Core Awareness, Revised Edition: Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise, and Dance

An indispensable resource for anyone interested in movement education, including yoga, Pilates, dance, and more.

Somatic educator and writer Liz Koch has spent decades studying the principles of Core Awareness—a body-based approach to movement that uses attention to inner sensation as the key to increasing strength, gaining flexibility, preventing injury, and improving resilience. In this book, she shares her vast knowledge of Core Awareness with readers, providing movements, stretches, and mindfulness explorations that she developed herself.

Her exercises are designed to enhance sensory development and shift readers from viewing the body as an “isolated object” to experiencing it as part of a living process of dynamic expression. This shift in perspective offers practitioners and teachers of movement, yoga, Pilates, bodywork, exercise, and dance an empowering model for self-healing and the key to becoming stronger, more flexible, and more resilient.

As Koch describes the practice of moving from one’s core, she highlights the importance of engaging the psoas muscle—located on either side of the spine—to integrate the body, mind, emotion, and spirit. She also explores how the pelvis forms the foundation of our physical core, providing vital connection with our bones and playing a crucial role in gaining a sense of support, nourishment, joint integrity, skeletal balance, and healthy muscle tone.

Rewritten with updated information, this revised edition includes 247 new photos and 25 new Core Awareness explorations—64 in total. A suggested reading list at the end of the book provides resources for continuing the development of the ideas presented within.