Dear Reader,

Summer is quickly coming to a close and with that our virtual Monhegan summer with Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks. The manuscript for the chapter “The Breathers on Monhegan” is finished and I sent it to my editor, Arnie Kotler, along with three other recently finished chapters, “Esalen Encounters,” “Back in New York City” (about the founding of the Sensory Awareness Foundation), and “How to Awaken From the Neck Down” (about Charlotte and Charles’s connection with San Francisco Zen Center).

Today’s post is a sort of bridge from the Monhegan chapter to the chapter I’m now working on, currently named “Expansion and Depth.” It is centered around the two 9-Month Sensory Awareness Study Groups in the 1970s.

Bill Littlewood participated in the first of them. Our focus in this post, though, is on what appears to be an early draft of “Waking Up – The Work of Charlotte Selver,” published in 2004.

In the early 1980s, Charlotte asked Bill to “make a selection from the audio tapes of her classes for the purpose of publishing a book of her actual classroom comments and interactions.” (Bill in Waking Up, page XII).

Bill was initially intimidated by that task, wondering how he could possibly “hear with her ears, see with her eyes,” to find what Charlotte would consider important. Charlotte, however, encouraged him to “pick out what you think important.” Which he then did, together with Mary Alice Roche.

The draft I have in front of me, was sent to me after Bill’s passing in 2017, along with other papers. It’s a spiral-bound copy of a manuscript of about 120 pages, written on a typewriter, simply titled (in handwriting) “Sensory Awareness Workshops.” Only the page headers’s initials, WCL, give away that it’s by William C. Littlewood.

I’m sharing with you three brief excerpts from the manuscript. As I usually do with archival materials, I have (almost completely) refrained from editing the text, tempting as it was at times. What we read is Charlotte’s spontaneous speaking voice, not a text that was composed for print or a talk that was prepared in advance of the class.

The “Prologue,” clearly has Charlotte Selver’s voice but it just as clearly has gone through a lot of editing, presumably by Bill.

The “Introductory Remarks by Bill Littlewood,” are just that. They give a bit of context to the class transcripts that follow. I shortened the remarks considerably for the purpose of the post. In this draft, he seemed to have used classes from workshops on Monhegan in 1974.

“Observing vs. Noticing” is my title for a short excerpt from part two of the manuscript, titled “Letting Go of Judgments and Ideas.”

You’ll also see two callout blocks, one with an excerpt from Fritz Perls’s “In and Out the Garbage Pale,” to give context to a remark by Charlotte. The other a quote from Richard Baker Roshi, a serendipitous find just as I was preparing this post. It fits neatly with the topic of observing.

I hope you’ll enjoy the read and that you give it the time it takes to let it go deeper than “just reading it.” Your comments are, as always, very welcome and will enrich the post.

Be well,

Stefan Laeng

Prologue

I have tried many times to explain what makes it so impossible to do for this work [and which is being done] in all other disciplines—namely, to write about it—and as I have been trying to explain it, it has become more clear to me.

We humans use so many words, and words today are being used like merchandise—one just handles them, tosses them about, swallows them down. Even when we dig for the meaning of words we have a terrific work on our hands to get to that meaning. So, to actually write down what is, is very difficult because one has to deeply, deeply sense what one says. One has to represent it. It’s not enough just to say it. It has to be flesh and blood in you—certainly as far as this work is concerned, since the work deals with just that.

Now, our work is a practice, a practice which was begun by Elsa Gindler in Berlin in the early part of this [the 20th] century. She was particularly interested in finding out what had happened to the marvelous potential which we all have as little children, and which we can see in every unspoiled child. How this potential can be cultivated as we grow up and brought to life again when it has become neglected and lost to us, so that as we grow older and riper we increase our possibilities instead of decreasing them, as so often happens.

For Gindler was exceedingly astonished to see that children who started their lives so very beautifully, by and by became adults who were not so fascinating any more. So she asked this question: “Why does this happen?,” and in the search for what is possible in us and why these possibilities are not [flowering], our work came into being.

Now, we all come from somewhere. We all began fresh and new, have grown up a certain way, have had many, many influences on us from the teaching we got from our parents and from society. We stand somewhere at this moment with all the past behind us. We have arrived at a certain phase of our life. And for each one of us now the question is equally crucial: do I allow what is happening to me? Do I actually, simply meet it with no expectations or ideas but as critical, as clear-minded and clear-feeling as possible? Not as something I believe in but as something I taste as I would food, and see whether it’s good for me or not, see what comes out of it? Or do I fall in love with some version I hear, or fit somehow into some kind of a system I have been thinking of? Do I fall in love with some expression and just take it over and sun myself in it? Do I see somebody doing something and say, “It looks so good, I’ll do it that way?” In other words, what is it to really learn out of our own questions? What is it to work without right away trying to do something with what comes to me?

In our century everybody wants to know, but the knowledge we get is no knowledge. When one speaks much about things it doesn’t mean that one knows them. The daughter of a friend of mine was in high school, and there was a paper she had to write, so she chose for her theme the work of Ibsen and she wrote her paper. I asked her, “What did you read of Ibsen?, “ and she said, “Nothing.” I said, “Nothing! How can you write about Ibsen when you have not read anything by him?” She said, “I read about him.” So I said, “You read about him when the works of Ibsen are available for everybody? Why do you read about him?” “Oh,” she said, “That’s a shortcut,” and she was very impatient with me. “We all do it,” she said. And that’s the trouble. We don’t go to the source. We hear about it, we read about it, we are taught about it, but we don’t find out for ourselves.

But you must realize that you are not just working on yourself. That would be a misunderstanding. Then the work could easily land—and it does with some people—in plain narcissism. You are living in this world, and in this respect the work has a tremendous role. It’s not so much that we learn to play with and to enjoy the world but that we have the strength to go against the world when we feel there is something not in order. We must have our minds very clear as to what we are really doing.

What I have most learned in this work is what it is like to be there for what is needed. It is a very difficult thing to understand that the appetite for having and getting can be transformed into a giving. To the end of her life Elsa Gindler said, “What does this want from me?,” not “What do I want from it?”

And I would like very much to warn you: don’t think the experiments are it. They are only a bridge. What I say may even get in your way, may hinder you from your own experiencing, if you let it. Your sensitivity is the only tool you have. Only what you experience helps you—and what you really experience without having any ideas about it.

Introductory Remarks by Bill Littlewood

On Monhegan, summer classes take place in the one-room schoolhouse which serves the small village on the island. All school furniture has been put away for the summer, so teacher and students work on straw mats which cover most of the bare wood floor. Sitting on the floor is Charlotte and Charles’ preferred way of working.

Class usually lasts about two hours. Sometimes there are two sessions a day. During most workshops in recent years, Charlotte and Charles alternate the teaching role, each teaching one or two classes at a time, followed by the other. When Charlotte teaches, Charles becomes a student; when Charles teaches, Charlotte usually sits by and observes, occasionally joining in an experiment or discussion.

Observing vs. Noticing

Student: I used to think that awareness involved observing. And, well, I can’t say that I don’t practice observation, but I see that it’s not a matter of observation but one of noticing. The difference between observing and noticing.

Charlotte: In other words, noticing means it occurs to you.

Student: Right. One notices something that’s happening.

Charlotte: Yeah. It comes as a recognition without that one goes looking for it. Sensing is becoming more awake. The finding out, the exploration which we do in this work, does not go by observation. It also does not go by even the slightest effort to watch. It is a kind of inner awakeness which is there without watching and without observing. When you close your eyes . . . Will you close your eyes? Now, if I invite you to let your eyes get open, you see. You don’t have to make an effort to see, you simply see. You can’t prevent it. If you put your fingers into your ears, you can’t hear. With your fingers out, do you make an effort to hear me? You don’t have to, because when your ears are open you must hear. You can’t prevent it. With your fingers out, you hear. It’s as simple as that.

I was with Fritz Perls in Provincetown many years ago. We were driving together through Cape Cod and I said to him,

“Look at this beautiful hill!”
“Oh, how lovely the ocean is!”
“Do you see such-and-such?”
and so on.

At last he turned to me and said,

“Charlotte, don’t I have my own eyes? You don’t have to tell me what to see!”

I was very hurt, but later I thought, “He’s right. Why should I tell him what he can see for himself?”

So, when our consciousness is not blocked or blurred, we are open for sensations, and the sensations can come much more precisely and freshly to us than when we make an effort to watch. We speak of sensing, and sensing means the use of the sensory nervous system, sensory nerves which go all through us, from A to Z, enveloping everything. And those sensory nerves can be asleep, or they can wake up. So that when I speak of sensing, it’s a waking up inside us.

Who understands that?

Who is astonished about this richness which we have?

To be awake means to allow this marvelous natural equipment of ours to come into play.

[Here, Charlotte asks the students to come up to standing and then slapping themselves all over. This is followed by an exchange between Charlotte and students. We’re jumping back in a few pages later.]

Now, the art is not to watch it. Not to observe it. Not to try to feel it, but just to be there in it. You can’t be in a higher state of being than to be there for something. In other words, you are not feeling something, you are not thinking about it, you are not watching it, you are not observing it. You don’t even make the effort to feel it, because every one of these things will diminish your possibility to sense, to get impressions.

Charles has given much time yesterday to bring a little bit more to your consciousness what it is when one watches. He invited you to give up the watching, which isn’t so easy at all. There was a very interesting question which Charles raised. He said,

“Is the watcher outside you or in you?”

Some attempts were made to imagine that somebody watches you, and you felt that you didn’t like it. But the organism—that means we—also doesn’t like that we watch ourselves. In the moment in which we watch ourselves we divide ourselves in two: the watcher and the one who is being watched. So, we kind of split ourselves in two, and this is bringing about a very unhealthy condition.

Most of us are still under the influence of an education in which watching and observing was constantly asked from us. It was asked by our parents, and it was asked by our teachers, but they don’t know what the organism actually is. We have very much more endowment for being aware, for being alert, than most people realize. We don’t need to watch and we don’t need to observe. We simply could be awake. I must admit it is not easy to know the difference between letting something be conscious and watching or observing it. It doesn’t come by trying to get it. It will come if we are hungry for it.

Another thing became acute yesterday when somebody said, “I felt it through my whole body.” Who is I, and who is the body? I am raising this question.

Could you show me where ‘I’ is, and where the body is?

Could you show me where you are? [Charlotte asking a student. Student indicates his head]

Do you agree with him? [Charlotte asking the group]

As one of my students once remarked, “My body is only there to carry my brains from place to place!”

There is no split by nature between this [indicating head] and the rest of us. It’s only man-made, this idea of ‘mind’ and ‘body’ where the mind is something free-floating and has nothing to do with the rest of us. But in reality it isn’t so. This is what Fritz Perls experienced when he studied with me. He then put it down in his quote, “We don’t have an organism, we are the organism.”

