Joy: The Surrender to the Body and to Life (Compass) - Softcover

Lowen, Alexander

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140194932 ISBN 13: 9780140194937

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 1995

Synopsis

Dr. Alexander Lowen believes that the key to personal change is contact with the body. This book rests on the idea that joy is a natural state, a positive feeling of the body, possible only through surrender to the body by listening to its wisdom and what it communicates. The book reviews the essentials of bioenergetic therapy in the light of other therapeutic approaches, and teaches how to surrender to joy by using bioenergetic principles. It discusses aggression, disappointment, sexual abuse, the fear of dying and issues of spirituality as it attemps to make joy a more common experience.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Alexander Lowen is the creator of bioenergetics, which he has defined as "a therapeutic technique to help a person get back together with his body and to help him enjoy to the fullest degree possible the life of the body." Incorporating direct work on the body into the psychoanalytic process, Dr. Lowen practices psychiatry in New York and Connecticut and is the executive director of the Institute of Bioenergetic Analysis. He is married and lives in New Canaan, Connecticut, with his wife and son.

From the Back Cover

Alexander Lowen, famous student of Wilhelm Reich and founder of Bioenergetics, reveals in this book how to reclaim a natural, childlike state of joy through exercises that revive the body's vitality and liberate the energy of suppressed feelings. Using examples from four decades of clinical practice, Lowen shows how painful emotional experiences - from sexual abuse and fear of dying to the anger and heartbreak all human beings experience in life - are manifested in bodily symptoms. He then instructs readers how to listen for and answer the unique signals in the body that serve as internal cries for freedom. The vibrant health that results has a wide range of holistic benefits for the total being including enhanced sexual pleasure and heightened spirituality. Joy, the culmination of Lowen's life work, is a wonderfully hopeful and transformational guide from one of the pioneers of body/mind therapy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140194932
• ISBN 13: 9780140194937
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352