Photo by Nik Wilhelm

“The price we pay for alienating ourselves from the life of our own bodies is great. First of all, we lose the vitality, spontaneity, and creativity that comes only from being in touch with our organismic being. Our actions become repetitive, feelingless, unconnected to organismic need. . . . our lives become a ‘self-torture game,’ in which alien introjects battle it out with now-alien organismic hungers (Freud’s id). We become unsure of ourselves, confused about what we need or want, because we are without inner guidance. Unable to make discriminations based on anything other than what we have been socially programmed to believe or what other people tell us, we chase after one thing, then another. Fighting against our bodies rather than letting them organize our experience, our gestalt formation is weakened. Few of our interactions actually satisfy our needs, and so we come to trail a growing bag of unfinished experiences behind us, especially those involving the grief and anger our superegos chide us against expressing. Lacking appetite, direction, bodily satisfaction, self-esteem, outgoing energy, and a willingness or ability to express forbidden emotion, we become prone to depression.”

– Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology