us to make systematic acquaintance with our body. Many of the people that author Plonka has worked with have sought her help only after all other resources have failed. They are "the desperate, the cynical, the hopeless" (Introduction). If I understand aright, Ms Plonka then brings her students through a series of individually tailored Feldenkrais Method exercises. These exercises help practitioners become acquainted with their bodies through small, deliberately pain-free physical movements. Within and behind these movements and postures sometimes lie bad habits long ago created by inter-personal confrontations, frustrations and other traumas. Through Feldenkrais practice, students come to know themselves, remember one-time dreams (or "talk") that they had felt forced to abandon, and ultimately they recover the power to make themselves what they really want to be. A fascinating set of insights in WALKING YOUR TALK relates to Aikido, the Japanese martial arts form, which Ms Plonka sublimates into an interpersonal tool for walking in an opponent's moccasins, going in his door in order to come out yours -- in peace. Another emphasized mental framework made much of in WALKING YOUR TALK is Francois Delsarte's "System of Expression," applied over and over again in the text. Delsarte saw body language as communication. In the early 19th Century he assigned Mental, Physical and Emotional roles to various body parts, from eyebrows through fingers to shoulders. In Lavinia Plonka's own words, here again is the book's leit motif: "Your
body is talking all the time -- whether your want it to or not. ...
Every activity is filled with information: how you hold the knife as
you slice an onion, for example. ... Your stance may be the result, or
the cause, of back pain, which is also visible to an attentive
observer. ... Your every move can serve as a feedback device that
informs you of your emotional state, your intentions, your health, and
your attention" (Ch. 1).
WALKING YOUR TALK is amply illustrated by the author, who includes a Worksheet on Goal Setting, Resources (books, articles, on-line materials) and an ample Index. Lavinia Plonka writes well. She is enthusiastic about her beliefs and roots them in more than three decades of immersion in movement education including time as theatrical choreographer and student of acting techniques, of yoga and in work with disadvantaged, at-risk inner city children. WALKING YOUR TALK soars above your average "how to" get healthy book. It is for sipping, not for gulping. -OOO- http://www.lunch.com/Reviews/d/Lavinia_Plonka_ WALKING_YOUR_WALK_CHANGING_YOUR_LIFE_ THROUGH_THE_MAGIC_OF_BODY_LANGUAGE-1684923.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 01/10/2011 title of review: "much of your body language is the result of tension" rating: * * * * review: Posted 1/10/2011: Lavinia Plonka, author of the 2007 study of "somatic education," WALKING YOUR TALK: CHANGING YOUR LIFE THROUGH THE MAGIC OF BODY LANGUAGE, is a lady with a mission. Personally convinced that for thousands of years the human race has been too absorbed in the external world, she has prepared a book for people who agree that it is now time to make time to tune in to their own bodies. Bodies talk. They reveal their owner's pains, satisfactions and yearnings. And bodies do this through their gestures, grimaces, stumblings and posture. In the hands of an instructor who shares Livinia Plonka's convictions and who is willing to pass them on to you, a class in yoga or Feldenkrais exercises or Aikido mimicking can help you find your true self. As you unclench your teeth, soften your chest, breathe deeply, you are encouraged to notice not just your physical movements, but your accompanying thoughts as well. Those thoughts may be no more profound than "What's for dinner?" or "Drat it, this hurts more than I was led to believe!" But if you do certain exercises day after day and keep a log of your concurrent thoughts, you may eventually remember that you used to throw your hands up before your face whenever your father or husband was about to slap you. And you may see that you have carried related, no longer necessary postures and tensions along with you for years. Here is a sample of Ms Plonka's writing. The subject is the habit of tenseness: "As
you become better at observing the details that make up your big
picture, you will become aware of how much of your body language is the
result of tension. ... You will see how much unnecessary tension has
gone into maintaining your personal patterns of self-deception and
self-sabotage. ... Unnecessary tension is not inevitable. It is not our
natural state, but a habit that interferes with effective function and
our true intention" (Ch. X, "Practical Shape-Shifting").
