Books

Your body has not forgotten anything. In the stiffness, in the inhibitions, in the muscular pains of your back, of your limbs, of your diaphragm and also of your face and genitals, your entire history is revealed, from birth to today. From the first months of your life, you have reacted to pressure: “Watch your posture. Don’t touch. Don’t touch yourself. . .”. You accommodated as best you could and in thus conforming, you deformed yourself. Liberate yourself from past programming. A woman tells you of her personal and professional experiences and suggests anti-exercise, not a forced shaping of your body/flesh, the body likened to a wild beast which must be broken, but movements that are conjured up from the past. It is through these that you will make a voyage backwards through your own life where you shall rediscover your true harmonious, balanced and autonomous body.

You don’t go to a therapist to state: “I absolutely do not want to get well”. Yet, the resistance to change, the need to continue recognizing oneself as a suffering being, victim of life and circumstances, are the underpinnings of many requests for care. This was one of the discoveries of Thérèse Bertherat while reading the 15,000 letters that she received after publishing her first book Le Corps a ses raisons. In this book, she talks about these very revealing letters which made her ask disturbing questions about her work, about her patients and about herself. Most importantly, she shares her research on a global therapy which would take into account not only the psychic reasons which have rendered the body susceptible to illness and deformation, but the mechanical causes of pain as well. She describes and critiques the numerous psycho-corporal therapies in vogue today and talks about the evolution of her own work on anti-exercise, where the word and the contact with others are one. Fifteen movements inform you, indeed very precisely, about your actual state and can lead you, your body consenting, towards lasting changes of your muscular, nervous and, it goes without saying, life organization. Rather than a sequel or an end to Le Corps a ses raisons, Courrier du corps, for those readers who dare to face themselves, will be the start of a new way to see and hear oneself.

We all have a tiger in our body. A live tiger, powerful and very beautiful to look at. Everyone does, even those that don’t know it. He stays in his den, in a very precise location, but in the anatomy books, appears in small detached pieces, truncated, unrecognizable. Not knowing him causes much harm: back aches, stiffness and various aches often have no other reason for their existence but our ignorance of this power that came from time immemorial. For Therese Bertherat (we know this thanks to her books, “Le Corps a ses raisons” and “Courrier du corps”), the tiger is an old aquaintance. For nearly twenty years now, she works at observing it and helps her students to live with, and benefit from, him. She outlines for us now, in a thousand beautiful and precise images, the anatomy of this tiger, but also his tricks. How we succeed to ensnare ourselves. From that point on, everyone can learn to tame one’s tiger, without haste, by simple movements. We all have the power to create our equilibrium.