The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living

by Hillary L. PhD McBride

Overview

2022 Word Guild Award, Culture and Life Stories categories
Globe and Mail Bestseller List, November 2021 (Self-Improvement)

Many of us have a complicated relationship with our body.

Maybe you've been made to feel ashamed of your body or like it isn't good enough. Maybe your body is riddled with stress, pain, or the effects of trauma. Maybe you think of your body as an accessory to what you believe you really are—your mind. Maybe your experiences with racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, or sizeism have made you believe your body isn't the right kind of body. Whatever the reason, many of us don't feel at home in our bodies. But being disconnected from ourselves as bodies means being disconnected from truly living and from the interconnection that weaves us all together.

Psychologist and award-winning researcher Hillary McBride explores the broken and unhealthy ideas we have inherited about our body. Embodiment is the way we are in the world, and our embodiment is heavily influenced by who we have been allowed to be. McBride shows that many of us feel disembodied due to colonization, racism, sexism, and patriarchy—destructive systems that rank certain bodies as less valuable, beautiful, or human than others. Embracing our embodiment can liberate us from these systems. As we come to understand the world around us and the stories we've been told, we see that our perspective of reality often limits how we see and experience ourselves, each other, and what we believe is Sacred. Instead of the body being a problem to overcome, our bodies can be the very place where we feel most alive, the seat of our spirituality and our wisdom.

The Wisdom of Your Body offers a compassionate, healthy, and holistic perspective on embodied living. Weaving together illuminating research, stories from her work as a therapist, and deeply personal narratives of healing from a life-threatening eating disorder, a near-fatal car accident, and chronic pain, McBride invites us to reclaim the wisdom of the body and to experience the wholeness that has been there all along. End-of-chapter questions and practices are included.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587435522
Publisher:	Baker Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	42,628
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Hillary L. McBride (PhD, University of British Columbia) is a registered psychologist, an award-winning researcher, and a sought-after speaker who specializes in embodiment. She formerly cohosted The Liturgists podcast (averages 4 million downloads per year), hosts the Other People's Problems podcast, and has appeared on other popular podcasts. McBride's clinical and academic work has been recognized by the American Psychological Association and the Canadian Psychological Association. She has a private counseling practice in Vancouver, British Columbia. McBride is the author of Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image and coeditor of Embodiment and Eating Disorders. Learn more at www.hillarylmcbride.com.

Table of Contents

Contents
An Invitation to Begin
1. Fully Alive: Exploring and Understanding Embodiment
2. How We Become Disembodied: Lies about Our Bodies and Finding Our Way Home
3. The Body Overwhelmed: Healing the Body from Stress and Trauma
4. Appearance and Image: How We See Our Body from the Outside
5. Feeling Feelings: Getting to Know the Emotional Body
6. You Are Not Broken: A New Perspective on Pain
7. The Body and Oppression: When Bodies Are Political
8. Pleasure and Enjoyment: The Sensual and Sexual Body
9. Holy Flesh: Reconciling the Spirit-Body Divide
10. Living as a Body: Embodiment Practices to Return to Ourselves
Epilogue: A Letter to My Body

Editorial Reviews

10/18/2021

Psychologist McBride (Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image) encourages readers to escape from damaged or harmful societal messages about their bodies in this insightful guide to being “embodied” in this “mysterious journey we each take from birth to death.” Weaving in research and anecdotes from her professional life, such as her experiences with an eating disorder and a life-threatening car accident, she draws on the work of fellow psychologist Niva Piran to describe a sense of “disconnection from our body.” She explores the phenomenon as it pertains to stress and trauma; appearance and image; feelings or emotions; pain, illness, and injury; sensuality and sexually; and spirituality, and in the context of the impacts of colonization, racism, sexism, and patriarchy, which she argues take their toll by making the implication that “you are less valuable in this society because of your body.” The advice to become “embodied” can be felt as either “liberation or ache” depending on the reader’s personal history, but the goal is a state of being completely present and connected to one’s self and others, with thought and physical exercises suggested to get there. McBride’s tone is gentle and instructive, displaying her amazement at how the body is made and of what it is capable. The result is an intelligent consideration on what and how to be “in” oneself in the world. Agent: Angela Scheff, Ferebee Literary Agency. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly