Janet Adler (1941 - 2023)

Authentic Movement pioneer Janet Adler passed away on July 19, 2023.

Here’s a beautiful tribute by photographer Jens Wazel, to be found on his YouTube channel, Jens Wazel Photography, where you can find a longer interview with her as well:

That same day, working on Charlotte Selver’s biography, I wrote about Janet’s memories of her. I’d had an email exchange with Janet just a few weeks ago, and I’m so touched that she would have taken the time to respond to several emails from me promptly and generously, only weeks before her death.

I had contacted Janet to ask about her memories of working with Charlotte and also about her teacher Mary Whitehouse, whose Los Angeles studio Charlotte used in the early 1960s, when Mary Whitehouse also took workshops with Charlotte.

Here is some of what Janet shared with me about workshops she took in the early 1970s on Monhegan Island in Maine: “What an amazing experience to be teetering out on the edges of giant rocks, in some unusual precarious position, being asked by Charlotte to feel the space between our fingers! Inside the old school house I remember her sitting in front of all of us, using the giant hearing device as she listened to our questions and responded, always with her wondrous smile.”

Some 15 years later they met again. “I remember when I moved from the east coast with my young sons to Sebastopol, CA, one of the first things I did once settled, was to find Charlotte. I wrote to her at Green Gulch. She was prompt in replying and asked me to come for tea in her apartment there. I vividly see her, already her torso arching forward into a curved shape, so as she spoke I had to listen well as her head was just above the tea tray. I somehow did not know that she and Mary Whitehouse were colleagues, friends maybe, so I was surprised and very touched as she told me that the first thing she would do every Spring when she and Charles arrived on Monhegan Island for a summer of teaching, was to go to Mary’s grave and brush off the debris gathered on her stone from winter storms. Such a loving, ancient gesture…..Mary, a beloved teacher of mine, asked to be buried there because of her deep memories of spending childhood summers on that island.”

A Conversation with Stanley Keleman

This is a short excerpt of my interview with Stanley Keleman in which he talks about his connection with Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, his understanding of the differences between his and Charlotte’s approach, New York City in the 50s, the revolution in the humanistic movement at that time and Charlotte Selver’s place in this movement.

You can also listen to the full, unedited interview here:

Berkeley, October 16, 2008

Stefan Laeng: You told me that you met Charles even before Charlotte. Was that in a Reichian or Lowen circle?

Stanley Keleman: I met Charles through a woman that I was seriously dating, I’m thinking of the dates – maybe ’58, 1958, ’59 at the latest. And she invited me to one of Charley Brooks’ famous parties.

SL: You call him Charley Brooks.

SK: He lived in the Village then, and he was a first class woodworker. These parties were salons; they were top-of-the-line. And they were fun. And Charles was working his way through paying for his therapy with John Pierrakos in the Lowenian movement. By making his desk and chairs and stuff. So that was the connection. I don’t actually know how I met Charlotte, but Charlotte was not part of that episode of me knowing Charles. So it was Charley and the gang around him, and the dances, and the let’s say the rebellious psychological people.

SL: Can you tell me a bit about that? Because we know little about that.

SK: About the party or the group?

SL: Well the party and the group. I know Charlotte did talk about his parties.

SK: Well she must have gone to some of them. ‘Cause I don’t know any other way you would meet him. ‘Cause the parties – how could you describe these parties? They were not drunk parties. I mean there was liquor, but they were not drunken parties. And there was food. And there was irreverent talk about the nature of life, society, condemnation (?) and the exploration of sexual reality and sense reality, and whatever we want to call the life of the body. As I remember it, Charlotte had a reputation coming through the Korzybski movement, whom I knew people in the Korzybski movement, and Read – Herbert Read and Erich Fromm. She ran these sensory workshops, I think Erich Fromm, which I – I never met him – sent people and supported Charlotte. But it was – it came from – an influence besides Gindler was the Korzybski movement, which at one time was extremely powerful in the States. I don’t know if you know that, but a lot of hot shot, upper echelon intellectuals in the social movement were involved in that. So I knew about Charlotte and her workshops through the people that I knew in the Korzybski movement. So otherwise there was a circle. And she did her workshop in a flat on the first floor – I’ve forgotten exactly what neighborhood that was. And her classes, right. Non-Aristotelian experiences. So I would say that there was this group of people, the Korzybskian people, the F. Matthias Alexander gang – not him directly but it wasn’t F. Matthias, but one of his disciples, I forgot his name, who came to the States, who was also very popular. And one of the Gurdjieffian guys. It may have been Orage, I’m not sure about that. So, it was through the Korzybskian, Orage entourage that one heard about Charlotte. And which, just as a little around the corner, like that, also Feldenkrais was a member of that gang, from the Orage side – from the, uh, Gurdjieffian side. And who else was in that package? Uh, Ida Rolf. I was at the session that Ida Rolf used Charlotte as a demonstration, and hurt her and she was hospitalized from that.

SL: Is that story true?

SK: That story is true!

SL: That story is true! I just spoke with Don Johnson yesterday, and we wondered, you know, if that actually happened.

SK: The story is true. It happened in Ida Rolf’s apartment on Central Park West I believe. And she used to give demonstrations for people, and I was there, and somebody would volunteer, and Charlotte volunteered. Now this is pure speculation. I thought that injury happened out of rivalry. But you can’t prove that. But Charlotte ended up hospitalized after that!

SL: What happened? Do you know?

SK: I think she loosened muscles in the shoulders – it was in the shoulder girdle, that she couldn’t move (laughs) her shoulders for a while. (Both laugh)

SL: You were in that session. That’s amazing.

SK: Well so was Annelies Widman and Charlotte Read, Herbert Read’s wife was there. There was another woman I can’t remember her name. So what I’m saying that there was quite a grouping of people coming from Korzybski and coming from the Gurdjieffian people and Erich Fromm was very strong, and Gindler was involved by reputation – she wasn’t there.

SL: But you knew about her. People knew about her.

SK: Oh yes. Her and Carola Speads was linked back to that. And Charlotte was a student of Karlfried von Dürckheim.

SL: She was not a student; she was friends with him.

SK: Well, she was also his student in his classes in philosophy, according – well I ....... only what Karlfried told me.

SL: Oh, I don’t know that.

SK: She was a friend. But she also was a student of him.

SL: Where would that have been, in Leipzig?

SK: Uh, he taught in Leipzig.

SL: ‘Cause she lived in Leipzig in the twenties.

SK: And he was – the whole idea of the Lebensraum – the living space – comes from him. And she took that. According to Karlfried.

SL: OK.

SK: I have to qualify that . . .

SL: Lebensraum – it’s not a term she used when I knew her.

SK: Well it was a term that, yes. ‘cause that term was prevalent – the living space of the human. The Lebensraum.

Charlotte Selver’s Work is the ABC of Being Human

This is an edited excerpt of a conversation with Don H. Johnson from Oct. 15, 2008

Don Hanlon Johnson, PhD, is the founder of the Somatic Psychology Program at CIIS in San Francisco where he is a Professor.  His lifetime of writing and teaching has been focused on the role the body plays in social transformation.  His latest books are Everyday Hopes, Utopian Dreams:  Reflections on American Ideals; and The Meaning of Life in the 21st Century: Tensions Among Science, Religion, and Values.

Members can also listen to an excerpt of this interview.

Stefan:  It seems to me that more than most other authors I have read in the field of somatics and psychology you emphasize the importance of Charlotte Selver and Elsa Gindler and of the German Gymnastik movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. How did you come to that understanding?

Don: If I were to list the three or four most important people to influence me, I would list Charlotte Selver in the group. And I would list Carl Rogers. What was really powerful about both of them was their radicalness in seeing a vast store of wisdom that’s pre-conceptual, by comparison to which conceptual knowledge has to be judged, not the other way around.  The two of them, and then Gene Gendlin in his ways, are the most radical people in really following that through.  I saw the radicalness of Carl and Charlotte as articulating a sound approach to human dialogue and human understanding.
Charlotte was wonderfully humble about being a student of Elsa Gindler, but I think what gets lost is her uniqueness. The uniqueness of Charlotte was not sensory awareness but her ability to question close to experience. I thought her questions were just amazing. And the reason that seems significant to me is that those questions open the work up to larger applications.

Stefan: I want to tie this in with something you said earlier in our conversation: that you often come from reading and listening to experience.  It seems that many of us in the Sensory Awareness world find that suspicious or dangerous.  It needs to be purely experiential. But that has not been my experience.  I also find that ideas often help me to experience. But often they tend to stay separate.  How do you integrate that?

Don:  Well, that is the big issue. I will talk about two alleyways in my life because they’re important in this question. What caught my attention in the spiritual tradition that I was raised in, which was Catholicism, was this notion of the indwelling of the holy spirit. There was this subterranean, although quite solid tradition in Catholic mysticism that what it meant to have the holy spirit indwelling is that the divine is in all of us and so all of us know the truth ourselves, and nobody needs to teach us anything.
I spent one whole summer reading all of the works of Thomas Aquinas in Latin, and to my surprise this is what he says.  He has this long treatise on the existence of God and after this long treatise on all these so-called proofs he says, what this really gets us to is the realization that we do not know God.  We only know God because we have this infinite capacity to ask questions and to love.

Stefan:  Did he not get in trouble with his own Catholic church?

Don: He was condemned shortly after he died for these ideas. And this is what the Inquisition was after, basically.  One of the main things that they were burning people at the stake for was that idea, because it was very anti-authoritarian. The revolution of the sixties in the church was mainly theologians going back to those kinds of readings. It was really saying – like there’s a quote from Charles that I quote a lot about trusting what we see and feel, that could have been right out of these people.

During my life, I have often rejected one authority only to accept another. Underneath, I was afraid at the thought of living in a world where there was not someone, somewhat like myself, who knew. But I have now come to feel that, to know what one is doing with life, it is no use to consult authorities. It is precisely through the veils which authorities have spun for us that our own ears and eyes and nerves must begin to penetrate if our hands are to grasp the world and our hearts to feel it. We must recover our own capacity to taste for ourselves. Then we shall be able to judge also. Charles V.W. Brooks (Reclaiming Vitality and Presence, p. 7)

Stefan:  In a way one could say that the core of Charlotte’s teaching was that we have the capacity to know.

Don:  Right. And the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola that I was a practitioner of – the whole goal of that was to get to a level where we were discerning that kind of experience. It was all a long preparation for Charlotte’s work, which was a cleaner version of all of that.
Another current, which was parallel, was my philosophical studies, where I really got into phenomenology and pragmatism. And of course Husserl, who has read the whole crisis in European thought as being detached from experience and from the body.  That attracted me in the sixties before I ever heard of Charlotte. And it made total sense to me in terms of this other current going on that Husserl was saying that all this brilliant proliferation of theoretical constructs that are going on in Western Europe had become untethered from experiences, and so the whole project of phenomenology is to get back to immediate experience.  But then of course the question is how? That was a huge question and Charlotte in some ways answered it.
I think Charlotte’s work is like the ABC of being human. It’s a fundamental work that is basic to being human, and I would like to see everybody having that course before they worry about the alphabet.
More and more developmental psychologists are talking about this terrible gap that happens between the infant at the preverbal stage and then when the infant starts getting introduced to language.  People don’t know how to handle this gap and so the child becomes alienated from the preverbal world. I think that early on the work is quite important. Developmental psychology is saying a lot of human problems are in that separation.

Stefan:  How does all of this translate into your work now?

Don:  I’m on sabbatical, and I think a lot about Charlotte, because one of the things that originally got me into all this work was the politics of the sixties. When I encountered these kinds of work I felt that they were enormously important socio-politically.  And it has been in some ways hard for me to implement that, because it gets very digested in a kind of self-care world of psychological and self-cultivation.  But I just came out of two seminars where I realized how powerful it is.
An old friend of mine from Yale runs an invitational seminar at Esalen called Global Potentials, and it’s about globalization in relation to poverty and global warming.  He gathers people from all over the world and they discuss those problems.  It was an extraordinary group of people.  There were people from China, Japan, South Africa, India, West Oakland, Europe, Russia and several other people, all involved in big global things. 
We had conversations from seven in the morning until midnight every night, individual and group. I came in the last morning and my job was to integrate, so I said a few words about my origins in getting into this work, about the connection between person and world, and how that connection gets to distorted and it makes it hard then to effectively work with other people changing the world if we’re all disconnected.  And then I just asked them to be quiet for ten minutes and did a simple sensory exploration with them sitting in their chair and with their breathing. And then I said each of their names – went around the group.  It just blew their minds. And I still don’t quite get it.  I mean I sort of get it. I can say banalities about it.  But it’s the thing that you probably are aware of from this work that people with very good intentions get so wrapped up in the talk world that there’s a certain disconnect from what they want to achieve in the actual world.  And just the quiet makes a huge difference.  And then the integration – what I had in mind about the names was, I thought the real integration is at the level of the people, not at the level of content.  So getting them to just have that quiet experience of each person’s name being uttered was kind of a sensory integration of the week that transcended content fascination.
Then I went from there to the University of Minnesota where I got invited by the Institute for Advanced Studies, which is an interdisciplinary faculty, to do a series of three days of seminars for most of the faculty.  They have a very large grant to do a yearlong project on the body and knowing.
I got there, and most of the people are connected in one way or another with agriculture, looking at international methods of farming.  And I thought, what the hell am I doing here? I found myself doing probably about eight seminars in the three days with various groups of people.  There was one person whose vision is reseeding the Great Plains.  He is organizing CEOs and farmers and scientists, looking at how you restore the Great Plains which have been ravaged by current agribusiness practices. He is terribly frustrated because these people with very good intentions just can’t work together – can’t get beyond the barriers or fear or fragmentation or whatever they run up against.  So there again I just did these really simple things: breathing, paying attention and all that stuff.  And there again they were totally blown away, excited and saying how relevant this is.  So it was one of the more extreme situations where I’ve seen my original intuition forty years ago was right that this work is indeed powerful and longed for in some ways. When people have no idea, and yet they are really good intentioned and they have open-heartedness and open-mindedness but are very wrapped up in ideas, it is really powerful.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen – “There is Always a Form – Charlotte Selver’s Form was Awareness”

A Conversation with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

by Stefan Laeng

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen is a movement artist, researcher, teacher and therapist. For over fifty years, she has been exploring movement, touch and the body-mind relationship. An innovator and leader, her work has influenced the fields of bodywork, movement, dance, yoga, body psychotherapy, infant and childhood education and many other body-mind disciplines. In 1973, Bonnie founded The School for Body-Mind Centering®, dedicated to the development and transmission of somatic practices based on embodied anatomy and embodied developmental movement principles. In addition to programs at her school, Bonnie has taught workshops throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. She is the author of the book Sensing, Feeling and Action and has several DVDs on Embodied Anatomy and Embryology, Dance & BMC, and working with children with special needs.

I spoke with Bonnie on December 12, 2009, at her home in El Sobrante, California.

Stefan Laeng: Tell me a bit about your work.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen: It’s hard to describe. The form is the embodiment process. With Charlotte, the form is the awareness. It’s not about any particular thing, and in that sense they’re similar. I always felt kindred spirit. I don’t know very much about Charlotte’s work. She didn’t know very much about mine, but there was that meeting.

I remember before our first meeting at Esalen*, I sent a video of four children that I was working with – maybe twenty-five years ago – and when she saw it, she said: “And she didn’t study with me either!” Our work was just similar. I remember once, when Charles was still living, we did something with sandbags. They gave me this sandbag, and I just felt the spirit was in the sandbag, but it wasn’t about sandbags.

Most of my memories of Charlotte are just playful and pure delight. One of them is my throwing Charlotte to the ground. I don’t know what we were disagreeing about – something. She wouldn’t listen to me. I would say, “Charlotte! Listen to me!” And she’d go, “Aahaahaahahhha.” I said, “Charlotte, you have to listen to me. If you don’t listen to me I’m going to throw you to the ground!” “Aahahahah.” So I took hold of her and I threw her to the ground very gently. We just had that kind of a playful connection.

We were always laughing. Once we went to this little birdhouse that she had in Big Sur on the cliff. I happen to not like heights and she just – was a bird. She loved that house. I didn’t even want to go inside. But going up to the house she was so happy, she was running. She was like a bird, flying up the path.

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Bonnie and Charlotte were part of a two-year training in Esalen on Somatics for professionals in the field.
From left to right: Michael Marsh, Don Hanlon Johnson, Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen and Len Cohen,
Charlotte Selver, Seymour Levine (one of the founders of psychoneuroendrocrinology, Stanford Med School); Robert Hall (the Lomi School). [ca 1989; photographer unknown]

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Stefan: That’s interesting you say she was a bird. I don’t think I’ve heard anybody say that.

Bonnie: Together we were birds – I wasn’t the bird; she was the bird.

Another time we met at a ZIST**-conference in Garmisch Partenkirchen in Germany. I walked – we didn’t know we were going to see each other – and she just ran, at this age, she just ran with her arms open. I think she left her cane behind. She had that light spirit. In that particular conference I brought out a hundred air balloons blown up and a hundred water balloons and spread them among 1,200 people. The person before me was Thich Nhat Hanh and everything was very quiet and peaceful. And then I brought all these toys and these balloons and the people went crazy. It was wonderful. And afterwards Charlotte asked if she could use the balloons for her workshop. So there was that playfulness that we shared.

Stefan: Can you say something about Charlotte’s place in the somatic movement, or the importance of her work.

Bonnie: I consider her one of the forerunners who prepared the way for me. I see her in the lineage even though I’m not in her exact lineage, I’m certainly in the lineage of the broader path. I also come out of the Laban work. I’m very influenced by that whole school which came out of Germany.

Stefan: She really respected what you were doing, though she no doubt had little idea of what you were actually doing. But one thing that I remember she said was something like: there’s too much form or dance or, you come from performance.

Bonnie: Yes, there’s a lot of form in our work. The form is very important, but it’s a changing form – it could be any form. There’s always a form, but her form was awareness. I mean, if you pick up something there’s a form if you are sensitive to what you’re holding. But I came from a dance background and working with children with special needs. I was certainly much more form oriented. But the essence wasn’t form, and that’s where we met.

Stefan: I don’t know your work either, but to me that question of form has always been intriguing, and it’s hard to talk about it. Charlotte certainly did not want a form in that sense, and she also certainly stayed away from expressive movements. That was her struggle because she came from that. With Gindler she said she had to unlearn so much. Before that she did Bode Gymnastik, which was very expressive and she had to shed that. Then, whenever she saw, or thought she saw, expression or form in somebody’s movement, she would want to work to shed that. But in my experience too, we cannot but express ourselves in some way. There’s always some kind of form and expression, and I’m really curious about that edge of being true, being connected.

