In Spirituality of the Body, Alexander Lowen provides a unique perspective about the nature of spirituality. Lowen views the body as the outer manifestation of the spirit and defines grace as the divine spirit acting within the body. Lowen shows that in the healthy individual, the divine spirit is experienced as the natural gracefulness of the body and is reflected in the person’s behavior. In a healthy body, movement, feeling, and thinking are integrated in grace and harmony. This book includes bodypsychotherapy techniques and exercises aimed at alleviating muscular tension and restoring the body’s natural grace. This spiritual grace involves a sense of connectedness to a higher order. In this state of grace we feel a kinship with all living creatures, and recognize our connection to our environment and to the world.
In Pleasure: A Creative Approach to Life, Alexander Lowen shows how the experience of pleasure or pain determines our emotions, thinking, and behavior. Examining the psychology and the biology of pleasure, he explores its roots in the nature of the body and shows that emotional health means that we are in a state of pleasure – that is, we feel good in our bodies. Lowen describes pleasure as the creative force in life and as the only force strong enough to oppose the potential destructiveness of power. In most adults, the struggle for power competes with the striving for pleasure, causing chronic muscular tensions, and undermining creativity. Through case studies illustrating the use of Bioenergetic Analysis, Lowen shows how people can reconnect to their bodies and restore a mind-body balance, regaining natural spontaneity and the capacity for pleasure and creativity.
Love, Sex, & Your Heart elucidates how emotional life and physical being are one, mutually reflective as two sides of a coin. Emotional life is tied to physical being and physical health is dependent on emotional well-being. Alexander Lowen’s insight into these powerful connections offers an innovative approach to cardiovascular health and the treatment of heart disease. Lowen examines the feeling of love as a physiological process in the body. When this process is frustrated, as in the case of heartbreak or isolation, especially during childhood, people suppress their pain by unconsciously rigidifying their chest muscles. This results in a chronic restriction of breathing, movement, and feeling. It is this tension that limits pleasure, and predisposes so many to heart disease. This book features the principles and therapeutic techniques to help people understand their fear of love, release chronic muscular tension, and become more loving. It is essential reading for health professionals and anyone interested in the health of the heart.
The Language of the Body, originally published as Physical Dynamics of Character Structure, brilliantly describes how personality is expressed in the form and function of the body. The body is the key to understanding behavior and working with the body is the key to psychological health. The Language of the Body outlines the foundations of character structure: schizoid, oral, masochistic, hysteric, and phallic narcissistic personality types. Dr. Lowen examines the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and body therapy.
The Way to Vibrant Health, now in its 3rd printing, represents over 20 years of Bioenergetic body-psychotherapy techniques. These unique exercises are designed to reduce muscular tension and promote well-being, allowing you to feel more joy and vibrancy. Bioenergetics is a way of understanding the human personality in terms of the body and its energetic processes. Bioenergetic Analysis is a form of psychotherapy that combines work with the mind and the body to help people resolve their emotional problems, and realize their potential for vibrant health and pleasure in all aspects of their lives. Bioenergetic Exercises help you experience: • Natural breathing as a t otal body respiratory wave. • Unblocking of the body’s holding patterns that restrict your energetic potential. • Increasing your capacity for pleasure and feeling.
The Voice of the Body is the first publication in a single volume of Alexander Lowen’s public lectures known as The Lowen Monographs. This historical collection of twenty-two lectures by one of the founders of contemporary body psychotherapy embodies the groundbreaking principles of Bioenergetics and Bioenergetic Analysis. Presented between 1962 and 1982, these lectures document the depth and breadth of Lowen’s work not otherwise detailed in his published work. Poignant and relevant to the challenges of today’s world, the topics include: Stress and Illness: A Bioenergetic View; Breathing, Movement and Feeling; Thinking and Feeling: The Bioenergetic Analysis of Thought; Sex and Personality; Self Expression vs. Survival; Aggression and Violence in the Individual; and Psychopathic Behavior and the Psychopathic Personality.
Fear of Life is an in-depth study of the human condition within modern culture. Alexander Lowen challenges conventional thinking and contends that neurotic behavior stems from a fear of life, and represents the individual’s unconscious effort to overcome that fear. But one cannot do so. One can only suppress or deny it, at the cost of spontaneity and being at ease. Lowen explains that being a person requires that one stop their frantic doing, and take time out to breathe and to feel. If one has the courage to accept and feel the pain and hurt, despair and sadness, and inner emptiness or anxiety in one’s life, one can heal trauma and gain pleasure, fulfillment, and joy….the object of Bioenergetic Analysis.
The Betrayal of the Body is Alexander Lowen’s pioneering study of the mind-body split. Lowen describes the way people deny the reality, needs, and feelings of their bodies. This denial leads to the development of the division between mind and body, creating an over-charged ego obsessed with thinking at the expense of feeling and being. This book illustrates the energetic factors behind the split, the factors that produce it, and the proven therapeutic techniques that are available to treat it. Lowen further explores the mind-body duality in the individual and its parallel duality and dysfunction in society between culture and nature, and between thinking and feeling.