We get off track. Capitalism takes us off track. You get off the "real" and get on the "wheel." The "wheel" becomes the winning and losing, the succeeding and failing, the "I will achieve." All that stuff becomes so preoccupying, particularly if you're born with low self-esteem, or no sense of yourself, or even if you're just born in the consumer culture. It's very powerful.
Eve EnslerEverything you deny is actually killing you on some level. You see something, you feel something wrong with your body, you pretend it's not happening, it goes on, it grows, it gets worse.
Eve EnslerFor me, so much of my life has been this attempt to find my way back into my body. I tried various forms, from promiscuity, to eating disorders, to performance art. And I think it wasn't until I got cancer, where I was suddenly being pricked and ported and chemoed and operated on, that I suddenly just became body. I was just a body. And it was in that, in that finally landing in myself that I really discovered the world in my body.
Eve EnslerIn America, we have a government that is now run by white nationalists, by billionaires, by incredible misogynists.
Eve EnslerI think to be honest, that being is inside. I meet that being in so many people that I meet everywhere in the world and when I do meet that being, in other people, what I want to ask is "How do we keep opening ourselves so that we can become as vulnerable and as willing to live in the deepest complexity and ambiguity and truth that we can?
Eve EnslerOne of the things I think about when we talk about a violence,and relationship to spirituality is that it seems to me when you take something from someone that isn't yours or you hurt someone else, fundamentally, you actually do that to yourself. You actually unmake yourself, you work against your own being and your own matter.
Eve Ensler