Bodily Awareness Quotes

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it... If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one's own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.

There is no substitute for learning to live in our bodies.

Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.

To live in this precious animal body on this earth is as great a part of spiritual life as anything else.

When I dance, I picture myself and the floor in my head.

Connecting to the feelings in your body brings you back into present-moment awareness.

It's nothing mystical, necessarily. It's nothing secretive. It's just what we do with our body we do with our soul.

Where's my heart at? Aw. Um, in my chest. I think it's in there - on the right hand side. Sometimes it's in my mouth and sometimes I can feel it in my stomach, when I get really nervous. So it's pretty physical.

I believe very much in sensual powers as a means of obtaining understanding.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

My asshole is doing as much to keep me alive as my brain.

Now sometimes I don't know if I feel well. Because I've been in my body for years.

Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.

Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened.

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

The man who has the sense of the body being himself cannot possibly worship God as formless; whatever worship he makes will be worship in form alone, not otherwise.

I think by and large, humans prefer to think of themselves as minds from the neck up. We don't really like to think of ourselves as another animal, another digesting, excreting, mating, snoring, sleeping kind of sack of guts. I don't think we like that. I think we'd rather not be reminded of it.

The difficulty is to learn to perceive with your whole body, not with just your eyes and reason. The world becomes a stream of tremendously rapid, unique events. So you must trim your body to make it a good receptor. The body is an awareness; and it must be treated impeccably.

... the body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question - they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty.

Normal birth to me should not be numb from the waist down and waiting for the doctor to tell you to push. There's a reason we feel it. There's a reason we need to feel it.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.

[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.

I had the landscape in my arms as I painted it. I had the landscape in my mind and shoulder and wrist.