The essays in this dynamic compilation are a testament to dance as a healing art. Widely interdisciplinary in nature and written by women dancers from around the world, they illustrate a rich array of dance practices, cultures, and disciplines and show how this expressive therapy can be both empowering and exhilarating. The women’s narratives all share a deep appreciation for the connection between mental, spiritual, and physical dimensions, offering dance as a transformative power of renewing and rebuilding that bond. Both personal and professional, the stories weave a vivid tapestry of lived experiences and insights, balance, and a community healed by dance.
Since Peter Senge published his groundbreaking book The Fifth Discipline, he and his associates have frequently been asked by the business community: "How do we go beyond the first steps of corporate change? How do we sustain momentum?" They know that companies and organizations cannot thrive today without learning to adapt their attitudes and practices. But companies that establish change initiatives discover, after initial success, that even the most promising efforts to transform or revitalize organizations—despite interest, resources, and compelling business results—can fail to sustain themselves over time. That's because organizations have complex, well-developed immune systems, aimed at preserving the status quo. Now, drawing upon new theories about leadership and the long-term success of change initiatives, and based upon twenty-five years of experience building learning organizations, the authors of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook show how to accelerate success and avoid the obstacles that can stall momentum. The Dance of Change, written for managers and executives at every level of an organization, reveals how business leaders can work together to anticipate the challenges that profound change will ultimately force the organization to face. Then, in a down-to-earth and compellingly clear format, readers will learn how to build the personal and organizational capabilities needed to meet those challenges. These challenges are not imposed from the outside; they are the product of assumptions and practices that people take for granted—an inherent, natural part of the processes of change. And they can stop innovation cold, unless managers at all levels learn to anticipate them and recognize the hidden rewards in each challenge, and the potential to spur further growth. Within the frequently encountered challenge of "Not Enough Time," for example—the lack of control over time available for innovation and learning initiatives—lies a valuable opportunity to reframe the way people organize their workplaces. This book identifies universal challenges that organizations ultimately find themselves confronting, including the challenge of "Fear and Anxiety"; the need to diffuse learning across organizational boundaries; the ways in which assumptions built in to corporate measurement systems can handcuff learning initiatives; and the almost unavoidable misunderstandings between "true believers" and nonbelievers in a company. Filled with individual and team exercises, in-depth accounts of sustaining learning initiatives by managers and leaders in the field, and well-tested practical advice, The Dance of Change provides an insider's perspective on implementing learning and change initiatives at such corporations as British Petroleum, Chrysler, Dupont, Ford, General Electric, Harley-Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi Electric, Royal DutchShell, Shell Oil Company, Toyota, the United States Army, and Xerox. It offers crucial advice for line-level managers, executive leaders, internal networkers, educators, and others who are struggling to put change initiatives into practice.
The Native American philosophy behind the vision of the Medicine Wheel is that all things and beings on the earth are related and, therefore, must be in harmony for the earth to be balanced. Dancing with the Wheel teaches you how to apply this philosophy to your daily life through many practical exercises and ceremonies. These exercises will help you gain energy from the spirits, which can heal both humans and the earth. Through Dancing with the Wheel, the second book specifically devoted to the Medicine Wheel, those familiar with this vision will gain an increased understanding of the wheel and its developments over the last ten years. Those new to the Medicine Wheel will be ushered into the teachings and technique of what has come to be a source of comfort and direction for thousands of people around the world. Whether you are in the middle of the wilderness or the middle of a city, this book and its exercises will help you center yourself and establish peace with the earth and other beings.
The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing the dynamic interaction of diverse human and nonhuman factors in their causation, unfolding, and aftermath. Focusing on the link between the ways disasters are framed by the stories told about them and how people tend to respond to them in practice, Rigby also shows how works of narrative fiction invite ethical reflection on human relations with one another, with our often unruly earthly environs, and with other species in the face of eco-catastrophe. In its investigation of an array of authors from the Romantic period to the present—including Heinrich von Kleist, Mary Shelley, Theodor Storm, Colin Thiele, and Alexis Wright— Dancing with Disaster demonstrates the importance of the environmental humanities in the development of more creative, compassionate, ecologically oriented, and socially just responses to the perils and possibilities of the Anthropocene. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism
Building a house requires certain steps to be completed; so does creating a successful life. The three books in this series detail the process of becoming the Master of your Life, raising your vibration, and creating the life that you desire. Synthesizing the metaphysical and life teachings of the ancient wisdoms, modern spiritual teachers, and quantum physics, each chapter provides practical steps for application. While each book stands alone, together they form a complete system for Dancing with the Energy Book 1: The Foundations of Conscious Living presents the blueprint, the tools, and the raw materials for constructing the life you desire along with tips for developing skill in applying these tools. Book 2: Conscious Living—What’s Holding You Back? analyzes and discusses the constraints that you must deal with in order to actually become the Master of your life. Book 3: Conscious Living—Creating the Life You Desire provides additional tools and techniques necessary to actually create the life you desire using the concepts and tools in Book 1 and within the constraints detailed in Book 2.
By 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change - what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it. Obviously, we failed.Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking account of that failure - and how tantalizingly close we came to signing binding treaties that would have saved us all before the fossil fuels industry and politicians committed to anti-scientific denialism - is already a journalistic blockbuster, a full issue of the New York Times Magazine that has earned favorable comparisons to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and John Hersey's Hiroshima. Rich has become an instant, in-demand expert and speaker. A major movie deal is already in place. It is the story, perhaps, that can shift the conversation.In the book Losing Earth, Rich is able to provide more of the context for what did - and didn't - happen in the 1980s and, more important, is able to carry the story fully into the present day and wrestle with what those past failures mean for us in 2019. It is not just an agonizing revelation of historical missed opportunities, but a clear-eyed and eloquent assessment of how we got to now, and what we can and must do before it's truly too late.
It is no coincidence, Daphne Lamothe writes, that so many black writers and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century either trained formally as ethnographers or worked as amateur collectors of folklore and folk culture. In Inventing the New Negro Lamothe explores the process by which key figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Sterling Brown adapted ethnography and folklore in their narratives to create a cohesive, collective, and modern black identity. Lamothe explores how these figures assumed the roles of self-reflective translators and explicators of African American and African diasporic cultures to Western, largely white audiences. Lamothe argues that New Negro writers ultimately shifted the presuppositions of both literary modernism and modernist anthropology by making their narratives as much about ways of understanding as they were about any quest for objective knowledge. In critiquing the ethnographic framework within which they worked, they confronted the classist, racist, and cultural biases of the dominant society and challenged their readers to imagine a different set of relations between the powerful and the oppressed. Inventing the New Negro combines an intellectual history of one of the most important eras of African American letters with nuanced and original readings of seminal works of literature. It will be of interest not only to Harlem Renaissance scholars but to anyone who is interested in the intersections of culture, literature, folklore, and ethnography.
The poets of North-East India, though belonging to diverse spaces, cultures, languages and religions, share a common bond. It is a sensibility defined by a deep connection with the land; the overarching presence of nature in their lives; the predominance of myths and tribal folklore; and the search for an identity. All this informs their poetry and gives it a unique flavour. Much of the distinctiveness of their work is also the consequence of contemporary events, often marked by violence. Like its title poem The Dancing Earth , the anthology too, is a celebration of this life, in all its unpredictable variety, richness and contradictions. So while Thangjam Ibopishak writes I Want to be Killed By an Indian Bullet and Chandrakanta Murasingh speaks of a minister with neither inside nor outside , there are also Temsula Ao s poems about her stone-people ancestors; Mamang Dai s portraits of swift rivers and primeval forests; and the Shillong poets with their mist-shrouded pine slopes, red cherries and gridlocked streets.
