Reading Books

[chimerical tortoise]

Currently I'm going through some books:

Pete Egoscrue's "Pain Free"
Sgt Miller's "Meditations on Violence"
and Gavin de Becker's "The Gift of Fear"

which, to the best of my memory, mostly came highly recommended here and there on RSF, and directly tackle issues relevant to MA practice. But none are MA-specific (maybe Miller, but not in the regular sense of "this is style X"). I've found that some books have pretty interesting ideas that contribute to my practice. For example, Vygotsky:

A mediating device is a mental tool that allows the individual to become familiar with something i.e. language or behaviour they're not familiar with. Once this acquired behaviour is familiarised enough, then fossilisation occurs where you do not need the mediating device to use.

i.e. Delta airlines flight attendants are trained to deal with asshole passengers. The mediating device is to imagine the passenger having suffered a death in the family, or a week-long delay in flight, or an unexpected layover, anything that lets the attendant explain the reason for passenger's rudeness. In doing so the attendant is able to suppress anger at being treated badly. After awhile, the 'imagine' is no longer needed and the attendant automatically shunts the anger away; this is 'fossilisation' where the behaviour has been acquired and naturalised to the point where there's no need for mediating devices.

Similarly,
Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish", particularly on docile bodies, and the examination as an institutional 'normalised gaze'
Parts of Edward Hall's "The Hidden Dimension" regarding proxemics and animal behaviour
have both been interesting.

I'm still hunting down "Marrow of the Nation", which I really want to read. The parts I've read off Google Books have been quite good.

What text (non- MA specific) contains concepts that you have found useful to your own MA practice and why?

[kshurika]

"Hara" by Karlfried Graf von Durckheim.


It's a great book and should be read simply because of that.