Generated by Rank Math SEO, this is an llms.txt file designed to help LLMs better understand and index this website. # Sensory Awareness Foundation: The Sensory Awareness Foundation (SAF) is dedicated to carrying forward the legacy of Charlotte Selver’s work in Sensory Awareness — a practice that awakens presence, clarity, and responsiveness in daily life. ## Sitemaps [XML Sitemap](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/sitemap_index.xml): Includes all crawlable and indexable pages. ## Pages - [Login](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/login/): If You want to avail our membership register our membership - [Account](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/account/): Recordings of SALG sessionsSubmit A WorkshopHeritageOrganizational MattersUser SettingsUpcoming Workshops - [Sensory Awareness Leaders Guild](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/leaders-guild/): Home > - [Registration](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/registration/): Get your Membership from 145$/ Year Or 12$ Monthly  - [Thank You](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/thank-you/): Thank you! - [My account](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/my-account/): My Account Login Username or email address *Required Password *Required Remember me Log in Lost your password? - [Checkout](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/checkout/): Home > - [Cart](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/cart/): Home > - [Refund Policy](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/refund-policy/): Home > - [Return Policy](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/return-policy/): Home > - [Shipping Policy](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/shipping-policy/): Home > - [Terms & Conditions](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/terms-conditions/): Home > - [Audio Practice](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/audio-practice/): Home > - [Knowledge Center](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/knowledge-center/): Home > - [Donate One-Time](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/donate-one-time/): Home > - [Donate](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/donate/): Home > - [Become a Member](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/become-a-member/): Home > - [Directory of Leaders](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/directory-of-leaders/): Home > - [About the Foundation](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/about-us/): Lorna is a development professional with a strong background in nonprofit consulting. With years of experience in supporting organizations through strategic planning and operations, she is passionate about helping nonprofits thrive. Lorna also enjoys the outdoors, balancing her work with a love for surfing. Currently, she is contributing her expertise to the Sensory Awareness Foundation, where she assists in advancing its mission to promote Sensory Awareness. - [External Events](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/external-events/) - [Special Events](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/special-events/): Home > - [Online Workshop](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/online-workshop/): Online Workshops - [In-Person Workshops](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/in-person-workshops/): Each year, the Sensory Awareness Foundation offers in-person workshops in different locations around the world. These gatherings invite participants to come together for shared exploration, direct experience, and deepening presence through the practice of Sensory Awareness. - [Shop](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/shop/) - [Privacy Policy](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/privacy-policy/): Home > - [Home](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/): Be fully present, connected with others, and alive in the world around you through Sensory Awareness - [Contact Us](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/contact-us/): Whether you're looking to connect with our leaders, discover more about our initiatives, or find ways to collaborate, our team is here for you. Get in touch and let us know how we can support your interest or partnership. - [The Practice](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/the-practice/): Home > ## Products - [Return to Our Senses: A Path to Stability in an Unstable World – Written by Lee Klinger Lesser](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/return-to-our-senses-a-path-to-stability-in-an-unstable-world-written-by-lee-klinger-lesser/): Return to Our Senses offers a life-changing invitation to come home to what is most reliable and intimate: our direct, embodied experience. In a time marked by turbulence, speed, and chronic uncertainty this book presents the somatic, mindfulness practice of Sensory Awareness as a practical and deeply humane antidote to disconnection and overwhelm. Drawing on over fifty years of teaching, Lee Klinger Lesser weaves together inspiring stories, simple yet profound practices, and clear guidance for cultivating presence in daily life. Readers are invited to explore how living more fully in their own bodies transforms the way they meet stress, conflict, and grief, and