There is nothing else but the organism. Every thought, every intuition, every memory, everything which ever could happen through you comes by the capacities of the living organism. That means of you. If we would begin to experience what we call ‘organism’ is living self—from head to foot, including everything—then we would begin to really live and understand. Before that you split yourself.

So the question would be: is there a state possible in which we can be without watching and without observing—simply awake? Is there a state of awareness possible which is permitted through our whole self from head to foot? So that everywhere we can be aware?

You can imagine how much more powerful this kind of awareness would be than when our poor head is so overworked all the time, while the rest of us is just vegetating around, and all this marvelous equipment which we have is restricted or dull, not really helping us to live our lives. So we have to approach the question: could we give up the overactivity in the head and allow fuller living and responding throughout ourself?

Dear Reader,

For my work on a chapter about Charlotte Selver’s times on Monhegan Island in Maine I went back to an interview I had done with Ed Deci in 2010. When I tried to reach out to him a few weeks ago, I learned that he died earlier this year at his home in Rochester, NY. He was 83 years old.

For more than 50 years, Ed spent summers on Monhegan after he “flipped for the place” while attending a workshop with Charlotte in 1973. A few years later he bought a summer residence on the island and became an engaged member of its community. A “Remembrance and Gathering” for Ed will be held on Monhegan on August 12.

As a passionate research psychologist, his life’s work was in what he called “intrinsic motivation,” “this inner kind of curiosity and vitality for living.” His research at the University of Rochester led him to develop the Self-Determination Theory, about which he lectured and wrote throughout his professional career.

Today, I’m sharing with you excerpts from our long conversation. A 21-minute audio excerpt is available for all readers. Paid subscribers and patrons have access the full 70-minute in-depth conversation, touching on such topics as the different teaching styles of Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, transference, the struggles around Charles’s manuscript for his book, “Sensory Awareness – the Rediscovery of Experiencing” (now titled Reclaiming Vitality and Presence), and much more .

I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Be well,

Stefan Laeng

PS: For more on Ed’s work, you might also want to read the New York Times obituary: Edward L. Deci, 83, Dies: Found Self-Determination as a Key to Happiness

Or this video in which Ed talks about his research: Ed Deci on Self-Determination Theory

Intrinsic Motivation - The Natural Activity of Life

A conversation with Ed Deci

My first question to Ed was about his work and how - if at all - it connects with the work of Charlotte Selver.

Ed Deci: I met Charlotte and Charles for the first time in January of 1973. I had heard about her from Sherman Kingsbury.

Sherm was a good friend of mine and he and Charlotte had done a workshop together in Bethel, Maine. I think a two-week residential workshop sponsored by what used to be called NTL [National Training Lab]. In those days, they had these workshops all summer long.

He told me to find a way to go work with this woman. So I did. I found out that she was giving workshops in Barra de Navidad, Mexico. And so I went off to Barra in 1973.

I got my PhD in psychology in 1970. I was already a faculty member at the University of Rochester when I first met Charlotte. I’m a research psychologist. I also do some clinical work, but the main thing that I do is research, writing, lecturing, and so on. And I have, throughout this whole time, really worked with a set of concepts that are motivational concepts. And they have the kind of jargon that goes along with academia and research and so on.

But really, quite simply stated, I was initially interested in something called intrinsic motivation, which is a kind of inner motivation that’s the natural activity of life. It’s about doing what interests you. Just look at kids, and it’s just such a remarkable thing to see how motivated they are.

The question that interested me as a researcher first was, what happens to people’s intrinsic motivation, this inner kind of excitement and interest and curiosity and vitality for living? What happens to that when you reward people for doing things that they’re perfectly willing to do anyway?

So, you’ve got your kids, and they love to learn just from everything they do. But then we get this notion that we have to motivate them to learn by using rewards of various sorts. We pay them or do whatever we do of that sort to motivate them. So I started doing research on that, and the first experiments that I did—I was still a graduate student at the time—was to literally pay people for doing things that they found interesting.

But then, using the scientific method, you would randomly assign people, and half of them would be paid to do this thing that interests them, and the other half would do exactly the same thing and not be paid. And then you would assess the key things that you’re interested in, which for me was we called intrinsic motivation, this curiosity and vitality for living. And what I found was that when you rewarded people with money for doing things they loved to do, they stopped loving it so much.

So, I was doing that, and in 1973 I started with Charlotte and for a period of four years or something, I went to several workshops a year. At first, I was just in the workshops, thinking how wonderful it is to spend time working toward greater inner quiet and more openness to what’s going on all around me, which is what her work was about in part.

But it didn’t take very long before it dawned on me that what Charlotte was doing in these experiential workshops with the method that she used, was really very close to the kinds of questions that I was dealing with in this much more abstract, scientific, academic kind of way.

Because so much of what the workshops are about is noticing those inner holdings, noticing the ways in which you’re bringing your thinking to bear on a situation instead of allowing that inner vitality and aliveness. What Charlotte was about is both noticing that in yourself, but then working to give it up.

To me it was hugely exciting, because I saw this link and to be working with her was working at an experiential level on the kinds of things that I was busy doing in my head and writing about and so on. The learnings from her are very important because it allows me to see within myself and then in working with others, these very kinds of things that I write books about.

I’ve been doing that kind of work for 40 years. I do some therapy as well, I do a lot of lecturing, travel around the world giving lectures in various places and do teaching and writing and research..

. . .

Stefan: Were you able to discuss some of these matters with Charlotte?

Ed: Sometimes. It was in some ways easier to discuss things with Charles because he was more of an intellectual than Charlotte and loved to talk about things like that. And he read some of the work I had written.

And I read his manuscript, the Sensory Awareness book. I did a little talking with him about it and provided comments on the manuscript. I had much more of that kind of intellectual interchange with Charles than with Charlotte. With Charlotte I stuck more to experiences and sharing the moment, talking about what was happening for me in relation to her and the work and so forth.

Read more

Dear Readers,

Monhegan is calling again, and this may turn into a little summer series. After all these years, some “Breathers” are still traveling to Monhegan this summer, while I’m staying home, looking back to the early years of Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks’s workshops on the island. And as I’m discovering and rediscovering stories from that time, I’m sharing bits and pieces with you.

Today, we’re revisiting Ben Weaver’s Song of Monhegan from the second bulletin of the then newly formed Charlotte Selver Foundation (now Sensory Awareness Foundation). Published in the Spring of 1971, it was printed on one large, folded sheet of heavy newsprint. Hence the halftone patterns on the photos (I left them that way to preserve as much detail as possible).

The exuberance in the articles of the bulletin reveal the excitement of a new beginning – and clearly also of that time. Ben’s song is one of them.

Ben Weaver was a student of Charlotte and Charles then, authorized by Charlotte to teach Sensory Awareness. I never met him and I’m not sure if he is in one of the photographs. If any of you recognize him or other people in the photos, please do let me know.

Enjoy,

Stefan Laeng

And here it is, Ben Weaver’s

Song of Monhegan

From Bulletin No. 2 of the Charlotte Selver Foundation, Spring 1971
© Sensory Awareness Foundation

Finally, last year, we decided to come to Monhegan for the summer. We had been working with Charlotte and Charles in Mexico and California that winter and spring and the whole flow of the situation seemed to point toward more work with them that summer. So we scraped our money together and sublet our house on the Western ocean and drove five days across the continent and sailed into the Eastern ocean on a boat called the Laura B. and came at last to an island called Monhegan.

But Monhegan is so many things, so many levels of richness that to call it an island is barely to hint at its geography. As I spent the ensuing weeks exploring the seemingly endless possibilities of a few acres in the Atlantic, I found myself falling in love with a place.

Monhegan for me last summer was a nostalgic journey backward in time; back to kerosene lighting, back to walking everywhere one goes, back to a general store with lovely great wheels of pale cheddar cheese, back to a one-room schoolhouse with faded portraits of Washington and Lincoln and a pot-bellied stove in the corner, back to penny candy, back to once-a-week movies starring Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and W. C. Fields.

Monhegan last summer was the work. Shall I ever forget those sessions of Sensory Awareness, day after day, Charlotte and Charles in the rarest form I had ever experienced them, seemingly inspired by the island’s ambience, working with deeply intuitive skill and sensitivity, everyone present so absorbed in the experiments that at moments the room seemed hushed and holy, like a church; and inside me, the healing going on, the intoxicating discoveries of simple things, the reawakening of spontaneity and freshness stifled since childhood.

Monhegan last summer! Have I ever experienced anything like the slow, sensuous pace of those gorgeous days; beginning with an hour of meditation, a civilized breakfast, then the work – a deep session with Charlotte or Charles in the schoolhouse – and when that finishes it’s still only noon, and stretching out before us the long, golden afternoons, with time for walks to Cathedral Woods or to the bluff granite headlands overlooking the Atlantic, time to visit artist friends, time for exotic journeys to whole other worlds amongst the strange, waving flora and countless shy creatures inhabiting rock-cleft tide pools, some no larger than a foot across?

Monhegan last summer was snapshots: Charlotte Selver, agile as a teenager, stealing flowers by an abandoned cottage; Charles Brooks, barefoot, preparing masterful fish chowders; Clydeen Malloch on the pier, her whole, long frame gracefully waving goodby to friends, leaving the island; the Weitzman brothers, nose to ground in close pursuit of leaf-mould-hidden chanterelles.

And can I ever forget our making music together in the evenings? Unselfconsciously, like children, making music with drums and flutes and rocks and chowder pots and our own voices; some of it approaching noise, none of it really bad; and out of the hours of good fun and fellowship, a few, incredible moments like the evening when six of us – drum, bamboo flute, voice, dulcimer, two dancers – miraculously caught the same breath of cosmic wind and for long, achingly beautiful phrases of pure improvisation were ensemble as none of us had ever experienced before – our mind shut off, the music and dance pouring through us; tremblingly aware that we were simply channels for a higher art, and not really doing anything at all?

Monhegan last summer was feeling glad the island is only a mile and a half long. How could I want for more possibilities when I am so tender, so open, that the perfect beauty of a black pool with a single wild iris intoxicates, then nourishes for an entire day?

Monhegan last summer was a high, clear song which rings in my ears even now, six months and a continent’s span away, calling me back, calling me back. And of course I’ll come. For we’re old lovers by now, Monhegan and I, and I can’t imagine anything I’d rather do than scrape our money together, close our house, drive across the continent, sail on the Laura B. and come at last to an island called Monhegan.

Dear Reader,

I’m currently working on a chapter about Monhegan Island in Maine, which was a major Sensory Awareness workshop location from 1964 onward and until Charlotte Selver’s death in 2003. She gave her last workshops there in the summer of 2002, aged 101.

For many years, Victor Lord was the caretaker of Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks’s summer home on Monhegan. As an island resident and someone who never took classes with Charlotte and Charles, I was particularly interested in his connection with them and his experience of the “Breathers,” as the islanders called Charlotte and Charles’s student. I spoke with him by phone on April 6, 2010.

