… the body itself can be a hermitage when I have embraced it as quite simply the place where I know I shall meet God […] there is no individual soul in the abstract, only the human material of my body, my words, my memories; my gifts, my weaknesses. […] Only the body saves the soul. Rowan Williams: Silence & Honey Cakes
Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Helene Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa
The key goal in spirituality and human evolution is to develop a consciousness potential within the entire human organism. Cut off from the knowing that is proper to our bodies, we lose that integral awareness through which we can resonate as living cells within a Larger Cosmic Organism. Peter A Campbell & Edwin M McMahon: Bio-Spirituality
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Mary Oliver: Dream Work
The living body is thus the very possibility of contact, not just with others but with oneself – the very possibility of reflection and thought. David Abram: The Spell of the Sensuous
We are much more conscious than our predecessors that we are body, not an ‘I’ possessing a soul and a body. I am soul, I am body; and not more soul than body. What is more, I can have absolutely no knowledge save what comes to me through the body. Ruth Burrows: Guidelines for Mystical Prayer
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle in not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on the earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child – our own two eyes. All is miracle. Thich Nhat Hanh: Miracle of Mindfulness
Today people live at various distances from this bodily source [of information and innovation]. I tell therapists: When your clients say something important, put your hand between your own stomach and chest, and ask them: “If you attend here, what comes in your body about this?” Therapy will immediately deepen for those clients who are already close to this source. The others will ask: “What do you mean?” Eugene T Gendlin: Focusing
… when we take up occupation of the site of our bodies in stillness before God. We are granted a place to be, simply in virtue of being there as material beings made by God: the physical act of drawing breath becomes an affirmation of my receiving of the gift of my place, an acknowledgement that I am ‘wanted’ by God in my fragility, my time-bound being which depends for its continuance on the physical environment. Rowan Williams: Lear & Eurydice
The ego is first and foremost a body-ego. Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id
I am my body. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendell: I Am My Body
Sculpture reminds everyone that we are human and that we are embodied, incarnate, that all your sense of self and being comes through the body which is only fully itself when placed, connected to an elemental world. Anthony Gormley
