reclaiming vitality and presence

SENSORY AWARENESS AS A PRACTICE FOR LIFE

Excerpts from our brand new publication, which combines the writings from Charles Brooks' Sensory Awareness - The Rediscovery of Experiencing, with Charlotte Selver's teachings from her workshops. "Our intention is to offer the reader the best of both worlds: Charlotte and Charles combined together in offering an updated, enhanced, and fuller guidebook for newcomers, beginning students, and 'veteran' students alike". (From the editors' introduction)

Bill Littlewood on our new publication:

“I am very impressed with your volume. It is filled with delightful photos and broken up into bite-sized readings. There are other qualities: let me count the ways...

• The cover is modest and clear and handsome.
• Norman Fischer’s Foreword is wonderfully clear, warm, brief and friendly.
• I liked your simple solution of putting Charlotte’s words in italics and Charles’ in normal type, making it effortless to decide who’s speaking.
• The way you suggest how Charlotte & Charles worked together by inter-leaving their words and ideas.
• A wonderfully generous selection of photos: earthy, and expressive, relevant to the texts, and all implicitly sug- gesting the utter simplicity of the work.
• The typefaces and line spacings make each page wel- coming, a pleasure to read.
• Your Epilogue, with summary statements by each of them: perfect!
• You have presented the heart of their work: it is an excellent introduction for newcomers.

The book is a very approachable presentation of their work, a most invitingly open, attractive, and pleasant way to discover Sensory Awareness. I can only wish the book were in hardcover binding so as to weather constant re-readings....”

From the Foreword by Norman Fischer:

... To be part of the earth, to love it, to experience it, not as an object outside the self, but as the essence of what the self is, connected, intimate, vibrant, and alive, overflowing with life and with the essential kindness that is life’s salient characteristic—to teach, explore, and demonstrate that in living: this was Charlotte and Charles’ work over the many years of their marriage and association in the Sensory Awareness movement. ...

... As a Zen student, I was especially moved by the work, and I experienced it in the context of my Zen practice. (Indeed, the Sensory Awareness work has a long connection with Zen, at first through Alan Watts and Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki, and for many years through an association with the successive abbots of San Francisco Zen Center, myself included.) Like Zen, Sensory Awareness focuses on perception, in the recognition that it is only through the full experiencing of our organic life that we can grasp the deepest and most important human truths. ...

From the Editors' Introduction:

Among the most influential and colorful pioneers in the Human Potential Movement Charlotte and Charles led classes and workshops together throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe in growth centers, universities, churches, dance studios, Zen onasteries, hotel rooftops, and even a small New England schoolhouse. The unique type of somatic reeducation they offered has been an important force in the development of the Human Potential Movement, Humanistic Psychology, and various types of now popular mind/body disciplines. It has also deeply touched and changed the lives of hundreds of students over the years, among them Ruth Denison, Fritz Perls, Alan Watts, and Erich Fromm, to name a few.
Charlotte was modest in always crediting the origins of this approach to Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby,* with whom she had studied in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, giving the greatest acknowledgment to Gindler as her primary teacher. Gindler had been a teacher of Harmonische Gymnastik who gradually developed her own special in-depth approach to body/mind integration. Jacoby was an innovative educator and musician who often collaborated in teaching with Gindler. Both were interested in helping people develop truer authenticity and unfold their fuller potentials. In 1938 Charlotte emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis, eventually offering her own classes in this study in New York. As her classes gradually became better known she called her approach “Sensory Awareness,” a name she was never completely satisfied with, feeling it was a bit too simplistic and limiting. “It is more than only the senses,” she would say.

From Chapter 2: Being in the World (Charles Brooks)

After heavy rains last week, we planted seeds in our garden. They are sprouting already. I know from past exploration how deep and intimately the little roots are pushing their way, with the amazing vigor of infancy, down through the dense particles of soil; and as I look I can almost see the stems and leaflets unfolding in the same air that I feel bathing me inside and out, under the same sun that beats on my skin.

Does not all individual life, as with these seeds, begin in moisture—either in the sea or, as here, in the damp earth, or on the yolk of an egg, or in the fluids of the womb? In the womb, when the united cells multiply to the point where something that one could call consciousness infuses them, the whole development of the new organism continues to take place in that total, invisible immediacy of the environment which is the nature of fluid, which leaves no crack unentered, no surface unembraced.

Until birth we had no experience of distance: of the possibility of falling, of the sound of something not adjacent to us, of warmth either coming to us or going from us. No wonder that on entering the world outside we clutched at the breast, with its soft tissues like our own, and breathed the strange air more easily when held and enveloped in mother’s arms.