Victor was an important and beloved member of the island community and greatly cherished by Charlotte and Charles – and myself, when I was in charge of the Square House (the harbor side of it, that is, the meadow side had, and still, has a different owner) as the executive director of the Sensory Awareness Foundation. Charlotte had gifted it to the Foundation after Charles’s death in 1991 but continued to spend Summers there to give workshops.

Victor died in 2017, aged 70. Read an obituary here to learn more about him and his many contributions to the island community. Victor R. Lord, 1947 - 2017.

Listen to our phone conversation below to get a sense of Victor’s delightful spirit. It is edited for length and clarity, as is the transcript. Take a look at the photos as well. Sadly, I have none of Victor.

As always, you can support my work on the biography of Charlotte Selver with a paid subscription. For more, see also my website at www.CharlotteSelverBiography.org.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. Please “like” it or leave a comment if you do.

With gratitude,

Stefan Laeng

PS: Sensory Awareness workshops are being offered on Monhegan Island to this day. This Summer, Ray Fowler will give a workshop in August. Find out more here: Would You Like to Be Present for Your Own Living?

“This is Victor calling.”

“Hello, Victor!”

Victor: How are you?

Stefan: I’m well, thank you. How are you?

Victor: Oh, good. It’s kind of a cloudy evening here in Monhegan. We had a little rain this morning, but – it’s pretty warm here.

Stefan: Is it? Oh, nice.

Victor: What’s it like out there?

Stefan: It’s very sunny and very windy. [in Santa Fe NM]

Victor: Ahhh. Well, what would you like to do, Stefan? Would you like to ask me some questions or just – maybe I could just say a few things or whatever. How would you like to handle it?

Stefan: I however you want to. If you have a few things you would like to say right away. Maybe then from there I’ll ask you some questions.

Victor: All right. You’re mainly interested in Charlotte, right? How about Charles? Anything about Charles?

Stefan: Oh, yes, both of them. I did notice last week that right away Charles was up there for you. You must have had a good connection with him.

Victor: Yes. Well, I first met Charlotte. I met her in the summer of 1969. My grandmother used to own the 1784 house, not far from Charlotte’s house. She had some apartments there. she passed away in 1969 and left the 1784 house to my sister and I. I was in college at that time and my sister was here in Maine, but she had a job and she couldn’t leave her job and it just worked out fine that I could come to the island and run the little apartments in the summer.

At that time these Sensory Awareness workshops were quite big. I mean there were a lot of people involved in those days, the early days of my being here, obviously. Charlotte was generally asking if I had rooms for her people and oftentimes we did. That went on for two or three summers. I came out summers until I moved here permanently in 1973, so there was three or four summers were I was just here in the summer, because Charlotte was only here in the summer.

She would always come by. She’d never call or anything. She’d stop by and asked me if I had rooms for certain dates, certain people. And I did the best I could to accommodate her people. She was always very pleasant to me. We got along great. I’ve got to be honest, Stefan, we did have a little language problem when I first met her. I found it a little difficult to understand her but as the summers progressed it got easier and easier.

Then I met Charles. I really don’t remember too much about Charles my first two or three summers here, although he was around, obviously.

At this point in time, I was not their caretaker. Then, one summer I think he recognized that I was doing odd jobs, going around doing things, eager to do things. And so he asked me if I would help him at the Square House. I said, “sure, I’d be glad to.” He wanted to re-side the southern end of the Square House and repair some porches, and do this and that. I recall helping him quite a bit. I don’t recall exactly what summer it was. I got such enjoyment out of working with Charles. He was a very unusual person, a very gentle person. It was unbelievable how easy it was to be around him. He was so pleasant to me.

Charlotte was there too, of course. But she was always busy with her students and studying or whatever she did. I didn’t have a lot of contact with her in those days.

I used to get such a kick out of Charles. When he was amused he’d kind of scrunch up his face and wink and kind of a like a chuckle or something. It was a very endearing trait that he had. And he loved to laugh. He was so very good to Charlotte, so attentive, it was unbelievable.

At some point in time she broke her hip or something went wrong. I don’t remember the year. It was sometime in the 1970s.

You would have been amazed at her students. They used to carry her from the Square House to the school. It was something else to see. All I could think of was a bit of royalty, you know. And I forget what they carried her on but it was a special thing to see her. They must have done that all summer long because I think she was laid up for a long time with that hip or whatever it was.

After a while their current caretaker didn’t want to do it anymore and I became their caretaker. And a short while afterwards I also became Jane Varnum’s caretaker. [The Square House was divided in two separately owned parts.] So I was caretaker of the whole house. And every time they left for the season at the end of the summer, I would have my conference with with Charlotte and Charles. And she would show her appreciation by thanking me and everything. It was always very pleasant to be with them.

And one thing that I really remember, she said to me one time,”Victor, you make it possible for us to come to the island.” And that made me feel so good. Yeah, what little role I had in them coming to the island. I turned the water on, that’s all I did. But she made it such a big deal, you know.

Stefan: Yes, and she meant it. Charlotte was that way. She was so grateful for people’s support.

Victor: I didn’t have a lot of visits with her, but some. Sometimes there would be a little problem at the Square House and she would get word to me through one of her students or somehow. And I would go over and we’d always have very pleasant conversations. They certainly weren’t long, extended conversations, because I still had a bit of a language problem with her, but I got to understand her better.

And unfortunately at some point in time Charles passed away. That was a very sad thing for me. Everybody on the island thought an awful lot of Charles. Because I think they had more interaction with Charles than Charlotte. Certainly Charlotte was known throughout the island, but Charles would get out into the community more, to the local people. And he always had his gardens, he was an avid gardener.

And at some point in time. Charlotte got remarried to – What was his name?

Stefan: Peter Gracey.

Victor: Yes. And I would I’d go over several times a summer, and Peter was there and of course Charlotte was there. It was always a very pleasant occasion. She was just so glad to see me. And she would be very very attentive. You know, she would devote her entire attention to you. I guess that’s a trait of her.

Stefan: Yes. Absolutely.

Victor: And Charles was like that, the same way. I didn’t know Peter very well. I met him several times, but he seemed very pleasant. And he was very attentive to Charlotte, I know that.

Stefan: Oh, he was wonderful for her.

Victor: Yes. And, oh, I could see Charlotte getting older every year, but by gosh, she came every year! She was something. I can still see her today sitting on the little porch there with her shawl, maybe a white shawl, or knitted shawl or something, and her dark glasses. And so I have some great memories of those folks. Very vivid memories. Yes, you know, I miss those people.

Stefan: I always try to understand how it would have been for the islanders in the early years for the two of them with their odd hippie entourage to invade Monhegan Island. I would imagine that was not just easy.

Victor: Oh, no. I always enjoyed the people that took Charlotte’s workshops. Obviously, they were from all over the world and they had certain traits that they brought with them. Their customs from Germany, and Scandinavia, and Mexico, and all over the place.

I honestly think that some of the local people kind of made fun of them. Mainly because they they were doing things that they found kind of odd. I certainly never took one of Charlotte’s classes, although she always invited me to come. I never did it.

I think people were in a way afraid of what was going on and afraid of new things they didn’t understand. I always found the people very very pleasant. They were just regular people trying to find some solitude out here and some fellowship. To me that wasn’t odd. I was trying to do the same thing in my own way. I was just from Maine and these people were from, say, Germany.

Stefan: So, you grew up in Maine, but not on Monhegan?

Victor: No. When I first saw her, not knowing who she was. You know, somebody that grew up in rural Maine, such as I did, and then came here and witnessed that type of behavior. It was very unusual.

Stefan: Yes. Tell me more.

Victor: You know the term country bumpkin, don’t you?

Stefan: Yes.

Victor: Well, that was me. I grew up in a small town. My mother passed away when I was five years old and I grew up with an older sister and my father. My sister was just old enough, older than I was, that she didn’t want me around. I never fit in with any of her group. Obviously, we never went to the same grammar school; we never went to the same high school; we never went to the same college. We both were in those same schools, but never together. And as I said, when my grandmother died I came out here summers and ultimately moved out here in 1973 and witnessed – in those years Charlotte’s following was huge.

Stefan: Yes.

Victor: She might have had 20 to 30 people or something, at least. They were all over the place.

Stefan: Yes, and then over a period of two months or so. Many workshops sometimes.

Victor: Yes, you’d have a whole schedule of workshops, one every week, or ten days, or something like that. All summer long. It was very unusual for me to witness something like that and, you know, all trooping up to the schoolhouse. It was quite a time for them – and for me too. I mean, it was it was quite a learning experience to experience that that type of thing.

Stefan: Yes. Did you have interactions or a connection with her students?

Victor: Oh, many students, yes. My first real experience, I think – do you remember Molly Black?

Stefan: No.

Victor: She was one of Charlotte’s students and she stayed at the 1784 house for years. And eventually, when I became owner of the Monhegan House in 1975 or ’76, a big part of our clientele were Charlotte’s students. From all over the world. And they came back year after year, a lot of them.

Stefan: Yeah.

Victor: Yes. And it was good to see them. You always knew that they would come back. They were great people. Good guests, quiet. Never a word of trouble or anything.

Stefan: So, it really also contributed to the economy of Monhegan.

Victor: They greatly increased the economy here. I’m not saying that they were big spenders or anything, but they did do their share. And they liked to – rightfully so – if one of their students rented a cottage or a house or something like that, they would try to congregate there to have meals and fellowship and whatever they were doing. They pull their own weight here, that’s for sure.

Stefan: Did Charlotte organize some of the housing herself?

Victor: She was always scurrying around, looking for housing and things like that.

Stefan: That was just amazing to me. Even in her nineties in California she would do a workshop – she was she was ninety-something and she would call up everybody she knew to find housing for her students.

Victor: Yes, exactly. After a while there was a woman, and I just can’t remember her name, that that did a lot of the corresponding here and setting up rooms and things. What the heck was her name? That’ll come to me in the middle of night. In one of your recent publications – Peggy! Peggy Wood. Peggy was the one that did a lot of the corresponding and trying to set up rooms and things like that.

Stefan: Okay. Oh and then later I think also Mary Alice Roche would have ....

Victor: Exactly. Yes, that’s a familiar name.

Stefan: She would have done some of that.

Victor: Yes, I think I met Mary Alice a couple of times when she came out. But not often. In my days of owning the Monhegan House I was always Amazed that people would make the commitment to come from Europe and all over the place for a week or two. That was a big commitment for them.

Stefan: It was. But Charlotte could do that.

Victor: She could. She was a magnet.

Stefan: She was a magnet, yes.

Victor: She was quite an amazing woman that she would be able to attract all those people with her studies. Really amazing. She had a lot going on for her.

I didn’t come here too much as a child. As I say, my grandmother lived here in the summer, but there was nothing here for me. I had my own life, you know, as a small child. My grandmother, Isa Cole, I think was pretty good pals with Charlotte, from what she said. She was here when Charlotte arrived. I don’t know exactly what year Charlotte would have started coming here.

