What if the secret to healthy aging has been inside of you all along?
The new science of embodiment tells us that interoceptive awareness—sensing the body from within—is crucial for our well-being across the span of our lives. In this eye-opening and wide-ranging book, Dr. Susan Sands unpacks the research to make a bold call to aging women to find safe harbor from the ravages of age right where they strike the deepest—in the body. Most of us in our heady, image-based society have never really gotten to know our bodies, to sense and feel our bodies from the inside out. Growing older can provide a golden opportunity to heal this mind-body divide. “As older women, we are actually primed to experience our bodies more deeply and pleasurably,” Dr. Sands says. “Our bodies are quieter and slower. Aging can open up a transformative new capacity to actually live in our bodies, allowing us to experience our full selves for perhaps the first time in our lives.”
“How can we manage the losses of aging? Stop focusing on the ‘outside body’ that others see—the one you may think is too fat, too wrinkled, or too saggy—and move your attention to the ‘inside body’ that you sense and feel.”
With wise and humorous insight, Dr. Sands calls on case studies, personal stories, and scientific findings to help us rewrite the cultural beliefs that put us at odds with our own bodies. Powerful yet accessible embodiment tools such as meditation, yoga, breathing practices, neural feedback, and guidance on exercise, sleep, diet and more make this a practical as well as enlightening self-care manifesto for women at midlife and beyond.
“This book is not about trying to look fifty when you’re seventy or thirty when you’re fifty,” writes Dr. Sands. “It’s about forging a healthier relationship with your actual maturing body—a relationship of respect, appreciation, tenderness, and yes, even love.”
Available April 26, 2022
Preorder at your favorite bookseller
“How can we manage the losses of aging? Stop focusing on the ‘outside body’ that others see—the one you may think is too fat, too wrinkled, or too saggy—and move your attention to the ‘inside body’ that you sense and feel.”
Susan Sands, PhD, is an internationally recognized clinical psychologist best known for her trail-blazing work on female development, eating disorders, body image and aging. She publishes and presents widely on these topics and is a core faculty member at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco and an assistant clinical professor at UC Berkeley. She incorporates Buddhist thought and meditative practices in her work with patients. Previously, she worked as a journalist, as a reporter, writer and editor, including posts at Newsweek and The Saturday Review. Dr. Sands lives in Berkeley, CA, where she maintains a private practice in psychotherapy and supervision of other therapists.
Advance Praise for The Inside Story
“We might wish to scorn our aging, but Susan Sands invites us to understand and—yes!—even relish our embodiments’ many surprises and gifts. This is a work of love to women.”—Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue and Bodies
"Rejoice! Susan Sands has crafted an exquisitely written, indispensable antidote to the typical self-help promise of triumph over aging. She deftly provides an integrated guide to navigating and enriching the aging process, utilizing a groundbreaking weaving of neuroscience and psychology that upends our fraught expectations about living in an aging body. With depth and grace, she turns our thinking about women aging on its head, challenging us to think about aging not as a problem or disorder but as a fresh and novel way to live in a stable older body. Sands invigorates our minds with the hope of finding solace and fertile ground through remaking and reexperiencing our relationship to our bodies so that we can live in and from them, in their ‘glory’ or not, as is." —Jean Petrucelli, PhD, CEDS, editor of Body-States and director of EDCAS at The William Alanson White Institute
“A delicious brew of new knowledge and fresh ideas, seasoned with a feminism that spans a long, rich life. What a treat!” —Valory Mitchell, PhD, coauthor of the 50-year study Women on the River of Life
“Now more than ever, we want to inhabit our bodies comfortably, honor our cycles, and consciously evolve. As we grow older, Susan’s book makes the neurological and psychological case for tending to the most vital relationship of all—with ourselves.” —Elena Brower, author of Being You
“Every woman over 50 must read this book; it will transform their lives. Dr. Sands’s core message is that women do not just have a body, they are a body, and being able to know and feel their bodies from the inside is the gateway to contentment and full acceptance of their aging. Supported by the latest neuroscience research and full of gripping first-person accounts of women struggling to come to terms with growing older, The Inside Story offers many practical methods—from mindfulness to touch, movement and yoga—for women to know themselves not for what others say they are, but for who they truly are, inside and out.” —Lewis Richmond, author of Aging as a Spiritual Practice