38+ Alexander Lowen Quotes On Education, Religion And Freedom

Alexander Lowen was an American psychotherapist who developed the body-oriented psychotherapy known as Bioenergetic Analysis. He was a major figure in the Human Potential Movement and his work focused on the relationship between the body and the mind, and the importance of physical expression in psychological healing. Lowen's work has been influential in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, and body-psychotherapy. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Alexander Lowen on education, religion, leadership.

Top 10 Alexander Lowen Quotes

1. Sexuality is not a leisure or part-time activity. It is a way of being.
2. Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.
3. Love is the feeling that emanates from the heart and extends through the blood to every cell of the body.
4. Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it.
5. Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance.
6. The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.
7. 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.
8. Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.
9. I would describe a hero as a person who has no fear of life, who can face life squarely.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Despair is the only cure for illusion.
• If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.
• The path to joy leads through despair.
• No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error.
• Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.

Alexander Lowen Quotes About Love

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

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

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

Alexander Lowen Quotes About Life

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

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

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

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

Alexander Lowen Quotes About Body

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

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

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

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

Alexander Lowen Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Alexander Lowen

1. Alexander Lowen's work emphasizes the importance of physical expression to emotional health and wellbeing, teaching us that our bodies can be a powerful tool for understanding and managing our emotions.
2. His work encourages us to explore our feelings and emotions through movement and physical activity, showing us the power of connecting our body and mind.
3. Lowen's teachings remind us that physical and emotional wellbeing are intertwined, and that we can use our body to help us understand and process our emotions.