Quotes by Alexander Lowen - Page 1

Despair is the only cure for illusion.
Alexander Lowen /
Cures
Despair
Illusion
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The path to joy leads through despair.
Alexander Lowen /
Despair
Joy
Path
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If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.
Alexander Lowen /
Ego
Ifs
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Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.
Alexander Lowen /
Conditions
Contact
Reality
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Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance.
Alexander Lowen /
Acceptance
Compassion
Self
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Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it.
Alexander Lowen /
Afraid Of Life
Masters
Control
Afraid
Master
Seek
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Sexuality is not a leisure or part-time activity. It is a way of being.
Alexander Lowen /
Physicians
Sex
Way
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No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error.
Alexander Lowen /
Errors
Recognition
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Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.
Alexander Lowen /
Needs
Suits
Theory
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I would describe a hero as a person who has no fear of life, who can face life squarely.
Alexander Lowen /
Fear
Faces
Hero
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The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.
Alexander Lowen /
Expression
Joy
Love Is
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Not to fear a person with power--to profess, instead, one's love--is to deny that that person has power.
Alexander Lowen /
Deny
Love Is
Persons
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Love is the feeling that emanates from the heart and extends through the blood to every cell of the body.
Alexander Lowen /
Love
Cells
Heart
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Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.
Alexander Lowen /
Attitude
Body
Feelings
Splits
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We believe it is bad or dangerous to be carried away by our emotions. We admire the person who is cool, who acts without feeling.
Alexander Lowen /
Cool
Admire
Acts
Carried
Emotions
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Doe
Fate
Long
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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
Alexander Lowen /
Faith
Animal
Psychics
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Feelings
Long
Memories
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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
Growth
Past
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Life
Long
Mixtures
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Feelings
Independent
People
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Sustenance for the infant and child is more than alimentary nourishment. The child needs love, security, narcissistic supplies -- however one may describe it.
Alexander Lowen /
Children
Narcissistic
Needs
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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 /
Action
Generations
Successful
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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 /
Committed
Motto
Belongs
Rightly
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Men
Goal
Powerful
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Depression
Doubt
Insanity
Play
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Death
Fate
Hero
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Envious
Levels
Want
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Running
Fear
Long
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Community
Modern Life
Would Be
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Mother
Play
Smart
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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
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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
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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
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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 /
Ocean
Air
Philosophy
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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
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Faith
Feelings
Roots
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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 /
Body
Needs
Stress
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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 /
Attitude
Hurt
Life And Love
Mean
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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
Alexander Lowen /
Love
Faith
Children
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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 /
Quality
Eye
Voice
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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
Animal
Country
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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 /
Believe
Children
Struggle
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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
Space
Animal
Rivers
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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.
Alexander Lowen /
Beautiful
Philosophy
Stress
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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
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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 /
Feelings
Long
Memories
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