Bonnie: In any form. Or all forms. That’s my exploration. But how one is the form, not how one makes a form.

Stefan: When you say form, what do you mean? Do you have particular movements that people do?

Bonnie: No. Charlotte gave up form where I went back to understand my form. Right now I have two yoga programs here in California. And one where we focus on embodying different tissues. In the yoga, we’re not creating a new form. It’s just whatever your form is, how do you embody it? What’s your style? It doesn’t matter. But are you just making a style? Or are you really a warrior? Is this a warrior pose or is this a loving pose? It’s very much about expression, but what is it when you are that?

Stefan: And how do we know?

Bonnie: If I say move your pinky finger, how do you know you’re moving your pinky finger when you don’t see it? You still know it. I’ve worked with a lot of dancers through the years. What is the principle for a dancer or athlete? That’s the same for a baby or a child who has severe cerebral palsy or someone with muscular dystrophy or multiple sclerosis or arthritis. What do we all have in common? This isn’t pathological.

These children that have severe challenges – people approach them from the place that there is something wrong with them. But they are what they are. That’s their form. Let’s honor them for what they are bringing into the world and what they have to teach us. Their form is perfect, not imperfect. I see them as my teachers. This is the place I meet them. And the same principles of movement and consciousness apply to them as to anybody.

How do we reach that level of being who we are, whatever that is? As soon as the egg and the sperm do their dance there’s a marker that goes to the membrane in which your immune system knows what is you, and there’s never been another marker like it, and there’ll never be another marker again. We’re that unique. So, how do we come to really know that marker, or that essential drone, if you think of music, that vibration that is our own?

Stefan: Would you want your clients to consciously remember? Or is it more about embodiment of that?

Bonnie: The grown-ups are different than children, because we do have a kind of conscious intelligence. We use that, but ultimately need to let go of it; otherwise you’re always witnessing, you’re not actually participating. There’s a level at which you feel the sandbag, you consciously feel it, and in a way you just forget about it. You know the sandbag. You don’t have to keep witnessing it. But in the beginning you would focus your attention because otherwise you’re just not remembering. It’s nothing to learn. And that I think Charlotte and I have in common – we never talked shop, by the way. We just played….
Maybe Charlotte thought of unlearning, when you said a form.

Stefan: Yes, the unlearning of what is extra, what is not needed, so that we then are free to connect with what is now rather than with what we have learned.

Bonnie: So it’s not a gaining from somebody else on the outside but from your own experience.

Stefan: Yes, I think that was really Elsa Gindler’s major turnaround, as I understand it. She came from teaching a form to say: if you really become sensitive to what wants to happen, what happens then? Rather than: Do this or do that. That exploration. It is really starting from not knowing every time. And I do hear that from you too.

Bonnie: Yes, it’s always the not. So students will say: “Well I don’t know.” I say: ”Great, just stay there.”

Stefan: When I first asked you to tell me about your work, your immediate response was what our response often is. It’s very hard to talk about it. It has a form, but it’s beyond that form.

Bonnie: Or the form is the process.

Stefan: So what is the goal of your work?

Bonnie: Just to enjoy the day.

Stefan: To enjoy the day.

Bonnie: Why not? Whatever you do. Because they can always get worse. Even when I was so very ill – not to say I didn’t suffer greatly – I still looked for what was in the day that was quite extraordinary. It doesn’t take away the suffering but it doesn’t waste it. (Bonnie was housebound for three years due to a collapse from post-polio.)

Stefan: In our work gravity is so important. I actually don’t call it gravity very much anymore. I call it the attraction of the earth, because gravity to me sounds like it’s a thing, but what it is is a relationship with the earth, the earth’s pulling on us constantly, and then our response. Gravity and then the support of the ground is so central, and was so central in Charlotte’s work. How does that play into your work?
Bonnie: It plays a lot. We are looking at gravity, and we are looking at space – which I know you’re doing too, but in a different way. We say, if you only feel the gravity, you can’t stop it. If you feel the gravity and the rebound, the anti-gravity, and the pull of heaven, then you have lightness.

Stefan: Charlotte never used the word space. Well, I shouldn’t say that. But that’s not something that comes to mind – space. She certainly worked with it, but not . . .

Bonnie: And she also had it. I think she was so spacious and light, and this bird quality, that gravity for her would be like the balance. But also the sun is drawing us.

Stefan: Tell me more about that. You also said the pull of heaven.

Bonnie: We’re in this position, we are the bridge between the earth and heaven. I mean, fortunately there’s attraction out there. Otherwise we would be chaos. We are rotating around the sun, and this is rotating around that. There are all these pulls. The moon is pulling on our fluids. We are under the forces of the universe. We’re spinning off the earth, but we’re also being pressed into the earth.

And we carry our ancestors. I don’t know about past lives. That’s not where my attention goes. But I know we carry all of the experiences of our ancestors. We have talked about genetics like gravity. It’s this thing that looks like this. But that thing was developed from experience with relationship to the world, and to the family, and to the emotion, and to the gravity. I always feel we heal our ancestors as well as ourselves. We’re a time machine or something. It all exists right now. I don’t know if that makes sense. So we also look at time. We are this collection and it makes a difference whether we feel it by remembering or by being. It’s not just: oh yeah, my grandfather was this and my grandmother was that, and we can trace back to seventeen hundred and something.

I’m interested because Hanna (Bonnie’s grandchild) comes from two languages that are getting lost – if you go to the generation before me and before Len and before Hanna’s other grandparents. The Okinawan speak Japanese now; they’re losing the roots of their culture, the Yiddish of our parents’ generation (except my father was English) – on my side three out of four – not the history but the successiveness is wiped out. How interesting, this little girl. If she goes back that far, the languages and the cultures are fading. And at the same time, all the possibilities that she has by this shadow of who she is.

Stefan: So in that sense, where we come from is really important because that’s – can we say, that’s who we are?

Bonnie: We carry all of those experiences. Whether or not we ever know our ancestors, our grandparents or parents or whatever. My parents met and were in the Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey Circus, so I grew up in the circus. After my mother quit the show when I was eight and they separated, and then my father, when I was fifteen, they closed the big top, I never wanted to go to the circus again. And then, when my mother died, the circus was in town. We went and I had no connection, because it was indoors. It wasn’t the stench of the elephants and the animals. There was something on television – Cirque de Soleil. It’s so boring to me. I see them doing these things. It has no meaning. And television has no meaning, because after this, there’s nothing they could do on TV that would compare – I mean these people were risking their lives every moment in performance.

This is why I would not want to take this form out of my existence. Where if I had a form that felt artificial – certainly there’s nothing more artificial than this circus getup. They dressed and everything was superficial on the outside, but there’s something real about death-defying acts. Inside they were risking their lives.

Stefan: So it’s very real in that sense.

Bonnie: Yes. It’s a paradox. So that’s an insight for me, when you say that, talking about Charlotte. I would not want to take away form. When I think of the man who led the circus band. He never missed a show in over fifty years. He would say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, and children of all ages, welcome to the Greatest Show on Earth,” and the band would hit up. Over fifty years. How could you erase that? Who would want to?

Stefan: This is fascinating. I like exploring form.

Bonnie: Yes. I know Charlotte had form. It’s just that she wanted it to be real.

Stefan: Yes. And no doubt we do have form. Or we are this form. And it comes from – from our ancestors.

Bonnie: And from our daily life, our environment.

* As part of a two-year training on Somatics for professionals in the field – see photograph.

** Center for Individual and Social Therapy, Munich

Bonnie’s website: www.bonniebainbridgecohen.com

Scleroderma and Cello

Scleroderma and Cello

A conversation with the late Carol Buck (Dec. 27, 1941 - Nov. 8, 2021)

From a June 14, 2008 interview by Stefan Laeng for the Charlotte Selver Oral History and Book Project.
I apologize for the relatively poor audio quality due to New York City traffic noise and a thunder storm.

Carol Buck (in the video below) plays her cello and talks about letting the sound vibrate through the whole person, player or listener. Filmed by Vanessa Meade at the 2015 Sensory Awareness Foundation Retreat at the Garrison Institute, Garrison NY.

Stefan: Tell me how did you meet Charlotte?

Carol: I wonder if I’m going to remember the exact time – maybe not, but the early seventies. And I was taking – studying the Alexander Technique with a woman by the name of – something, it’ll come to me later – a young woman, and she mentioned to me Charlotte. She said, “You should go study with Charlotte Selver. She will be on Monhegan Island,” she said, “and she’s quite old. She’s in her, like, early seventies, and she may not be around much longer, and you should take the opportunity to go meet her and take her class. I was at that time working on Broadway.

Photos by Stefan Laeng from the Sensory Awareness Foundation’s 2015 retreat at the Garrison Institute in Garrison NY.

I went to Monhegan in August of that year and I met Charlotte there. And I went to take a – what did she give – a two week class or something, and at the end of the two weeks – actually before the two weeks were over, I quit my Broadway show – that was a big deal to do that – and I was married at the time, and I told my husband that I was gonna stay a little bit longer, and I stayed I think five more weeks.

Stefan: So you didn’t go to a class here in New York first?

Carol: Nope. I went straight there. I met Charles and Charlotte. I stayed much longer, and at the end of the time Charlotte asked me if I would join the Study Group, her first Study Group, that was leaving in December. I just dove right in! And came back from Monhegan, and Charlotte of course and Charles came that fall to the city. They had their place. And I took classes with them. I expressed my intention to my husband that I was gonna go on this trip for nine months, and he said, “if you go, our marriage is over.” I went.

Stefan: And that was the end of it?

Carol: Yup. We’re still good friends. Yeah. So that was when I met Charlotte.

Stefan: Yeah. And the Study Group began at Green Gulch?

Carol: It began in Mexico. And from Mexico to California to Monhegan. We were three months in Mexico. Eighteen of us I believe.

Stefan: In different places?

Carol: One place. Barra de Navidad.

Stefan:  The whole time?

Carol: Yes. Classes every day.

Stefan: How come you got so into it so quickly?

Carol: Well, I had been diagnosed, in 1969, with a connective tissue disease [scleroderma], and I had been told that I would be very ill for the rest of my life. And that I would gradually lose mobility and that I should expect to be in a wheelchair. I found out some things myself working on my own, which were very sensing like.

Stefan: But before you knew Charlotte . . .

Carol: Before I knew Charlotte, yes. And – oh by the way, the woman who told me to go see Charlotte was Rachel Zahn – I just thought of that. I discovered basically that I needed to allow change. Cause the connective tissue disease was gradually hardening all of my connective tissues. And I discovered that if I pushed against that – if I hardened, you know, tried to stop that, it got worse. And that if I would just go – basically go inside and feel where the life was . . .

Stefan: How did you discover that?

Carol: Well, I had to! I had to. 

Stefan: That’s marvelous.

Carol: And I was gradually getting better. And I did massage, or I got massage, I did the Alexander Technique, and it was this woman who told me to go see Charlotte. And the first class, I remember sitting there, putting my hands over my eyes. It was like, yeah, this is it! There was no question.

Stefan: And how did the disease develop, or not.

Carol: It receded. … One of the other things that I had been experimenting with before I met Charlotte was in playing the cello was allowing the vibrations of the instrument, and of the sound, to travel through my inner (laughs), and that also felt very much like allowing breathing, and all of it just felt like of a piece. And I had – it’s funny, everything’s tingling now that I’m talking about it – I had had a doctor in New York who was the one who diagnosed this illness, and who basically said to me, he said, “oh you have this horrible thing and you’re gonna be in a wheelchair, and I hope you weren’t every planning to have children ‘cause you won’t be able to take care of them,” etc. etc. And then he walked out of the office, and left me sitting there. What am I supposed to do? Die? You know. And it was all a very interesting experience. I remember I finally left that room, and he was eating his lunch in the next room, and I thought ‘I believe there’s another way.’ And I began another way. . . . And Charlotte was extremely helpful.

Stefan: Yes. And she knew about you . . .

Carol: Well, I told her about it. I told her about it. At the time, Stefan, I was unable to lift my arms, I couldn’t brush my hair. So you see – it’s not something I think about very much anymore, you know, ‘cause it’s not there. I have some residual problems with my hands, but that’s it.

Stefan: But can you play the cello?

Carol: I play, but I was no longer able to be a professional. 

Stefan: So how did – what did you first discover. There were symptoms of what?

Carol: First my hands swelled up. That was odd. And then they got stiff. And then I got – I mean that’s what I noticed first since that’s what I used to play the cello. Then it spread.

Stefan: So is that – do bones fuse, or tissue . . .

Carol: No, tissue, it’s all tissue.

Stefan: And it’s progressive, usually.

Carol: Yes.

Carol: What I had was called scleroderma, which means hard skin. 

Stefan: So did you go back to the doctor and take . . .

Carol: No. No point. 

Stefan: Certainly not to that one!

Carol: Yeah. I subsequently did find another doctor who was a Viola player and who felt it was very important to listen to his patients, and he was just completely different than other doctors, and he actually had me come and speak to his students, his interns. And he would sometimes have other patients contact me. 

I met Charlotte in the early seventies, yes. And I did have my cello. Because one of – I mentioned to you about the vibrations going through – I found that if I would allow the vibrations to resonate, that the sound of the instrument changed in a way that would fill a space without effort. And it was after that time that I actually gave my debut in New York City at Carnegie Recital Hall. And I remember this feeling of allowing the resonance, filling the hall, and the fact that I was able to play still at that time. Charlotte had a lot to do with it.

Stefan: So that was after you met Charlotte.

Carol: Yes. I think it was in 1979, so it was quite some time after. And I used the sensing work quite a lot in my own teaching of the cello.

Stefan: You’re also a cello teacher.

Carol: Well, I taught for years. I don’t at this time.

Stefan: Yeah. Can you say something about that – how you used it?

Carol: Yes. It’s such a competitive business, the music business. And so much tension and pushing and striving. And what I often would do, working with someone, often people would come to be if they were going to be auditioning for some Philharmonic or the opera or whatever, and I would work with them. And I would take the cello away from them and ask them to sit, and they’re like, “What are you doing?” You know that kind of thing. And see what would happen if they would just allow themselves to sit on the chair, you know? And then have the cello come to them, and what did they feel. And then to draw a bow across the string without any fingering, again to begin to feel how enlivening that was without having to do anything, and build from there.

And it was very wonderful. Wonderful, both for me and for the students. And also, when you’re going to do an audition somewhere, there are so many things that you don’t even think about beforehand, like walking into the room. You’re walking into a room and everybody’s going to judge you, and people don’t practice that. So, I would also have them, without the instrument, open a door – what does it feel like to open a door and walk into a room? And then to just feel their steps as they walked into a room. What does breathing think about it? You know? I still do it occasionally.

I remember a violinist who was auditioning for the Metropolitan Opera. And she was an extremely tense, small person. She was very (demonstrates by inhaling forcefully and quaveringly), you know, she was very good. But I suggested that she take a walk over to Lincoln Center and walk around, and feel what it felt like to walk there, you know? And she got in! It wasn’t because she walked it – well, whatever – she got in.

I worked privately with Charlotte too.

Stefan: Oh you did? Tell me – you’re the first person to tell me that.

Carol: Really? I’m trying to put it all back together because it’s all of a piece, you know. . . . She asked me to bring my cello to the schoolhouse, and – ‘cause I had talked with her – I’d actually played in class, I think. And, oh yes, I remember playing a Bach Suite in C Major, and I remember at the end the foghorn went on, and it was the same note! And what I remember is Charlotte coming over and putting her hands on my chest, and she said, “You are still sounding.” And she sang the pitch. Which was still resonating. And she asked me that if I would come back with the cello and she would put her hands on my feet, and on my knees while I played, and I went back – on my head, you know.

She asked if she could hold the cello. She sat, took the cello, and I helped her to draw the bow. We did some work, I believe we experimented with sounds, making sounds without the instrument. She loved the music.  . . . 

Stefan: Could she hear the cello well?

Carol: Yes. I think that was part of the, you know, the fact that she could feel it, and because the cello touches the floor, she could feel it in the floor. And because of the way that I was working where I was allowing the resonance in my body, and I felt that what happened was that once my body started to vibrate, the air did. And this seemed to be what she was acknowledging – that she could feel it. 

She did not act seventy- whatever she was. She acted – oh, and she looked – years later when I went back with my kids, my son was quite young at the time, and we went several times, several summers, and I remember going back when Tony could talk. And we were coming to the dock, and Tony asked me, he said, “Mom, is that girl who is old going to be there?” 

Carol: Charlotte just looked this – the girl! She was the girl who was old. Which was such a wonderful description.

Part of her wanting to have me come and work with her was the music – she just loved the music so much – and because it was helping me to soften my tissues. 

Stefan: So this may be an unanswerable or stupid question, but – I mean you say you let the sound vibrate, reverberate in you – so you could also not do that. And would you say most people or musicians might not?

Carol: . . . I would say that there are those who do it without thinking. Definitely. And there are people who harden themselves against the vibration, and they want to act as a sounding board that pushes it out. But a sounding board actually vibrates, which was always what I would say. And it’s an audible difference. It’s really an audible difference.

Stefan: Would you say it’s noticeable to an audience?

Carol: I would say it’s noticeable. I wouldn’t say people would know what was going on. But it’s definitely noticeable.

Stefan: We’re right at the heart of what the work is about here – and Charlotte’s allowing for something to happen – that you can only allow. You can’t do it.

Carol: You can’t do it. You can’t make it.

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Body Image

[If you got here from the newsletter you might want to skip the first two paragraphs and continue reading at “That Charlotte would speak about ‘body image’…”]

I visited the archives at Cooper Union in New York City on March 12, 2020, only a day before the college closed its doors to students and visitors because of the Covid 19 pandemic. In a letter Charlotte wrote to her teacher Elsa Gindler in Berlin on February 4, 1957, I had read about a talk she had given as part of the Cooper Union Forum’s series on “The Self.” “Your ears must have rung on January 23,” Charlotte wrote, “because that evening I gave a talk at Cooper Union in front of 1,100 people. […] The theme was given to me [..], ’Body Image.’ A delicate theme! After I laid out the different influences leading to such an image, I was able, by way of our work, to slowly arrive at reality. What one can say in one speech is of course very limited, but it was as perfect (or imperfect) as it could have been in such a short time. It seems that the lecture made an impression. I received a letter from the chairman of Cooper Union Forum, asking for permission to broadcast the recording of the lecture on the radio as well as loaning it to other educational institutions.”