Stefan: Yes, I’m still not clear about that. [It was in 1964 that Charlotte and Charles gave the first workshops on Monhegan.]

Victor: I don’t have a clue. It must have been sometime in the in the 60s. It had to be early to mid ‘60s.

Stefan: What I do know, interestingly – but that has nothing to do with the workshops – is that she has an entry in her schedule book in the 40s [it was 1949] But just going on a vacation on Monhegan. She must have really liked it. Charles, too. He got married to his first wife on Monhegan also in the 40s [in 1936, actually].

Victor: You’re kidding. I had no idea.

Stefan: They both had this very long connection. They really liked the place. In the beginning, they did not own the Square House, or a house, but they were probably renting as far as I understand, right?

Victor: Well, in fact they may have stayed at the 1784 house. My grandmother always kept a guest book and my sister has it now. It goes way back, I think into the 1940s. I will make a point of asking her if she has an entry of either Charlotte or Charles or anything like that.

Stefan: Oh, thank you. That would be great.

Victor: You don’t know the year that they bought the Square House?

Stefan: I should know that. I will be able to find out but I don’t know it now.

Victor: I’ve got a book here that Ruth Faller wrote. It’s called “Monhegan, Her Houses and People.”

Stefan: Oh, right. I’ve seen that.

Victor: Do you have a copy?

Stefan: I don’t but I’ve seen that book.

Victor: I was just looking up Selver. Charlotte Selver, page 14, 15. Yes, there it is. Well, it says Charles Brooks and Charlotte Selver. It looks like they bought the house on December 5, 1974. They bought it from Doris Slayton, who had owned it since 1941, according to this book. So, in the ‘70s, the mid ‘70s, they bought that house.

Stefan: So, you would have probably done the work with Charles after they bought it.

Victor: Right. I moved here in the spring of ’73. They bought the house the next year. But I didn’t become their caretaker for a number of years, as I recall. Maybe 1980 or something like that. But I did do work as I mentioned, with Charles, soon after they bought the house. They were a great couple of people. I know that. They were very unusual.

Then she met Charles in New York City at some point?

Stefan: He was her student at first.

Victor: Oh. How – he was younger obviously, right?

Stefan: He was 12 years younger. Though he did not know that for a very long time.

Victor: She wouldn’t tell her age?

Stefan: No, she lied about her age. When she came to the States – because of the German writing of the number one – it was read at as a seven by the immigration authorities.

Victor: Oh, I see.

Stefan: That’s what was on her papers and she seemed to quite like being six years younger suddenly. As I understand it, she did not reveal her true age until her 90th birthday, when she wanted to celebrate her 90th birthday

Victor: But everybody thought she would be, say 84? She was actually 90?

Stefan: Yes, including Charles. I wasn’t around for that but I think Charles was very hurt and upset, you know, his wife wouldn’t tell him her true age for all this time.

Victor: How old was she when she died? Was she over a hundred?

Stefan: Yeah, she was 102. I traveled with her to Europe when she was 100 and again when she was 101.

Victor: Was Charles ever in Europe with her?

Stefan: Oh, yes, they went together. But often they also went their separate ways in Europe. It was interesting that – Charlotte always said of the last time Charles went on his own [and when I first met him in 1990], that that was a very important summer for him; that he felt, finally, that he could be a teacher in his own right, away from Charlotte. Because I think it was also really hard for Charles. He was always in in the shadow of Charlotte. It was hard for him not to be recognized.

Victor: In his own right, yeah. Oh, good for him. Oh boy.

Stefan: So, you know, amazing lives, just amazing lives and they touched so many people’s lives.

Victor: Yes. I can imagine. Well, she she certainly had many, many devoted followers here on the island. And around the world, obviously.

Stefan: Yes. Were there other people on the island that were close to her, but maybe not so much in the workshops?

Victor: I think there were a few people, although I can’t remember exactly who they’d be.

Stefan: Obviously there was Kathie Iannicelli. [Known to us in later year as the gardener on Monhegan. Among many other gardens, she took care of Charlotte’s after Charles died. Charlotte and she were good friends. She also never took a workshop with her.]

Victor: Yes, Kathie. And do you remember a woman named Amy Lou? Do you remember Amy Lou?

Stefan: I remember a woman named Amy Hirakis. [A much cherished massage therapist on the island at the time - who did become a student of Charlotte.]

Victor: Yeah, exactly, that’s Amy Lou Hirakis. She seemed to be quite quite close with Charlotte. And there might have been one or two others, but other than that, not too many, I don’t think.

Stefan: Yes. Of course, she was so hard of hearing. It was hard for her to have regular contact with people.

Victor: Yes, it was difficult. It was not only the the language barrier. It was the hearing thing.

Stefan: Yes, and that was of course connected. You know, she never heard herself speak. And if you don’t hear accents or how people pronounce things, it’s almost impossible – I remember Charlotte and I getting into little quarrels when she would tell me, “your English with this strong Swiss accent, I just can’t understand what you’re saying.” And when I spoke German with her it would be the same. She’d say, “Oh, your German with your Swiss accent, it’s impossible to understand.” And I would go, “Charlotte you’re hard of hearing!”

Victor: That’s why you can’t understand, you can’t hear it! But you must have been able to converse with her quite readily.

Stefan: Oh, yes.

Victor: So, that’s kind of a walk down memory lane for me here.

Stefan: Yes, it must be.

Victor: I used to get a kick out of those people from – oh, they were from Scandinavia and all over the darn place. What a darn trip that must be. But it was good to see those people. In fact, a good percentage of our business was was through Charlotte. We were glad to have them. Let me put it that way.

Stefan: Yes, I imagine so.

Victor: In fact, the way things are going here on the island, I think we could use a few of those students here in the summer.

Stefan: Oh, is that right?

Victor: Yes. The last two summers have not been good at all here on the island, in view of the economy. The prices are pretty high and the boat is getting expensive. People just can’t seem to come for longer periods of time now.

Stefan: Yes, I can imagine. But those last years with Charlotte, in August there were sometimes too many people on the island. Maybe not for those who made a living from it, but it was very crowded.

Victor: Well, it’s different than when I was at the Monhegan House. There was a time here in August, if you thought you wanted a room in the middle of August at a moment’s notice, you were out of luck. But now you’ve got a darn good chance of having just about what you want. Maybe not some of the cottages, but in the hotels and things like that. They’re chasing for customers now.

Stefan: Yeah, this is a hard time.

Victor: I don’t expect a real hot, good summer this year either.

Stefan: Well, I do hope that some year I’ll make it again, or we will.

Victor: I hope so.

Stefan: Yes, it’s a lovely place.

Victor: Well, I guess maybe that’s enough down memory lane. I hope I’ve been somewhat helpful, that it’s not been boring you too much.

Stefan: Absolutely not. On the contrary. It’s interesting for me to talk with people who were not her immediate students or close friends, because there’s always a little bit of a different view you have on what was going on and then seeing it from a bit of a distance. So, that’s always interesting to me.

Victor: Oh, that’s good. I hope I’ve been somewhat helpful.

Stefan: Yes, thank you.

Victor: I can’t wait for your book, Charles. Oh, Charles … I’m sorry, Stefan. Well, very good Stefan.

Stefan: Thank you so much, Victor.

Victor: It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

“Yes, same here.”

“Best to you and your family.”

“Yes, to you too.”

• Friedrich Everling was a student of Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby before moving to the United States, where he studied with Charlotte and became a Sensory Awareness leader. As an associate professor of physics at North Carolina University, “he has been conducting classes in Sensory Awareness for advanced students of environmental design in a credited, special projects course, and is also integrating the work into his physics teaching,” Mary Alice Roche wrote in the first bulletin of the Charlotte Selver Foundation (now Sensory Awareness Foundation) in 1971.

Dear Reader,

Inspired by a recent stay on Cape Cod, where I always think of Charlotte, I’m sharing with you today excerpts from the chapter ‘Today I Met My Brother,’ from the manuscript of my biography of Charlotte Selver.

I hope you’ll enjoy the read.

Stefan Laeng

PS: Today’s post is free for anyone. You can support my work with a paid subscription.
More on the Charlotte Selver Oral History and Book Project on my website.

When Charlotte and I were going page by page through her schedule book of 1944, she lit up when we hit an entry on July 13.

“I had a student, Henny Gurland,” she recalled, “who one day before class asked me,

‘Are you free tonight?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘why?’

‘I would like to invite you to dinner and meet my fiancée.’

So, after class, we left my studio on 57th Street. Down on the street we were met by a man and Henny introduced us. ‘This is Erich Fromm, and this is Charlotte Selver.’ I had never heard of him. We went to a German restaurant together and had a beautiful dinner with delicious German wine.”

The three had a delightful conversation over what I imagine to be one of those sweet German wines that Charlotte loved so much and would, many years later, not tire of offering me every night with dinner, much as she knew that I did not care for it. To her it still meant home, and she wanted everyone to delight with her in that sweet taste of a long-gone past.

During their conversation, Henny turned to Charlotte and said, “My God, I’ve always found you to be thoughtful and earnest, and tonight I see that you are cheerful, too.”

“Do you know why?” Charlotte responded, “This morning I became an American citizen.”

“That was a great,” Charlotte told me, “I became an American citizen, and I met Erich Fromm. When I came home later that night, I said to my mother, ‘I met my brother today.’ She thought that was absurd, but Erich and I understood each other right away.”

Beginning with September 20, Dr. Erich Fromm’s name appears in her diaries almost weekly, as he began to take private lessons with Charlotte. She would go to their apartment at 322 Central Park West, a short subway ride away from her home near Columbus Circle. “After the session we always had breakfast together, fresh bread baked by Henny. It was a beautiful beginning of my Wednesdays. So, Erich started working with me, and I don’t know whether it was his happiness in this new marriage, or liking the work, but he was sold,” Charlotte said, laughing.

“I will never forget that one time I worked with Erich. We worked in his office. There was a desk and there was a fireplace with a marble slab in front of it. Very little space. We worked on standing and then I asked him to lie down. How he then lay down, gently placing his head on the marble slab, how he reached for the fireplace tools and quietly pushed them out of the way, I will never forget. Everybody else would have been bothered by the stuff in their way, by the cold and hard marble. It was beautiful working with him. Later I told him, ‘I’d love to have students like you,’ which he enjoyed hearing.” Erich Fromm would continue to take regular lessons with Charlotte until he and Henny moved to Mexico in1950.1

***

“Erich helped me very much in my work,” Charlotte recounted as we continued our journey through her diaries. In her workshops, she often gave Fromm credit for her early success in the U.S.. He introduced her to the faculty of the William Alanson White Institute, including its first director, psychoanalyst Clara Thompson. Thompson had a house in Provincetown on Cape Cod. “A beautiful house,” Charlotte said. “Some day you must go and see if it’s still there.”

