Embodied Healing Quotes

“This shift from intellectual to embodied compassion is at the heart of deep forgiveness, or what we call compassionate release that gives us the gift of not needing to fend off the ones who hurt us anymore.

It is a letting go at a different depth.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“...while I sometimes resist the work of writing I resist my own psychic suffering more, and writing has become for me a primary means of digesting and integrating my experiences and thereby reducing the pains of living. Or if not, at least making them useful to myself and to others.

There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“In any attachment encounter, there is both what we perceive being offered and our embodied response to it.

If we call to mind, heart and body three or four people with whom we've had particularly close relationships, how do our bodies respond to their offers of connection?

We can begin by being with muscles, belly, heart and breath. How does our body want to move?”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Sand tray can be an embodied conversation between our inner world and outer awareness, held and witnessed by another. Because of the tactile experiences of the sand and minatures and the symbolic nature of the figures, we have the opportunity to make contact with implicit memories that have no words. We follow our body's guidance in arranging the sand and allowing the minatures to choose us. It is a right-centric process that allows us to let go of meaning-making in favor of following our felt sense and behavioral impulse. Meaning may arrive later, but we at least begin, as best we can, without expectation to give our inner world the most freedom we can.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“This wasn't a cognitive idea, but an embodied anticipation and certainty about how things work that required her body to behave in a particular way.”
― Bonnie Badenoch