The Wisdom of Your Body

Drawing on her doctoral research and clinical work, McBride invites her reader to learn the deep value and embrace the vital practice of embodiment. She lays out, in terms that are easily understandable, how the impact that embodiment or the lack thereof has on all aspects of our health - physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. She offers an enormous amount of compassion as she explains how our socio-cultural history has led so may of us (perhaps nearly all of us) to be disembodied, often without even realizing it. Each chapter concludes with "things to think about" and "things to try", inviting the reader to a posture of curiosity and experimentation, to listen to our bodies and learn what helps us to listen to them and settle into them. Overall, a very helpful book.

Thank you NetGalley and Brazos for an advanced copy of The Wisdom of Your Body.

Embodiment is a relatively new concept for me, having grown up in a faith tradition that emphatically teaches the body is bad. I wasn’t sure what to expect as I started reading, but as I read I could feel this book helping me change. There were times I could feel the stories and thoughts Hilary shared affecting my body, and that made it hard for me to read in those moments. But the permission is there to take your time. This is not a book to rush through, and certainly it will need to be read again as I can feel my body is still processing. I can see how I am already starting to think differently about the stress response in my body, how I view the role emotions play in giving me guidance, and, how my body is connected to spirituality.

The truths and concepts Hilary shares are incredibly important for anyone who feels the messages (feelings are bad, there is an ideal body, bodies are impure to name a few) we have been given about our bodies continue to cause harm to them. Bodies are good, sacred, and hold so much wisdom. Hilary shows us how we can return to that truth.

THE WISDOM OF YOUR BODY by Hillary McBride is that rarest of books -- accessible, wise, and so powerfully expressed it stays with you. Versus powerful, lifelong messages and rules that keep us small and isolated, McBride reminds us that we hold the power in our own hands for who we are, how we express ourselves, and how we live well. Gently, compassionately, and lyrically, she reveals the false narratives that are so ubiquitous, unexamined, and seductive that we fail to see them as the limiting, self-serving stories that drive so many to despise themselves and their bodies, to do themselves harm in large and small ways, and to fail to hear that small, still voice within that never ceases imploring us to listen to our own wisdom and act in alignment with our overall, long-term wellbeing. I felt like I'd shared tea and conversation with a wise, witty, funny, and well-spoken friend. I received an advance reader copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review.

I read this book slowly, and I'm sure I'll read it again because there is so much good information in it. I'd love to read it in a discussion group.

The Wisdom of Your Body is an excellent book, it is accessible, well researched, easily readable, and applicable.
Told through stories and research, McBride crafts a book to help people live more fully in our bodies. She addresses a wide range of topics: healing from physical trauma, feeling feelings, politicization of bodies, and sensuality and sexuality.

The chapters are laid out in a way where you could read them out of order, each chapter concludes with a practice or prompt to take what you read further.

Our bodies exist as part of us, but we are largely disconnected from feeling and trusting this part of ourselves. McBride brings light to areas we may need to heal from, grow in, and learn to inhabit. Highly recommend.

Hillary writes about neuroscientific research and the topic of embodiment with such balance. l don’t feel like I’m reading a textbook when I read Hillary’s writing. This book feels like a story, a compassionate love letter, and a narrative of her own lived experience in a body in a broken world. Trauma, body image, and dissociation from our bodies are such sensitive topics, but this book invites them to the table of discussion with empathy and care. Hillary gives prompts and questions at the end of each chapter for self-reflection which I LOVED. As someone who has spent years disconnected from her body - this book offers such wisdom and a healing balm. Our bodies are so damn smart. We’re on the same team.

🥺 I tearfully made my way through so many chapters. I’m a big fan of metaphors to describe concepts and this was packed full. Wow - I just don’t have enough words for this new release. @hillaryliannamcbride is a gift to the world - Congrats to her on this powerhouse of a book.

This book covers a variety of different topics and implications for life, addressing different ways that people can move into a deeper sense of embodied living and work through negative beliefs that they have about their bodies. At times, I felt like the author tried to tackle too much all at once, and that some of the heavy topics didn't get their due, but the range that this book covers will make it helpful for a variety of different people, since she isn't focused on just body image, or just sexuality, or just chronic pain, but covers all of these and many other topics.

