Quotes from Alexander Lowen

To sell out the kingdom of heaven for power is a devil's bargain. It is the bargain that the narcissist makes.

Wisdom is balance, and a three-legged stance (old man), like a three-legged stool, offers the best balance. When one has become older, one knows that doing is valid only when it enhances being and that thinking makes sense only if it stems from feeling.

The living organism expresses itself in movement more clearly than in words. But not alone in movement! In pose, in posture, in attitude and in every gesture, the organism speaks a language which antedates and transcends its verbal expression

If being is what life is all about, why are we so afraid of it? Why is it so difficult for us to "let go and just be"?

suppressing a feeling doesn't make it go away; it only pushes it deeper into the unconscious. By this action we internalize the problem.

We cannot afford to be afraid, and so we don't allow ourselves to sense and feel the fear within us. We lower our brows to deny it, set our jaws to defy it, and smile to deceive ourselves. But inwardly we remain scared to death.

Every chronic muscular tension in the body has associated with it sadness, fear, and anger. Since tension is a restriction of our being, it makes us sad. It also makes us angry to be so limited. And we are frightened to show our sadness or express our anger, so we stay locked in a diminished state of being and tied to our fate.

The wounds produced by the traumas of our life may heal, but the scars remain. We cannot return to our original state of innocence. There will always be some limitation upon our being.

If being crazy means having a hard time adapting to the world as it is (a definition that I agree with), then society is crazy."1

Once we give up our true self to play a role, we are fated to be rejected because we have already rejected ourselves. Yet we will struggle to make the role more successful, hoping to overcome our fate but finding ourselves more enmeshed in it. We are caught in a vicious cycle that keeps closing in, diminishing our life and being.

psyche and soma [are] two aspects of a unitary process, one mental and the other physical, much like the head and tail faces of a coin. Whatever one does with the coin affects both sides simultaneously.

Restringiendo la respiración, el individuo neurótico reduce su energía y su vitalidad, y de esa forma logra mantener un control inconsciente sobre sus sentimientos, su ira, sus miedos y su tristeza. Como

This] shell . . . eventually becomes a tomb. The situation is truly tragic. To break out of the shell is to risk death but to stay in the shell, which is a living death, threatens one also with actual death, more inevitable but slower.

Two factors are important one is an ego that is weak or insecure. . The other factor is a flood of feeling that cannot be integrated by the ego.

To understand contamination in modern terms we should think of purity as innocence.

Una delle principali premesse di questo studio è che un totale coinvolgimento con ciò che si sta facendo è la condizione essenziale del piacere. Un coinvolgimento parziale ci lascia divisi e in conflitto. p. 12

Lo importante es sobrevivir y una persona tolerará el dolor y renunciará al placer para mantenerse viva.

if we suffer a loss of love as young children, the grief may still be in us. Children cannot properly mourn such losses because they cannot conceive of a replacement. Such a loss could be caused by the death of a parent, by loss of contact with one parent through divorce, or by parental rejection.

Such a loss is devastating to a young child unless there is a replacement.

The child can only react by denying the loss and living in the fantasy that the parent will return with love.

Mabel Elsworth Todd,The Thinking Body,

Bioenergetics is a way of understanding personality in terms of the body and its energetic processes.

The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person.

intellectualized insight alone is not sufficient to result in positive changes.