Embodiment Quotes

“I seem to myself, as in a dream,
An accidental guest in this dreadful body.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“Life is a useless passion, an exciting journey of a mammal in survival mode. Each day is a miracle, a blessing unexplored and the more you immerse yourself in light, the less you will feel the darkness. There is more to life than nothingness. And cynicism. And nihilism. And selfishness. And glorious isolation. Be selfish with yourself, but live your life through your immortal acts, acts that engrain your legacy onto humanity. Transcend your fears and follow yourself into the void instead of letting yourself get eaten up by entropy and decay. Freedom is being yourself without permission. Be soft and leave a lasting impression on everybody you meet”
― Mohadesa Najumi

“But Sauron was not of mortal flesh, and though he was robbed now of that shape in which had wrought so great an evil, so that he could never again appear fair to the eyes of Men, yet his spirit arose out of the deep and passed as a shadow and a black wind over the sea, and came back to Middle-earth and to Mordor that was his home. There he took up again his great Ring in Barad-dur, and dwelt there, dark and silent, until he wrought himself a new guise, an image of malice and hatred made visible; and the Eye of Sauron the Terrible few could endure.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“Vulnerability is the least celebrated emotion in our society”
― Mohadesa Najumi

“When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on ice and gyrate crazily but do not fall, when I unconsciously counter-steer my way into a sharp bicycle turn, taking advantage of physics I do not understand using a technique I am not even aware of using, when I somehow catch the dropped oranges before I know I've dropped them, when my wounds heal in my ignorance, I realize how much bigger I am than I think I am. And how much more important, nine times out of ten, those lower-level processes are to my overall well-being than the higher-level ones that tend to be the ones getting me bent out of shape or making me feel disappointed or proud.”
― Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

“I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.
The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. When I really want to hear another person's story, I try to leave my preconceptions at the door and draw close to their telling. I am always partially listening to the thoughts in my own head when others are speaking, so I consciously quiet my thoughts and begin to listen with my senses. Empathy is cognitive and emotional—to inhabit another person's view of the world is to feel the world with them. But I also know that it's okay if I don't feel very much for them at all. I just need to feel safe enough to stay curious. The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters. Sometimes I start to lose myself in their story. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. As Hannah Arendt says, 'One trains one's imagination to go visiting.' When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit. So I ask myself, What is this story demanding of me? What will I do now that I know this?”
― Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

“The worst part of embodiment is being unseen.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater

“There's a difference between intellect and intelligence. Noise propagates the former, silence the later. Intellect is inherited, intelligence is inherent.”
― Drew Gerald

“Expressive arts therapy--the purposeful application of art, music, dance/movement, dramatic enactment, creative writing, and imaginative play--is a non-verbal way of self-expression of feelings and perceptions. More importantly, they are action-oriented and tap implicit, embodied experiences of trauma that can defy expression through verbal therapy or logic.”
― Cathy A. Malchiodi, Trauma and Expressive Arts Therapy: Brain, Body, and Imagination in the Healing Process

“Although our brain and nervous system only represent two percent of our body weight, they use a full 20 percent of oxygen we consume. When our breathing is dysfunctional oxygen supply is limited, and the conscious mind will work a little slower and perceive incoming stimuli as slightly more stressful and threatening”
― Anders Olsson, Conscious Breathing

“The partner of head is heart.
Body has no opposite.
In body, heart and head are one.”
― Georgi Y. Johnson, Nondual Therapy: The Psychology of Awakening

“Christ is the perfect embodiment of the Spirit of God. He is the Son of God, the miracle worker, the overcomer, the way maker, and our brother. As fellow children of God, our task is to learn more about His character and to become more like Him.”
― Benjamin W. Decker, Meditations on Christ: A 5-Minute Guided Journal for Christians

“Enlightenment needs embodiment. Wide-open insight needs deep-rooted instinct. As above, so below.”
― Kris Franken, The Call of Intuition: How to Recognize & Honor Your Intuition, Instinct & Insight

