Quotes about the body

Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. (p13)

In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.” (p.97)

As I often tell my students, the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.

"Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment," she said, thrusting a skinny back of her hand before my eyes, "most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”

Our bodies may be fragile, but our spirits are unbreakable

If you could, wouldn’t you replace your damaged legs with cybernetic ones? Why hold on to malfunctioning or poorly formed flesh and bone because “we were born with it”? That’s something said only by people who have no choice or have no actual experience with being…unable. What makes you you, really? I’m a mechanic. When something isn’t working, you replace it with something better, something that is working.

This body of ours, which we cherish so dearly, will turn into a corpse that our friends and family will only want to dispose of as quickly as possible.

Spirituality is not some external goal that one must seek, but a part of the divine core of each of us, which we must reveal… For the yogi, spirit is not separate from body. Spirituality is not ethereal and outside nature but accessible and palpable in our bodies

To be “reasonable” means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. “Be reasonable” means, practically speaking, do not trust your impulses, do not listen to your body, learn control, starting with your own sensuousness. But intellect and sensuousness are inseparable. Torless’s outbreak of sweating after two pages of the Critique of Pure Reason contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism. The understood mutual interaction of physis and logos is philosophy, not what is spoken.

Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.

This was the most difficult, the most extraordinary transition. Her body had been a source of shame and disgust; to engage in activities with no purpose at all except to revel in their sheer physicality had first nauseated, then terrified, and finally liberated her.