Although this therapist writes to a predominately female audience, she also includes some examples from male clients and some applications for specific struggles that men are likely to have based on their upbringing and the social messages that they receive. I appreciate that this book isn't just about women's issues, and is more holistic than that. She also does a good job of writing from a Christian belief standpoint without making the book inaccessible to people who don't share her beliefs.

I enjoyed this book, and it gave me a lot to think about. I certainly didn't agree with everything that the author said, but she wrote in a logical and clear way, explaining what she meant by things instead of just making assertions and moving on, as many authors of body-focused books do. I appreciated her reasoned approach and gracious tone, and since people can easily take or leave what does or doesn't apply to them, I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in the topic.

Dr. Hillary McBride is a clinical therapist. In this book she brings together research, the experiences of others and her own experience to deal with the topic of how we view and treat our bodies. The quality of our lives change as our perspectives on our own bodies change. This book brings intriguing thoughts and insights to embodied living. One of the things that I've enjoyed while reading it are the questions to consider at the end of each chapter. I found it to be an interesting, thought provoking read. #theWisdomOfYourBody #NetGalley

My relationship with my body is a living thing. At the age of 37 it feels warm and familiar and conversational, but it is also a relationship that has been through the trenches—animosity and frustration in my teens, disconnection and estrangement in my 20s and early 30s. It is a relationship informed by comments directed at my body, but also messages about bodies in general, and influences that may not seem directly connected to embodiment at all—my desires as shaped by living under late-stage capitalism, my academic focus, narratives of what it means to be transgender and what it means to be successful and what it means to be human.

I say “relationship” because I experience my body as having its own personality, its own means of communication, that is a part of me but also not the “me” I experience as the subject in conversations with my body. Working with my body in this way has been healing because it gives me the chance to affirmatively claim my body as someone I want to be in relationship with—not just because I have to, but because I have learned to see the way we can nurture each other and cultivate a sense of belonging within the system of self, whether or not we are being affirmed or held by those outside of it. So in some ways it may seem that I would disagree with psychologist and researcher Hillary McBride’s fundamental lens in this book: the idea that you ARE your body. And I do find that lens a little challenging—for some of us, particularly with complicating factors like dysphoria, it may not feel particularly liberating.

But at the same time, I’ve tried the approach of “self as mind” as a strategy for gender self-determination, and it didn’t really offer me honest ways to process my pain and work through the complexities of embodied experience. It also tended to mask the pain of living as a neurodivergent person in a brutal capitalist world so that I didn’t see how burnt out I was, nor how much I relied on others’ approval, until my body was actually screaming at me. Although I’d frame it more as “I am, through my body,” engaging in practices similar to the ones McBride explores here helped me to re-engage with my body, but also to connect with my own truth, recover from mental exhaustion, and experience the world as an integrated system, a “self” with multiple ways to communicate, sense, process, create, and recover.

This book is quite a gem, as it brings together threads from an array of disciplines that you would otherwise have to discover on your own, with really accessible explanations and a focus on starting right where you are, working with your body and not simply trying to mentally understand or explain it. McBride offers practical tools and relatable stories from her own experiences both working with clients and personally struggling with disordered eating and a traumatic car accident. But she also centers the cultural context for why embodiment can be so hard, showing how the worldview of a separate body and mind serves exploitative agendas. And throughout, she provides examples for how to have the kind of conversations with the body I’ve found so helpful, as a gentle way to build and repair relationship.

What is particularly notable about this book in comparison to others I’ve read on the topic is that while it does cover things you’ll find in a lot of feminist texts about beauty standards and body image, it gets both more philosophical and more concrete in using a somatic approach to creating a direct loving relationship with your body and exploring the body through a number of lenses, including sections on trauma, pain, sexuality, spirituality, emotional experience, and systemic oppression. McBride packs a lot in here, from emotional regulation to models of sexual response to the difference between immanence and transcendence in our understandings of the divine to epigenetics and how trauma needs to be processed in the body. She explores many different frameworks so that you can zoom in on areas of particular struggle, and the prompts and exercises at the end of each chapter go beyond surface-level. While I love a lot of the authors she sources and would recommend their books for a deeper dive, it’s nice to have a one-stop shop!

