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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”
― James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro

“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

“That is your disease: you want to capture life in formulas of your own. You want to embrace all aspects of life with your intellect instead of allowing yourself to be embraced by life. You want to create the world all over again each time, instead of enjoying it as it is.”
― Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork

“Jesus doesn't just want a relationship with us on the thought level. He wants us to commune with him, and one another, as embodied beings. He came as an incarnate, flesh-and-blood person who walked and talked and ate with us. God could have just sent us a PowerPoint presentation with five ideas to believe in order to be saved. Instead he sent a person. God in flesh, our hope divine.”
― Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World

“The little person inside you needs your presence to process the physical sensations you label as emotion.”
― Kelly Graham Tick , 365 Days of Compassion

“I set my bag on top of my thighs and take a look around. There are cameras here and cameras over there as well. There are old cameras and new cameras. Cameras to carry with you. Standing cameras, sitting cameras, cameras riding wheelchairs, yawning cameras, dozing cameras, sleeping cameras, chatting cameras, cracking-up cameras, angry cameras, passionate gaming cameras, music-listening cameras, begging cameras, ignoring cameras, swearing cameras . . . and even a camera on my insides filming me. The cameras don’t know who they are. When one camera shoots another, they too are shot. Cameras that are shot and are shooting each other. Surveilling and being surveilled. Being surveilled and surveilling.”
― Dolki Min, Walking Practice

“Angels are terrifying because they illuminate this choice: stay small or embody all the love that God keeps showing you is your birthright.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Embodiment teaches us about the power of resilience and the human heart to learn from our mistakes and align with our innermost truth, urging us to engage with life more fully so we can delight in this human experience.”
― Alison Litchfield, Roots and Wings: A Woman’s Guide to Embodying the Midlife Passage

“The journey through midlife, leads us to uncover the hidden parts of ourselves, to reconcile them, and to return to our origins, not as fragmented beings but as embodiments as our full, authentic selves.”
― Alison Litchfield, Roots and Wings: A Woman’s Guide to Embodying the Midlife Passage