“My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I imagined when I was young some science-fiction version of humans becoming brains in jars as a good thing, that our bodies were some sad thing we were mired in rather than instruments of joy, connection, and vitality, the non-negotiable terms of our existence.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“Within their distinct niche markets, sex workers employ competing technologies of embodiment that in turn reveal how desire reflects and constructs different national formations in the global imaginary.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Impaired breathing, such as short and forced exhalation, makes the sympathetic part more active, resulting in shallow breathing, a tense body, increased stress, and fight or flight behaviour.”
― Anders Olsson, Conscious Breathing

“The evils of the world hurt us because they impinge upon our embodied existence, and they can be changed only through our embodied intervention in an actual world (not by 'thinking' of them in a different way, or by the 'treatment' of their effects on us through interference either physical or mental-- with the way we perceive them).”
― David Smail, Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Meditation means to let the word descend from our minds into our hearts and thus to become enfleshed.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith

“What I have to offer is not a gadget or a pill, but it is a medicine and it's always at your fingertips. It's the medicine of movement.”
― Rachel Allyn, Ph.D.

“The body tells the truth regardless of if we speak its language or not. ... Often my practice has focused on trying to meet my body where it is, instead of constantly trying to get it to meet me where I am.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“Your sensual growth and evolution isn’t a mental journey, it’s an embodiment journey that leads into expansive energetics or new levels of ecstasy.”
― Lebo Grand

“All flesh is grasse, is not onely metaphorically, but literally true, for all those creatures which we behold, are but the hearbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves. Nay further, we are what we all abhorre, Antropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouths: this frame wee look upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured our selves and yet do live and remaine our selves.”
― Thomas Browne, Urne Burial

“But the world might guess it; and I will not bare my soul to their shallow, prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry--too much of myself!”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“When I feel the steadiness of ground beneath my feet, the wind in my hair, the warmth of a fire, snowflakes melting on my nose, I recognize that I’m more than just a brain, more than my thoughts or self-definition. Instead of defining myself narrowly, I begin to expand.”
― Amanda W. Jenkins, Go From Hustle to Flow: Yoga + Mindset Practice to Release Overwhelm, Cultivate Peace + Redefine Success

“To heal we must feel. All people, all bodies, all feelings.”
― Rachel Allyn, Ph.D.

“I’m here to show women how to be the full embodiment of dreams of ecstasy.”
― Lebo Grand

“Winnie felt better in the sunlight. She let her hand rest on the tree's ropy trunk. The bark was smooth beneath her fingers. These were the breed of strangling ficus that spent two hundred years braiding their bodies around a host tree, killing it while gradually assuming its form. Parasite, doppelgänger, sarcophagus. Winnie admired it. What she wished, she reflected dreamily, her whole back now leaning against the tree, was for the same thing to happen to her. For the new self she'd hoped she would become in Saigon a better self, a banyan self, resilient and impenetrable to encase Old Winnie completely in its cage-like lattice of roots and then let her wither away inside. She wanted there to be no trace left of that thirteen-year-old girl that Dr. Sang had remembered.”
― Violet Kupersmith, Build Your House Around My Body

“On good nights, Winnie managed to glean five nonconsecutive hours of a shallow and unsatisfying slumber. But those nights were
rare. Usually, Winnie was wide awake between midnight and dawn and
passed the time by staring at the street below the apartment. Her room did not have its own balcony, just one window outfitted with a cage-like lattice designed to keep out burglars. When the afternoon sun came through at the right angle it created shadowy tessellations on her bed, and Winnie would lie down and position herself so that the scales of light would be cast onto her own skin. After dark, she climbed up and perched motionless on the sill for hours with her legs poking out through the bars, until her lower half went numb. She liked the feeling of having nothing beneath her feet while she was three stories high. It allowed her to pretend for a moment that she was no longer a girl, just a hovering, discorporate displacement of night sky. Safely concealed by the treetops, she could clock the nocturnal comings and goings of the trash collectors and grilled-squid carts and irresponsible, drunk revelers driving home from bars, occasionally wobbling off the road and crashing into a utility pole.”
― Violet Kupersmith

“I have no Life but this—
To lead it here—
Nor any Death—but lest
Dispelled from there—

Nor tie to Earths to come—
Nor Action new—
Except through this extent—
The Realm of you—”
― Emily Dickinson