From the Cooper Union Forum’s Spring 1957 Program. You may recognize some of the other speaker in the series, such as Fritz Perls and Ashley Montagu. Clara Thompson was an other important person in Charlotte’s life at the time.

I had approached the archives some months prior, just as they were in the process of digitizing some 2,000 reels of tape. It took a few months but then the good news came – Charlotte’s talk was among them, in pristine condition. It appears that the lecture was broadcast indeed, resulting in copyright issues, which is why I was only granted permission to listen to the talk and take notes on location. Strangely, I then all but forgot about the visit and the talk. In part, perhaps, because my writing at the time was less about her teaching activity in New York and more about the falling out with Gindler shortly after that talk. The onset of the pandemic was probably another reason that the visit simply faded from memory. Only recently, when I was rereading the chapter that I want to share with you today, did I suddenly remember. However, though I now remember sitting in front of a computer at a white desk in a small office, I still can’t at all recall hearing Charlotte’s voice. Luckily, though, I did recover the notes and they really make me want to get a hold of that recording, so I just got back in touch with the archive. Hopefully, I will be able to share the talk with you in full sometime in the near future. For now I can share some of my notes. Maybe they’ll whet your appetite too.

That Charlotte would speak about “body image” at all will come as a surprise to some of us who remember that she strongly disapproved of the use of the word “body” as to something we have. She generally asked us to replace “body” with the first person pronoun I, saying something like, “it’s not your body, it’s you!” 

What’s more, in the talk she introduced herself as a “teacher of body-reorientation.” Sensory Awareness was not yet the name of her work, though she started toying with that term around the time of the talk. Really surprising to me was that she did not disproof of having an image of the body in the first place. Again, students of her will remember how she discouraged us from having images at all. But in this talk she recognizes the inevitability of having images of ourselves, calling it “one of the most exciting and revealing [topics] for self inquiry.” Rather than discouraging it, she sees her work as a process of inquiry leading to the dismantling of acquired imagery which then can lead to the building up of a healthy body image grounded in our own felt experience. 

Here are some snippets from the talk: 

“There are many more factors contributing to our body image. Everything which happens in our environment, our relations to other people, friendship, love, sex, people's attitude towards us. How they look at us, what they say about us, ideals of beauty, fashion, the dictates of the advertising agency, the tendency to conform to the current patterns of what everybody does, what we read, hear, and see. […] In our civilization, the influences from the environment due to modern means of mass communication, are very powerful. They may be healthy, challenging, and constructive, but often they are the opposite: Irrational, superimposed, artificial.”

“We are endowed with the potential which allows us to accept the challenge. We can perceive clearly. We can weigh out what we perceive. We can make the choice. It's all in our biological equipment. There are only some ifs: If we are alert; if we are responsive*; if we can play the game. This brings us face to face to the significance of awareness, of fuller sensory awareness in living.”

“The knowledge that our body is well equipped to gain accurate information, gives the feeling of security, while sensory awareness, which permits us deeper, more differentiated experiences, adds richness to our feeling of self. It seems to me that only when we are fully open for reception, with no brakes applied, so that the whole range of sensory perception is possible, a healthy balance can be achieved between our own mobilized totality and the influences from the environment, which we then are able to evaluate properly. And only then a healthy body image can develop.”

“To find out about body image in our generation means really to find out about the dynamic forces in our time, a time of extreme opposites. On the one hand, there are true efforts towards self realization, towards deeper experiencing fuller expression, towards more meaningful living. On the other hand, there are potent elements of prejudice, the trend to conform, the lure of luxury and fancifulness. There is superficiality, there is narcissism, which dilutes genuine substance and hinders growing.”

“Would ever a person whose sense of self, whose body image is healthily developed, who has faith in his own riches, want to throw off his own and try to become like somebody else?”

“Why do words have such an impact on us? The answering of this question leads us to the most basic issue, which influences our self-experience today. The separation of mind and body, or still more correctly, mind over body.”

“This is [her teachers Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby’s] contribution to the chapter of body image. First: That there are no ungifted people. When we think we are, we will find on closer examination that we are only hindered. And hindrances can be shed. Second: That one can sense how hindering tendencies come about and what one has to allow to let them be dissolved. Third: That any technique the human mind designs will never be as complete as what our own organism can teach us once we become able to listen to it.”

“So what we are aiming at is [the] unfolding of the human totality, and this time not neglecting the physical. The releasing and fostering of the natural capacity to grow; more health and freedom in our living; more responsiveness* towards our environment. A true work on bio-social relatedness, […]

“We gradually begin to realize in what an overstimulated way we are living; how many unnecessarily efforts we are making; how often we put on an act when we think we are genuine. Such recognitions are very helpful. We learn that in order to become more responsive*, the whole organism has to become receptive, antenna-like. We learn that we can't force sensations through straining or doing – they are wise, they come, they happen.”

“Many people's body image includes the concept that effort is necessarily for every activity, as though the organism were not potent enough to develop the energy needed. Even for relaxation one makes efforts. As one student remarked: "All this week I tried hard to undo my overdoing."

Interestingly, even though Charlotte had just spent an hour talking about the body image, she did end her excursion into the world of her work with words that suggest that images of ourselves drop away or become less static.

“We gain the knowledge that whether we are younger or older, at any time there can be a new beginning because every moment is a new one. The experience that I, a living being among other living beings, underlie the same natural laws and so am related to all living, is a really cosmic experience. As one of my students once explained it so beautifully, "The experience of all one." We have come home to ourselves, a home in which the reality of our living self takes the place of body image.” 

Coda: Just as I was getting ready to post this blog I heard back from the Cooper Union archives. The archivist sent me a link to the recording, allowing me to listen to it, which I immediately did. To hear Charlotte’s voice at the age of 56 for the first time (again) was a surprisingly strange experience – but I won’t get into this. I want you to have your own experience when the recording becomes publicly available for streaming on the archive’s new website. I’ll keep you posted. 

*Charlotte used the words “reactive” and “reactiveness.” I took the liberty to change that. I believe “responsive” it is more in the spirit of what she meant. The way we use and hear these words may have changed since 1957.

On Silent Levels

Below are the opening paragraphs of a chapter about Charlotte Selver’s encounter with General Semantics and how it informed her work. Charlotte had a fine sense for the use of language. Some of that came most certainly from being hard of hearing. It will also have been in part because English was her second language. I know from my own experience how that forces us to reach for words because they often don’t come by themselves. A third reason was her encounter with Charlotte Schuchardt Read and General Semantics in the 1950s. Because the chapter is as of yet unedited, I am not putting it on the web in its entirety. But I’m happy to send you a pdf. Just let me know. An email link is at the bottom of this blog.

General Semantics Seminar at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 1957. Charlotte Selver is on the right.

“Central to Elsa Gindler’s work was to become quiet,” Charlotte explains at her summer workshop in St. Ulrich in the Black Forest in 1992. “As long as we are preoccupied with ideas and expectations we cannot be there for what is happening, for what could be happening. Alfred Korzybski’s central question, stemming from his personal experiences of World War One, was, ‘why must there be wars?’ After years of research, which led him to the study of the origins of language, he concluded, ‘Because people don’t listen to each other.’” I heard Charlotte speak about Korzybski many times and while I always had questions about her understanding of the principals underlying his work, General Semantics, especially with respect to its neurological foundation—the imagery she used seemed to stem from her study of photography rather than neuroscience—I was touched each time by her explanation of “how it comes to the word,” as she put it. 

“Words do not exist in corpses.
Words only exist where life exists.
Words only exist where brains and blood and cells that live exist.”
Jeff Mordkowitz

“Sensory cells are like photographic plates. When light hits receptors in the eye, they are impregnated with a pattern of shapes and colors. This information spreads throughout the entire nervous system. We begin to perceive, to feel, we experience in our totality. This occurs, Korzybski said, on silent levels, that is, in complete silence. It is only after this that we begin to put our experience into words. But when there is all this thinking noise it is impossible for the impression to reach us in our totality, impossible to really perceive. To be really touched by what we see, or hear, or taste, we need to become quiet.” 

“What on deeper levels we all long for,
what we are continually aiming for in one way or another,
is a feeling of contact or 'continuity' with our environment.”
Charlotte Read

“But that’s just the beginning, that’s just getting ready,” Charlotte added, “because once there is seeing, then you’ll see, once there is hearing, you’ll hear, but then you have to respond to what you see and hear. Then you have to play your part in the world, not just for yourself and your family.” From there, Charlotte moved seamlessly to a sensory awareness exploration, rather than discussing the matter. We were asked to place little sandbags on our heads, very gently, grain by grain, as it were. “Could the stillness and peacefulness of this little bag also bring stillness to you?” she asked. “Can you receive the weight and let its impact travel through you? Can you really let yourself experience this throughout? We all received such pretty heads. It would be a shame to use them only for thinking. We are smarter than that. The head can feel as well, just as we are capable of intelligence throughout. The legs, the toes, the hands, it all has potential for intelligence. When you are being touched you feel, you know immediately where you’re being touched and how it feels.” To this Charlotte added, modifying her initial remarks about becoming quiet being the heart of Gindler’s work, “What we learned with Elsa Gindler is to become ready.”

The focus of Sensory Awareness may be on cultivating the “silent levels” but just as in General Semantics, it is not for the sake of dwelling in silence but to create conditions for adequate responses to what we perceive or, to use a Buddhist term, for right action.

If you would like to read on I will gladly send you the whole chapter as a pdf. Just let me know by email.

When Bodhidharma Met a German Gymnastics Teacher

This article was originally published in the 3/2018 issue of the German Buddhist magazine Buddhismus Aktuell. You can read the German version there or right here by following this link.

Charlotte Selver, teacher of a newly developed, purposely nameless approach to physical education escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 hoping to revive her destroyed career in New York. In the ensuing years, she befriended pioneers of Western Buddhism such as Alan Watts, Shunryu Suzuki, and D.T. Suzuki. The affinity discovered then between the work what would come to be known as Sensory Awareness and Buddhist teachings could today point to an integrated path for our time.

I’m sitting on the cool, wooden floor of a therapist’s office in Zürich. It’s a November evening in 1989. Others are around me, but they’re not sitting in proper rows as I’m accustomed. They are randomly scattered through the space, a little like rolled dice. It’s completely quiet, and only a skilled observer might notice that we’re not exactly sitting still but are exploring our connection with the floor, experiencing the natural micro-adjustments, our relationship with the pull of gravity, and the firmness of the ground—wide awake in our ever-so-delicately moving buttocks while our folded legs, like feelers, navigate their relationship with the earth. 

Sensory Awareness leader Seymour Carter drops questions like stones into the quiet pond of our experiencing. He doesn’t expect answers but is guiding us in a process of inquiry to experience the changes in sitting taking place in real time, with and without our volition. Suddenly, I arrive. I sit upright and at ease, with an alertness and concentration I’ve only experienced during long Vipassana retreats. 

On the train home later that evening, my partner Sabine and I share our experiences. Over the past years, we’ve both spent hours and days seated on floors, sometimes with a zafu under our buttocks and a zabuton under our pretzeled legs, neatly lined up and facing a wall, at other times on blankets and cushions, with little outer but much inner structure at Vipassana retreats. Now we’re sitting on the cushioned seats of a commuter train, wide awake, present, and quite excited. 

We just had our first experience of Sensory Awareness, a practice we’d recently heard about through our Vipassana teacher, Fred von Allmen. In the course of two hours, we’d walked through a room, sat down, stood up again or—as we soon learned to phrase it, understanding that it is as much about the process as about the goal—we came to standing, came to lying, came into contact with other people. We saw, heard, and acted with a freshness that even now, on the busy train, was still with us. There wasn’t anything unusual about this train ride, yet we realized acutely that this moment, like each moment in our lives, was unique, an ephemeral apparition in a constantly shifting tapestry of becoming and passing away. The everyday had become a living meditation. 

Questions Instead of Answers

And as we soon would learn, the practice of Sensory Awareness is largely free of “Truths.” We were given precise yet open-ended invitations to find out for ourselves, not unlike the instructions in early Buddhist texts, such as: “… when walking, a bhikkhu understands: 'I am walking'; when standing, he understands: 'I am standing'; when sitting, he understands: 'I am sitting'; when lying down, he understands: 'I am lying down.’ (Satipatthana Sutta)

What the wandering mendicant Siddhartha Gautama asks his disciples is as strikingly simple as it is challenging for goal-oriented seekers: to be in the experience of each ever-unfolding moment, so they’ll wake up to the reality of nature—“our” nature. And what is this moment? It’s not a snapshot, not something to “observe,” but people and things, concrete situations to respond to and engage with. It’s the ongoing call for “right action” in the immediacy of being alive. We practice not to be become good at “knowing,” but to tune in to the actuality of what’s present, to become response-able, whether to the air we breathe or a person in need, and not be fooled by the seeming permanence of whatever it is we wish to attain. 

One thing became clear to me after this first workshop and has become central to my work as a Sensory Awareness teacher, namely that this practice, which emerged as a response to radically shifting living conditions in the wake of Western industrialization—in combination with the perennial wisdom found in Buddhist philosophy and practice—has the potential to be a path of awakening for today’s society, starting with putting an end to the artificial body-mind split that has led to vast disequilibrium in individuals, societies, and the earth’s ecosystem. The empirical, experience-based practice of Sensory Awareness in tandem with the profound insights into the human condition that we find in Buddhist teachings are powerful tools to help us overcome this division. The following journey into the history of this West-East encounter of the German Gymnastic Movement and Buddhism will, I hope, shed light on a healing path for our time.

On August 3, 1953, almost forty years before my first personal encounter with Sensory Awareness pioneer Charlotte Selver, she found herself meeting with Alan Watts in his office at the American Academy of Asian Studies (which later became the California Institute of Integral Studies) in San Francisco. Charlotte Selver, born 1901 in Ruhrort, Germany, fled to New York in 1938 to escape the Nazi terror. In Germany, she was a teacher-in-training of the popular Bode Gymnastik, a tightly choreographed dance-like movement practice, when in 1923 she met Elsa Gindler, a Berlin movement teacher whose radically different approach to physical education had no form and no name. Gindler, a trained teacher of Harmonische Gymnastik, had turned away from predefined exercises in favor of a practical exploration of everyday movement patterns and behavior. 

Watts, having been introduced to Buddhism at a very young age before a brief stint as an Anglican priest, was on his way to becoming a popular and colorful disseminator of Eastern wisdom for a new generation in the 1960s. In a conversation I had with her in the late 1990s, Charlotte remembered their first meeting: “There was this rather young man sitting at his desk. Behind him on the wall hung a calligraphy. I asked him what it said, and he answered, ‘Mountains are mountains.’ ‘Of course,’ I responded, ‘mountains are mountains.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘in Zen, mountains are mountains at first but then everything must fall apart before mountains can be mountains again.’”

Selver had already read Alan Watts’ The Spirit of Zen, a gift from her aunt in San Francisco, who attached a note saying, “I recently attended a lecture Watts gave. He talks about what you do.” At their meeting, Selver and Watts came to the same conclusion. It was the beginning of a friendship and collaboration that lasted until Alan’s early death in 1973. Over the next two decades, the two would offer many workshops together in which Watts gave a lecture followed by Selver’s experiential explorations. In Watts’ words: “Charlotte Selver conveys the actual sensation of some of the things which I try to express in mere words and, above all, the organic relationship of man with the whole world of nature.”(1) Their workshops had names like Moving Stillness, The Mystery of Perception, and The Tao in Rest and Motion. In the early years, Selver’s work had no name, but in time it would be called Sensory Awareness and it became a significant contributor to the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s.

Zen & Sensory Awareness Retreat, Hesseln, Germany, 2017

"I don't want to teach, I want to explore"

Another deep friendship connected Charlotte Selver with psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm. They met in New York in 1944, where Fromm took private lessons with Charlotte for years, leading to an invitation to participate in the famous "Zen Buddhism & Psychoanalysis"(2) conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1957, headlined by Fromm and the Zen scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki. Charlotte gave a lecture on “Sensory Awareness and Body Functioning,” followed by a class in Sensory Awareness. Her favorite memory of the conference was how D. T. Suzuki introduced himself: “There were all these doctors, professors, and psychoanalysts who introduced themselves with their titles and credentials. Suzuki, who was nearly 80 at the time and a world-renowned scholar, introduced himself simply by saying, ‘I’m a student of Zen.’ This felt similar to what my teacher Elsa Gindler would say, ’I don’t want to teach, I want to explore with you what it means to be human.’” The other Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who Charlotte would soon meet, alluded to the same attitude when he spoke about “beginner’s mind.”(3) 


The Door of Sensory Awareness

In the summer of 1961, a young man walked along Pacific Street in San Francisco looking for an address to attend a seminar with Alan Watts and Charlotte Selver. He knew a bit about Alan’s work, but what really attracted him was what he’d read by Charlotte in the seminar brochure. He found the house and entered. “It was a Victorian house like most others,” Richard Baker Roshi later recalled. “How was I to know that I would walk through such an ordinary door into the presence of a woman who would change my life? She said a few things and showed me a few practices that I have carried the rest of my life. They continue to be a resource, a deep well, available in each physical moment. She said, simply, as if it were nothing: 'Come to standing.' Was this her English? Her native tongue was German. She didn't say, 'stand up.' So I watched her. She didn't stand up, she came to standing. Moving through a physical course in her body and in the air. I moved up too, for the first time not between two mental points, but in a sensuous opening from the floor to some posture called upright and in discovery.

“Charlotte was my first teacher, my first life teacher. I saw in her what a human being could be. I saw someone in possession of herself through compassion to others. Only months earlier, I had come to San Francisco looking for a Zen master, but first I found the door of Sensory Awareness.” Richard Baker would soon find his Zen master as well. 

Shunryu Suzuki came to San Francisco from Japan in 1959 to lead a temple in Japantown for Americans of Japanese descent. He soon began to attract students of a different cultural background, including Baker, who threw himself into the practice and eventually into building what would become a major magnet for the wisdom-seeking hippie generation: San Francisco Zen Center.


