The Embodied Path: Telling the Story of Your Body for Healing and Wholeness

by Ellie Roscher

Overview

Our bodies have a story to tell. When we turn toward our bodies with curiosity and reverence, we honor those stories, embrace our inner dignity, and make space for more agency. Sharing our bodies' stories helps us feel seen so that, little by little, society's limiting master narratives can shift so that more bodies feel safe and beautiful and have a sense of belonging.

The Embodied Path tells more than twenty body stories, woven together with Ellie Roscher's own body story and insights, to do the essential work of resistance and repair at the individual and communal level. The book includes the story of a woman who sees her hijab as an extension of her body, a front man in a funk band who views his entire body as his instrument, a quadriplegic woman who became a lawyer to advocate for herself, and a transgender man who underwent a gender transition after birthing two children. It also includes profoundly simple, beautiful stories of broken bones, motherhood, sickness, and healing toward wholeness.

For anyone interested in creating more capacity for compassion for themselves and others by doing the internal work to contend with privilege and trauma, The Embodied Path invites readers to join in the process with discussion questions, writing prompts, and breath and body practices. The work is simple but not easy, yet the benefits are lasting and profound. Our bodies are always talking to us, trying to get our attention. Our work is to unfold, to listen, and to claim the truth about our beautiful, storied bodies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781506482828
Publisher:	1517 Media
Publication date:	12/06/2022
Pages:	255
Sales rank:	212,304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ellie Roscher is the author of Play Like a Girl and How Coffee Saved My Life and coauthor of 12 Tiny Things. She hosts the Unlikely Conversations podcast and teaches writing and yoga at The Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Writing Project, and Up Yoga. She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College as well as an MA in Theology from Luther Seminary. She lives in Minneapolis with her spouse and sons.

Table of Contents

Author's Note xi

Introduction xiii

How to Use This Book xxiii

1 Bodies Break: Living with Limitation 1

2 Bodies Connect: Expanding the Love 37

3 Bodies Persevere: Choosing Our Story 79

4 Bodies Transform; Embracing Our Ever-Unfolding Identity 109

5 Bodies Overcome: Surviving Oppressive Systems 155

6 Bodies Remember: Welcoming Ourselves Back Home 187

7 Bodies Transcend: Dissolving Internalized Boundaries 211

Conclusion 243

Recommended Resources 247

Acknowledgments 249

Notes 253

Editorial Reviews

10/10/2022

This contemplative outing by yoga teacher Roscher (12 Tiny Things) argues that the stories humans tell about their bodies can be restorative. She shares accounts of individuals who have lived through bodily crises, beginning with her own story about breaking her arm in a gymnastics accident when she was in eighth grade. She remembers that her self-pity turned to gratitude after a doctor explained how close she had come to having her arm amputated, changing the story she told herself about the incident. “Body stories” help process trauma, give lives meaning, and trouble the mind/body distinction, she contends. Roscher tells the stories of such ordinary people as Kevin, who faced sudden kidney failure when he was a 21-year-old college student, and Rebecca, who has used a wheelchair since she was seven and became a lawyer to call attention to the need for inclusive infrastructure. Reflection questions encourage readers to contemplate their relationship with their body, asking, “When was a time you did not feel at home in your body?” and “What has your body lost?” The narratives thoughtfully probe the relationship between the self and the body, as well as the role that stories themselves play in shaping how one understands disability. Soulful and wise, this meditative volume illuminates. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Soulful and wise, this meditative volume illuminates." ——Publishers Weekly

"A book that encourages compassion and kindness for all bodies." ——Library Journal

"Full of diverse perspectives, truth-telling, and opportunities to reflect, this book is a must-read for anyone with a body. It started healing something in me that I didn't know needed to be healed." —Heidi Barr, wellness coach and author of Collisions of Earth and Sky

"The Embodied Path was like attending a beautiful dinner party with strangers who become friends. I savored these stories and all the ways the telling eludes the trappings of competition and assimilation for the sake of something true and holy. This book is alive, a wellspring of gratitude, and the invitation to notice incarnation everywhere." —Meta Herrick Carlson, pastor, poet, and author of Ordinary Blessings and Speak It Plain

"In this thoughtfully crafted book, Ellie Roscher demonstrates the power of counter-stories. She provides tools and models for re-authoring our stories and, in the process, changing our relationships with ourselves and others." —Lee C. Fisher, PhD, director of the Minnesota Writing Project

"The Embodied Path is a brilliant, vulnerable, equity-seeking, cutting-edge exploration of life within our messy and beautiful bodies. Read it and fall in love with your own body, perhaps for the first time." —Dr. Jacqueline Bussie, author of Love Without Limits and Outlaw Christian

"Ellie Roscher is a sage story-keeper and unleasher. Bare, beautiful, and quietly revolutionary, her book unravels our menacing master-narratives about what a body is for and invites us to feel at home (again) in our own skin." —Erin S. Lane, author of Someone Other Than a Mother

"Ellie Roscher offers a vivid and diverse collection of body narratives, tangled with the twists and transformations that bodies endure. Readers will be challenged and changed by The Embodied Path and its powerful, provocative invitation to enter our own stories: the hidden narratives of suffering and strength held within our bodies." —Laura Kelly Fanucci, author and speaker

"Generous, informative, and moving, Roscher's latest is a key offering to those of us who are fully aware that we can do better. Perhaps most important, it is a reminder that we have always been capable of more." —Yi Shun Lai, workshop developer and facilitator at All-In Inclusivity Workshops

From the Publisher

10/01/2022

Roscher (Play Like a Girl) shares the story of her body in its varied iterations—from broken to transcendent—and weaves her personal narrative together with the stories of other bodies in an effort to textually transform embodied experiences into meaningful reflections and representations of identity. The book draws on the scholarship of activists like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, as well as the more recent surge of political, philosophical, and personal body writing produced since 2020 by scholars and activists striving to reclaim bodies during a time of fragmentation, isolation, dehumanization, and more. Roscher has crafted a collection interspersed with journal-style prompts and space for reflection designed to slow readers down so they can take stock of where their bodies were and are in time and space. Much like Rachel Ricketts's Do Better and Sebene Selassie's You Belong, this book encourages readers to resist disembodiment. At times, the author seems to veer away from the activist history of embodiment and focuses on a gentler, safer modality of self-care. VERDICT Overall, this is a book that encourages compassion and kindness for all bodies, which isn't ever a bad thing.—Emily Bowles

Library Journal