This is a (bodily) wisdom book, reminiscent of certain Hebrew Scriptures. Unrelated aphorisms trip merrily across the pages. How-to exercises are accompanied by lucid, vivid drawings by the author. There are excellent add-ons: bibliography, index, a Worksheet for Goal Setting. You learn to scan your body for clues from toes to pelvis to gumlines to fingers. Your body is talking. All you have to do is listen for its clues. Lavinia Plonka teaches you how to listen. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Pam Grout: JUMPSTART YOUR METABOLISM: HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT BY CHANGING THE WAY YOU BREATHE. -- Gay Hendricks: CONSCIOUS BREATHING: BREATHWORK FOR HEALTH, STRESS RELEASE AND PERSONAL MASTERY -- Marilyn Lacey: THIS FLOWING TOWARD ME: A STORY OF GOD ARRIVING IN STRANGERS -- Lavinia Plonka: WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF? A BODY/MIND GUIDE TO COURAGEOUS LIVING. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Walking-Your-Talk/ Lavinia-Plonka/e/9781585425426/?itm=1&USRI= lavinia+plonka+-+walking+your+talk =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 01/10/2011 title of review: "Less Effort plus More Attention Yields a Greater Result" (Moshe Feldenkrais) rating: * * * * review: There is an abundance of snappy, one-line action aphorisms and other (bodily) wisdom literature sayings in Lavinia Plonka's 2007 study of the human body and its ways of expressing emotions and dreams, WALKING YOUR TALK: CHANGING YOUR LIFE THROUGH THE MAGIC OF BODY LANGUAGE. And who among us doesn't love simple aphorisms: "Eat
Less, Move More" (Weightwatchers),
"No Pain, no Gain" (Jane Fonda?), "Walk Softly, Carry a Big Stick and You Shall Go Far" (Teddy Roosevelt), "Radiate Christ" (Fr. Raul Plus) and "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother" (God). Lavinia Plonka's book is about bodily motion and her zingers come from mime, ballroom dancing, theater, choreography, martial arts, a 19th Century classic on assigning psychic roles to body parts and such like. Thus: "... find
a way to blend with others by receiving what they offer and redirecting
it" (Aikido martial art).
And " ... 'step in and step out' of emotional states" (Alba Emoting Method). And "Don't hold your breath for too long!" (after Francois Delsarte). For every one such aphorism by others there are ten from the man whose thinking dominates and guides WALKING YOUR TALK. He is Moshe Feldenkrais (1904 - 1984). His observations, recommendations and obiter dicta dot the pages of Lavinia Plonka's book. She is, after all, a practitioner of Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education. And her most damaged and pain-wracked clients come to her expecting Feldenkrais treatments. If there is any one slogan that sets the Feldenkrais method apart it is this: "Less Effort plus More Attention Yields a
Greater Result" (Moshe Feldenkrais).
Feldenkrais classes (I go to one once a week) concentrate on one body part at a time: hands, ribs, spine, shoulder. This is brain work, not muscle-building or cardio enhancement. The instructor leads the class through a series of tiny, slow, pain-free movements different from what we do in daily life. It is not how much you strain, but how much you notice and think. In my weekly classes we never get beyond the purely physical: learning how to relax, to unwind spasms, to banish tensions as we roll over, stretch our spines, bring fingers and thumb together and on and on. By contrast, however, there is a further, deeper dimension to Feldenkrais Method not known to me until I opened this book. For in my weekly Feldenkrais classes the instructor never tells us to notice and learn from the accompanying thoughts as we exercise. In the hands of Lavinia Plonka, however, systematic noticing of both movements and thoughts can lead back to buried causes and traumas behind current bad posture, aches and pains and lack of self-confidence. She preaches Feldenkrais Method as healing, as recovering our buried dreams. WALKING YOUR TALK is a complex book. You learn to scan every part of your body from ankles through pelvis to eyebrows. And you have a purpose: to listen to your body. What is it telling you about why its pelvis is so stiff or its ribs so sore? Lavinia Plonka will help you find out. -OOO- tags: lavinia plonka, Asheville Movement Center, Moshe Feldenkrais, aikido, Francois Delsarte, somatic education http://www.amazon.com/Walking-Your-Talk-Changing -Language/dp/1585425427/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s= books&qid=1294089993&sr=1-1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 01/11/2011 Review Title: "If you're not having fun, you're not learning" (Moshe Feldenkrais) Product Rating: * * * * PROS: You will scan every posture in your body for messages about long gone traumas. CONS: It may take you a year's reading and exercising to do this book justice. BOTTOM LINE: Lavinia Polka hits her stride. You learn body language, dig back into past disappointments now revealing themselves in your pained posture. You climb from fearful loser to lover of others. aohcapablanca's Full Review: In 2005's WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF? Lavinia Plonka taught us baby steps and then led us by the hand up from fear, anxiety, anger and pride. We struggled out into daylight after a lifetime watching shadows in a modern version of Plato's Cave. Comes Plonka's 2007 WALKING YOUR TALK: CHANGING YOUR LIFE THROUGH THE MAGIC OF BODY LANGUAGE. The book is longer. The scope is vaster. The unaccustomed light can strain our eyes as we struggle to sense what our body is telling us. We see our postures as frozen responses to long ago traumas. Lavinia Plonka teaches us when to soften or thrust forward our chests as appropriate and how to move away from habitual, stressed out mere reacting to others to loving them and to helping both them and ourselves "walk our talk," i.e., recover our long buried dreams and hopes for ourselves. By Chapter 11, listening to our bodies has taught us to stop fearing and to start loving. We are now in Dalai Lama high country. He said: "When you are angry at your enemy, you
make him happy, because he sees that you are suffering."
We have systematically noticed, attended to every major part of our body, run our tongues around our gum lines, with actor Michael Caine practiced making our eyes stop blinking, loosened up our rib cage and meditated on the meaning of our gestures and postures within a 19th Century framework created by Francois Delsarte. We have looked into Chilean neuroscientist Susana Bloch's Alba Emoting Method. We have not been too proud to borrow from the Japanese martial arts form created by Morihei Ueshiba: Aikido. We now know how to yield, to imitate, to blend with our adversary's attack, to turn it. We go in his door and come out our own. This is Aikido: the "way of harmonizing energy," the way of peace. I glance through the Index of WALKING YOUR TALK. In addition to some of the terms and names just mentioned, here are are a few more that were unfamiliar to me before I met and read Lavinia Plonka: "breatharians, chest as truth center,
contra-mask, Delsarte (Francois), emotions and posture, the pelvic
clock (exercise), facial action coding system (Paul Ekman), hara: the vital center of man
(Karlfried Graf Durckheim), mindfulness of breath,
psychoneuroimmunology, shoulder girdle, TMJ (temporomandibular joint
[disorder]), transition posture ("You
could go in any direction from here"; see Illustration) and
Worksheet for Goal Setting."
A reader can indeed romp through the Index of Plonka's WALKING YOUR TALK. By contrast you could usefully skim in an hour every last word of Ms Plonka's earlier, less demanding WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF? I mean romp through the entire book once over lightly. In WALKING YOUR TALK we have in our hands something very different: a small encyclopedia, a reference book, full of exercises that will take weeks to work through on our path to nirvana or at least into the companionship of the Dalai Lama. WALKING YOUR TALK is full of one-line zingers and insights: -- "The
human body, while often referred to as a bag of water, is actually
mostly oxygen (65 percent)" (Ch. 10, "Practical Shape-Shifting");
-- "Walking has been described as falling and catching yourself, over and over" (Ch. 4 "A Leg To Stand On); -- and Moshe Feldenkrais's upbeat "If you're not having fun, you're not learning." The slow, gentle, microscopically exact Somatic Education exercises of Moshe Feldenkrais as taught by Lavinia Plonka make up the undersung skeleton of WALKING YOUR TALK. Tempting though it be to dazzle you with dozens of such aphorisms, let me conclude my sketch of the book's flavor and substance with this: "The following is a checklist of some of
the more common ways habitual tension influences your body language.
Forehead: Wrinkled, furrows in the brow Eyes: Squinting or very wide Mouth: Lips tight, jaw clenched, tongue biting Neck: Head projecting forward Shoulders: Hunched, rounded, unmoving Hands: Fingers clenched, stretched; picking at cuticles, biting nails, wringing hands Chest: Shallow breath, stiff ribs Spine: Stiffness, soreness" (Ch. 10) WALKING YOUR TALK is amply and well illustrated by black and white drawings which I think are by the author herself (a celebrated artist). Smacking of the novels of Sir Walter Scott or James Fenimore Cooper, every chapter is preceded by an apt epigraph. It might take you a demanding but rewarding year to read through all books listed in Resources. The writing is clear. The ideas come either from the author's 30+ years experience in the field of motion education or from cited authorities. So why a less than five star rating?
The book is immensely fascinating and impressive. I rate it 4.4 stars, rounding down to 4.0. For I personally would be more impressed by a book better exemplifying the three elements of good writing that the Jesuits taught me in high school: "CUE" = Coherence, Unity, Emphasis. All Ms Plonka's authorities are "treated," for instance in the narrative as if equal. But look at the space given in the Index to Moshe Feldenkrais and his method. Feldenkraisiana make up by far the biggest component of WALKING YOUR TALK. Why mute that note? What is it that loosely unifies this book: merely its subject -- experience-based physical and mental health through attending to bodily motions, gestures and postures. What I miss is some broader unifying factor: e.g., Christian asceticism or the philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. I would settle for other world views. Perhaps Lavinia Plonka's next book will address my quibbles. Nonetheless, WALKING YOUR TALK is a breath-taking achievement. -OOO- P.S. Thank you DramaStef for making WALKING YOUR TALK reviewable by us epinionators. =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/plonka_walking.html |