The Yurt Is Our Zendo

“A student goes to his Zen master, slaps him in the face and says, ‘I’ve been practicing for 30 years. Why didn’t you tell me from the start that it’s so simple.” Charlotte told us this story at San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm near her home in Muir Beach, where 24 of her students took part in a three-month study group with the 92-year-old. We had come from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Switzerland to immerse ourselves in the practice of Sensory Awareness. Taking part in the daily activities on the farm, in the kitchen, and with other chores at Green Gulch was par for the course. Whether or not we sat zazen or studied Zen in any other way was not important to Charlotte. The yurt, which she had recently donated to Green Gulch, was our Zendo, and Sensory Awareness was our zazen. We students laughed when Charlotte told us the story about the student slapping his master, but Charlotte didn’t. She asked us to come to standing and pair up to slap each other all around our bottoms. “Lively and fresh please,” we heard her shout over the noise of our slapping, “But don’t beat each other up!” This time she laughed too and asked, “Are you awake now?” 

Charlotte Selver and Norman Fischer, at the time the abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, in front of the yurt at Green Gulch Zen Center (photo by Stefan Laeng 1993)

Charlotte wasn’t a Buddhist. She was a lifelong skeptic of all “-isms.” In 1922, at age 21, she wrote to her boyfriend, “I view religious diversity to be just as valuable—and just as obsolete as mankind’s compulsion to create boundaries everywhere. Nature smiles at the sight of them, because in the end, only nature has the power to create boundaries. Then again, much of value has come about through distinction. I think people can’t live without boundaries, because they’re overwhelmed by the vastness of the unbound.”(5) 

Charlotte nonetheless felt a strong affinity between Buddhism and her work because of the inquiring spirit she experienced at the heart of Buddhist teachings. She was impressed by Suzuki Roshi’s direct and simple ways. “He doesn’t assume a posture when he sits, he simply sits. And you can see how amazingly moveable he is even when he sits still.” And Suzuki said about Charlotte’s work: “It is the inner experience of the entire being, the pure flow of sensory awareness, when the mind—through calmness—ceases to work, deeper than mind-made awareness.”

Sensory Awareness has its roots in the German Reform Movement of the early 20th century which emerged in response to increasing alienation from nature and natural rhythms in the wake of the industrial revolution. Sensory Awareness was an attempt to reclaim “natural” responses in our interactions with the world, i.e. actions that are felt-responses to actual situations rather than habitual reactions rooted in personal belief systems or cultural corsets. This requires wakeful presence from head to toe and from moment to moment. Nature is central in Buddhism as well. But when it solidifies into dogma like “True Nature,” we risk abandoning direct experience and replacing it with reified teachings (“Truths”) and deference to authorities present and long-gone.


No Nature

In a conversation with Zen teacher and cook Edward Espe Brown, another of Charlotte’s many San Francisco Zen Center acquaintances, I asked about the meaning of ”Original Nature.” “It’s a concept,” Ed replied, curtly, then added, “Original nature is no nature, no fixed nature. Knowing your original nature is knowing that originally you’re free, that there’s nothing to fix or change.”(6) This may sound simple, but it requires tremendous patience, the willingness to transcend belief systems and trust in the very nature which, from the beginning of time, evolved through experience, not by design. 

“There is no nature, only culture,” Sensory Awareness leader Seymour Carter liked to say, not a pretty pebble dropping into the surface of our secluded pond. It was more like a boulder, throwing into question what we think we know, a stark reminder that even what appears to be a direct experience of the true nature of things is heavily colored by social and cultural context. 

Where do we go from here? Maybe nowhere, maybe just more deeply into the tentative moment. “We’re groping in the dark,” Charlotte would often remind us. It wasn’t an admission of failure but a prompt to keep the doors of perception open and not get too attached to answers. When a student would report their findings to her after a practice sequence, she’d often say, approvingly, “This was your experience. Now forget it.” 

What I’ve learned from Sensory Awareness is that knowledge is not a goal but a path. What I’m still learning is that maybe the worn saying “The path is the goal” is more profoundly true than I’d realized. Maybe there really is nowhere to arrive except in the perplexing reality of a fleeting moment with no “original nature” or definitive answer. 

Perhaps, when the bhikkhu “understands that he is sitting,” he—or she—also understands that she always sits in a context. We never sit on our own, we always sit on something, that is, we collaborate with another presence. And that presence, like everything, is neither permanent nor essentially other.

The thinking mind, eager to arrive at final answers, may not appreciate such context-dependent solutions, but Sensory Awareness cautions the mind and suggests that our buttocks may have as much to say about what’s right for this moment as all the concepts we might have of right posture. This is not to negate the astonishing power of the human mind to figure things out, but its tendency to see itself as independent and superior to “nature” or “matter” has led us astray in fatal ways. Knowledge comes through contact and interaction, a path is created by exploring the territory. The thinking mind, in this way, is simply a participant—albeit an indispensable one—in a sensuous journey of discovery. Traditions can give us invaluable guidelines for the journey, but an actual path exists only when we walk it together, based on our shared experience of being in the world now. 

Footnotes

1 These testimonials were quoted in Charlotte's printed schedules for many years

2 See: Fromm: Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1960.

3 Charlotte Selver in a conversation with Stefan Laeng in Barra de Navidad, Mexiko, 1999.

4 Richard Baker-roshi: „Meeting Charlotte Selver“ in: Sensory Awareness Foundation Newsletter, Winter 1998/99.

5 Letter to Heinrich Selver vom Sept, 25, 1922.

6 „What should We Be Tasting now?“, Interview with Edward Espe Brown.

Pathways of Sensory Awareness LLC | Stefan Laeng
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The World Opened Up for Me

A conversation with Sophia Rosoff (1924 - 2017)

New York City, June 15, 2008

At age 87, Sophia is still active and sought after as a piano teacher. She took the first workshop with Charlotte in 1948, which makes her the earliest student I have been able to interview to date. Here she talks about how she met Charlotte and what working with her meant for her piano playing and teaching. (In this excerpt, you will hear Sophia say she met Charlotte in 1968. This error was corrected later in the interview.)

SR:  The first time I went to Charlotte I went because I had had a piano teacher who was a great pianist.  She got me to New York because she heard me play.  And I was about nineteen years old then.  But she didn’t really know how to teach; she knew how to play.  But I was her only student and I lived with her.  And she was just so – everything was so tight, and my joints got so tight, and I just couldn’t get free.  And then one day I was accompanying Artie Shaw – I don’t know if you know who he is.

SLG:  Oh yes.

SR:  He was a friend, and I was accompanying him.  We playing doing Schubert. And I said afterwards, “Artie, you know, my playing feels terrible.”  And he said, “It sounds all right, but what’s the trouble?”  I said, “My joints are all locked.”  So he said, “I’m going to see Morton Gould for dinner tonight, and I hear he’s got a genius of a teacher.  So if you promise you’ll call tomorrow, I’ll get the number for you.”  So that was Abby Whiteside (??), and he got the number for me, and I called her the next day.  And I got my playing back, and the skies opened up, but she said, “You know, you’re right. Your joints are tight.  You should see someone.”  And Miriam Gideon was going to Charlotte.  She’s a composer.  Charlotte loved her.  She was great.  She died a few years ago.  But so she said, “Come with me to see Charlotte Selver.”  And I went.  And Charlotte was saying, “How do you feel insidely?” and how is this, and the answers sounded so funny.  I thought “Everybody’s crazy!”  (Both laugh)  And I didn’t really know what they were talking about.  But something caught my attention, and I went back, and pretty soon I got it.  And the world opened up for me.  Everything changed.  I was married at the time.  I had a child.  My husband was a great man.  My child was wonderful, and nothing wrong with him.  But my piano had been stuck, and I just couldn’t play the way I used to.  And I kept thinking to myself, “I can’t stand this anymore.  Is this the way it’s gotta be forever?”  And then when Charlotte took hold, all the magic came in.  And I would hear music; I would hear particularly the low sounds I would hear as I’d never heard them before, and I’d listen to Toscanini and it was a miracle.  And I was terribly shy, and I found myself standing behind a man at a drugstore and he was paying his bill, and I was right behind him.  And they said the bill is 3 O whatever, it was $3.04, and he started fusing around in his pocket.  And I heard myself – I didn’t know him – I heard myself saying, “I’ve got four cents.”  And everything changed.  So that was the beginning – that was 1968 I think [it was in fact in 1948].  And I’ve been with her ever since.  And then when she went to California I was terribly upset, but I went to Carola Speads.

SLG:  Oh you did.

SR: I did.  Go to Carola.  Because I’d miss the work.  And Carola was very different.

SLG:  Yes.

SR:  But she was – uh, you know, she was a physical therapist and it was more.  It was wonderful work.  It wasn’t the magic work.  It wasn’t just finding out what was it your own self wanted to do.  That was new to me.  And that really is the basis – well, Abby Whiteside, who was my genius of a piano teacher is the basis, but Charlotte is there all the time.  The way she experienced things is how I experience them at the piano since working with her.  And that’s how I work with my students.

SLG:  Oh, wonderful.

SR:  I just – I don’t really teach them.  I sit there and I clear the – help them clear the tracks, so that what they feel and what they personally have to say about the music can come through.

SLG:  How do you do that?  Clear the tracks.  How do you . . .

SR:  Just get rid of the things that are taught at the conservatories.  Exercises – I don’t do exercises.  I don’t do anything mechanical.  It’s all connected with music.  And for me it’s very important that they find their emotional connection, which gives them the rhythm with which to move.  How they’re feeling.  But this all comes out of Charlotte’s work.  It’s been one of the most important things in my whole life.  The piano has been there all them time, and it’s terribly important.  So it really translates itself into the way I work at the piano.  But that was Charlotte.  And oh God, she was so funny.  Because we had another one of those small classes, and when we were coming to standing, she said, “Who felt they could come up easily?”  And my hand shot up.  So later she said, “Sophia, you weren’t really telling the truth.”  (Both laugh)  And I said – I thought for a minute and I said, “Well maybe you’re right, Charlotte, but it certainly felt better than it’s felt before.”  But I’ll tell you the thing that she really taught me was really don’t make talk.  Just say what you honestly experience.  And that’s helped me in my teaching too.  And knowing what my students honestly experience.  That’s a very important part of my work.  Then Charlotte and I did a workshop at NYU, Charlotte did the sensing and I did the music.  And I was scared to death.  There were 250 strangers.  I didn’t know what I was going to say.  I just was terrified.  And Charlotte looked at me and she said, “Sophia,” there was a terrace there, and she said, “come outside with me.”  She said, “What a beautiful day.  Just be yourself.”  So she did her part and I did my part, and afterwards we had a meeting and, I’ll never forget this, she said, “Sophia, I wish my students would learn to talk in their own voice.”  And I use that, and I thought immediately, “I want people to play music in their own connection with it.”  Not in anybody else’s.  Not to superimpose what even the editor has written on the page.  How do they feel about it.  That’s clearing the tracks too so they can get to it.  But that’s – that’s Charlotte’s work.

A Glimpse of Wilder Years

Excerpts of an interview with Bill Littlewood from August 11, 2005.

Bill: After my first workshop with Charlotte at Esalen Institute I stayed on for another few weeks while Charles and Charlotte had gone on to Monhegan Island. I knew that and I decided when I left Esalen I would go to Monhegan.

I drove my truck from California to Maine and took the boat to Monhegan, where I stayed a month. And I can’t remember what happened exactly, except that I met a whole lot of the breathers [as students of Sensory Awareness were called on the island], and I was very much impressed by what I found. So I began to follow her around. In fact, I met her at Esalen again and she asked me, “Why don’t you come and study with me for nine months.” I said: “No, I won’t do that because you keep moving around all the time. If you stood still, I’d come.” Shortly thereafter she designed the first long-term study group and I was the first person to sign up for it. That was in 71, I think.

Stefan: But the long-term study group didn’t stay in one place. You had to travel.

Bill: That’s exactly it. There were seventeen of us signed up for the first long-term study group. We started out in Tepoztlan, south of Mexico City. We spent three months there, then went to Santa Barbara where we spent three months at La Casa de Maria. Then we had a break and then we were supposed to go to Monhegan. Well, in that time Charles and Charlotte had an automobile accident. They were in their van driving across the desert and they ran out of gas. So Charles said, “Well, I’ll hitchhike to town and get some gas.” So Charlotte sat in their VW van and waited on the side of the road while Charles went to get gas. But she was rear-ended and that’s when her hip* was broken. 

So, they’re out in the middle of the desert in Nevada and I’m I’m driving in a van with Kate Skinner, who was also in the study group. We were in Portland, Oregon, visiting my son and his wife when Charles called us and asked if we could buy him a Volkswagen van to replace the damaged one. Charlotte was in the hospital right then getting her hip in Elko, Nevada. 

We found a VW dealer in Portland, put him in touch with Charles, and they bought a van over the telephone. Kate and I drove it to Elko so that Charles could put the stuff that they had packed up in their other van into the new van. And then we drove on to Monhegan. Charlotte was flown to Monhegan and we joined back up with the group there. Of course, Charlotte was stuck in her daybed downstairs in their house, and various members of the group took to teaching the class. And in the evenings we would collect around Charlotte’s couch and she would talk and work with us us for an hour or two. 

This was also the time when Charles was trying to finish his book. At La Casa de Maria I helped him pick out pictures and what not, and so Charlotte and Charles asked me if I would help with the editing, because Charles and Charlotte kept fighting over the book all the time. She’d object to what he wrote and he’d get mad; so they decided to put me in the middle. Charles would sit in the living room of their house on Monhegan while Charlotte was lying on the couch, and I was placed in an upstairs bedroom they weren’t using. Charles would write a chapter – he was under deadline pressure – this was his third deadline and he had to get it done. He would write a chapter and give it to Charlotte and she would read it and pencil in her comments. She would then pass it to me and I would read it and I would pencil my comments. Then she and I would get together, hackle out our differences and give the edited version back to Charles. This went on for a month or two. Finally, Charles got mad at me and told me that he didn’t want my help anymore because I was giving him a hard time. I said, fine, and he finished the book on his own. It took a great responsibility off my shoulder. But I got to read it before the end of the study group. And they went on and published it.

Stefan: Was Charlotte eventually able to get up and give the classes again?

Bill: Not then. She was still incapacitated while we were in the study group. I can’t remember when she was able to get up again but I remember them carrying her to the school house so that she could be in the class room.

Stefan: Yeah. Yeah. I heard the story of her being carried on a door?

Bill: (Laughs). I don’t know it. I could believe it. (More laughter) I don’t know what they carried her on.

Stefan: So, would she then teach lying down or just watch?

Bill: No, she was just being present. She wasn’t teaching.

Stefan: And did Charles lead some of those classes?

Bill: No, we’d fired him in Mexico. Well, in Tepoztlan we got very upset with his teaching. They would alternate each day – we got angry. So we refused to have him teach. He made the best of it and he joined with the group of pupils. For the rest of the nine months Charlotte did all the teaching. He was a good pupil.

Stefan: But you also said that some of the students would lead classes when Charlotte couldn’t.
Bill: That was on Monhegan. Students did all the teaching on Monhegan. I didn’t do any of it, because I didn’t feel up to it. But some of the other ones did. Gary Sohns. What’s his name now? 

Stefan: Seymour Carter.

Bill: Yes, Seymour and various other people gave classes. 

* Help me out, old breathers: was it not the pelvis?

"It Really Doesn’t Matter What Happens, But How We Respond"

After this year’s toxic presidential election season in the US, resulting in the selection of a man who’s views and manner of conduct are deeply troubling to many, we might be tempted to resign in the face of impending doom, we might want to retreat into “safe spaces” and focus on our personal well-being, to protect ourselves from the pain of loss and a sense of futility, as we see the formation of a government that threatens to undo many of civil society’s hard-fought-for achievements. 

In the 1930s, Charlotte Selver, along with the many who had worked enthusiastically on building a new society based on life-affirming values after the horrors of World War One, was faced with the ascent to power of a government incomparably more horrendous than what we can expect to experience. 

Nazi parade, saluting Hitler. Augustusplatz in Leibzig, July 1933.
Charlotte's studio was at the time in the building on the left, approximately where the bright circle is.
(Source: Leipzig wird braun, Lehmstedt Verlag 2008, Page 192)

Then and now, the response proposed by the practice of Sensory Awareness to such troubling developments have been neither to retreat nor to react unreflected but to cultivate skillful interaction.

I hope that you will take the time to read the  excerpt below from the manuscript of my biography of Charlotte Selver. It gives us a sense of how practicing Sensory Awareness is inextricably intertwined with cultivating an engaged response to anything we might encounter. 

This country, the world, is very fractured, and I see Sensory Awareness as having the potential to advance the mending of such fractures, within ourselves, between us, and with the natural world. It is for that reason, too, that I am writing Charlotte’s biography. For Charlotte Selver, as well as for her teachers, the work was always about being fully engaged in all aspects of life.

It Really Doesn’t Matter What Happens, But How We Respond“

An abridged excerpt from the chapter on Charlotte Selver’s last three years in Germany.*

By Stefan Laeng

Some context for this excerpt: In 1935, due to the persecution of Jews, Charlotte Selver was forced to abandon her school in Leipzig and move to Berlin, where her husband, Heinrich, headed a private Jewish school. Lotte Mann, like Charlotte a student of Elsa Gindler, took over Charlotte’s studio. With her professional life in shambles and her marriage falling apart, Charlotte was devastated. A letter exchange between her, Lotte Mann, and their student Agnes Ohler ensued, affording us with a rare glimpse into the formation of the practice we now call Sensory Awareness. 

To one of Charlotte’s first letters, Agnes Ohler responded: “Please don’t despair. Don’t write that you are wallowing on the ground in agony. No, a warrior – and we are all warriors – cannot let herself go like that. She can only recognize what response is called for. Your greatness is in teaching, not in housekeeping, not in a subordinate job – not even in your husband’s school!”

"A warrior – and we are all warriors – cannot let herself go like that. 
She can only recognize what response is called for."

Agnes Ohler was one of a handful of students from Leipzig with whom Charlotte stayed in touch after she left. Students of Charlotte will recognize in Ohler’s responses to Charlotte her own admonishments to pupils decades later. “It really doesn’t matter what happens, but how we respond. Hardship can bring forth the best in us! Just like you were a role model in Gymnastik you can be a role model and support in these struggles. Nothing is harmonious in this world. We have to be ready to carry our cross, then it won’t be a burden.” A pious Christian, Ohler also had some advice for the reluctant Jew. “Don’t shrug off your religion and your race. It is nonsense to resist one’s heritage. Whether Moslem or Buddhist, Jew or Christian, it’s all the same, and we all have to live according to our kind. Maybe you don’t know your religion enough, but I’m sure it has its beauty and its solace.” She also assured her that “Germany, will surely not expel you. You just have to be patient.”