Almost twenty years later I finally did. The house was still there, and it is spectacular in its elegant, white New England simplicity. When I visited on a hot summer day in 2018, the front door was wide open, inviting me to look right through its airy interior and onto the pale blue Cape Cod Bay.

I recalled film footage I’d seen of another summer day in 1947, with Charlotte lying on a lawn by the bay moving her arms and hands delicately through the breeze. Psychiatrist Edward Tauber had recorded Charlotte and some of her students for a presentation he gave about her work. It was likely filmed in the backyard of this house.

The current owner, tending the garden as I stood there imagining a lively time long ago, was quite knowledgeable about his home’s past and recommended that I go and find Clara Thompson’s gravestone, which he said she designed herself. I found it in the sprawling town cemetery among hundreds of conforming stones. It stands out in its raw and seemingly unfinished depiction of possibly a human torso and head.

Charlotte had vacationed on the Cape before with one of her first friends in New York, Yela Brichta. “She was a dentist who took my classes,” Charlotte remembered. “Yela and I became friends, and she told many people about my classes.” As she spoke, Charlotte became animated and amused. “One day in New York she said to me, ‘I’m visiting Hungarian friends tonight and I think you should meet them too.’ I went along and of course they asked me about my work. They were very interested but said that unfortunately they had just rented a house for the summer and would not be able to attend a class. When I asked where the house was, they said, ‘In North Truro,’ and I said, ’Oh, we rented a house there, too.’

So, when we all were on the Cape, we had many beautiful hours together. It was also very funny: our house was on a hill and I had to pass theirs to get to it. And every single time the door would open and they’d say, ‘We just cooked this delicious meal. Come, eat with us.’ We became good friends. Gisi and Enemir Kardosh [spelling?] shared the house with the analyst Diana Kemeny, with whom I became very close. She sent me many patients, among them Charles [Charles Brooks, Charlotte’s later husband]. But that was much later.”

In 1945, Charlotte gave her first summer course in Truro, preceded by a lecture titled “Rediscovery of our Organism and its Functioning”2 at the Town Hall. When I asked her about it, Charlotte laughed. “Oh, yes. Gisi and Diana sat in the audience. When they heard someone whisper, ‘She looks so young. I wonder how old she is?’ Gisi replied, ‘seventy-two,’ prompting the woman to say, ‘What? Let’s register immediately.’” Charlotte was forty-four at the time.

The friendly present owner of the house knew about such lectures in Truro. He said that Thompson had started them and that they were continuing to this day.

Charlotte took lots of notes about those classes in her diary, small glimpses into the formative years of establishing her work not only in a new country but in a different language as well. One of these notes reads:

“What can we feel of the head?
Attempt to change attitude from watching to sensing.
Eyes.
Feet.
Slapping.
Swinging in standing, forward, backward. Joints and feet elastic.
What happens in head?
Getting up and lying down and feeling if feet must press.
Stop if lose contact with feet.
Feel head – feel head and feet.
Slapping on spine.
Lying on stomach. Can I feel my back?
Lie on back, what touches?
What needs more adjustment?
Lifting of pelvis and sinking down.
Adjustment through whole body.
Discussion about what is reactiveness.”

That last remark probably refers to a discussion about what she’d later call being responsive vs. reactive, that is responding to a situation from a place of connection and awareness rather than reacting habitually. Another note reads:

“Long walk with Diana who says I ask too much of students,” and that there is, apparently, too much talking, a “discrepancy between people [who take] responsibility for every word and Jules who just talks.”

Jules Modlin was a jazz violinist who studied with Charlotte, together with his wife, Teri Modlin, one of Charlotte’s early students in New York, who would later work on various projects to advance Charlotte’s work.

We don’t know whether or not the woman who heard her lecture at the town hall took the classes, but Charlotte remembered that Gisi and Diana were there, as was Clara Thompson and other analysts who had fled the sweltering New York summer. “They all knew each other, you know, analysts and their patients, and they all hung out together.”

The psychiatrist Fritz Perls, who was then developing what would become Gestalt Therapy, joined the classes a couple of years later, when he and his wife and collaborator, the one-time head of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute, Laura Perls, spent their summers on the Cape, presumably with their children, Renate and Steve.

Fritz Perls arrived in New York in the summer of 1946 from South Africa, where the Perls had lived for twelve years. They had fled Germany right after Hitler’s rise to power, and after a couple of economically desperate years in Holland, had successfully established themselves as psychoanalysts in South Africa. But after the end of the war, an economic downturn, and their experience of a “growing indigenous brand of South African fascism,”3 they decided to leave. An affidavit by Karen Horney made it possible for Fritz, as Dr. Perls would eventually be called by his followers, to explore his options in New York. After a rocky start to gain professional footing finally bore fruit thanks to the support and encouragement of Clara Thomson, Erich Fromm, and, apparently, Charlotte, Perls’s family followed fifteen months later.

“I helped him furnish his office, chose the curtains, I helped him in many ways. Perls had told Erich Fromm that he was very much interested in what he called the body. So, Erich said, ‘If you are interested in the body you have to meet Charlotte Selver. And so, Perls came to me. He was so overwhelmed by the work, he actually wept. He worked with me for maybe a year and a half in weekly private sessions. Then he wanted me to work with his clients before they came to him, and I said, ‘No, I don’t want to warm up patients for you, you have to do that yourself.’ He then offered a large sum of money to my student Tery Modlin [to do the same], but she, too, refused.”

Charlotte, responding to an inquiry by her colleague Hilde Elsberg in 1954, wrote: “[Perls] studied with me intensely, almost every day. He was very enthusiastic about the work and because he is a very vain and presumptuous man, he told me, ‘collaborate with me and I’ll make you famous!’ To which I responded, ‘If I want to become famous, I’ll try on my own.’ This really annoyed him as he took it as a rejection. Then he published his book in which he, not surprisingly, put everything he had learned at the time without mentioning Gindler or my name. Fromm sent him to me. He thinks Perls is very gifted and he undoubtedly is, but when I asked him recently if he’d read Gestalt Therapy, he just said, ‘I find this man too unappealing.’”

“He became my best enemy,” Charlotte told me, “and for many years he wouldn’t talk to me. When we met in company—he had these very big, dark eyes—he would stare at me and I would stare at him. No word, no sign of recognition, no greeting. He was so angry. Then, much later, we became friends again at Esalen,” and to much laughter, she added, “He could make these funny remarks. Once he said to me, ‘You have trouble with hearing? Go see Charlotte Selver! She will help you.’ He was a beast.”

The 1940s were time of intense engagement and expansiveness in Charlotte’s life after the devastating losses the decade before. Familiar sounding names abound in Charlotte’s diaries of those years. Some that popped out of the pages when we went through them might not be of importance in the larger context of Charlotte’s life, but they give us an impression of the web of interactions that comprised the colorful fabric of her early years in New York. For Charlotte, seeing the diaries again was a chance to reminisce, sometimes overwhelming her with memories of hardship, at other times, and quite frequently, an opportunity to tell a good story, which she enjoyed very much. Such as when I saw a note about her sending an invitation to Truman Capote.

“Truman Capote! You know him, don’t you?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“He was my student. He had such a cruel mother. And then he wrote this wonderful book. I remember when his first short stories were published. I had a student, Barbara Lawrence, who edited his work. She told me that the publisher couldn’t stop praising Truman’s writing. ‘They had no idea how much I helped him,’ she added. She was very mad and also sad that she did not get a piece of the praise.”

Barbara Lawrence met Truman at the New Yorker magazine, where she was an editor in 1943 and he a copyboy struggling to be recognized as a writer. Over the coming years she helped him structure his stories.4

At age 87, Sophia was still active and sought after as a piano teacher. She took the first workshop with Charlotte in 1948, which makes her the earliest student of Charlotte I have been able to interview. I spoke with Sophia about how she met her 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.

The full, wide-ranging recording of the interview is available to paid subscribers at the bottom of the post.

Sophia: 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 when I was about nineteen years old then. But she didn’t really know how to teach; she knew how to play. I was her only student and I lived with her. 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. He was a friend and we played Schubert. When we were done I said to him, “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.”

That was Abby Whiteside. I called her the next day. And I got my playing back. But she said to me, “You know, you’re right. Your joints are tight. You should see someone.” The composer Miriam Gideon was going to Charlotte. Charlotte loved her. She was great. She died a few years ago. But so she said, “Come with me to see Charlotte Selver.” So I went.

Charlotte said things like, “How do you feel insidely?” or “How is this and that?”, and the answers other students gave sounded so funny. I thought “Everybody’s crazy!” 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.

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 was $3.04, and he started fussing 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.

Stefan: Oh you did.

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

Stefan: Yes.

Sophia: 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.

Stefan: Oh, wonderful.

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

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

Sophia: 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.” 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 New York University. Charlotte did the sensing and I did the music.1 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. That’s Charlotte’s work.

I just discovered this recent insightful Substack post about Sophia. I learned a lot that I did not know about Sophia. Delighted to see Charlotte mentioned in very eloquent ways. I highly recommend you read it too.
(There’s only one false claim: Charlotte was not related to Ludwig Wittgenstein.)

Transitional Technology

The Emotional Rhythm of Sophia Rosoff (by Sarah Deming)

Sophia Rosoff (1924—2017) taught a unique way of looking at the piano from a happy perch on the Upper East Side for over 60 years. For a decade, I was a devoted student. This profile written by Sarah Deming originally appeared in The Threepenny Review…

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4 months ago · 52 likes · 13 comments · ETHAN IVERSON

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Dear Reader,

Today’s post is a peek into the personal life of Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks in the early 1960s as told by Charles and through a conversation I had with Charlotte.

I am currently working on a chapter with the working title “Back in New York City,” about their New York activities in the 1960s and early ‘70s and the founding of the Sensory Awareness Foundation. In the chapter, I set the scene by reading a piece by Mary Alice Roche, the co-founder of the Foundation, to Charlotte. The piece includes parts of an interview Mary Alice had done with Charles in preparation of a never published SAF Bulletin about Charlotte Selver.

Charles was a great story teller1 and it delighted Charlotte to hear what he told Mary Alice, which is mostly what I want to share with you today. But Charlotte’s sometimes less than kind response to Mary Alice’s tireless efforts to document the history of Sensory Awareness is also part of the story to be told in the book and it shines through in this post as well. Her struggle with publications and publicity had a long history, which I address in other chapters of the biography.

I’m including a brief audio excerpt of the 1987 interview with Charles so that you can hear his voice. More of his conversation with Mary Alice will be shared in a later post.

Enjoy,

Stefan Laeng

Though Charlotte and Charles spent more and more time in California in the 1960s, they still considered New York City their main home. Charlotte had lived in an apartment on 315 West 57th Street near Columbus Circle for many years, long before she met Charles, and her father had rented an apartment there as well after the death of Charlotte’s mother. With Charles being Charlotte’s student, they at first kept their relationship a secret, even after Charles had moved into Charlotte’s studio, which was separate from her apartment. This would lead to some awkward situations as Charles remembered in a conversation with Mary Alice Roche.

