“One day I read a book and my whole life changed”. This is what Orhan Pamuk writes in his book “The New Life”. It is a difficult book, it cost me a lot of time and energy to understand it, if I did at all. But…Recently, I read a book. My whole life changed. Well, not really. Just that, everything fell in place…It is a book by Alexander Loewen called the “Fear of Life“. It is a book that you find under the category ‘Psychology’ when searching in Amazon. It is such a coincidence how I landed on this book… I am grateful.
After having read the book many things fell in place. Even my education on English language and literature. The book discusses the Genesis, the Fall and the Greek mythology extensively which are the core discussions of English philology, too.
I found this book because of tango. One day, I stumbled upon a blog called “Tango Principles”. The author was talking about a therapeutic approach called Bioenergetics and how it helped him overcome the tensions in his body. Being the curious person am I went on reading.
The founder of this school named aa Bioenergetic Therapy is Alexander Loewen. He has numerous books and he is the founder of the institute with the same name. I started reading him. A lot.
It is a beautiful book, which wakes you up to yourself and to life if you let it. A few years ago I may not have understood many things I read, but now everything falls in place… Loewen’s main message is that we cannot be happy if we ignore our bodies and operate only with our minds. Yet, our society and civilization drive us to do so and reward us when we do so. We are all after success, money, titles, possessions because we equate them to happiness and security. But are they really the equivalents of happiness? And if freedom is happiness, how free are we when we have all those things?
Loewen says says we don’t need much to be happy, we just need to ensure that our ‘self’ is aligned with our body. That is, listening to what comes from our heart, core and physical body and not mainly from the left side of our brains.
So true. I had to think back about my life and my past decisions…Everything I decided with my heart and ‘belly’ felt right and made me happy…All decisions resulting only from rational thinking turned out to bring me unhappiness sooner or later.
Why do we do that though? Why do we ignore our instincts and always go with the mind? Because civilization and acculturation educate us to do so. But then, Loewen says, our bodies are so much older than our minds. They are the products of millions of years of evolution, they have been through things. Our bodies know. All we need to do is to trust them more and let go.
Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease. Hippocrates
Reflections 
Insightful and deep as the rest of your blog, and as I expect you are Pinar!
Body and mind are so strictly connected, and we’d need to become more aware of our body signals if we want to respect ourselves and get closer to happiness.
Highly recommend practicing bioenergetic sessions as a way to release tensions we (all) tend by nature to accumulate in our body, Seeing is believing.
LikeLike