The Wakeful Body Quotes

“Naturalness has something to do with our wildness, beyond the civilizing influences of the everyday mind. The everyday mind fabricates. It plans. It manages. It interprets and seeks meaning. Its energy is tight. Naturalness is the part of the self that is unconstructed, spontaneous, free, unmade, and without plans or agendas. It is a part of you that is at ease in your own skin, and it does not resist being present. This part of you is aligned with the realm of the body and can be felt there. The body is, after all, an animal.”
― Willa Blythe Baker, The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom

“Somatic mindfulness is informed by one very simple observation: the mind is distracted but the body is not. The body is not thinking or ruminating. It is just feeling and being present, aware, and vibrant. In other words: the body is already mindful.”
― Willa Blythe Baker, The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom

“But there is certainly more than one kind of attention, not all of which are mindful. Scattered attention is distracted and restless. Focused attention is narrow and sharp. Vigilance, an attention-like factor, guards against distraction. Panoramic attention is open and diffuse. And somatic attention, the kind emphasized in this book, engages and even emerges from the body.”
― Willa Blythe Baker, The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom

“All the tension and darkness of our embodied life is held in a scaffolding of balance and symmetry, a natural order that is hard to see, like the ocean’s turbulence is held by its depths.”
― Willa Blythe Baker, The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom

“If meditation is doing its job, space opens within. In the space opened by practice, every memory and trauma will revisit us, every fear will surface. Our shadow will come out to play. This is not a sign of backsliding. It is a sign the work is beginning.”
― Willa Blythe Baker, The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom