Alexander Lowen Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Life, Freedom, Moving

  Alexander Lowen (1994). “Bioenergetics”, Penguin Group USA

  77 Copy quote

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

  Alexander Lowen

  Attitude, Feelings, Body

  53 Copy quote

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

  Alexander Lowen

  Acceptance, Compassion, Self

  36 Copy quote

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

  Alexander Lowen

  Masters, Afraid Of Life

  34 Copy quote

• 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

  Alexander Lowen

  Eye, Voice, Quality

  35 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Ocean, Animal, Space

  51 Copy quote

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

  Alexander Lowen

  Sex, Physicians, Way

  62 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Faith, Country, Animal

  42 Copy quote

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

  Alexander Lowen

  Love, Heart, Cells

  41 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Children, Believe, Struggle

  32 Copy quote

• Despair is the only cure for illusion.

  Alexander Lowen

  Despair, Illusion, Cures

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Alexander Lowen

  Memories, Long, Feelings

  40 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Philosophy, Ocean, Air

  38 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Hurt, Life And Love, Attitude

  Alexander Lowen (1994). “Bioenergetics”, Penguin Group USA

  27 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Successful, Generations, Action

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Children, Pain, People

  9 Copy quote

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

  Alexander Lowen

  Love Is, Expression, Joy

  22 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Cutting, Past, Growth

  Alexander Lowen (1994). “Bioenergetics”, Penguin Group USA

  22 Copy quote

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

  Alexander Lowen

  Love Is, Deny, Persons

  Alexander Lowen (2012). “Narcissism: Denial of the True Self”, p.92, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Fear, Emotion, Scared

  22 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Heart, Love Is, Roots

  Alexander Lowen (1995). “Joy: The Surrender to the Body and to Life”, p.112, Penguin

  36 Copy quote

• The path to joy leads through despair.

  Alexander Lowen

  Joy, Despair, Path

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Adventure, Discovery, Self

  Alexander Lowen (1994). “Bioenergetics”, Penguin Group USA

  18 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alexander Lowen

  Stress, Needs, Body

  Alexander Lowen (2012). “Narcissism: Denial of the True Self”, p.112, Simon and Schuster

  20 Copy quote

• If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.

  Alexander Lowen

  Ego, Ifs

  Alexander Lowen (1978). “The Language of the Body”

  27 Copy quote

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