Mary Alice had worked on a Sensory Awareness Foundation bulletin about Charlotte in the 1980s but it never saw the light of day. I can only guess that the reason for this was its very subject itself. This became pretty clear when I read a 1988 draft titled “Charlotte Selver: The Early Years” to Charlotte while in Barra de Navidad in Mexico in 1999. Mary Alice had just sent it to me along with a note that I understood to mean that she had given up on a bulletin about Charlotte and that, in any case, she “would do it differently now.”

Charlotte seemed relieved to hear that but was eager for me to read it to her during one of our long conversations about her life on a free afternoon in her room at the Hotel Barra. I asked Charlotte to put her headphones on so she could hear me better. Then, microphone in hand, I began to read, frequently interrupted by Charlotte who, no surprise, objected to Mary Alice’s style. “She wants to present me as something amazing,” Charlotte would interject, or, “She always has her mouth so full of my success. Her writing is not simple enough, you know.”

That Charlotte was so hard on Mary Alice was not new to me. It had colored their relationship since the founding of what was at first named the Charlotte Selver Foundation in 1971. Still, knowing how much Mary Alice had given to documenting Charlotte’s work, it was painful to hear her ongoing criticism, even if I shared some of Charlotte’s assessment of the hagiographical style of the text we read.

Charlotte’s interested peaked, however, when we read Charles’s account of his early days on 57th Street followed by the dramatic ending of their years there. After moving in but before their relationship was official he’d be “invited” to have dinner at the apartment, along with other guests. Then, when it was time to leave, he would leave together with everyone, “down the elevator and as far as the subway entrance of 57th Street and 8th Avenue. Then we would all disappear, and when the coast was clear, I’d return. That went on for a while at great cost to my sense of propriety until, upon our return from California in 1961 we decided that I better come out of the closet. I guess it was known to all our friends by that time anyway.”

The eventual loss, in 1963, of their home on 57th Street was, Charles remembered, “a calamity for Charlotte, and one she resisted to the very last moment. In 1962, I guess, the whole five-story building with these ‘gemütlich’, unassuming, spacious and easygoing studios, with squeaky floors and singers going a-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha from morning to night,” —here, Charlotte burst out in laughter— “was sold to one of the big, faceless companies that was going to tear it down and put up a sixteen story building there. But they couldn’t get the tenants out.

There was a tenant’s committee that was sworn to fight them, and litigation went on for some time. There was one occasion when they were to meet in Charlotte’s studio, but Alan Watts had drawn a sign, in his beautiful calligraphy, ‘Please remove your shoes to preserve the studio carpet.’” At least a third of the tenants refused to demean themselves by taking off their shoes and coming in in their stockings.” More laughter from Charlotte interrupted my reading. It took a moment until I could continue with Charles’s account of their final days at 57th Street, often interrupted by more laughter. Charlotte was now quite literally at the edge of her seat.

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Today, I’m sharing with you the first pages of the opening chapter of my biography of Charlotte Selver. It is a work in progress but I’m eager to share bits and pieces of it with you now, as I continue writing.

The account begins with the first workshop I took with Charlotte in 1991, though Sensory Awareness had been part of my life for a decade before. Curiously, I met her as the last of my Sensory Awareness teachers, following five other students and peers of hers that I studied with. At the time it seemed likely that it would be my only chance to work with her. She was ninety and I considered myself lucky to attend that one workshop. Little did I know that I would work closely with her for the next twelve years.

I hope that the beginning of the chapter will give you a taste of what it was like to study with Charlotte. I then move from news that reached us half way through the workshop—the beginnings of the war in the Balkans—to take us back to Charlotte’s early life in Ruhrort/Duisburg in Germany, where we meet Charlotte as a teenager experiencing World War I. From there, the chapter explores her childhood and family. This post ends just before that deep dive.

As I usually do, I offer part of the post for free because I love sharing my discoveries with as many people as possible. With a subscription you can read the full text. Your subscription helps me to share these stories and to continue work on the biography.

Thank you for your support.

Stefan Laeng

Beginnings

On June 15, 1991, I traveled to Matrei, an alpine village south of Innsbruck in Austria. Nestled in a valley that has for centuries served as a passageway through the Alps, Matrei lies only miles from the Italian border, where a busy freeway now transports northern European tourists over the Brenner Pass, in search of sun and Mediterranean pleasures .

My destination was a Catholic retreat center on the eastern flank of the valley, a short walk from the village’s main street. I was here to attend a workshop in Sensory Awareness led by Charlotte Selver, who had recently celebrated her ninetieth birthday. I had attended a workshop with Charlotte’s husband and long time collaborator, Charles Brooks, the year before at a retreat center in the Black Forest, but I’d never met Charlotte, whose teaching was a thread in my life for many years.

I had my first glimpse of her that afternoon when she entered the center’s lobby, accompanied by a student who discretely offered her arm to assist Charlotte’s delicate balance as they descended the main flight of stairs. Charlotte was dressed in that soft, yellow morning gown that I would later fold often and place in her neatly packed suitcase as she prepared for another teaching tour across Europe or North America.

The gown covered her almost completely, but did little to hide her fragility. My first impression was of a sweet, old woman who greeted the arriving students with a tender smile and a frail voice. I had heard accounts of her commanding presence, but now I wondered how this woman could possibly lead a two-week workshop with a group of hearty students decades younger than she.

That evening, we gathered in the large meeting room. Charlotte sat in a chair, the rest of us on the wooden floor, hiding our discomfort with the cool, firm surface. We had traveled from Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and Israel and were eagerly awaiting the teacher’s words.

I don’t remember if Charlotte introduced what she reverently called the work, as my notes begin with her request that we each share our life stories up to that very day. She wanted to know how we came to the work. She was especially interested in hearing about our childhoods, as “it sets the tone for our life’s journey.” She later asked us to write our stories down and relive them as we wrote.

In a second go-round Charlotte wanted to know how we respond to social injustice, to the plight of the world: “What calls for your attention and how do you respond?” She made it clear that this was a central question in the work. When people express helplessness in matters like these, she says, “This work will help us wake up, and when we are awake, we’ll see.”

The next morning, Charlotte quoted her teacher, Elsa Gindler: “I explore. If you want to explore too, you are welcome to join me.”1 This set the tone for our work together. Invoking the spirit of Elsa Gindler, she was setting the frame of reference that had guided her since the early 1920s. One cannot overestimate the influence Elsa Gindler had on Charlotte Selver’s life. From what those of us who were newcomers in this workshop could gather, she was a larger-than-life teacher to whom Charlotte owed all that she passed on to us now. Gindler had discovered a way of working with people that profoundly altered the common understanding of the role of the teacher and how we learn, namely, “Trust in nature and find out for yourself.”

What Charlotte shared with us, the way she guided us in exploring our relationship with the floor beneath our feet, how she skillfully encouraged us in discovering a way of breathing that was not forced but allowed, how she guided us in developing a sensitivity in our touch that gave complete freedom of experiencing to the touched rather than imposing change, for all of that Elsa Gindler was given full credit.

As I look at my notebook now, I’m intrigued that right below the Gindler quote I note Charlotte as saying, “Trust your own nature more than a teacher. Teachers are dangerous.” The juxtaposition of Charlotte’s adoration of Gindler and her words of warning reflect a lifelong conflict. Her words were like the prism of a multifaceted kaleidoscope through which the world can be seen in seemingly contradictory ways. In the context of this workshop, Charlotte’s words were meant to encourage us to explore and learn to trust our own experience.

Over the next two weeks, Charlotte led one or two three-hour session each day to explore what it means to be connected and engaged with the demands of the present, with the expectation that we would explore on our own between sessions. Just as she had for decades, Charlotte guided us with a steady stream of questions through “experiments” that gradually—sometimes suddenly—woke us up to clearer seeing, tasting, hearing, feeling, and interacting with the world within and around us.

“How much room do you need between your eyes? Above your eyes?” We’re standing, our gaze resting on the floor in front of us. Quietly we let this question sink into us, and we try to feel the answer rather than thinking what it might be. Next we’re asked to gently place our hands on different parts of our skull. “How deep can your touch go?” We explore this for a long time.

Then we work in pairs, one person tapping the back of the other person’s head with his or her fingertips, lively and sensitively. “How does this affect you, in your head, your eyes, from head to toe?” Working with partners changes the mood dramatically. After working on our own, these lively exchanges bring a lightness into the room and into some heads of students who in the earlier explorations were trying too hard to feel what they thought they should feel. In Charlotte’s gentle questions and suggestions, many of us hear commands from our parents or other childhood authorities: Pass auf! Pay attention! Look at me! Listen!

We’ve grown so accustomed to following, or resisting, orders that we struggle to hear these as mere invitations for discovery. Charlotte’s response to such struggling is usually understanding and patient, but at times she can be quite sharp. “When we strain to see, it’s as though our eyes won’t work without our grimacing. When we prick up our ears, it’s as tough we won’t hear if we don’t tense. Doing so, we spit in the face of nature!”

Four days into the workshop, Charlotte introduces gravity, which in many ways is the foundation of her approach: “Each cell in us in every moment aligns with gravity. Are we open to experiencing this?” As we stand, Charlotte prompts us to “let our eyes close,” and asks, “Where in you can you feel the pull of gravity?…How do you respond to this steady pull of the earth, this call to come down?…Do you hold yourself up?…Do you stiffen?…Do you collapse?…There might be one response in your knees and another in your head.…Can you feel something in you that responds to this pull from the earth? Can you feel your own aliveness? Can you find the balance between gravity and muscle tone so that you are neither tense nor flabby?” Such questions can lead to a shift in the way we relate to a force that pervades our life on earth, an energy some of us might have perceived as our enemy dragging us down. Suddenly, gravity is our ally, a force to engage with, the earth’s invitation to participate in life.

Some in the group experience a kind of awakening when we work with the tiny cloth sandbags Charlotte brings to every workshop. A participant might lift one up against the pull of gravity, and suddenly she experiences such ease and joy in this simple task her face lights up and she feels enlivened throughout.“Wonderful.,” Charlotte says. “This was your experience. Now forget it!” Charlotte’s response is both acknowledgment and warning. These experiences might last just a moment and then fade away to become memories, and we try in vain to repeat them. Charlotte encourages us to use these breakthroughs as inspiration for further explorations, and not obstructions on the path of discovery.

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On August 4, 1973, the participants of the first long-term Study Group with Charlotte Selver met for an evening of discussion on Monhegan Island in Maine. They had studied together for the past nine months, changing locations occasionally to accommodate Charlotte’s annual schedule of regular workshops. They had started in Tepoztlán, Mexico, in December 1972. Spring 1973 was spent in Santa Barbara, California. The last three months were to be on Monhegan Island in Maine. When Charlotte and her husband and colleague Charles Brooks crossed the country with their VW bus, the bus was rear-ended while parked at the side of a highway in Nevada. Charles was not in the car but Charlotte was injured with a broken hip. She would not make it to Monhegan for several weeks and even once she got there she was housebound and unable to work with the group until almost the end of their time together. And so the participants worked with one-another, taking turns in leading classes, meeting occasionally with Charlotte in her home to reflect on their work together.