You’re going to get a real sense of how our culture normalizes war with the body, and how important it is to simply learn to listen to your body’s story. What trauma is your body holding? Does it desire pleasure? Movement? Touch? What does that desire look like for your specific body? This approach may be challenging for some, but as McBride writes: "Change does not happen through trying to trick ourselves out of a story we have been groomed to rehearse through our developing years. Rather, transformation happens from the ground up: when we have a new experience of ourselves and hold our attention on it long enough for it to sink in."

While I will admit that in my personal experience, doing this work mentally did actually work somewhat—I moved from disordered eating to loving my belly, for example, largely through the “thought replacement” strategy McBride describes as ineffective—it took a very long time. And ultimately I relied on a certain degree of disembodiment to achieve the change, which ultimately caused its own problems! McBride frames embodiment as an experience of being fully alive, and in retrospect I can see how that mental approach of viewing myself as a brain in a vessel kept me from accessing some of the most beautiful parts of aliveness.

The approach McBride frames as curiosity, attention, sensation, and acceptance is a path to re-mapping self onto body that allows us access something truly divine, a kind of trust and belonging that no one can take away. Part of this is unlearning cultural scripts, but another part is learning to trust the body even if we don’t always understand it. When we see the body as a beacon trying to communicate with us, we can take that as an invitation, whether the invitation is to work with emotions in the body using some of the techniques McBride describes, to see pain as a message rather than an enemy, or to question the impact of unjust power structures in our lives.

This kind of reframe also allows us to be with what’s present, rather than focusing on goals and striving and trying to “fix” ourselves. This isn’t a book that bypasses the specifics that you might struggle with if you’re living in a marginalized body, grappling with pain and/or trauma. While McBride encourages us to come home to our bodies, she also offers ways to work with complexity and start small when we need.

While this is a solo-authored book, and thus there are limits to the perspective, McBride does make an effort to acknowledge many different experiences and the challenges they present. (For example, I felt very seen by a brief mention of how asexual spectrum folks might struggle to communicate need and desire for touch in a social context with a narrow understanding of how desire varies.) While you might also be interested in seeking out authors that go a bit narrower and more specific, I’d really recommend this book as a starting point for all sorts of people and body relationships, including coaches / therapists / healing practitioners who are looking for a good all-around recommendation for clients who are working on embodiment.

As McBride writes: "Regardless of our circumstances or what we have been told about bodies, remembering and reuniting with our bodily selves is a radical act to undo our need to earn our worth, helping us wake up to the fact that there is something sacred right here, in this moment, always present and always available. That connection to our bodily selves is available to us in every moment. We have always been embodied, but sometimes we need a gentle invitation to remember that."

This book is that invitation.

What an excellent, thought-provoking book! I loved the wisdom that Dr. McBride shared with us in this book. Each chapter centered around a different topic related to our bodies and embodiment, be it the history of how we became disembodied, the role trauma has played in how we see our bodies, spirituality, sexuality, etc. I really appreciated how the author blended deep research with personal anecdotes. This made what could have been a heavy book relatable and gentle. I think this would be a great book to read with friends or a small group, as there were reflection questions and practices to try at the end of each chapter. I read this book slowly, over a couple months, and can see myself returning to a chapter or two in the future as it is relevant in my life.

Also, I do want to note that a book about bodies, in our culture, seems like it should be a book for women. Though this book was written by a woman, it is a book for men and women. The examples shared are from both perspectives, so I think both genders could benefit from this book. Another thing to note is that though the author is a Christian and her faith is a theme throughout the book, this isn't evangelical at all and some chapters do touch on issues of how faith and misinterpretation of the Bible/cultural issues have really harmed people.

I am glad I read this book and will recommend it to others, personally and professionally.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for the advanced eARC. All opinions are my own.