The Wisdom of Your Body:
Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection Through Embodied Living
By Hillary L. McBride, Ph.D.
Hillary L. McBride, Ph.D. is a psychotherapist and award-winning researcher specializing in women’s life issues and somatic identity. She is a speaker on radio, podcasts, and workshops dealing with a variety of mental health topics including sexuality, well-being, authentic living, and the resolution of trauma. McBride is the author of Practices for Embodied Living, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual trauma and the Process of Healing, Embodiment and Eating Disorders, and Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image. Her work has been recognized by the Canadian Psychological Association. Photo Credit: © Lily Glass Photography; used by permission.
Reading Difficulty: Average
279 pages
Table of Contents
- Fully Alive: Exploring and Understanding
- How We Become Disembodied: Lies About Our Bodies and Finding Our Ways Home
- The Body Overwhelmed: Healing the Body from Stress and Trauma
- Appearance and Image: How We See Our Body from the Outside
- Feeling Feelings: Getting to Know the Emotional Body
- You Are Not Broken: A New Perspective on Pain
- The Body and Oppression: When Bodies are Political
- Pleasure and Enjoyment: The Sensual and Sexual Body
- Holy Flesh: Reconciling the Spirit-Body Divide
- Living as a Body: Embodiment Practices to Return to Ourselves
Epilogue
* * * * *
This is an impressive work and probably the most difficult I have reviewed thus far. This is because the material the author covers is incredibly rich. And, because it is so dense with details, ideas, questions, images, and advice, it needs a very slow and close read; it should be both savored and studied as the author’s own sophisticated approach to using body awareness in somatic clinical psychotherapy. It’s so rich that I stopped halfway through and did a close read of the footnotes. (Yeah, I’m that kind of guy and it was well worth it.)
McBride’s definition of embodiment is important because it includes the social context—hearkening to the theory of embodied cognition, although she doesn’t mention it. She also makes the profound observation that embodiment through self-awareness is at once a state of being and a modality for healing. I have not come across this distinction before and admit it’s very elegant in its simplicity, power, and apparency.
There are other books on body wisdom, in fact, it’s a very popular subject extending back several decades; see my blog-lecture on The Body Wisdom Genre where I provide 39 titles dealing with body wisdom. What most of the titles have in common is their differing takes on how to utilize the principle of organismic self-regulation—a concept first devised by Walter B. Cannon (1871-1945) in 1932 as the now very well-known homeostasis concept and then later articulated in a somatic clinical psychotherapy context by Paul Goodman (1911-1972) in Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951).
McBride’s perspective on body wisdom shares some similarities with those books but is quite different in that she weaves in clinical acumen, heart intuition, and aspects of diversity making it a holistic work reflecting the levels of the Biopsychosocial Model.
McBride urges us to “re-member” our bodies. This is one of many, many other themes. For example, another key idea is that forgetting the body leads to loss of well-being, connectedness, pleasure, wisdom, empathy, and justice. To lose one’s body is to become a lost soul. Loss of body is not being fully alive. There are more themes running through these pages and just a handful chosen at random include:
- Restoring acuity of body awareness in what she calls embodiment as a clinical perspective and approach.
- Disembodiment is both personal and societal.
- Exploring and restoring one’s embodiment requires practice.
- Being wary of cultural messages that negatively affect body image.
- Realizing you are not your body
- Becoming aware when believing that appearance is everything
- Becoming aware when told in some way that you need to change your body because it is not OK as it is
- Becoming aware that you are brainwashed that the opinions of other people about your body are more important than your own
- Intellect is more important than the body is a false belief
Probably the most important theme of all is McBride experiencing a very serious auto accident. She uses her own case as a red thread from chapter to chapter to illustrate various points and, I am sure, to inspire the reader to work on his or self. McBride worked to transform her own pain and suffering into a healing process which now serves as a pivotal life event. In her own work she discovered that the brain-body system is adaptive and that her trauma could be resolved and integrated by working with her body. In this regard, McBride offers the tools which have been proven in the past to be the most effective:
- Talk your body and develop a relationship with it
- Practice grounding yourself as part of your health regimen
- Exercise choice and power over your body
- Work with your imagination and emotions
- Explore your stress responses and coping style
- Use your breath to center and heal
- Learn to become slow
One thing that caught my eye, as I myself have written so much on the subject, is her mention of the Tri-Partite Model of Body Image Influence (see my discussion in the blog-lecture entitled I Just Love A Good Theory I: Five Key Theories of Embodiment). McBride offers some lovely teaching about body appearance vs. body image conundrum so common today where body image disturbance is now a normative part of being human. She also devotes quality time to the dynamic problem of shame, especially in the family system along with the coping strategies of body positivity vs. body neutrality. This material has universal application, and I am sure she touched and inspired many readers in this section.
The closing chapters lead the reader down the avenue of sexuality, spirituality, and lastly somatic clinical psychology techniques. Again, the breadth of her narrative is most impressive and these chapters can serve the reader who is not educated in these areas with a quick, but practical introduction to the essential issues.
Closing Thoughts
McBride invites readers to join her in the re-discovery of their bodies. It’s an invitation to engage in your own healing. In reading her book, I was reminded of the old image that trauma/illness is being trapped inside of a locked box with no way out from the inside, but with the instructions on how to open the box printed on the outside of the box. McBride’s book is the formula for unlocking the box of suffering. Part of McBride’s invitation is to begin to experiment on yourself using awareness. All in all, this is a book about healing: the reader’s and the author’s. It’s also, as far as I am concerned, a state-of-the-art take on contemporary somatic clinical psychotherapy.
The last three chapters on sexuality, spirituality, and somatic clinical psychotherapy techniques are worth separate books in their own rights and I hope McBride is considering those possibilities.
Finally, I admire this work because McBride attempts to ground her clinical work in the scientific literature which has also been my mission: to emphasize empirical evidence to articulate a distinct perspective on somatic psychology, but no, as in her case, somatic clinical psychotherapy.
Again, a powerful and brave work from a brave and powerful young woman.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
References
Cannon, W. (1932). The Widom of Your Body. W.W. Norton & Company.
McBride, H. (2021). The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection Through Embodied Living. Ada, MI: Brazos Press.
Perls, F., Hefferline, F., & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York, NY: Julian Press.