open to creativity, change, and possibility. At its heart, Return to Our Senses is an act of love for life. It calls us to respond, rather than react, to the conditions we find ourselves in; to bring forward our unique gifts with care, courage, and compassion; and to - [Waking Up](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/waking-up/): This book is a lovingly selected and skillfully edited compilation of excerpts of more than two decades of Charlotte Selver’s profound teachings, colorful sayings, and rich insights, arranged topically. They represent the heart of her teaching. Using her own words, the text of each experiment feels like Charlotte Selver herself speaking not only to her class but to the reader. The reader is invited to try out some of the suggested experiments. Although the practice of Sensory Awareness, the rediscovery of experiencing, is nonverbal, its essence can be distilled from the tape-recorded words of its seminal teacher, Charlotte Selver, in response to her students' actions and questions during her classes. This book is a lovingly selected and skillfully edited compilation of excerpts of more than two decades of Charlotte Selver's profound teachings, colorful sayings, and rich insights, arranged topically. They represent the heart of her teaching. Using only her own words, the text of each experiment feels like Charlotte Selver herself speaking not only to her class but to the reader. The reader is invited to try out some of the suggested experiments. - [Reclaiming Vitality and Presence: Sensory Awareness as a Practice for Life](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/reclaiming-vitality-and-presence-sensory-awareness-as-a-practice-for-life/): This book captures the essence of Charlotte Selver’s practice of Sensory Awareness like no other publication. It is an invitation to experience life firsthand again, as we did when we were children. In a culture where we have grown accustomed to accumulating knowledge from teachers and experts, it is rare to find a book that actually invites us to trust our own senses again. It is the authors’ intent to give back to the reader authority over his or her own experience and learning processes. Much of the book focuses on reviving the senses in order to open the mind and body to direct learning. The book imitates an actual Sensory Awareness class, involving the reader as a student, guiding him or her along a journey with and through the senses to a way of living that is in accordance with the natural functioning of the human organism in its environment. The range of explorations include a renewed connection to the support of the earth as a foundation for trust; the central role of gravity for our health and for finding orientation in life; a study of breathing that promotes health and vitality; and connecting and interacting with other people. A handbook to a more genuine and connected way of living, the work is also a beautifully crafted account of Sensory Awareness, showing these profound teachers at work with their students and with the reader. - [Waking Up – Becoming Response-Able](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/waking-up-becoming-response-able/): Green Gulch Farm Study Group, May 2, 1988 “Everything which we should work at means the whole person. So that it’s – it doesn’t make any difference what we work at, it’s the question whether it is deeply received and understood and approached – as you from beyond foot ‘til beyond head. Through your whole being devoting yourself to something and by that coming more to unity and coming more to what you actually are communicating with, whether it’s a person or a task or a situation or whatever it is.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Permitting Inner Activities](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/permitting-inner-activities/): Monhegan Island, July 31, 1980 “It would be very interesting that you don’t feel that our sessions are a lesson but that you feel that it’s a beginning of a process. And the question is whether this process is permitted to continue. … I would like to try today to bring a little bit more of experience about in you, where you can feel a little bit more how it is when you begin to get more respect for your life, for your living interior. And you follow more what you have got and how it wants to relate in you. It needs no criticism. . . . It needs willingness to allow changes. It needs respect for something which is your nature but you have not yet permitted it entirely.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Natural or Performed? – A Tightrope Walk](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/natural-or-performed-a-tightrope-walk/): Monhegan Island, August 30, 2001 “Each moment is a moment. . . . . it's not performed, it's only allowed. … Give up the performing. Allow more the nature of yourself. … Everybody comes to a standing, which feels natural to you. . . . So that you are not performing...so that you try to find your own nature. . . And any little change in standing or anywhere in you, which is needed, to find your own nature. . . . . Where does it lead me? . . . Where is it that I permit my own nature?” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Learning to Receive – Being Receptive](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/learning-to-receive-being-receptive/): Monhegan Island, Monhegan, July 30, 1992 “When I came to Elsa Gindler I began to understand what it is to receive. To be there for reception. This one moment of this – the hand on my shoulder. If it would be possible for us . . . to be such a receiver. To let it happen to me. Rather than words. To come more and more into the neighborhood of it. Who understands that? This is really normal. Everything else is abnormal. What we usually do in just listening to words and letting them go through our brain is just the opposite of that what I have been trying to explain to you. …. Words can become experience. . . . When you hear it, does it ring a bell in you, so to say? Can you communicate with it? Can it become felt to you? So that it is not words. Words become experience. You receive. I receive from you when I hear you speak.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Learning Through Sensing](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/learning-through-sensing/): Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, November 14, 1977 “I feel a great sense of responsibility. We are offering to you a work which in its very character somehow embraces our possibility of getting in touch with whatever we do or whoever we meet. . . . And going as deep as possible into this coming in contact with what we do. . . . If you want so, as Gindler called it, everything which we do is an exercise in concentration. The way, in other words, we are alerted and give what we have. So you must not see it as a skill besides of other skills. It's true when somebody is trying to come with his leg over his head that's a very precise task. But it isn't so important, this task, than how we approach it.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Giving Up Doing](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/giving-up-doing/): Barra de Navidad, January 19, 2001 “Do you feel your heart beat? . . . Your breathing going – don’t try to breath. That comes all by itself. . . . . . . So, sensing would mean giving up any exercises. Just feeling what happens. . . . How the heart beats now. . . . How breathing goes now when you don’t command anything. It just happens. . . . You may learn something from it. . . . Breathing is just the sign of being alive. . . . It’s no exercise.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Freeing the Hip Joints and Legs](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/freeing-the-hip-joints-and-legs/): La Casa de Maria, Santa Barbara, April 1, 2000 “Would you feel what all is happening between your trunk and your leg in your hip joints? . . How it feels when it opens? When the bending is happening? . . It’s like tasting. . . . Could you be more feeling, not rushing, feeling? . . . Yes. . . Feeling. ... Very gentle…” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Freeing the Eyes – Being Open for Seeing](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/freeing-the-eyes-being-open-for-seeing/): Three Month Study Group at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, March 31, 1993 “Would close your eyelids. . . . It’s already in the before the act of the eyelids close starts, there is this moment and then in the process of it, of readiness that they can close, with all the effects it has already. . . . And when the eyelids are closed, from moment to moment this inner willingness to permit renewing . . . makes resting so beautiful. . . . It’s not that you do anything. The organism has this tendency of renewing. But there is this inner, permitting that it can happen. . . . And I’m as I’m speaking of it, I feel this kind of permissiveness for something which happens by the creative character of our organism. It’s going through and through. So there’s not only that the eyelids close, and there is an occasion for the eyes to come to renewing, but all the cells in me would permit this process too. So it’s not located, here and the rest just keeps mum, you know, but all through us the possibility of joining, permitting, being part of.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Finding Movement that is True](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/finding-movement-that-is-true/): Three Month Study Group at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, April 1, 1993 “When you give up this thinking about it, maybe you come closer. But it’s very true. Who felt something of that yourself? In order to come to the true, we have to notice the untrue. . . . And not say, “Oh, terrible.” Be happy when you feel it. . . . You also will begin to feel when you mistake a movement with - “strampeln”. … fidgeting . . . Just like when you speak, your words say, hopefully, exactly that what you want to say. What you feel. True. So movement can become true.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Charlotte Selver About Her Early Life and Study](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/charlotte-selver-about-her-early-life-and-study/): Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, December 5, 1999 Charlotte Selver talks about her early life in Germany, studying Expressive Gymnastics with Rudolph Bode, and meeting and studying with the teacher who most informed her life and work, Elsa Ginder. - [Breathing and Full Reactivity](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/breathing-and-full-reactivity/): Breathing involves steps. First, allow it to function naturally without manipulation. - [Becoming Ready – Being Tuned In](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/becoming-ready-being-tuned-in/): Leaders Study Group, July 19, 1990, afternoon session “There is a great difference between whether I focus on something or whether something focuses me. In other words, it arouses my attention, my full being. I am there for it. It’s not that I do something. But something affects this totality which is me. I don’t just hear with my ears what you say. What you say arouses my vital capacities.