Book Report: 'Your Body Believes Every Word You Say'

"Your Body Believes Every Word You Say : The Language of the Bodymind Connection," by Barbara Hoberman Levine is not an academically rigorous treatise, although it is packed with references, citations and authorities. Rather, it is a sincere, experiential, personal exploration of the potency of the words we use, the thoughts we harbor, and how these manifest physiologically, with many exercises and suggestions for improving your own self-talk.

She structures the material well, considering that she draws from such a plethora of disciplines, traditions and anecdotal experiences. To read the book is to be immersed in the understanding that body/mind/emotion are interconnected and mutually influential. This immersion is particularly timely for me at the moment as I go through this cleansing process. And of course, I have always believed in body/mind/emotional interdependence, yet I have long been aware that my self-talk is almost uniformly derogative and counter-productive, so I'm seeking all the encouragement and help I can get in actively changing that!

Some of the strategies may seem obvious, like diverting your attention elsewhere, or using affirmations, and the strategy of pretending - pretending you have already achieved your goal, pretending you have a better attitude toward something than you in fact do - is one that I grasp intellectually but still feel somewhat uncomfortable with. I know that there are always many possible ways to feel about a situation and I would like to be able to choose how I feel, but sometimes pretending I feel otherwise than I do seems like denial.

And in fact the most helpful thing that this book brought me was the recognition that in order to effectively counter negative feelings, you have to first recognize them. My tendency has been to stuff and stifle things that I think I shouldn't be feeling, not even acknowledging them, and I now see that this can lead straight to dogma and black-and-white thinking. Now, acknowledging negatives in order to dispel them seems kind of at odds with the 'pretending' strategy, but that's probably just me being picky. I also know that these things don't have to be internally consistent, as diverse as we all are.

It is a very readable and enjoyable book, and the author has definitely been successful in being of service through her experiences. One minor quibble is the typeface, which is somewhat hard to read and frequently mis-spaced.