Body awareness is a key element in mind-body therapies such as yoga, Tai Chi, and mindfulness meditation, yet its meaning across these approaches is not always clear. Through focus groups with leading practitioners and their patients, the study finds that body awareness is understood as an inseparable part of embodied self-awareness, realized through action and interaction with the environment. It is seen as an innate tendency of the organism toward self-organization and wholeness. Patients experience a progression toward greater unity between body and self, mirroring a philosophical concept of embodiment as a dialectic experienced at distinct developmental levels.
Soul retrieval in modern Chinese shamanism is not a purely spiritual or purely material event but a bodily technique. Using phenomenology of the body, the paper examines three body states—soul loss, evocation, and return—in contemporary Chinese shamanic practices. The analysis shows that shamans adjust, configure, and reposition a patient's dislocated body state by temporarily sharing a body (Einleibung) with them. This body-centered turn, influenced by the body revitalization movement, moves beyond conventional mind-matter dualism. The work proposes an interpretive "body-situation" Einleibung mechanism to explain how shamans negotiate the semantics of illness and healing.