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Bulletin: Emmi Pikler 1902-1984](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/emmi-pikler/): Dr. Emmi Pikler, Hungarian pediatrician, has greatly influenced early childhood upbringing in Europe. - [Explorations in Sitting](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/explorations-in-sitting/): Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, February 27, 2000 “In each one of us has a feeling of what we call "how it wants to be". Very often we have supplanted this how it wants to be too much with habits; or imitations of others; or admonitions of others; and so on. In other works, it's not yet - not anymore quite we. And, uh, so today, I would very much like to work on something, which kind of concerns us all - very much. How does it want to be?" How - you will have many voices inside now which will here or there call and say: "Oh this! No, not this. This is better. This doesn't feel so good anymore.", and so on. In other words, we will all be, so to say, admonished by our nature. Our own nature. Our very deep inside nature. To come back to how we are really created. And our - how our inner wants to function. And very often we have been educated into something which is very contrary to that, and so we may gradually find our way back.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Coming Back to Experiencing](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/coming-back-to-experiencing/): Santa Barbara, April 2, 2000 “As old as I am, all these moments of a new reality, of a new experiencing, make everything so alive and so full. When I’m not only in my head, with my thoughts, when I really feel in my tissues, in my nerves, in my bones how everything affects me.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [A Taste of Sensory Awareness](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/a-taste-of-sensory-awareness/): An overview of the work, with an edited transcript of a session from the 1987 NY Open Center workshop. 38 pages - [Breathing and the Diaphragm](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/breathing-and-the-diaphragm/): Green Gulch Farm Study Group, May 12, 2000 “Very gently, once more go with your hands into this area and just touch so gently that you don’t disturb anything. That’s the region of the diaphragm; the most sensitive muscle in the whole organism, which either constricts, or gradually opens to whatever wants to happen inside. . . . . . It has nothing to do with this wilful breathing, which is usually taught. . . . If it wants to go fast, it goes fast. If it hardly wants to move, it hardly moves. .... If it wants to change, it changes.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Breath and Heartbeat](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/breath-and-heartbeat/): Monhegan Island, August 13, 2001 “Let us give a little time just to feel how the air comes and goes when we don’t direct it. When we let it have its own way. . . . Like the beating of the heart, we don’t direct it. It has its own way to be. . . . And everything which it wants, permitting when it wants to be small, let it be small. ... When the exhalation wants to become deeper, let it become deeper. Don’t direct it. Permit it. . . . Or faster. Or slower. . . . What comes, comes. ... And in order to become more quiet yet and more permissive, would you gently go with your hands around your eyes and forehead. ... to quieten the inner head. . . . To create more peace inside. ... Giving up thinking.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Being Fully Present](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/being-fully-present/): Allow movement. How far can my arm stretch? You are present. - [Are You Tuned In?](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/are-you-tuned-in/): Sensory Awareness with Charlotte Selver Recording and Transcript Monhegan Island, August 6, 2001 “Even the slightest little change which may be needed you would gratefully allow, so that the inner of the organism is like a very fine tuned violin … everywhere … sounding and resounding.” This is a recording of an actual Sensory Awareness class, not a lecture. We suggest that you take the time to follow Charlotte’s guidance rather than just listening to the recording. We include a transcript because Charlotte is sometimes hard to understand for people who didn’t know her. - [Alan Watts on the Work of Charlotte Selver](https://www.sensoryawareness.org/product/alan-watts-on-the-work-of-charlotte-selver/): Alan Watts, author, philosopher, and early disseminator of Eastern philosophy in the West collaborated closely with Charlotte Selver from the 1950s on until his death in 1973. This recording is from a radio broadcast for KPFA, probably early 1960s.