Lotte Mann had already started to sub for Charlotte before Charlotte left Leipzig. In this time of transition, the expectation was, apparently, that Mann work just like Charlotte, which led to some friction between the two. 

In a letter to Charlotte, Mann wrote: “My understanding of the work differs from yours. This became clear to me recently in the breath course. I still see myself as a Gymnastik-teacher, and as that it is my job to help the students physically. I don’t feel capable of intervening in people’s personal processes. That said, I am of course aware that we reach people in their totality even when we work with them ‘physically’. I can’t say it any better right now but we urgently need to talk about the work in person. I’m afraid that I am creating a conflict in your students if we don’t. I have tried to adapt to your style but I feel increasingly restricted and I want to go back to my way. I have always felt that it is not possible in our profession to have others work for us in our ways. What we can’t do ourselves we have to let go of. The only possible way would be to work on a level playing field, professionally as well as economically.” Charlotte seemed to have been very hurt by these letters but their heated exchanges came to a friendly end when Charlotte decided to leave Leipzig for good and after they found a mutually agreeable solution for Lotte Mann’s takeover of the school. 

Some of her students stayed on to work with Lotte Mann and another unnamed teacher. In her letters to Charlotte, Agnes Ohler reported in some detail how their work unfolded without her. Just as it will have been with Charlotte, the students took different courses that together built a whole. Ohler writes about lessons in Basics, Movement, and Breath. In the Basics lesson they worked on things like “drawing letters and words in the air with our feet, or sometimes on a piece of paper with a pencil between our toes. Now we are thoroughly working our necks. We discover how it protrudes from the body, how we are built there. One person sits and another places one hand on the forehead, the other hand at the base of the skull in the back, and she pulls the head upwards (we did that with you lying down). The effect is fabulous! In the movement lesson one person lies on the floor belly down, the other lyes down with her back on the back of the first. Now the first person tries to get up. Or one person plays horsey while the other rides on her back. We also practice walking in a circle, tuning completely into the pace of the others as we go from walking to running and then back to walking and finally to standing. In the breathing lesson we recently sat around a bowl of water with Olbas oil. We were asked to let the vapors act on our respiratory system.”

“We sometimes also work while the others watch. One of us will be blindfolded and she now has to report any changes that she becomes aware of. That is really effective because you cannot doze off, which is what we too often love to do. This really helps us to make progress while before we were often not quite there for it when we worked on our own. It is interesting for those watching too, because the eye can perceive what we didn’t feel when left on our own. Lotte Mann explained why it is so crucial to share our experience. It helps her to understand where we are in the process, whether we might need more tapping, or if it is time to move on to a new task. It has become easier for us to share, a sign that we are now more able to name what we apparently couldn’t before, which you often lamented.” 

Lotte Mann, for her part, shared with Charlotte some of her difficulties with Agnes Ohler: “The work is going well but the breath course is on a precipice. Well, really only Mrs. O. She claims again that she always feels the same things and doesn’t make any progress. Now I let them work and report individually. I hope that this will help us to find out what’s off in Mrs. O’s work. It sometimes seems to me that ‘ideas’ take a hold of her head, which prevent her from being open for what is happening within and around her. It really makes it hard to communicate. But such challenges are ultimately what it’s all about, and they are usually followed by progress.”

“Lotte Mann speaks in very simply terms and she often criticizes our complicated ways,” writes Agnes Ohler.“But we continue to work diligently and we are full of joy. Is it the work? We are so fortunate to always have teachers who are so natural and decent with us. Lotte Mann, too, is so completely in her work and so focussed when she works with us. We old students have grown even closer. Sometimes have heated discussions about who it is “nicer to work with.” Stop. You will not accept “nicer”, let me be more precise. Where did we work more!? In the end we agreed that the result is the same with both teachers. It is equally fruitful and interesting, as different as their approach is, the success is the same!”

This glimpse into their meticulous process is complemented by occasional apologies from Agnes Ohler about the “clumsiness of the reporting and the sloppiness of the style” of her letters. These seemingly negligible remarks point to the weight that was given to any manner of expression, be it a simple gesture or jumping, breathing or singing, speech or writing. How we do what we do likely became the fulcrum on which the work still pivots when Heinrich Jacoby began to collaborate with Gindler in 1924. His experience as a music educator with the the labored performances of his pupils sparked a lifelong passion to exploring the roots of “ungiftedness” which, he was convinced, was not nature given but had its causes in a person’s upbringing and in misguided education. This led to his search, together with his students, for “zweckmässiges Verhalten” – suited conduct. While the pursuit of this was undoubtedly a liberating experience for many students, it sometimes led to just just the opposite, such as in this case when Agnes Ohler not only felt the need to apologize for her less than “suited” writing but also told her that one reason some students didn’t stay in touch with Charlotte was because they didn’t dare to write for fear that their letters might not be impeccable, just like their reports hadn’t been.

For Charlotte, the high bar set by Jacoby – and undoubtedly herself too – led to the complete abandonment of her beloved piano playing after an incident which seems impossible to place in time but was often recounted by Charlotte as a formative, and traumatic, experience in her life. “We worked on improvisation and Jacoby asked us to come forward to play the piano. Everybody else was very timid but I thought, ‘What’s the big deal, I love improvising. I hope he’ll ask me.’ I had loved improvising since childhood, and it had been a big part of my work as a Bode Gymnastik teacher. When Jacoby did ask me I went to the piano and hit the keys. After I finished, Jacoby asked with that devilish smile he sometimes displayed: ‘So, you just improvised, Charlotte Selver?’ ‘Yes’ I responded and he, ‘Would you please play again, but this time listen!’ I started playing again but after a short while I abruptly stopped. What I had just heard was Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, all the composers I had once played. I jumped up and yelled: ‘But that’s impossible!’ I never touched a piano again after that. Jacoby will have expected that I now work on improvisation but I just couldn’t do it. The thought of going through the same painful process of shedding my habits I had undergone with Gindler in movement was just too much to bare.”

*As with all excerpts I share from the manuscript of my Biography of Charlotte Selver, it is not in its edited final form and may contain grammatical and spelling errors.

The Thrill Comes From This

Three short audio excerpts from two classes Charlotte Selver gave in New York City on November 12, 1959. 

The Thrill Comes From This

““Why not be here in the moment we are working here
to such an extent that you really feel:
this is what I want,
and this is [what] I’m here for,
and this is what I [unclear] myself for.

The thrill comes from this!
There is not such a thing like constantly offering novelties.
Everything is a novelty – if you let it be!” ”

In the 1950s Charlotte Selver worked closely with the English-American interpreter of Eastern thought, Alan Watts, such as in November of 1959, when Charlotte’s students were urged to attend Alan Watts’ lectures at the New School for Social Research. They often gave joint seminars, though this didn’t seem to have been the case in this particular series. The audio excerpts presented here are from classes given on the eve of a talk by Alan Watts on “Taoism and the Psychology of Repression”. Charlotte suggested that in her classes they also deal with "the psychology of repression. So much of the healthiest things in the world we are not admitting. We repress them,” she said at the end of her morning session on November 12. 

Each of these fragments shows how deeply she and others were engaged in laying the foundation in the modern Western world for the now widely recognized movement and mindfulness modalities. 

What is more, it was a very advanced study and cultivation of what it means to live fully in the present moment, beyond “practicing”. This becomes especially clear in the longer piece titled “Experiencing” vs. Observing” (below), where we also find a reference to another important influence at the time on Charlotte’s understanding of consciousness and the human potential, General Semantics.

“When I say permissive,
that doesn’t mean you become lifeless
or insensitive or anything like that.
...

Never mistake permissiveness, or ‘letting happen’ [allowing],
which is in every real first class activity,
with this kind of dulling of whatever it is.”

Experience vs. Observing

This video is a 4:50 minutes long. The quotes below are just a couple of excerpts. You can find the full text and audio by following this link.  Hear and read the full text here.

“In experiencing you have to be very clear about the difference between enumerating all kind of items which you feel. That is observation. Experience is something entirely different. This occurs to you without any enumeration.” 

”When the whole organism is awake we don’t need any observation anymore. Because we are ever so much more awake than usually when we observe.”

[Observing] leads everybody to this kind of effort in the head which makes actual experience impossible, or at least lowers it to a tremendous degree. And it creates usually, let me say, a dutiful anxiety, but not genuine experiencing.” ”

The Dance in Each Moment

An Interview with Etta Ehrlich

Etta Ehrlich is one of the very few people still alive who first met Charlotte Selver in the 1950s. I had the pleasure of speaking with her in her home in Leonia, New Jersey, on December 8, 2016. 

Etta had just attended a workshop with me in New York, where she was the oldest participant - in years but not in spirit! At 85, Etta is full of life, engaged and curious, a joy to be with. Our conversation touched such topics as,

• Are what is happening and what is needed the same?

• Learning from Alan Watts

• Studying with Charlotte Selver and Betty Keane 

• Sensory Awareness in Psychotherapy

• Meditation as therapy

• Growing up in an enclosed Jewish community in New York (Etta's father was a rabbi)

– and about engraved glass bottles. That's when Etta took me on a tour through her house, where her artwork is on display everywhere. Glass vessels of all shapes and sizes, engraved with insightful and playful words, such as, "Meditation is not a vacation from irritation", or "Can WAR be civil?"

Listen to excerpts and the full interview below.

From Sensory Awareness to Vipassana Meditation

Ruth Denison 1922 - 2015

Ruth Denison, the pioneering Western Buddhist teacher died today, she was 92.

In memory of Ruth I am reposting an article I published a couple of years ago.

A conversation with the pioneering Buddhist Teacher Ruth Denison

by Stefan Laeng

I visited Ruth Denison on April 29,1999, at Dhamma Dena Desert Vipassana Center, her Buddhist retreat in the Mojave Desert of Southern California. I do not recall how it came to this visit but it must have been on my way home from an extended stay with Charlotte Selver together with my then fiancé, Sarah Gilliatt, driving through the vast deserts of Southern California and seizing the opportunity. Some of my interviews with Charlotte had taken place just before and Charlotte had told me stories about Henry and Ruth Denison. I must have been inspired to hear from Ruth directly about the role of Charlotte in her life. Ruth wasn’t young then and it seemed a good idea to interview her, even though at that time writing a biography of Charlotte was only a wild idea. I had met Ruth before and when I called her she immediately invited Sarah and I to stay at her house in Joshua Tree. 

Ruth has kept in touch with the Sensory Awareness community over the years, and in a way renewed her ties after Charlotte’s death. She has been a frequent visitor at Sensory Awareness conferences and workshops, be it as a presenter or to be a student again. She has also been a great supporter of the Sensory Awareness Foundation and the Charlotte Selver Oral History and Book Project. 

Photos from the 2006 Sensory Awareness Conference
at Mt. Madonna Center in Watsonville, California

It was largely thanks to Alan Watts and Henry Denison that Charlotte’s work came to California. Charlotte gave her first workshop on the West Coast at Henry’s house in Hollywood. Henry was a lifelong spiritual seeker, he had been a monk in the Advaita Vedanta order for some years before building his house in the Hollywood Hills. In the early sixties, the Denisons were hosts to many luminaries of the counterculture: philosophers, psychotherapists, Zen masters. Alan Watts was among them. He and Charlotte had been collaborating for some years and he now suggested that Henry invite Charlotte into that circle.

Charlotte spoke always very fondly of Henry and never failed to mention how handsome he was: “He looked like a Spanish grande,” she would say. I’m not really sure what a Spanish grande is but at the time of our visit Henry Denison was still alive, though suffering from Alzheimer's disease. I had a chance to meet him and – in spite of his illness – it was immediately clear why Charlotte would have been impressed by his appearance. He was tall and slender and he looked very dignified with his full, grey beard. Sarah and I had a lovely visit with him, in which he recalled Charlotte with much fondness.

The interview with Ruth took place over lunch. Ruth has always been a very gracious hostess and she put on many dinners for Charlotte and her husband, Charles Brooks, at the time. Now we were sitting in her small house and she was telling us about meeting Charlotte. 

“I dated Henry Denison at that time. Alan Watts told him about this lady who is getting with it. That’s how Henry put it. Getting with the process that was going on at that time. And that was almost an underground movement, meeting and speaking about psychology and facing yourself and developing yourself. Charlotte sounded good to him the way Alan Watts described her, providing a practice, a process of becoming aware of your mental and psychic domain.”

Charlotte Selver remembered that first meeting vividly and loved to tell the story: “I came to Henry Denison, with Charles [According to Ruth, Charles was not there that first time]. Henry brought us to his porch with the beautiful view, deep down to a lake. We waited and sat there while he was preparing lunch for us. And then he came with a very beautiful, very thin wooden vessel with fresh salad. He offered this salad to me. And at this moment a bird began to sing in the tree under which we were sitting. I stopped taking the salad. And when the bird had finished singing I took the salad – and Henry said: ‘You are in!’

Suddenly, we heard a terrible noise of dogs, barking: “Woof, woof, woof, woof.” And in came four little dogs jumping around him and licking him and so on. And after the dogs came a woman who seemed to be his sweetheart. That was Ruth Denison.”

Ruth recalls: “I remember what Charlotte was wearing. A beautiful pure silk blouse with cuffs, very formal. I came and arrived with two dachshunds and they made a lot of noise. I was a noisy lady when I came in into this peaceful, quiet atmosphere of highest delicacy and sensitivity with the dogs, like dynamite. The silence was gone and the peace went. Charlotte had joy with that. She can – when it is so absorbed and then suddenly topsy turvy – she can enjoy that. She has a great sense of humor.”

This was probably in 1959. Ruth Schäfer – Henry and Ruth hadn’t married yet and she did not live in his house – had emigrated from Germany in 1957, sponsored by one Mr. Newton, for whom she worked when she first dated Henry Denison. For more about Ruth’s life, read Sandy Boucher’s fascinating biography Dancing in the Dharma.

“I had met Henry, and I think maybe just half a year or a year later Charlotte came into the picture. Henry was one of those who were very interested at that time in Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood and all these avant-garde people. 

Henry arranged with Charlotte that the house is available and she can make her seminars there, in the large living room with a fabulous terrace all around the house and its wonderful view over the hills and the lake. Our furniture could easily be moved. The big table was pushed against the glass wall, and then there was a space big enough for twenty people to lie down. It was a dream house. And the guest wing was the same. There was a terrace overlooking the lake and they lived there. That’s when I got my training. I cooked there, and any minute I had time I would be in the living room. 

At that time it was really a great breakthrough for many, Charlotte’s work, you know. Psychologists came and yoga teachers came, and artists. They got some nice groundedness through her work, Sensory Awareness. The senses are heightened and practiced and developed to more clarity in perception. You don’t let the mind interfere in these sense perceptions. You just hear, see, smell, taste. So, equipped with this awareness of the senses, I came to Vipassana. I had the best practice and preparation. And Charlotte cannot understand! But it is hard to understand that.”

Ruth’s claim that Charlotte did not understand refers, I believe, to Charlotte’s refusal to see Sensory Awareness as a mere vehicle for liberation within a Buddhist context. Charlotte, as did most of Elsa Gindler’s students, insisted that hers was a practice in its own right. That it would be used to prepare people for therapy or spiritual practices meant that the depth of their work was not recognized. And, indeed, one could argue that Ruth likewise did not understand either. 

To think that Sensory Awareness does not address suffering, that its goals are simply harmony and “greater pleasantness”, is to misunderstand what Charlotte Selver and her teachers were about. But Sensory Awareness lacks a clearly spelled out philosophical framework, for better or for worse, and is therefore easily disregarded as a feel-good practice – a notion that caused Charlotte Selver much grief. That said, it may very well be that Charlotte underestimated Ruth and that she, like many others, did not recognize the depth of her unique approach to teach the Buddha Dharma.

“In the beginning I didn’t know what to do with Charlotte. Then I caught up, because actually I lived with it a great deal. I was very earthy and I lived with my body. But then, coming into this so-called higher society with psychologists and with these high goals of enlightenment and spiritual awakening, I had other ideas about that. When I was asked to feel, to notice my feet and my hands and my breath – ‘God’, I said, ‘what are they doing? I do that all the time. You do that by living.’ You know, sometimes I was puzzled by it. Also, I realized pretty soon that there were many things missing. I took it in the wrong way. I did it just for pleasure, maybe, and for feeling better. 

But when you come into Vipassana, then it’s a different story. That can hold up in Sensory Awareness practice – you do it for more harmony, you awaken more to the senses and you have more joy, a greater pleasantness to experience – because dukkha and unpleasantness are not really paid attention to. In the Sensory Awareness practice always the goal is to come to a greater harmony and to better feelings and to more wholeness, sure.

I came now with this kind of attitude to Vipassana and I heard that attention has to be paid also to the unpleasant. The inner peace you get through the awareness of the senses can help you to move in harmony through the unpleasantness, and so on. The development of mindfulness and the development of the awareness is actually the very basis of Vipassana. We use the body and other senses as objects for attention.”

“Laying the Four Foundations of Mindfulness”, Stefan interjects.

“Yes. Well, one works actually only with the first, and the other three one awakens very naturally to. Because feeling, pleasant and unpleasant, states of mind and contents of the mind [depend on] our paying attention to body sensations, to nonverbal levels. [By this] the mind is contained and drawn away from its usual activity and getting caught up in it. Instead of that, you begin to understand: this is arising now, the feelings, or that state of mind, or that kind of content of the mind. You notice it and you do not get involved. 

So, like the Buddha said: in this fathom long body with its perception, feelings, and states of mind, there is the whole world contained, the beginning and the ending. You can also replace these words with dukkha, with suffering. Then you have Buddha’s teaching: I teach only for one reason, for the cessation of suffering and how to recognize it. How to trace it back to our own ignorance, to not understanding and to emotional [confusion]. How we are creating our own dissatisfaction and so on. 

So, when Henry and I came to U Ba Khin, our teacher in Burma, I was very well equipped. Paying attention to my breathing, this was just wonderful, I could continue. The first few days I resisted him because I didn’t trust the situation. I already did it, you see. But then he discovered my resistance and was very firm with me, telling me that he is not talking to me but to my evil spirits of resistance. That was helpful.

And then it comes so gradually together. You know for what purpose you are doing it and you recognize the process rather than just getting an overview. Many beautiful insights arise through the systematic application of mindfulness of the body: The impermanence you can realize on a very microscopic level, the change, the dukkha you do learn to know, how much pain is involved in it always, when you look at the body, so that you don’t get attached just to having it the pleasant way, you see. You learn now to be open for the unpleasant and then it becomes pleasant.” Ruth chuckles.

