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Mature love is not a surrender of the self but a surrender to the self. The ego surrenders its hegemony of the personality to the heart, but in this surrender it is not annihilated. Rather it is strengthened because its roots in the body are nourished by the joy that the body feels.

Alexander Lowen

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Alexander Lowen
Age: 97 †
Born: 1910
Born: December 23
Died: 2008
Died: October 28
Psychotherapist
New York City
New York
Love
Roots
Surrenders
Personality
Annihilated
Joy
Hegemony
Rather
Nourished
Body
Strengthened
Self
Mature
Feels
Ego
Heart
Surrender

More quotes by Alexander Lowen

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Sustenance for the infant and child is more than alimentary nourishment. The child needs love, security, narcissistic supplies -- however one may describe it.
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A person does not choose his or her fate he or she only fulfills it. We are bound by our fate as long as we accept the values that determine it.
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In my opinion the hectic and almost frantic pace of modern living is a clear sign of the fear we have of being and of life. And as long as this fear exists in a person's unconscious, he will run faster and do more so as not to feel his fear.
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Despair is the only cure for illusion.
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Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it.
Alexander Lowen
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A person with faith does not question its roots, for he knows that if he subjected it to the critical examination of his intellect, he would end up without faith. The same thing can be said of any feeling. You can analyze any feeling to death, but when you do that, you end up without feeling and without a meaninful life.
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Life is not a mixture of matter and energy but energy in matter, bound in such a way that dissociation is impossible so long as the living process continues.
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Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.
Alexander Lowen
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We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water. By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere. If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist. In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss.
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Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.
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A person who doesn't breathe deeply reduces the life of his body. If he doesn't move freely, he restricts the life of his body. If he doesn't feel fully, he narrows the life of his body. And if his self-expression is constricted, he limits the life of his body.
Alexander Lowen
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What happened to me is that as I grew up, I found that I was smart. My mother had insisted on that you see. Oh, but I loved to play ball. I loved the physical aspect. So you have one leg in one field, and one leg in the other and you're nowhere.
Alexander Lowen
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Sexuality is not a leisure or part-time activity. It is a way of being.
Alexander Lowen
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The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the action generation whose motto is do more but feel less.
Alexander Lowen
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The ego exists as a powerful force in Western man that cannot be dismissed or denied. The therapeutic goal is to integrate the ego with the body and its striving for pleasure and sexual fulfilment.
Alexander Lowen
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No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error.
Alexander Lowen
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Power seems to confer on its possessor a mantle of superiority, specialness, and sexual potency, which the envious person desperately wants because he feels himself on some level to be inferior, unimportant, and impotent.
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Above all, faith is grounded in one's body, in one's humanity, and in one's animal nature. It is an biological phenomenon and not a psychic creation
Alexander Lowen
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The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.
Alexander Lowen
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Bioenergetics is an adventure in self-discovery. It differs from similar explorations into the nature of the self by attempting to understand the human personality in terms of the human body. Most previous explorations focused their investigations on the mind.
Alexander Lowen