The Embodied Path: Telling the Story of Your Body for Healing and Wholeness
Our bodies have a story to tell. When we turn toward our bodies with curiosity and reverence, we honor those stories, embrace our inner dignity, and make space for more agency. Sharing our bodies' stories helps us feel seen so that, little by little, society's limiting master narratives can shift so that more bodies feel safe and beautiful and have a sense of belonging.
The Embodied Path tells more than twenty body stories, woven together with Ellie Roscher's own body story and insights, to do the essential work of resistance and repair at the individual and communal level. The book includes the story of a woman who sees her hijab as an extension of her body, a front man in a funk band who views his entire body as his instrument, a quadriplegic woman who became a lawyer to advocate for herself, and a transgender man who underwent a gender transition after birthing two children. It also includes profoundly simple, beautiful stories of broken bones, motherhood, sickness, and healing toward wholeness.
For anyone interested in creating more capacity for compassion for themselves and others by doing the internal work to contend with privilege and trauma, The Embodied Path invites readers to join in the process with discussion questions, writing prompts, and breath and body practices. The work is simple but not easy, yet the benefits are lasting and profound. Our bodies are always talking to us, trying to get our attention. Our work is to unfold, to listen, and to claim the truth about our beautiful, storied bodies.
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"Soulful and wise, this meditative volume illuminates." ----Publishers Weekly
"A book that encourages compassion and kindness for all bodies." ----Library Journal
"Full of diverse perspectives, truth-telling, and opportunities to reflect, this book is a must-read for anyone with a body. It started healing something in me that I didn't know needed to be healed." --Heidi Barr, wellness coach and author of Collisions of Earth and Sky
"The Embodied Path was like attending a beautiful dinner party with strangers who become friends. I savored these stories and all the ways the telling eludes the trappings of competition and assimilation for the sake of something true and holy. This book is alive, a wellspring of gratitude, and the invitation to notice incarnation everywhere."? --Meta Herrick Carlson, pastor, poet, and author of Ordinary Blessings and Speak It Plain
"In this thoughtfully crafted book, Ellie Roscher demonstrates the power of counter-stories. She provides tools and models for re-authoring our stories and, in the process, changing our relationships with ourselves and others." --Lee C. Fisher, PhD, director of the Minnesota Writing Project
"The Embodied Path is a brilliant, vulnerable, equity-seeking, cutting-edge exploration of life within our messy and beautiful bodies. Read it and fall in love with your own body, perhaps for the first time." --Dr. Jacqueline Bussie, author of Love Without Limits?and Outlaw Christian
"Ellie Roscher is a sage story-keeper and unleasher. Bare, beautiful, and quietly revolutionary, her book unravels our menacing master-narratives about what a body is for and invites us to feel at home (again) in our own skin." --Erin S. Lane, author of Someone Other Than a Mother
"Ellie Roscher offers a vivid and diverse collection of body narratives, tangled with the twists and transformations that bodies endure. Readers will be challenged and changed by The Embodied Path?and its powerful, provocative invitation to enter our own stories: the hidden narratives of suffering and strength held within our bodies." --Laura Kelly Fanucci, author and speaker
"Generous, informative, and moving, Roscher's latest is a key offering to those of us who are fully aware that we can do better. Perhaps most important, it is a reminder that we have always been capable of more." --Yi Shun Lai, workshop developer and facilitator at All-In Inclusivity Workshops?