“I think I could never have done it without Charlotte’s preparation because my time was very short with U Ba Khin. I couldn’t have gone that deep into the kind of letting your mind go into the body level as I could do now with Charlotte’s practice, Sensory Awareness. I could penetrate quite deeply in the short time I was with U Ba Khin, five or six months. 

Then, when I started teaching – he gave me the transmission to teach – I wouldn’t have been able to really guide people in the practice of mindfulness, and how to give good instructions, and where it is at, and how to be more constant and start anew, again and again, sitting two hours without moving and allowing the mind in a witnessing attitude to penetrate into the level of sensations. That is not how you practice with Charlotte. You do it lightly and you go outside. 

I also had some Zen training. From Zen I got a little the way how to order and organize. From Charlotte I had this lovely groundedness: mind being there, and psyche, and mind energies being there where the body is. That means where your life is really occurring, and where you can have direct touch with it. So you bring your mind to a very special calm and undistractedness. And it wakes up to what it is doing. And you begin to understand more and more. It’s called insight. Correct understanding, [one aspect of] the Buddha’s Eightfold Path.

So I would let them stand – I hear myself sometimes saying like Charlotte did: ‘Please come to standing.’ Not to stand but to come to standing. Then I would explore: notice your arms and let the shoulders drop with gravity, and notice the contact with your feet, between your feet and the earth. Just like Charlotte told us. Gently shift your weight to the left foot, and feel the difference, how the other one feels. That is a very beautiful basis for Vipassana. 

It also made me a safe guide. I realized always when their minds were off and it was too mental and when they had disconnected themselves from body, that became very clear.

But, believe it or not, some Vipassana students who came at that time from Goenka [the best-known disciple of U Ba Khin], thought I was playing around. One got up, ran to the door, widely opened it and screamed into the silence of the room of my experimenting: “That’s enough of hanky-panky!” I took a lot. Now, in Vipassana circles, they have yoga exercises, they have sensory awareness practice, and so on. But Charlotte was a pioneer and I was a pioneer also.

Later I sent Charlotte students. Those who needed a little bit more groundwork for sitting still and being without movement, without doing anything, students who needed a little bit more practice in a different way. More through movement. And I would also in my seminars let them lie down on the floor and do things Charlotte did. Like working with touch, working with partners. Or I would let everybody collect a rock and hold the rock and give it into the other hand. Or take a nut, and let them chew and eat it, experience this whole process from hard to soft to mush – and then the swallowing, all of that I did. When I first started teaching I felt uncomfortable sitting in front of them and watching their nervousness, their fidgeting, and their inner unrest. I could immediately bring rest in by just allowing one hand to rise and then putting it on the other hand. Or on the shoulder of somebody. But I encountered terrible criticism in the beginning.

I’d let students face each other and just see what is there. How they can perceive the other person without losing contact to their feet and to their standing and to the wholeness of their being. It’s a practice in not being distracted and so much over there in the experience, but rather staying with the fullness of your own being in awareness. And then to take the other person in. 

Or how to pick a flower, or how to smell the ground. Through sensory awareness. I took them into the mountains, let them look into that sight before them, let them realize: seeing takes place [when the eye meets] the object. It goes a little further than Charlotte, sometimes, you know, because it is more a calculation of the mind and not just noticing your stillness in perceiving. Becoming very clear in perceiving. In the process of perception, there are the eyes (physical base), the object, and mind. These objects – it’s not really true that we see this container,” Ruth knocks on an object, “we see color and shape. And then realizing that the whole thing is mind, hmm? Seeing, visual consciousness. 

So what we become aware of is realizing that this is only a function which takes place now, the mental function of seeing. And that it has three components: a physical base, an object, and mind. And that puts you into the position where you cannot help but seeing: it is empty of I, it is a process. And it’s through that, through Charlotte’s work – I mean, as a base – that I could bring them into such graphic and tangible ways to see the truth of what Buddha points to: no-self, emptiness. From the beginning [I taught] through these lovely experiences – the smell of the earth. I let them crawl as worms and as snakes without hands on the floor – basic things from Charlotte.

I am always grateful to her and to Henry, to both of them, because I would have never met her [if not for Henry]. From Charlotte I received a great basis for the Vipassana practice.

Seymour Carter (1936 - 2012)

Remembering Seymour Carter

July 27, 1936 – November 1, 2012

Seymour Carter at a protest in San Francisco, days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (photo by Stefan Laeng)

Seymour Carter, long-time Sensory Awareness leader, acting president of the Sensory Awareness Leaders Guild, and so much more, died suddenly in Chernovcy, Ukraine. He was on a teaching tour in Europe.

Was there anyone who didn't know him or know of him?
Was there any place he walked where people were not somehow changed?
He has joined the ether and I suspect he isn't done with us or with life.
Natalie Ednie, Sensory Awareness leader, Sandpoint ID

I had many conversations with Seymour about his work, some recorded, most not. Here is an excerpt from the February 11, 2008 interview in which he talks about meeting Charlotte Selver.

Charlotte Selver and Seymour Carter, Sensory Awareness Conference 2003, Fort Mason, San Francisco. (photo by Stefan Laeng)

---

Esalen's Resident Alien

Seymour Carter: Secular Sceptic in a Utopian Community (pdf)
An in-depth interview with Seymour about his decades long connection with Esalen.
Courtesy of John Callahan

---

Seymour Carter with Ned Dwelle, Amsterdam, October 23, 2012.

Seymour Carter, giving a class. Sensory Awareness Conference 2003, Fort Mason, San Francisco. (photo by Stefan Laeng)

Seymour Carter and Stefan Laeng.
Charlotte Selver's 1994 Study Group at Green Gulch Zen Center, Muir Beach, California.
Seymour gave the afternoon classes.

Seymour Carter on Monhegan Island, Maine, 1980.

Seymour Carter, Holland, 2012?

Images courtesy of Ned Dwelle and unknown others.

There is Always a Form – Charlotte Selver's Form was Awareness

A Conversation with Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen

by Stefan

Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen is a movement artist, researcher, teacher and therapist. For over fifty years, she has been exploring movement, touch and the body-mind relationship. An innovator and leader, her work has influenced the fields of bodywork, movement, dance, yoga, body psychotherapy, infant and childhood education and many other body-mind disciplines. In 1973, Bonnie founded The School for Body-Mind Centering®, dedicated to the development and transmission of somatic practices based on embodied anatomy and embodied developmental movement principles. In addition to programs at her school, Bonnie has taught workshops throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. She is the author of the book Sensing, Feeling and Action and has several DVDs on Embodied Anatomy and Embryology, Dance & BMC, and working with children with special needs. She is currently producing other books and DVDs. 

Stefan Laeng: Tell me a bit about your work. 

Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen: It’s hard to describe. The form is the embodiment process. With Charlotte, the form is the awareness. It’s not about any particular thing, and in that sense they’re similar. I always felt kindred spirit. I don’t know very much about Charlotte’s work. She didn’t know very much about mine, but there was that meeting.

I remember before our first meeting at Esalen*, I sent a video of four children that I was working with – maybe twenty-five years ago – and when she saw it, she said: “And she didn’t study with me either!” Our work was just similar. I remember once, when Charles was still living, we did something with sandbags. They gave me this sandbag, and I just felt the spirit was in the sandbag, but it wasn’t about sandbags.

Most of my memories of Charlotte are just playful and pure delight. One of them is my throwing Charlotte to the ground. I don’t know what we were disagreeing about – something. She wouldn’t listen to me. I would say, “Charlotte! Listen to me!” And she’d go, “Aahaahaahahhha.” I said, “Charlotte, you have to listen to me. If you don’t listen to me I’m going to throw you to the ground!” “Aahahahah.” So I took hold of her and I threw her to the ground very gently. We just had that kind of a playful connection.

We were always laughing. Once we went to this little birdhouse that she had in Big Sur on the cliff. I happen to not like heights and she just – was a bird. She loved that house. I didn’t even want to go inside. But going up to the house she was so happy, she was running. She was like a bird, flying up the path. 

Bonnie and Charlotte were part of a two-year training in Esalen on Somatics for professionals in the field.
From left to right: Michael Marsh, Don Hanlon Johnson, Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen and Len Cohen, Charlotte Selver, Seymour Levine (one of the founders of psychoneuroendrocrinology, Stanford Med School); Robert Hall (the Lomi School). [ca 1989; photographer unknown]

Stefan: That’s interesting you say she was a bird. I don’t think I’ve heard anybody say that.

Bonnie: Together we were birds – I wasn’t the bird; she was the bird. 

Another time we met at a ZIST**-conference in Garmisch Partenkirchen in Germany. I walked – we didn’t know we were going to see each other – and she just ran, at this age, she just ran with her arms open. I think she left her cane behind. She had that light spirit. In that particular conference I brought out a hundred air balloons blown up and a hundred water balloons and spread them among 1,200 people. The person before me was Thich Nhat Hanh and everything was very quiet and peaceful. And then I brought all these toys and these balloons and the people went crazy. It was wonderful. And afterwards Charlotte asked if she could use the balloons for her workshop. So there was that playfulness that we shared.

Stefan: Can you say something about Charlotte’s place in the somatic movement, or the importance of her work. 

Bonnie: I consider her one of the forerunners who prepared the way for me. I see her in the lineage even though I’m not in her exact lineage, I’m certainly in the lineage of the broader path. I also come out of the Laban work. I’m very influenced by that whole school which came out of Germany.

Stefan: She really respected what you were doing, though she no doubt had little idea of what you were actually doing. But one thing that I remember she said was something like: there’s too much form or dance or, you come from performance.

Bonnie: Yes, there’s a lot of form in our work. The form is very important, but it’s a changing form – it could be any form. There’s always a form, but her form was awareness. I mean, if you pick up something there’s a form if you are sensitive to what you’re holding. But I came from a dance background and working with children with special needs. I was certainly much more form oriented. But the essence wasn’t form, and that’s where we met.

Stefan: I don’t know your work either, but to me that question of form has always been intriguing, and it’s hard to talk about it. Charlotte certainly did not want a form in that sense, and she also certainly stayed away from expressive movements. That was her struggle because she came from that. With Gindler she said she had to unlearn so much. Before that she did Bode Gymnastik, which was very expressive and she had to shed that. Then, whenever she saw, or thought she saw, expression or form in somebody’s movement, she would want to work to shed that. But in my experience too, we cannot but express ourselves in some way. There’s always some kind of form and expression, and I’m really curious about that edge of being true, being connected.

Bonnie: In any form. Or all forms. That’s my exploration. But how one is the form, not how one makes a form.

Stefan: When you say form, what do you mean? Do you have particular movements that people do? 

Bonnie: No. Charlotte gave up form where I went back to understand my form. Right now I have two yoga programs here in California. And one where we focus on embodying different tissues. In the yoga, we’re not creating a new form. It’s just whatever your form is, how do you embody it? What’s your style? It doesn’t matter. But are you just making a style? Or are you really a warrior? Is this a warrior pose or is this a loving pose? It’s very much about expression, but what is it when you are that?

Stefan: And how do we know?

Bonnie: If I say move your pinky finger, how do you know you’re moving your pinky finger when you don’t see it? You still know it. I’ve worked with a lot of dancers through the years. What is the principle for a dancer or athlete? That’s the same for a baby or a child who has severe cerebral palsy or someone with muscular dystrophy or multiple sclerosis or arthritis. What do we all have in common? This isn’t pathological. 

These children that have severe challenges – people approach them from the place that there is something wrong with them. But they are what they are. That’s their form. Let’s honor them for what they are bringing into the world and what they have to teach us. Their form is perfect, not imperfect. I see them as my teachers. This is the place I meet them. And the same principles of movement and consciousness apply to them as to anybody.

How do we reach that level of being who we are, whatever that is? As soon as the egg and the sperm do their dance there’s a marker that goes to the membrane in which your immune system knows what is you, and there’s never been another marker like it, and there’ll never be another marker again. We’re that unique. So, how do we come to really know that marker, or that essential drone, if you think of music, that vibration that is our own?

Stefan: Would you want your clients to consciously remember? Or is it more about embodiment of that?

Bonnie: The grown-ups are different than children, because we do have a kind of conscious intelligence. We use that, but ultimately need to let go of it; otherwise you’re always witnessing, you’re not actually participating. There’s a level at which you feel the sandbag, you consciously feel it, and in a way you just forget about it. You know the sandbag. You don’t have to keep witnessing it. But in the beginning you would focus your attention because otherwise you’re just not remembering. It’s nothing to learn. And that I think Charlotte and I have in common – we never talked shop, by the way. We just played…. 
Maybe Charlotte thought of unlearning, when you said a form.

Stefan: Yes, the unlearning of what is extra, what is not needed, so that we then are free to connect with what is now rather than with what we have learned.

Bonnie: So it’s not a gaining from somebody else on the outside but from your own experience.

Stefan: Yes, I think that was really Elsa Gindler’s major turnaround, as I understand it. She came from teaching a form to say: if you really become sensitive to what wants to happen, what happens then? Rather than: Do this or do that. That exploration. It is really starting from not knowing every time. And I do hear that from you too.

Bonnie: Yes, it’s always the not. So students will say: “Well I don’t know.” I say: ”Great, just stay there.”

Stefan: When I first asked you to tell me about your work, your immediate response was what our response often is. It’s very hard to talk about it. It has a form, but it’s beyond that form.

Bonnie: Or the form is the process.

Stefan: So what is the goal of your work?

Bonnie: Just to enjoy the day.

Stefan: To enjoy the day.

Bonnie: Why not? Whatever you do. Because they can always get worse. Even when I was so very ill – not to say I didn’t suffer greatly – I still looked for what was in the day that was quite extraordinary. It doesn’t take away the suffering but it doesn’t waste it. (Bonnie was housebound for three years due to a collapse from post-polio.)

Stefan: In our work gravity is so important. I actually don’t call it gravity very much anymore. I call it the attraction of the earth, because gravity to me sounds like it’s a thing, but what it is is a relationship with the earth, the earth’s pulling on us constantly, and then our response. Gravity and then the support of the ground is so central, and was so central in Charlotte’s work. How does that play into your work?
Bonnie: It plays a lot. We are looking at gravity, and we are looking at space – which I know you’re doing too, but in a different way. We say, if you only feel the gravity, you can’t stop it. If you feel the gravity and the rebound, the anti-gravity, and the pull of heaven, then you have lightness. 

Stefan: Charlotte never used the word space. Well, I shouldn’t say that. But that’s not something that comes to mind – space. She certainly worked with it, but not . . .

Bonnie: And she also had it. I think she was so spacious and light, and this bird quality, that gravity for her would be like the balance. But also the sun is drawing us.

Stefan: Tell me more about that. You also said the pull of heaven.

Bonnie: We’re in this position, we are the bridge between the earth and heaven. I mean, fortunately there’s attraction out there. Otherwise we would be chaos. We are rotating around the sun, and this is rotating around that. There are all these pulls. The moon is pulling on our fluids. We are under the forces of the universe. We’re spinning off the earth, but we’re also being pressed into the earth.

And we carry our ancestors. I don’t know about past lives. That’s not where my attention goes. But I know we carry all of the experiences of our ancestors. We have talked about genetics like gravity. It’s this thing that looks like this. But that thing was developed from experience with relationship to the world, and to the family, and to the emotion, and to the gravity. I always feel we heal our ancestors as well as ourselves. We’re a time machine or something. It all exists right now. I don’t know if that makes sense. So we also look at time. We are this collection and it makes a difference whether we feel it by remembering or by being. It’s not just: oh yeah, my grandfather was this and my grandmother was that, and we can trace back to seventeen hundred and something. 

I’m interested because Hanna (Bonnie’s grandchild) comes from two languages that are getting lost – if you go to the generation before me and before Len and before Hanna’s other grandparents. The Okinawan speak Japanese now; they’re losing the roots of their culture, the Yiddish of our parents’ generation (except my father was English) – on my side three out of four – not the history but the successiveness is wiped out. How interesting, this little girl. If she goes back that far, the languages and the cultures are fading. And at the same time, all the possibilities that she has by this shadow of who she is. 

Stefan: So in that sense, where we come from is really important because that’s – can we say, that’s who we are?

Bonnie: We carry all of those experiences. Whether or not we ever know our ancestors, our grandparents or parents or whatever. My parents met and were in the Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey Circus, so I grew up in the circus. After my mother quit the show when I was eight and they separated, and then my father, when I was fifteen, they closed the big top, I never wanted to go to the circus again. And then, when my mother died, the circus was in town. We went and I had no connection, because it was indoors. It wasn’t the stench of the elephants and the animals. There was something on television – Cirque de Soleil. It’s so boring to me. I see them doing these things. It has no meaning. And television has no meaning, because after this, there’s nothing they could do on TV that would compare – I mean these people were risking their lives every moment in performance. 

This is why I would not want to take this form out of my existence. Where if I had a form that felt artificial – certainly there’s nothing more artificial than this circus getup. They dressed and everything was superficial on the outside, but there’s something real about death-defying acts. Inside they were risking their lives.

Stefan: So it’s very real in that sense.

Bonnie: Yes. It’s a paradox. So that’s an insight for me, when you say that, talking about Charlotte. I would not want to take away form. When I think of the man who led the circus band. He never missed a show in over fifty years. He would say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, and children of all ages, welcome to the Greatest Show on Earth,” and the band would hit up. Over fifty years. How could you erase that? Who would want to? 

Stefan: This is fascinating. I like exploring form. 

Bonnie: Yes. I know Charlotte had form. It’s just that she wanted it to be real.

Stefan: Yes. And no doubt we do have form. Or we are this form. And it comes from – from our ancestors.

Bonnie: And from our daily life, our environment.

* As part of a two-year training on Somatics for professionals in the field – see photograph.

** Center for Individual and Social Therapy, Munich

You Can Open Up Again

Johanna Kulbach (January 1, 1912 – July 21, 2010)

This interview with the late Johanna Kulbach from June 12, 2008, was held at her home on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Spending time with her was very inspiring in many ways. Having recently lost both legs due to arterial sclerosis, Johanna was full of life, happy to live and simply a joy to be with. Johanna died earlier this year and I am happy to share with you what she shared with me on that hot summer day in New York City.

