By Hillary McBride
This book is a powerful reminder that we don’t just have a body, we are a body. We experience everything—our world, our society, our emotions, sensation etc—from within our bodies. It is time (or past time) to reconnect to our bodies and become embodied human beings! This book is about embodiment, presence, living in the here-and-now.
Hillary talks about the history of the body and how philosophy and religion have taught western society often to suppress bodily functions and feelings, elevating “mind over matter,” and thought or rationale over emotions, sexuality, even feelings of hunger and pain. Her book then defines embodiment and encourages and informs readers about how they can develop more embodied lives.
Hillary delves into bodily trauma and body image. She talks about the seven main categories of feelings: anger, excitement, sadness, disgust, joy, fear and sexual excitement and how emotion influences us even more than thought does. We need to learn to feel our feelings, acknowledging then, healing them, and expressing them healthily.
She delves into purity culture. Like the trauma chapter, this chapter had me in tears, reliving the trauma of purity culture that I still feel within my own body. Purity culture stunted my sexual development, resulting in sexual repression and prohibiting me from engaging in sexual relationships until much later in life. I appreciate her shedding further light on this topic and on how we can become more sexually embodied people as well.
Hillary talks about the political nature of our bodies and how our gender, race, skin color, disability, age etc.,—all of which could be considered bodily attributes—can experience political oppression and make political statements. I’m probably not explaining this well, so you really need to buy the book and read it for yourself, because this is powerful information to be armed with!
Overall an ingenious book that I would recommend to pretty much everyone in the Western world.