Alexander Lowen Quotes

A person who doesn't breathe deeply reduces the life of his body. If he doesn't move freely, he restricts the life of his body. If he doesn't feel fully, he narrows the life of his body. And if his self-expression is constricted, he limits the life of his body.

Sexuality is not a leisure or part-time activity. It is a way of being.

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

As one grows older, the sense of separateness is slowly reduced. Old people do not live on an ego level. Their concerns are not about their individuality but about the river of life, the family, the community, the nation, people, animals, nature, life. They can die easily if they are assured that life will continue positively, for they feel part of the river again, and soon they will be part of the ocean. When they are very old, they no longer belong to our time and space, but to all time and all space.

Faith is a quality of being: of being in touch with oneself, with life, and with the universe. It is a sense of belonging to one's community, to one's country and to the earth. Above all it is a feeling of being grounded in one's body, in one's humanity, and in one's animal nature. It can be all of these things because it is a manifestation of life, an expression of the living force that unites all beings. It is a biological phenomenon and not a psychic creation.

Love is the feeling that emanates from the heart and extends through the blood to every cell of the body.

While the repression of a memory is a psychological process, the suppression of feeling is accomplished by deadening a part of the body or reducing its motility so that feeling is diminished. The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid. Suppression entails the development of chronic muscular tension in those areas of the body where the feeling would be experienced. In the case of sexual feeling, this tension is found in and about the abdomen and pelvis

We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water. By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere. If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist. In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss.

Spirit is not a mystic concept. The spirit of a person is manifest in her aliveness, brightness of his eyes, in the resonance of her voice and in the ease and gracefulness of his movements. These qualities are related to and stem from a high level of energy in the body... Sensing the harmony between the internal pulsation of our body and that in the universe, we feel identified with the universal, with God. We are like tuning forks vibrating at the same pitch

Mature love is not a surrender of the self but a surrender to the self. The ego surrenders its hegemony of the personality to the heart, but in this surrender it is not annihilated. Rather it is strengthened because its roots in the body are nourished by the joy that the body feels.

Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance.

Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it.

Unfortunately, most people do not stop to feel their tiredness. Faced with the pressures of life, they believe that it is a matter of survival to go on as they have been. Feeling tired raises a deep fear that they may not be able to continue the struggle. Many find it difficult to say, ‘I can’t.’ As children, they were taught that where there’s a will, there’s a way. To say, ‘I can’t,’ is to admit failure, which is seen as evidence that they are unworthy of love.

Despair is the only cure for illusion.

The primary nature of every human being is to be open to life and love. Being guarded, armoured, distrustful and enclosed is second nature in our culture. It is the means we adopt to protect ourselves against being hurt, but when such attitudes become characterological or structured in the personality, they constitute a more severe hurt and create a greater crippling than the one originally suffered.

If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.

It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.

Fear is another emotion that is strongly suppressed. 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.

The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.

Crying, that is, sobbing is the earliest and deepest way to release tension. Infants can cry almost from the moment of birth, and do so easily following every stress that produces a state of tension in the body... Human beings are the only creatures who can react in this way to stress and tension. Most probably, they are the only ones who need this form of release.

Bioenergetics is an adventure in self-discovery. It differs from similar explorations into the nature of the self by attempting to understand the human personality in terms of the human body. Most previous explorations focused their investigations on the mind.

No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error.

Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity in doubt.

The single factor most responsible for the disruption of the family is the automobile. Its full effect cannot be assessed. Modern life, as we know, would be impossible without the ubiquitous motorcar. It broke up the old family and community.

Are we not witnessing a situation where children are conciously rejecting their parents' value despite love and devotion given to them? The present situation has arisen because parents have failed to transmit a sustaining faith to their children. The basic reason for this failure is that the parents themselves lacked faith. Without faith, their love was an image not a reality, a statement of words not an expression of feelings

Life is not a mixture of matter and energy but energy in matter, bound in such a way that dissociation is impossible so long as the living process continues.

Above all, faith is grounded in one's body, in one's humanity, and in one's animal nature. It is an biological phenomenon and not a psychic creation

Death is the fate no one can escape. The question, then, is, How does one die? A person can die like a hero or like a coward. The difference is that the hero can face death without fear, whereas the coward can't.

A person with faith does not question its roots, for he knows that if he subjected it to the critical examination of his intellect, he would end up without faith. The same thing can be said of any feeling. You can analyze any feeling to death, but when you do that, you end up without feeling and without a meaninful life.

What happened to me is that as I grew up, I found that I was smart. My mother had insisted on that you see. Oh, but I loved to play ball. I loved the physical aspect. So you have one leg in one field, and one leg in the other and you're nowhere.

The path to joy leads through despair.

Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.

The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the action generation whose motto is do more but feel less.

It is a grave injustice to a child or adult to insist that they stop crying. One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary; but to humiliate a crying child is to increase his pain, and augment his rigidity. We stop other people from crying because we cannot stand the sounds and movements of their bodies. It threatens our own rigidity. It induces similar feelings in ourselves which we dare not express and it evokes a resonance in our own bodies which we resist.

Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.

A person does not choose his or her fate; he or she only fulfills it. We are bound by our fate as long as we accept the values that determine it.

I would describe a hero as a person who has no fear of life, who can face life squarely.

Sustenance for the infant and child is more than alimentary nourishment. The child needs love, security, narcissistic supplies -- however one may describe it.

In my opinion the hectic and almost frantic pace of modern living is a clear sign of the fear we have of being and of life. And as long as this fear exists in a person's unconscious, he will run faster and do more so as not to feel his fear.

The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid.

The only way you can make a marriage work is as free, independent people. It needs to be based on the good feelings that you have for each other, not on need.

The person senses what it feels like to be free from inhibitions. At the same time he feels connected and integrated – with his body and, through his body, with his environment. He has a sense of well-being and inner peace. He gains the knowledge that the life of the body resides in its involuntary aspect. […] Unfortunately these beautiful feelings do not always hold up under the stress of daily living in our modern culture. The pace, the pressure and the philosophy of our times are antithetical to life.

Power seems to confer on its possessor a mantle of superiority, specialness, and sexual potency, which the envious person desperately wants because he feels himself on some level to be inferior, unimportant, and impotent.

Not to fear a person with power--to profess, instead, one's love--is to deny that that person has power.

The ego exists as a powerful force in Western man that cannot be dismissed or denied. The therapeutic goal is to integrate the ego with the body and its striving for pleasure and sexual fulfilment.