As always, the published interview is an "edited excerpt". For an interview to work in print it is usually necessary to shorten it considerably and I often have to rearrange the order of the questions and answers to create a better flow. Occasionally I also take the liberty of rearranging the sentence structure or replace a word because the spontaneity of the spoken work does not always translate into a complete and understandable sentence in print.

The unedited, raw interview with Johanna can be accessed by supporters of this project. This is the first time I've done it and it is a bit of an experiment. You will experience "that scattering of the conversation [which] is so typical of my mother's style", as her daughter Lisle recently wrote to me. The interview contains many more details about Johanna's life, her odyssey with Lisle from Berlin to New York, and her relationship with Charlotte Selver. I only removed some personal remarks which seemed not suitable for publication. You and access it through the Members Pages, where you will also find an an audio excerpt.

Johanna Kulbach: I studied music in Berlin when I was very young. There was this big movement in Germany, everybody did something like dance or Gymnasik. We heard about all the people who taught, and so I heard about Elsa Gindler too, but she didn’t accept anyone at that time. But then a good friend of mine said to me: “I do something unusual.” She took classes with one of Gindler’s students. I went with her instead of first taking the beginners class, so I didn’t really understand what was going on. And then Nazi time came and she wasn’t supposed to teach Jewish people anymore. So she sent me to another Gindler student but I didn’t understand what was going on, and she got me to Gindler. I have to be very grateful that she did. Gindler took me to one of the beginner’s classes and slowly, slowly I began to understand.

Gindler was very thorough. We had to do experiments during the week and write a report on it and send it to her before the next lesson so she knew what we had understood. I hate writing, so that was a challenge for me. But eventually I got clearer by being forced to write, which was very helpful. I stayed with Gindler maybe three or four years. But then, close to the end of the war, her studio was bombed, and we were bombed, so it ended like that.

But years later I took a 3 week workshop in Hindelang. I don’t remember very much about that year and class. Everybody was still under the influence of the end of the war and where they had been, and some people from Israel came. At that time she tried very hard to get people to discover more on their own. She was eager and hopeful that people would learn how to do it, not only do what she had taught them.
I’m grateful to Charlotte Selver and to Elsa Gindler because their work was important for me, it helped me a lot.

Stefan Laeng-Gilliatt : Can you say in which way?

Johanna: I’m much healthier than most people. I react more positively I think. I can deal with things. The things which Gindler addressed in her classes. We were very afraid at that time. We had double the fear – the bombing and the Nazis. Going to the concentration camp was always on our horizon.

Stefan: Why did you not leave?

Johanna: I was married to a German. He had polio, he limped. So he couldn’t be a soldier. He worked – and I peeled potatoes for a year and a half. You don’t have to think when you peel potatoes, you just sit there. But I had a very good neighbor and we had wonderful conversations. I always told her about the classes with Gindler. I was very fortunate because she had worked with one of the Gindler people. Many people knew about Gindler. She was very, very well known. Actors went to her to learn how to fall when they had to die or faint. They learned how to fall and not to hurt themselves. Many artists knew about her.

Stefan: So you were able to go and see her during the war?

Johanna: Oh yes, it was all during the war.

Stefan: And the Nazis, they left you alone because you were married?

Johanna: Yes. They knew about it. It was really toward the end of the war that we would have been shipped to concentration camps, but the war was so advanced, the trains couldn’t take us anymore. They had to take all the people fleeing from the East. And then we experienced the Russians. That was, on top of it, a horrible experience. Nothing happened to me. I was lucky but I was also aware of the danger. When the Russians first came I saw a neighbor woman standing there outside, watching what’s going on. She was so obvious. . . .

What I learned about fear is that after the bombing is over, the bombs don’t fall anymore and you don’t have to stay in this situation of fear. You can open up again. I learned that with Gindler. Oh, that helped a lot.

My parents were in Berlin when I got Lisle after the war. They were American citizens. My father was a professor of art history. He was lecturing for one semester at the Berlin University in his language again, in German, and some old students could be with him at that moment. That’s when Lisle was born and they got for me the things I needed for the birth. Can you imagine, there was absolutely nothing in the clinic. I brought everything. No cotton, nothing, no diapers for the baby. My sister sent me a CARE parcel with all this stuff – diapers with safety pins. It was amazing that my parents were there and I could stay with them for a few days after the birth in an apartment which had heat, because we had no heat and we had electricity only in the middle of the night for two hours, from two to four.

Stefan: What happened to your husband?

Johanna: He died in an accident. We had survived the Nazis and the war. . . .

I was married for 15 years. Then I got Lisle and when she was 9 months old, he died. It was devastating. And then I had to get out of Berlin and to the United States, where part of my family was. An aunt in Munich said: “You have to go to America; you have to go to America!”

I came to the US at Christmas of 1949, and I met Charlotte very soon after I arrived because my sister had worked with Carola Speads [another student of Elsa Gindler]. When Carola gave a talk with slides my sister took me there and in the audience was somebody who looked very different from other people. I asked: “Who is this interesting woman?” My sister said: “Oh, that is Charlotte Selver. I can introduce you.” So she introduced me and I told her I had worked with Gindler, and she said, “Oh, that’s wonderful.” So we became very close friends.

Charlotte invited me to join her classes. I didn’t have to pay her because I had absolutely no money and I was also at the beginning of teaching – I taught recorder. I took Charlotte’s classes for quite some time. Charlotte also gave lectures with slides about the work. I heard that lecture over and over again, and eventually saw much more of what she saw in the slides, why somebody in this photo was so with the movement. It became so much clearer. I learned a lot from Charlotte. She was very generous. She liked to share.

Stefan: How did Gindler work compared to Charlotte? Was it different?

Johanna: Gindler was very methodical. Charlotte you wouldn’t say was methodical. She was intuitive. Gindler tried to be very methodical. She wanted to know what happened when we worked at home and thought very much about people’s experience. And later on, in Hindelang, she said: “I’m not interested to hear about when you are feeling fine; I want to know what your problem is – that you find your problem.” That was one of the striking things. Charlotte was much more intuitive.

Stefan: Can you remember a particular class – what you would have done during a class with Gindler, for example?

Johanna: In Hindelang, the first day, quite a number of people came late. So she discussed why people are late. Gindler went about that very strictly, and very clearly. “Why do you come late?” “How long does it take you to get ready?” “Did you wake up late?” She started even with lying down and going to sleep: “Do you lie down with all your stiffness and your flabbiness? Take a broom stick and lie on it before you go to bed to get yourself in better shape for sleeping.” Such daily life questions came up and they were taken very seriously. And relationships. “How do you react?” “Do you carry something for a long time, anger?”

Stefan: Tell me about how you became a recorder teacher?

Johanna: I visited someone we knew from Germany and she said, “My son has a good friend. She takes the lesson with so-and-so.” And I called so-and-so, and she said, “I don’t want to teach on Friday afternoon anymore.” She taught at the 92nd Street Y. So I gave the lesson and somebody said: “You know so much more about teaching!” You know, I had taught in Germany. I had forgotten about it. After the war, we were in Weimar for one and a half or two years. In the Russian sector, where my husband had a job again. And they desperately needed teachers, music teachers. So I taught music in a boys’ public school there – 35 boys in a class. You have to have humor and patience for that. I had both. The boys went to the train stations with their mothers in the morning at 5:00 to steal charcoal briquettes. When the railroad cars rolled by some boys jumped up on top, threw down the briquettes, and the other boys picked them up. The cars were always half empty when they got to where the soldiers were living. The population lived that way. It was brutal. It was really bad, such a cold winter. Everything was frozen. It was not good. But I don’t think about it. Now, I don’t know, war certainly doesn’t solve things. And how many wars have we had since? It’s unbelievable. People don’t learn. . . .

Stefan: How did the work with Gindler influence how you were teaching the recorder? Was there a clear connection?

Johanna: Most children liked it. I taught at Mannes College and many times children were put in my class who had been violinists and they had done very well. But the teachers were so excited about how good the children were that they overtaxed them. They lost the joy. Then they had recorder with me and so got to enjoying it again. Then they often went back to their violin.

I certainly use a lot of what I have learned with Gindler. In my trying operations and to recuperate afterwards. After the last operation, I think it was in January 2007, it took me a long time to recuperate and feel like myself again. I was worn out I guess. It was so much – they were always big [Besides open-heart surgery, Johanna had both legs amputated in her old age]. It’s unbelievable what this work can help – how to help yourself.

Stefan: Did you consciously do things or was it just working in you?

Johanna: I think I reacted – I did not sit there and practice. I just reacted. And I don’t complain. I’m not in misery. I have a much more positive outlook.

Stefan: Yes, I can hear that in your voice too! That’s wonderful.

What Should We Be Tasting Now?

Edward Espe Brown in an interview with Stefan Laeng

I recently interviewed a number of people from the San Francisco Zen Center community with which Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks had a longstanding friendship. Ed Brown first met them at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the 1960s, where he was the head cook at that time. Charlotte and Charles were frequent guests at Tassajara where they conducted workshops every summer for many years. The following is an edited excerpt of my conversation with Ed. 

Supporters of the project can hear an audio excerpt of the interview on the Memberspage. 

Ed Brown: What Charlotte Selver was teaching is so unusual and it’s difficult for people to get. I remember one of the classes at Tassajara. She was instructing people: “Now turn your head to the right, and then turn it back.” And right away somebody asked: “How are we supposed to do that?” Many years later when I started teaching cooking classes I would say: “Let’s taste this”, and then people would ask: “What should we be tasting?” It’s so hard to get people to just taste. Somehow, many people would rather have the right experience than the experience they’re having.

I now teach something I call mindfulness touch. Part of the inspiration for that is having done classes with Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks at Tassajara. In mindfulness touch it’s the same thing – mindfulness is the Buddhist concept for experiencing something without judging good/bad, without assessing right/wrong. Just to experience something. This is very challenging, but I’ve come to understand that as long as you’re judging, then you’re not experiencing. Touch mostly comes with directives, and I think most moments of consciousness come with directives, and when you’re giving out directives about what to do or how to be, then how do you experience anything? 

I had some experience with Charlotte and Charles finding this out. But it took years to have that really come to fruition in my life. And then it’s so hard to shift. I had terrible childhood trauma. I don’t know what other people experience but the more I started just experiencing what’s inside instead of trying to make sure I was experiencing the right thing I went right into that. 

I used to go to Charlotte’s and Charles’ classes on the back porch of the dining room in Tassajara. I would be so tired in the afternoon. I was working so hard and sleeping so little. But when I would go to one of their classes I’d be refreshed after an hour of just having awareness rather than “I need to this, I have to that.” 

There’s a story that Charlotte told me about how she started doing Sensory Awareness. I use it a lot when I do Qi Gong with people. The kind of Qi Gong I do is not about getting it right, it is about sensing the movement rather than executing the movement. I don’t know if Charlotte used that language, but it’s what I’ve come to: “Don’t execute the movement, sense the movement.”

Stefan: She wouldn’t use those words but that’s what she did.

Ed: Charlotte heard about a teacher named Elsa Gindler and went to see her. She told Elsa: “I’d like to study with you.” And Elsa said: “You know too much, you can’t study with me.” And somehow Charlotte persisted until finally Elsa said okay. Charlotte said for a year she just thought Elsa was teaching the most wonderful things and everything she said was so brilliant and wise but, she said, “she just didn’t seem to really acknowledge me. When she looked at me she didn’t really seem to be appreciating my being there. And then, after about a year one day Elsa turned to me and she said, ‘Oh, thank God, Charlotte, at last, an authentic movement. You’re not posturing.’” Charlotte said it got a lot harder after that. 

So that’s another thing I try to teach people, the difference between being authentic and posturing, or the difference between approval-seeking behaviors and being present and alive and showing up. Sometimes I call it getting real. And I don’t see a lot of people getting real. Zen people are often in that category, but not always. There are some Zen people who seem to be more real than others. 

Stefan: In Zen you have this challenge of having a very clear form and you have to be real in it. And very often people confuse that and they try to be that form.

Ed: Yes, people confuse that and they try to be the form. Suzuki Roshi said we do formal practice with informal feeling, but a lot of people do formal practice with formal feeling. On the other hand I think that it is very difficult for people coming to Sensory Awareness directly, and not having some practice of "here’s what you do and this is how you do it".

Stefan: That is an interesting point. I have worked with people in Switzerland who were peers of Charlotte and students of Gindler and Jacoby, and I know that in Berlin there is a precision that Charlotte had left behind. Not that she was not precise, but she, in a way, I guess she went right for the heart of it.

Ed: I do think that over the years Charlotte must have noticed that a lot of people at Zen Center are pretty “fixed” and doing something the way that they should be doing it as opposed to experiencing something about what’s going on. I’ve been trying to teach that for years, and I’m about as successful probably as Charlotte was, but who knows. 

I now have a lot of tasting in my classes. Sometimes I take strawberries, and we taste the strawberries and then I add a little bit of maple syrup: “Oh, that’s nice.” And then we put on a few drops of balsamic vinegar – but not so much that you taste vinegar, but that little bit of tartness and they say: “Boy, this tastes more like strawberry now.” And then a few delicate grinds of black pepper and then they say, “It’s not like it’s peppery or like it’s hot in your mouth, but it’s even more like strawberries.” It seems like you can get strawberries to taste even more like strawberries if you’re careful and you don’t over season.

Stefan: Charlotte used the analogy of tasting a lot, asking us to taste a movement even.

Ed: Yes, well, I have had the experience over the years that some movements or things are much more delicious than others. 

I’m working on a new book now about my life. I’m starting out with the time at Tassajara when after nineteen years of Zen practice I one day I was thinking well what do I do today while I’m sitting, and the thought came to me, why don’t I just touch what’s inside, with some warmth and kindness. And right away the tears started pouring down my face, and a little voice said, “It’s about time.” So that’s how long it took me – nineteen years of Zen practice – to get around to just experiencing something more analogous to Sensory Awareness. I had a lot of work to do with all of that. I don’t know if that’s true for everybody but certainly for people who had childhood abuse and alcoholic parents it seems like there’s a lot of residual drama which would make it very difficult to practice Sensory Awareness. To open to a kind of internal reality or just sensing what is you have to break a lot of rules. There are rules about that that you’ve made for yourself and if you break the rules you can’t help believing that you’re going to get hurt. 

Stefan: It’s interesting that one would then choose a practice like Zen that has so many rules.

Ed: Well, it’s what’s safe – up to a point. I saw Katagiri Roshi after that. He was the interim abbot then, and I said, “Katagiri Roshi, in meditation I’m just touching what’s inside. Is that okay? Is that Zen?” And he said, “Ed, for twenty years I tried to do the zazen of Dogen before I realized there’s no such thing.” There is no getting it right, there is no way you need to be. 

I do understand something about being in touch with things and actually sensing things and knowing for yourself what’s what and not having a fixed body that you need to keep. But there is something about the form of Zen that sometimes there’s almost nothing you can do besides study some difficulty. There does seem to be some usefulness in that there’s enough structure. I needed structure. Emotions are mostly from our early childhood. Emotions aren’t about today. Feelings from before get triggered. I’ve gotten lost in that for years and I spent years finding my way out of all that and so it’s hard to know what is useful or appropriate to be doing with oneself. I think that Zen in theory – formal practice with informal feeling, outwardly you are manifesting your life, inwardly you can unravel – can be very useful but I don’t think most people get that. Most people think the thing to do with your life is to keep it together but ideally you keep it together and fall apart. Otherwise you’re just keeping it together and then all this stuff that you haven’t dealt with is going to get you sick. 

Suzuki Roshi used to say hindrances become the opportunity for practice. Difficulties are the way. But I think most people understand no, I’ll just do this Sensory Awareness and breeze on through. And in the meantime the people who are sitting still in the zendo say: “Well, I’m accomplishing this practice.”

Stefan: We do want to keep it together. This is really interesting for me because I’ve wondered about why we do what we do – and is it really useful? 

Ed: It’s really hard to know.

Stefan: Even in Sensory Awareness I have noticed that we can trick ourselves into sensing something that is not actually there. 

Ed: I spent years just trying to see if I could breathe. In Buddhism over and over people say follow the breath and I’ve studied what is allowing the breath. You can think you’re allowing the breath and it turns out you’re just having it go the way you tell it to go. And then every so often you notice something about your breath like, “oh, I guess I was creating that after all.” It’s very hard to have experience that’s really actually fresh and new, immediate. But that seems to be extremely powerful, extremely important for waking up in some way rather than just “can I get better at creating the experience I should be having.”

Stefan: I’m also seeing that whatever we do will always be new experience but from some previous condition. What is fresh experience? In Buddhism you talk of original nature. I have abandoned that notion. What is that even? 

Ed: It’s a word. It’s a concept. Original nature is no nature, no fixed nature. Knowing your original nature is knowing that originally you’re free. That there’s not something to do, or fix or change. Is there some point where I could just receive and be blessed by experience rather than finding the next thing that’s wrong with it that needs to be addressed and fixed? That to me is something like Sensory Awareness. 

On the other hand, sometimes you want to know, well, how do I cook this? What do I do? We live in various worlds that way, and I think people think when they start to meditate that it’s going to help them figure out what to do and how to do things better and how things will work out better, but I’m not sure – maybe, maybe not. I think it’s more finally about ….. 

With this our conversation ended suddenly when the phone rang and Ed went to answer it. When editing the transcript for this article I contacted Ed and asked him what he might have said there. His response: “Perfect timing! I think it is finally more about answering the phone when it rings.” He did offer another ending too, though, namely that it is not about things working out better but to be more intimate with our experience, to live from the heart rather than to function in survival mode.

Edward Espe Brown began Zen practice and cooking in 1965 and was ordained as a priest by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1971. His teaching style is both light-hearted and penetrating, incorporating poetry and story-telling. Having been head resident teacher at each of the San Francisco Zen Centers: Tassajara, Green Gulch, and City Center, he has also led meditation retreats and cooking classes throughout the United States, as well as Austria, Germany, Spain, and England. Author of several cookbooks including The Tassajara Bread Book and Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, and editor of Not Always So, a book of lectures by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (June, 2002), he has also done extensive Vipassana practice and on-and-off yoga since 1980. In recent years he has begun leading workshops on Liberation Through Handwriting and Mindfulness Touch, and taken up the practice of chi gung. His critically-acclaimed movie How to Cook Your Life premiered in October, 2007.  The Complete Tassajara Cookbook, a collection of his writings, was published in September, 2009.

For more information go to: www.peacefulseasangha.com

Reflections on Charlotte Selver and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

An Interview with Yvonne Rand 

This is an edited excerpt of a much longer interview which was conducted as part of the Charlotte Selver Oral History and Book Project.

Yvonne Rand: The first time Charlotte and Suzuki Roshi* taught together in North Beach in San Francisco in 1967. It was the first time Suzuki Roshi had met Charlotte. He was right there doing everything with her. He led part of the day, and she led part of the day, and he was completely a participant. 

His students noticed that. Oh, so this is a teacher we should pay attention to. There were also some of Charlotte’s students who felt a resonating with Suzuki Roshi and what he was teaching.

I remember one of Charlotte’s first workshops at Green Gulch where she had some big stones. She had us lie down on the floor and put the stones on different parts of the body as a way of bringing attention to the body. Suzuki Roshi was thrilled with all of that. Because for us as Americans, even to this day, we concentrate our attention very much from the neck up. So I think he was very glad to feel that kind of company and mutuality between what he was doing and what she was doing.

For Suzuki Roshi, who loved stones – he was mad for stones – to meet somebody like Charlotte who used stones in her teaching, and who would use stones as a way of introducing her students to a kind of awakening of sensing, and beginning to allow oneself to pay attention to what one experiences in a body-based, sense-based, way – it was clear to him that she could provide what was missing.

For a Japanese Zen priest here in the United States at that time, body-based work and practice would have been unusual. To find a Westerner who was doing the kind of work Charlotte was doing which resonated so strongly with Zen and with his own experience was rare. And I think there’s a way in which he sometimes felt rather lonely. He certainly had a very close connection with his students. But there was something different and reassuring about the kind of company that you have that’s collegial with another teacher. 

Most American Zen students tended to dogmatism – it’s almost as though people had blinders on. If Zen practice is not strict and formal, it is not Zen. And yet if you look at the history of Zen in China and in Vietnam and Japan, there are all these eccentrics, and there are all the different forms that are recognized as the expression of Buddhism and in particular of Zen teachings. 

My sense, from Suzuki Roshi, was that it was very clear to him that Charlotte’s practice was very much a spiritual practice, one that could give people experientially a sense of how to awaken from the neck down. 

So there is a way in which Charlotte’s teaching, towards the latter part of her life, integrated into this community which was primarily focused on Buddhism and primarily focused on Suzuki Roshi’s teachings. There was some sense of resonating, I think both for her and her students and subsequently for the Zen students at the time.

I remember talking to Suzuki Roshi about his experience of teaching with Charlotte. That was when he made the comment about what she is doing is bringing in the elements that have to do with ceremony, a kind of ceremony that was body-based. 

Stefan Laeng-Gilliatt: It’s interesting that you point to the importance of ceremony and ritual, and how Sensory Awareness or Charlotte played a part in that because . . .

Yvonne: Well that was Suzuki Roshi’s perception.

Stefan: Charlotte of course avoided ceremony and ritual.

Yvonne: Well, she did and she didn’t. I mean having a meal out there on the patio at their house in Muir Beach was everything about ritual and ceremony, disguised if you will under the designation of, “let’s have lunch together.” But my sense was when I ate meals with Charlotte and Charles, that there was a way in which sitting down to eat a meal was a sacred practice, a spiritual practice. That was very clear to me. That was one of the things I appreciated about Charlotte. Because I felt there was a way in which Suzuki Roshi would – how can I put it? I felt like that he was present whenever I’d go up there to the house and have lunch with Charlotte and Charles, or later just with Charlotte. There was a sense of, oh, Suzuki Roshi would have enjoyed this. And it’s also to some degree the way Charlotte arranged the house. The way she dressed. The way she taught, how she would arrange the room, and the kinds of things she would do in her teaching. 

And also I think Charlotte maybe was the first person I knew who was supportive of setting the table without having everything match. The dishes didn’t necessarily all match; the silverware certainly didn’t all match. The napkins might or might not all match. So even that was a kind of play. I never experienced her as being held by the need for perfection. She really wanted to invite whatever responsiveness would arise out of somebody that would be unique to them. And that sense of uniqueness, I think she really expressed.

Stefan: Yes. At the same time, while it might not have mattered whether or not things matched, it was not out of carelessness.

Yvonne: No, no. It was not chaotic. The table was always harmonious. She had a developed sense of presentation. And I think that that cultivated sense of aesthetics on Charlotte’s part in particular was something that really rang true for Suzuki Roshi. It was one of the places where he felt a real connection with her. That sense of shared enthusiasm was a great gift for him because it gave him a sense of friendship. It is one of the reasons why I think he was so sympathetic and keen on having her teach his students. 

I thought about a sesshin with Suzuki Roshi the other day and I thought of Charlotte in conjunction with this. He said, “It is true that sometimes I am the teacher and you are the student. But it is also true that sometimes you are the teacher and I am the student.” And maybe a year before that I drove him back from Tassajara after Thanksgiving dinner. We got back to the sokoji [the temple in San Francisco] at about midnight, one o’clock in the morning. He slept the whole way. That was his usual thing. And of course he woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and proceeded to give me a teaching on trust. That started with, “I don’t trust anyone.” And his concern about his students and the need he felt we all expressed of needing to trust him. And he said, “Sometimes I’m trustworthy and sometimes I’m not. But you’re barking up the wrong tree. What about trusting yourself? How come it’s all projected out like this?” 

And Charlotte had a certain kind of – the word that comes up but it doesn’t seem quite accurate – a kind of capacity for devilment. A capacity to be a little naughty, to be a little playful, which he had also. 

I used to drive Suzuki Roshi to Tassajara, back and forth. And one time, at the top of the ridge before we started down into Tassajara, across a barbed wire fence in a pasture, there were some ferns. But at the stage before they had opened up, where they’re described as fiddlehead ferns. And in that stage where they’re still all closed, they’ve come up, but they haven’t opened, they’re a great treat in Japan. And Suzuki Roshi said, “Yvonne, stop. Stop the car.” And then he pointed and he said, “I want you to go get me as many of those as you can. Do you have something you can put them in?” And I said, “But Suzuki Roshi, there’s this big ‘No Trespassing’ sign.” He said, “Ignore it!”

Stefan: I laugh because I did things just like that with Charlotte.

Yvonne: Yes. Well, that’s what I mean when I say there was this kind of naughty resonating between them. So, he put his foot on the barbed wire like this so I could scoot through, and then he went back and sat in the car, rolled the window down, giving me instructions, at which point did I have enough. It was only after I had practically decimated the whole field of ferns! And when he said: “Okay, we have to get to Tassajara very quickly. Drive as fast as you can.” And he went right to the kitchen where he made fiddlehead soup. He was so excited, he could hardly stand it. 

Stefan: That could have been Charlotte. 

Yvonne: Yes. Well, I think it’s that sense of, how can I put it? For Suzuki Roshi, he saw the ferns, so there was this immediate sense of his delight and enthusiasm and thrill at seeing them, and immediately – he was almost drooling he was so excited. And I think of the two of them having that kind of physical enthusiastic reaction to something they were delighted by.

In terms of my own teaching as a Zen teacher, I’m viewed by traditionalists as being rather eclectic, but actually I think that is not at all accurate. There is a way in which the Japanese Zen tradition can be misread as teaching a disconnect from the physical body. Part of what opened up Zen in America, in physical terms, was Charlotte’s and Charles’ work which was so much about bringing attention back into a more body-based way, not coming from Asia, but coming from Europe. 

Stefan: So would you say in your work today what you learned from Charlotte is somehow present?

Yvonne: Very much so. Charlotte helped me understand how, particularly for Americans, there is so much emphasis on thoughts, and often a kind of disregard or diminishment of what we are experiencing in a more body-based way, and how reliable body sensing is in a way that thinking can be but often is not. She enabled me to appreciate what happens when you do walking meditation and you really let the foot come to the floor. Well, I think of Charlotte in that context. That sense of when you walk and you feel the movement of the air in the room. For a lot of meditators, they’re so in their heads that it’s like, huh? What are you talking about? My sense is that the heart of Charlotte’s work was paying attention to everything we know through the senses. And the fact that she was drawing on her own experience as a westerner, and her own experience with her teacher, for me, that’s been crucially important. 

I think she was an important person for those of us who had a chance to work with her, who were also practicing Zen. There was a way in which her teaching brought everything to life. . . . Rather than going to rigidity, there was no way she was going to collaborate with rigidity.

* San Francisco Zen Center was established in 1962 by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971) and his American students. Suzuki-roshi, a Japanese Zen priest belonging to the Soto lineage, came to San Francisco in 1959 at the age of fifty-four. Already a respected Zen master in Japan, he was impressed by the seriousness and quality of "beginner's mind" among Americans he met who were interested in Zen and decided to settle here. (From the web site of San Francisco Zen Center.)

Yvonne Rand is a meditation teacher and lay householder priest in the Soto Zen Buddhist tradition. She began her practice and study of Zen with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1966. Her other principal teachers and mentors have been Dainin Katagiri Roshi, Maureen Stuart Roshi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Venerable Tara Tulku, and Shodo Harada Roshi. Her primary practice path is Zen, augmented by practices and teachings from the traditions of Theravada and Vajrayana. Ms. Rand incorporates insights from the psychotherapy traditions in her teaching. She also investigates the relevance of the arts and gardening for training the mind. Ms. Rand is married and is a mother and a gardener.

Reflections on Charlotte Selver and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

An Interview with Yvonne Rand

February 20, 2009

This is an edited excerpt of a much longer interview which was conducted as part of the Charlotte Selver Oral History and Book Project.

Yvonne Rand: The first time Charlotte and Suzuki Roshi* taught together in North Beach in San Francisco in 1967. It was the first time Suzuki Roshi had met Charlotte. He was right there doing everything with her. He led part of the day, and she led part of the day, and he was completely a participant.

His students noticed that. Oh, so this is a teacher we should pay attention to. There were also some of Charlotte’s students who felt a resonating with Suzuki Roshi and what he was teaching.

I remember one of Charlotte’s first workshops at Green Gulch where she had some big stones. She had us lie down on the floor and put the stones on different parts of the body as a way of bringing attention to the body. Suzuki Roshi was thrilled with all of that. Because for us as Americans, even to this day, we concentrate our attention very much from the neck up. So I think he was very glad to feel that kind of company and mutuality between what he was doing and what she was doing.

For Suzuki Roshi, who loved stones – he was mad for stones – to meet somebody like Charlotte who used stones in her teaching, and who would use stones as a way of introducing her students to a kind of awakening of sensing, and beginning to allow oneself to pay attention to what one experiences in a body-based, sense-based, way – it was clear to him that she could provide what was missing.

For a Japanese Zen priest here in the United States at that time, body-based work and practice would have been unusual. To find a Westerner who was doing the kind of work Charlotte was doing which resonated so strongly with Zen and with his own experience was rare. And I think there’s a way in which he sometimes felt rather lonely. He certainly had a very close connection with his students. But there was something different and reassuring about the kind of company that you have that’s collegial with another teacher.

Most American Zen students tended to dogmatism – it’s almost as though people had blinders on. If Zen practice is not strict and formal, it is not Zen. And yet if you look at the history of Zen in China and in Vietnam and Japan, there are all these eccentrics, and there are all the different forms that are recognized as the expression of Buddhism and in particular of Zen teachings.

My sense, from Suzuki Roshi, was that it was very clear to him that Charlotte’s practice was very much a spiritual practice, one that could give people experientially a sense of how to awaken from the neck down.

So there is a way in which Charlotte’s teaching, towards the latter part of her life, integrated into this community which was primarily focused on Buddhism and primarily focused on Suzuki Roshi’s teachings. There was some sense of resonating, I think both for her and her students and subsequently for the Zen students at the time.

I remember talking to Suzuki Roshi about his experience of teaching with Charlotte. That was when he made the comment about what she is doing is bringing in the elements that have to do with ceremony, a kind of ceremony that was body-based.

Stefan Laeng: It’s interesting that you point to the importance of ceremony and ritual, and how Sensory Awareness or Charlotte played a part in that because . . .

Yvonne: Well that was Suzuki Roshi’s perception.

Stefan: Charlotte of course avoided ceremony and ritual.

Yvonne: Well, she did and she didn’t. I mean having a meal out there on the patio at their house in Muir Beach was everything about ritual and ceremony, disguised if you will under the designation of, “let’s have lunch together.” But my sense was when I ate meals with Charlotte and Charles, that there was a way in which sitting down to eat a meal was a sacred practice, a spiritual practice. That was very clear to me. That was one of the things I appreciated about Charlotte. Because I felt there was a way in which Suzuki Roshi would – how can I put it? I felt like that he was present whenever I’d go up there to the house and have lunch with Charlotte and Charles, or later just with Charlotte. There was a sense of, oh, Suzuki Roshi would have enjoyed this. And it’s also to some degree the way Charlotte arranged the house. The way she dressed. The way she taught, how she would arrange the room, and the kinds of things she would do in her teaching.

And also I think Charlotte maybe was the first person I knew who was supportive of setting the table without having everything match. The dishes didn’t necessarily all match; the silverware certainly didn’t all match. The napkins might or might not all match. So even that was a kind of play. I never experienced her as being held by the need for perfection. She really wanted to invite whatever responsiveness would arise out of somebody that would be unique to them. And that sense of uniqueness, I think she really expressed.

Stefan: Yes. At the same time, while it might not have mattered whether or not things matched, it was not out of carelessness.

Yvonne: No, no. It was not chaotic. The table was always harmonious. She had a developed sense of presentation. And I think that that cultivated sense of aesthetics on Charlotte’s part in particular was something that really rang true for Suzuki Roshi. It was one of the places where he felt a real connection with her. That sense of shared enthusiasm was a great gift for him because it gave him a sense of friendship. It is one of the reasons why I think he was so sympathetic and keen on having her teach his students.

I thought about a sesshin with Suzuki Roshi the other day and I thought of Charlotte in conjunction with this. He said, “It is true that sometimes I am the teacher and you are the student. But it is also true that sometimes you are the teacher and I am the student.” And maybe a year before that I drove him back from Tassajara after Thanksgiving dinner. We got back to the sokoji [the temple in San Francisco] at about midnight, one o’clock in the morning. He slept the whole way. That was his usual thing. And of course he woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and proceeded to give me a teaching on trust. That started with, “I don’t trust anyone.” And his concern about his students and the need he felt we all expressed of needing to trust him. And he said, “Sometimes I’m trustworthy and sometimes I’m not. But you’re barking up the wrong tree. What about trusting yourself? How come it’s all projected out like this?”

And Charlotte had a certain kind of – the word that comes up but it doesn’t seem quite accurate – a kind of capacity for devilment. A capacity to be a little naughty, to be a little playful, which he had also.

I used to drive Suzuki Roshi to Tassajara, back and forth. And one time, at the top of the ridge before we started down into Tassajara, across a barbed wire fence in a pasture, there were some ferns. But at the stage before they had opened up, where they’re described as fiddlehead ferns. And in that stage where they’re still all closed, they’ve come up, but they haven’t opened, they’re a great treat in Japan. And Suzuki Roshi said, “Yvonne, stop. Stop the car.” And then he pointed and he said, “I want you to go get me as many of those as you can. Do you have something you can put them in?” And I said, “But Suzuki Roshi, there’s this big ‘No Trespassing’ sign.” He said, “Ignore it!”

Stefan: I laugh because I did things just like that with Charlotte.

Yvonne: Yes. Well, that’s what I mean when I say there was this kind of naughty resonating between them. So, he put his foot on the barbed wire like this so I could scoot through, and then he went back and sat in the car, rolled the window down, giving me instructions, at which point did I have enough. It was only after I had practically decimated the whole field of ferns! And when he said: “Okay, we have to get to Tassajara very quickly. Drive as fast as you can.” And he went right to the kitchen where he made fiddlehead soup. He was so excited, he could hardly stand it.

Stefan: That could have been Charlotte.

Yvonne: Yes. Well, I think it’s that sense of, how can I put it? For Suzuki Roshi, he saw the ferns, so there was this immediate sense of his delight and enthusiasm and thrill at seeing them, and immediately – he was almost drooling he was so excited. And I think of the two of them having that kind of physical enthusiastic reaction to something they were delighted by.

In terms of my own teaching as a Zen teacher, I’m viewed by traditionalists as being rather eclectic, but actually I think that is not at all accurate. There is a way in which the Japanese Zen tradition can be misread as teaching a disconnect from the physical body. Part of what opened up Zen in America, in physical terms, was Charlotte’s and Charles’ work which was so much about bringing attention back into a more body-based way, not coming from Asia, but coming from Europe.

Stefan: So would you say in your work today what you learned from Charlotte is somehow present?

Yvonne: Very much so. Charlotte helped me understand how, particularly for Americans, there is so much emphasis on thoughts, and often a kind of disregard or diminishment of what we are experiencing in a more body-based way, and how reliable body sensing is in a way that thinking can be but often is not. She enabled me to appreciate what happens when you do walking meditation and you really let the foot come to the floor. Well, I think of Charlotte in that context. That sense of when you walk and you feel the movement of the air in the room. For a lot of meditators, they’re so in their heads that it’s like, huh? What are you talking about? My sense is that the heart of Charlotte’s work was paying attention to everything we know through the senses. And the fact that she was drawing on her own experience as a westerner, and her own experience with her teacher, for me, that’s been crucially important.

I think she was an important person for those of us who had a chance to work with her, who were also practicing Zen. There was a way in which her teaching brought everything to life. . . . Rather than going to rigidity, there was no way she was going to collaborate with rigidity.

* San Francisco Zen Center was established in 1962 by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971) and his American students. Suzuki-roshi, a Japanese Zen priest belonging to the Soto lineage, came to San Francisco in 1959 at the age of fifty-four. Already a respected Zen master in Japan, he was impressed by the seriousness and quality of "beginner's mind" among Americans he met who were interested in Zen and decided to settle here. (From the web site of San Francisco Zen Center. For more information go to www.sfzc.org.)

Yvonne Rand is a meditation teacher and lay householder priest in the Soto Zen Buddhist tradition. She began her practice and study of Zen with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1966. Her other principal teachers and mentors have been Dainin Katagiri Roshi, Maureen Stuart Roshi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Venerable Tara Tulku, and Shodo Harada Roshi. Her primary practice path is Zen, augmented by practices and teachings from the traditions of Theravada and Vajrayana. Ms. Rand incorporates insights from the psychotherapy traditions in her teaching. She also investigates the relevance of the arts and gardening for training the mind. Ms. Rand is married and is a mother and a gardener. (For more information go to www.goatintheroad.org.)