The nine-month study group was not meant to be a training for Sensory Awareness leaders but, as we can see in the excerpt from that discussion in the living room of Charlotte and Charles’s home on Monhegan, they had inadvertently been confronted with questions of what it takes to lead classes.

As always in these posts of archival materials, I refrain from commenting or giving much context, much as I am tempted to, but let the material speak for itself. However, I edited and rearranged the transcript somewhat for clarity.

Stefan Laeng

Charlotte Selver [apparently responding to a remark by a participant about being spontaneous versus using techniques when giving a class]: And you just did it. I wonder how this works in you? From the beginning to the end of our work we have always said that we do not use any techniques. We are sensing. Sensing1 and techniques have nothing to do with each other. What do you call “techniques?” What’s happening when you become conscious that you are using one or the other?

Participant 1: What I meant by that was that when I’m leading there may come times when I’m for one reason or another not fully sensing. A lot of times it’s because of insecurity, of being afraid. Often at the beginning of the class I feel this way, before I get warmed up in the work. And sometimes I’ll fall back on something that I remember, maybe phrases that you use. Maybe things that I’ve done over and over again that I remember rather than feel in the moment.

CS: Who understands what he is talking about?

Participant 1: I don’t feel that I stay in that place for a long time usually, but I get into that place of being cut off from my own sensing and cut off from people in the class, and get into my head and use these things. It happens. And often after a while I can get out of it and be in more connection.

Participant 2: I recognize that I’m not always sensing in the experimenting. At times, when I feel best about doing an experiment, I have an idea of where to start, and then I follow where that leads. When I’m not quite sure of where to go, then I fall back onto something that’s already been done. I feel like it’s a way of coming to grips with a whole lifetime of “techniques are the answer.” It’s very hard for me to give that up. I experience both when I’m giving classes, and I recognize the difference between technique and really sensing out an experiment. The best classes that I give are a combination between having a framework—an idea of what I want to do in the class, like a brief sketch—and then during the class I’m allowing the group and the moments in the class to fill in that brief sketch.

Participant 3: What’s been said speaks for me too, and I would add to it that I think at my stage of development it is quite a sound practice to have an outline, have an idea when I come to class of what I might do. The question would be my willingness to abandon it if the class leads some other direction and I’m aware of that. All I can say is I’m aware of it and I’ve tried to be open, and I would say so far nothing has led me to abandon the plan, which simply may be insecurity or lack of sensitivity or whatever, but I don’t think the plan in and of itself is undesirable. For me the technique has not so much to do with having an idea of what I might do beforehand as with the types of phrases or the types of questioning which you use—“how is breathing,” “how big is your big toe,” “how much space is between your eyes,” etc. Whether that question comes from my connection to the moment or whether it seems just like a good idea at that point. And I know that I very often fail – it’s been silent too long, I get nervous, and I think I better say something. I just hope that with time, with experience, that might go away and I know the difference.

CS: Who does not know the difference? It could very easily be that one is not yet quite clear about that. It takes a long time until we really clearly feel the difference.

Participant 3: Your suggestion yesterday was very meaningful to me, and as I heard it, it was that when one feels disconnected in that way to possibly just stop and say, “Help, time out, I feel disconnected, let me get back with it.” Or however that might come about. And I don’t know if I’d have the guts to try it, but something in me said yes to that.

CS: Yeah. I like to hear as much as possible from you in this respect. This is very important.

Participant 4: Most of what’s been said thus far speaks for me too. It never feels like a deliberate use of any technique. It’s always in retrospect that I’m aware of those moments in the class which are usually in the beginning, when invitations aren’t coming out of that fresh and spontaneous natural place in me, but have something to do with “a good idea,” or “memory.” I’ve been thinking about it some lately, and something you said to us weeks ago about following the thread. What I feel needs to happen for me is that the way I work in leading a class needs to be less circling around my own sensing and following the thread that it’s possible to pick up in what is happening in the room. Now I have a hunger to have the experience we had in Mexico of observing classes, which at that time was just too much for me. Now I realize what a valuable experience that could have been. I really have a curiosity now about being able to see what’s happening in the room and let that be something that leads, leads me in the way I’m working with that group of people.

Participant 2: When I first started leading classes, I was shocked by what I could see by leading. For several years I’d never opened my eyes during experiments, so I didn’t really know what was going on with other people. When I could see the different attitudes that people were into when they were doing an experiment, then I could see that there was a lot I needed to learn about how to approach someone with indications. That if a person, for instance, is very mental in doing an experiment, how to couch a statement to them without just blasting them between the eyes with that which is apparent to me, but to kind of lay out invitations so they start to explore that. Now when I feel like I’m doing an experiment best, I give myself a sketch to start with, a starting situation, and then I sense it myself and I’m watching people in the class to see whether they’re with the experiment or not. And if they’re busy with thoughts or things like that, then I have to change my format. I have to really start to become aware of how to relate to the class at that moment. And that’s the problem for me, that I don’t know how to be really subtle in that, like I’ve seen you and Charles be. I can go from knowing something’s there, like if someone is squeezing their arms together, and they’re not allowing themselves to breathe, I can go to an experiment that deals with becoming freer there. And sometimes that gets techniquey in that I’m stringing together—Sherman said that you can string together a bunch of experiments or you can sense it out, moment by moment. It’s a crucial question with this work to be able to do that. I really find it a difficult question how to go about it subtly. I feel it’s a matter of experience that I give myself the freedom to be techniquey at times because I’m not quite yet subtle enough to follow the moment. And at times, when I break free of that, I just am ecstatic about it. The class is as much for me as it is for the participants.

CS: Yes.

Participant 5: I led the class once about a month ago and I was petrified. I realize that I had no trust at all in my own sensing and I felt very much my age, that I am much younger than most of the people in the group, and I realize the difference in when I taught an acting class to children in the parks, the freedom I felt to sense where they were and to go with them. I didn’t feel anything of that. I was just petrified. And I realize that I spent the whole class just trying to fight being nervous.

CS: Who felt that she was petrified? … Did nobody take her into their arms and say to her, “Listen, … ”? By the way, one of the first classes that Charles gave was on Allan Watts’s house boat. Charles stood there on a little podium, and he looked around and looked around and then he said, “I hope you are not influenced by my terrible anxiousness!” That was the beginning of his class. This statement brought about so much laughter that he became wound up and couldn’t stop [being anxious?]. But he made it later on. I’ll never forget this. I was struck by his honesty. That’s how he started. …. Yeah. Go on. Was that the whole session?

Participant 5: I was petrified the whole session and by the end I just gave up any responsibility at all. I offered an experiment and I shut my mouth. And I just let people go ahead. That experiment lasted maybe an hour. I don’t know how long!

CS: Was it an interesting experiment for a whole hour? Maybe they were grateful that you were so patient.

Participant 5: I don’t know if I can get past being petrified when I lead another class. I just really didn’t give myself the chance to go with it. I spent so much time trying to fight being nervous that I lost any contact with the people in the room. I had no room to sense where they were. I was just caught up.

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“What do you think of Western civilization?”
“I think it would be a good idea.”
Attributed to Mahatma Ghandi

Tuesday morning, April 7, 2026. It’s time to write my by-weekly Substack post. I have some ideas for what I’d like to share with you. But first I’ll make myself an espresso.

I turn on the radio to catch up on the news while I’m waiting for the espresso machine to heat up. And there it is. The president of the United States of America posted on his social media channel that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” 1

I am frightened, frozen, outraged. We have gotten used to abhorrent remarks and behavior of the current president and the people he surrounded himself with, but this one shocks, hits, and scares me more than anything I have heard them say before.

And now? Will I just sit here and go about my day as though nothing happened? Write about the interesting life of a woman who died twenty-some years ago?

I look out the window of my home in downtown Peterborough, New Hampshire. It’s snowing. Cars go by, this way and that, as they always do. No-one is walking the streets on this cold Tuesday morning. I wish we’d all jump up and leave our cosy homes, our work, millions of us. No more quiet treading of those boiling waters. We have to jump out of that pot before it’s too late. But how?

Maybe I just go on my own, with some pots to bang together and make a noise. Maybe someone will join me – or maybe the cops would pick me up. We’d need to be millions. Right now. Where are we?

If you read on, dear reader, – and I hope you will – don’t look for advice. I’m just sharing my desperation because I can’t not, can’t just sit here and be silent. I know that I’m probably just preaching to the choir but sometimes I’m just happy to know that there is a choir. I have no desire to preach anyway, just to talk with you and share some of my writing for whatever it’s worth.

Charlotte Selver would often say that, “we’re groping in the dark,” trying to find our way, step by step, trying to feel what’s called for, not pretending to know. Sometimes it may lead nowhere and we have to start over and try again. But I have learned to trust and take this next step anyway. Not because I know it’s going to be alright but because I trust in the trying. Charlotte’s work has a lot to do with that.

And so I pick a few excerpts from the manuscript of my biography of Charlotte which in some way address this situation we find ourselves in. Maybe something is there that speaks to us, wakes us up and lets us take that next step.

The first set of excerpts is from the opening chapter of the biography, titled “Beginnings.” The second set is from a chapter with the title “On Silent Levels,” about her encounter with Alfred Korzybski’s work, General Semantics.2 The quotes from Heinrich Selver are from the chapter about Charlotte’s arrival and first months in New York City, titled “Diary of a New Beginning.”

The excerpts are not necessarily in a particular order and they may or may not build a whole. But they speak to me today. Maybe to you too.

As I’m finishing up this post on Tuesday night, I hear the news that a the U.S. and Iran agreed on a two-week ceasefire. I feel relieved – tentatively.

May we all find our way back to peace. Again and again. In spite of everything that speaks against it.

Stefan Laeng

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Beginnings

On June 15, 1991, I traveled to Matrei, an alpine village south of Innsbruck in Austria. Nestled in a valley that has, for centuries, served as a passageway through the Alps, Matrei lies only miles from the Italian border, where a busy freeway now transports northern European tourists over the Brenner Pass, in search of sun and Mediterranean pleasures. My destination was a Catholic retreat center on the eastern flank of the valley, a short walk from the village’s main street. I went there to attend a two-week workshop in Sensory Awareness led by Charlotte Selver, who had recently celebrated her ninetieth birthday.

. . .

That evening, we gathered in the large meeting room. Charlotte sat in a chair, the rest of us on the wooden floor, hiding our discomfort with the cool, firm surface. We had traveled from Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and Israel and were eagerly awaiting the teacher’s words.

