HEALTH AND WELLBEING.

The Body as Our Foundation. On Empowerment and Self Authorship, Part II. 

Agency—that enlivening quality that emerges through awareness of ourselves and our environments—gifts us a felt sense of self-authorship, and perceived capacity, the recognition that we can meaningfully shape our lives rather than merely react to them.

Agency, essential to our wellbeing, is an antidote to helplessness that can subsume us, moving us towards an inner sense of responsibility and assertion. One that may have diminished throughout our lives, through our exposure to heirachiral structures or other formative influences that challenged our capacity to develop freedom of thought, freedom of mind and of body. We may have subliminally absolved the notion that others are responsible for us.

Assertion which accompanies agency, offers a gentle counter to this. Gabor Mate writes about the qualities of assertion in his book When the Body Says No

“We think autonomy and freedom means the liberty to do to,to act or react as we wish. Assertion in the sense of self declaration is deeper than the limited autonomy of action. It is the statement of our being.”

Assertion in the felt sense affirms that our worthiness and our human dignity. It is the orientating force, not one that is forceful or one that offers us invincibility, but one within that helps us to reclaim personal responsibility over ourselves, over our health, our lives and our choices.

And of course, agency, awareness and assertion, is always tempered and held alongside the delicate and compassionate understanding of human vulnerability and that life is not linear- that agency can spring forth from other sources as the realms and capabilities of humans are infinite. And in the beautiful words of Martha Nussbum read on The Marginalian, reminds us that even as we develop degrees of mastery and independence, we never outgrow the fundamental vulnerability with which we are born. We remain, in many ways, incomplete and dependent—on one another and on an uncertain world. Thus agency represents this reality that strength and vulnerability exist aside each other.

22.nd Jan 2025.

Mate Gabor, 2003, When the body says no, the cost of hidden stress, Scribe Publications, Brunswick Australia.

Popova Maria, Oct 2012, Do Not Despise Your Inner World, Advice on a Full Life from Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, The Marginalian,https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/10/12/martha-nussbaum-take-my-advice/accessed online Jan 2026.