Healthy Mind and Body All-in-One For Dummies Book

I liked this book a lot. It comes from a more holistic approach to the body-mind as a unit rather than the standard way of dividing them and speaking of one and ignoring the other. A seminal book on this is Antonio Damasios's "Decartes Error". Decartes said "I think, therefore I am" and Damasio's book has been a classic in psychology for his idea that we are not brain-thinkers who feel, instead we are body-feelers who think. This was chemically proven by Candace Pert in her book "Molecules of Emotion". I expect that this author (Shapiro) is well-versed in Damasio's somatic marker – body memory hypothesis and Pert's discoveries. Shapiro's book is based on the body-mind as one unit.

She also seems broadly knowledgeable in psychology, eastern medicine, and other fields. She mentions Jung, Dr. Candace Pert, dream-therapy, rebirthing, massage, meditation, ayurveda, reflexology, yoga, bioenergetics, acupuncture, yoga, Buddhism and Hinduism and more. She has written several books, one is entitled "The Metamorphic Technique" and another book is in the Turkish language. Her weakest area seems to be physiology, and I cite pages 177 and 178 - about how the immune system works - as one of the places where I believe she has minor mistakes.

The book is in two sections. Part One lays the foundation for the rest of the book in Part Two which goes over illnesses and analyzes them with body-mind explanations. Part One is "Finding Order in the Midst of Chaos". The chapters of Part One are: Mind and Matter Unite; The Language of Thoughts and Emotions; The Language of the Body; Listening to the Body Speak; Curing a Symptom or Healing a Life?

Part Two contains thirteen chapters dealing with the entire body. She goes over the body from head to toe, and analyzes its troubles with statements and dialogue questions based upon the concepts and thoughts presented in Part One. Her body-mind dialogues where one asks questions of feelings to the body-mind to discover emotional components of illness seemed excellent and revealing.

As an example, Chapter Seven is "The Moving Parts: Bones, Joints and Muscles". She gives a good overview of how the way that we move our body when walking or standing expresses our emotional state, and then she individually analyzes the different illnesses of bones, illnesses of joints, and illnesses of muscles with overviews and dialogues to expose the emotional components.

In order to give the flavor of how the author discusses the many different illnesses, I choose here one of her shortest discussions – gout, from Chapter Seven – where she says: "Gout is caused by an accumulation of uric acid in the joints, often in the big toe. Uric acid is normally removed by the urine, which is the body's way of releasing emotions that are finished with, or no longer needed, so they do not poison your system. If you do not release these old emotions they begin to get stuck, to solidify and crystallize, causing rigidity and inflexibility." Most of her discussions are much longer than this short example.

This is an excellent book because of its unique enlightening body-mind perceptions and I think everyone, even healthy people, would enjoy it. It supplements understanding of medical diagnoses and it is also a sort of a preventive maintenance guide for keeping healthy.