At a recent event from the excellent Books at Noon series at The New York Public Library, I had the pleasure of seeing Eve Ensler — activist, playwright, author of the paradigm-shifting 1998 cultural classic The Vagina Monologues, and founder of the magnificent V-Day movement — discuss her harrowing, humbling, and ultimately hope-giving memoir, In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection (public library).

In this particularly poignant segment, Ensler who has spent decades working with women survivors of some of the most brutal sexual violence on the planet, cracks open our most painful mind-body schism and spiritual rupture:

I think — from my own life experience, and certainly what I’ve discovered in many women and men across the planet — is [that] when we’re traumatized, when we’re beaten, when we’re raped, we leave our bodies. We disconnect from ourselves. And if it’s true that one out of every three women on the planet have been raped or beaten, which is a U.N. statistic, that’s a billion women.

Many, many of us have left our bodies — we’re not embodied creatures, we’re not living inside our own muscles and cells and sinews. And so we’re not in our power, we’re not in our energy.

[…]

It’s been a long journey to get fully back into my body. And, certainly, what I’ve seen everywhere in the world is that the more traumatized people are, the less connected they are to their own source of strength, their own source of inspiration, intuition, heart — everything.

Listen to the full interview on iTunes and do subscribe to the fantastic Books at Noon podcast.

Without a sliver of exaggeration, In the Body of the World is a soul-stretching, life-changing read.

Ensler is also the founder of City of Joy, an infinitely heartening community for women survivors of gender violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, offering group counseling, sexual and economic empowerment, self-defense, and creative expression through storytelling, dance, and theater.