I don’t remember if Charlotte introduced what she reverently called the work, as my notes begin with her request that we each share our life stories up to that very day. She wanted to know how we came to the work. She was especially interested in hearing about our childhoods, as “it sets the tone for our life’s journey.” She later asked us to write our stories down and relive them as we wrote.

In a second go-round Charlotte wanted to know how we respond to social injustice, to the plight of the world: “What calls for your attention and how do you respond?” She made it clear that this was always a central question in the work. When people express helplessness in matters like these, she’d say, “This work will help us wake up, and when we are awake, we’ll see.” Or she’d paraphrase Elsa Gindler’s close collaborator, Heinrich Jacoby, “Don’t you hear that the world screams for your participation?”

Ten days into the workshop, we hear that Yugoslavia’s federal government has ordered national army and police units to seize control posts along Slovenia’s borders. On June 25, 1991, the Republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, following months of futile efforts to gain more autonomy within the Yugoslav federation. While we are quietly standing in a circle, carefully balanced bamboo poles between each of us, hearing Charlotte’s age-old voice guiding us with utmost care, a hundred miles away young men are lining up in rows, Gewehr bei Fuss, receiving orders to shoot their neighbors. It is a distant echo of a shot seventy-seven years earlier, on June 28, 1914, that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire on his visit to Sarajevo, precipitating World War I. Charlotte was thirteen years old.

While leading this workshop, Charlotte may not have been aware that a long and brutal war was about to be launched nearby. What about young Charlotte Wittgenstein and her family in Ruhrort, Germany, in 1914? They knew war was in the air, but that war, they thought, was going to be short and glorious. Germany felt threatened by its neighbors and the young and upcoming nation state was going to assert itself. No one in Europe wanted war, but since there was no way to avoid it—or so they thought—it was better to attack. And while at it, Germany would acquire the space a growing new European power needed and deserved. The murder in Sarajevo seemed to be handy. Germany had to support its ally Austria, which demanded rigorous investigation of the murder and severe punishment of Serbia, if it had been involved.

This is not the place to elaborate on how a handful of men from a few nations managed to drag much of Europe into the most senseless and brutal war the world had known up to then. Decades later, Charlotte would refer to Alfred Korzybski’s quest to decode human communication, precipitated by his own experience of the Great War, which led him to wonder, “Why must there be war?” His method, General Semantics, would inform Charlotte’s work from the 1950s on. In class, she would summarize his findings in the simple statement, “Because people don’t listen to one another.” But in Ruhrort in the summer of 1914, such questions were not asked. Charlotte was 13 years old and she and her family, along with their German compatriots, celebrated the outbreak of war.

In 1999, I was with Charlotte at her home in Muir Beach, California when she shared this story: “When the war began, the soldiers crossed the nearby Rhine bridge on their way to France. We stood there with baskets full of fruit, flowers, and all kinds of things that we gave to the soldiers. Every day we went, giving them what we could. It was a delight to see them marching to battle. My father even drove to the front line to deliver Liebesgaben, “soldiers’ packages,” and my mother marched with the soldiers to let them know what my father was doing. Later, he too was drafted and had to train soldiers.”

“We were terribly patriotic. We had a map on a wall in our apartment, where we kept track of the German advances. ‘This is how far they have advanced, wonderful!’ we would say, and stick a flagged pin on the map. ‘Another 400 French men dead, hurray!’ The first war was a terrible disappointment. When the soldiers came back—those who did come back, most didn’t—devastated and depleted, we went to greet them again and gave them food and water. Those endless columns of soldiers. I still feel nauseated when I think about our attitude toward war, this so-called patriotism.”

On Silent Levels

“Central to Elsa Gindler’s work was to become quiet,” Charlotte explained at her summer workshop in St. Ulrich’s Priory 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 I, 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 principles 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 I heard her explain “how it comes to the word,” as she put it.

“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 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.”

“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 top of 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 ourselves. 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 as 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 responding to what we perceive, or to use a Buddhist term, for right action.

“General Semantics was developed by Alfred Korzybski because he wanted, after his experience as an officer in World War I, to make people more rational and avoid war,” Martha Santer explained during my third visit with her and her husband, Jeff Mordkowitz, in their Brooklyn apartment. Martha Santer’s succinct contributions helped me a great deal in grasping the meaning of Jeff’s thorough and passionate elaborations. Jeff is a past president and executive director of the Institute of General Semantics, and Martha is a past executive secretary. Sitting at their kitchen table with them, I was trying to gain a deeper understanding of General Semantics and its connection with Sensory Awareness. My voice recorder, a banana that was on the table, and other objects at hand served as props to help me grasp the concepts of “evaluational reactions” or “time-binding.”

Martha continued, “Korzybski used science and math as well as philosophy and rational thought to show how the neurological system gets stimulated by something that happens but—instead of reacting immediately—responses can be changed. Korzybski was very interested in getting people to not react with war or bigotry and violence, triggered by their nervous system, but to consider what countless possibilities there are.”

. . .

“Say a bit more about evaluational reactions,” I asked. “What does it mean?” “If I took your recorder,” Jeff picked up my voice recorder and moved it on the table, “your reaction to that I would call an evaluational reaction. I don’t know what you experienced. It wasn’t nothing.” “Oh, it was very much something,” I responded, “because I knew it would interfere with the recording. I could feel it in my chest. It was the perfect thing to move.”

Jeff: “How you respond to the meanings, the multiple meanings, not to the dictionary definition of voice recorder, that’s an evaluational reaction. Words do not exist in corpses. Words only exist where life exists. Words only exist where living brains and blood and cells exist. Something happens and you react, you respond to it in whatever way your entire life prepared you for. My wife will have had a different evaluational reaction to moving that voice recorder.”

“Evaluation, then, is a thinking process only in part, and only after an experience went through other, verbally silent, organismic levels of evaluation. Is thinking just an afterthought? More often than not, thinking and words serve to justify evaluations that have already happened unconsciously based on primordial survival instincts, our ethnic and cultural socialization, as well as past personal experience. To become conscious of these determining factors is, according to Korzybski, a uniquely—alas often tragically neglected—human potential. Like no other creature, we seem to be able to accumulate knowledge and build upon past generations’ experiences.

“Korzybski hoped that his work would help prevent these disasters,” Jeff added. “General Semantics was built as a preventative set of tools that people could use to become conscious of abstracting, to learn about how their nervous system works, how language exists as part of their nervous system, how not to misuse your nervous system—to see if the map they’re using has any similarity with the territory. He realized that through lack of consciousness of abstracting, [some] people use one set of maps, one set of language, while other people may use language that sounds like the same map but they are talking about different territories. They don’t make a distinction between the map and the territory. For them the language is the object.”

. . .

“I cannot know what you see when you see this.” Jeff says, pointing to the banana. “Your brain forms an image, which we call an object. We look around the room, we see a first level of abstraction, we see objects, we do not see the scientific objects [atoms, quarks, etc.], which we can only infer. On the next level of abstraction, we have a word, or a label, a set of meanings. If we can get that across, we can prevent a lot of shocks, a lot of hurts, a lot of surprises.”

“How do you approach these issues in General Semantics?” I asked. “Language lives neuro-physiologically,” Jeff responded. “But if people don’t experience it as that, we can’t work with them. First, we need to have what we call ‘non-verbal awareness.’ If people walk around with their heads and nothing below it, we can’t teach them. If they don’t experience it in their hands, in their feet, in their lungs, in their breathing, and it returns to the head and they speak about it, we can’t reach them. We need people to start experiencing their whole selfs. That brings in Charlotte Selver’s work.”

In the 1957 lecture that became the General Semantics Bulletin article “Sensory Awareness and Total Functioning,” Charlotte Selver opened by paying tribute to Elsa Gindler, who she called a “natural scientist of extraordinary quality” and Heinrich Jacoby. Charlotte said that their work was “bio-social in nature.” She didn’t define the term, but it has a General Semantics ring to it, as do other parts of the lecture/article.

“Interest fires the tissues,” she wrote. “Vitality, nerve activity, organic functioning, reactiveness are at their best, when we are really interested and in contact with what we are doing. Senses are open for reception, muscles for necessary changes, energy supply is at hand just as we need it, we are ready for action just as for rest—whatever is warranted. In other words, our whole self functions in what we do. But when our thirst for genuine experience is more and more discouraged, vitality tends to ebb away or is wasted by continued repression.” Charlotte called the culprit “superimposed education.”

“I meet in my classes this dependence, the stern belief in what others advise or teach, no matter how superficial or artificial it might be. It requires a great deal of work to loosen these ties so that we begin to dare again to trust our own sensations and feelings. It seems to me that this insecurity, so subtly developed—‘I don’t know, the other knows’—follows us through life, weakening more and more our productive abilities.

“Can you feel what all this does to the organism, and what attitudes it creates in us? We become mainly directed towards: Doing, getting, gaining approval, making an effort, following superimposed advice. And where is room left for individual search, for the blessings of just being, existing, responding in a genuine way, for sensitive awareness? What do we retain to a smaller or larger degree, in case an education based on disregard of spontaneity and natural development is successful? Superimposed education will have to be laid aside if we are to return to those values which nature has given us. We have to rediscover them. We have to learn anew—like children—to use our biological potentials. In this process the wisdom inherent in our own body can guide us.”

. . .

“Korzybski’s work has an ethic,” Jeff explained. “The population alive now created virtually nothing; we inherited everything. If people become conscious of abstracting, a time-binding ethic will lead them, we hope, to choose what’s beneficial for most people and to stop fighting over resources that they inherited, things they didn’t create.” Korzybski coined the term Time-Binding to describe the human capacity to build upon experience of past generations, thus creating ever more complex civilizations with sheer boundless advances through science, engineering, the arts, etc. Yet, humans seem to be unable to apply this time-binding capacity to resolving conflicts. We use past war experience to develop the most sophisticated weapons systems. General Semantics was Korzybski’s attempt to create nonviolent conflict resolution techniques based on a deep understanding of how we evaluate what we experience to prevent future wars.

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I never met Leon Siegel and never knew much about him, though his name was always around. He was a student of Charlotte Selver, a Sensory Awareness leader, and a participant in the first of the two 9-month study groups Charlotte and her husband, Charles Brooks, offered in 1972/73. He was also a medical doctor and a psychotherapist (and inadvertently the “physician-in-charge” on Monhegan Island in Maine during that study group, when Charlotte was recovering from a serious car accident. See the obituary at the bottom of this post to learn more about Leon’s interesting life. He died in 2021.1)

I recently came across a typed, undated write-up among Charlotte’s papers for a workshop he planned to—and possibly did?—offer, Sensory Awareness and Healing. I’m sharing it with you today as one of those “shavings” from my writing workshop, which could easily fall off the table and be discarded, but seem well worth spending a bit of time with, even if they will not make it onto the biography.

I’m working on a chapter about the 1970s in New York and the beginnings of the Charlotte Selver Foundation (now Sensory Awareness Foundation). This prompted me to pull out the first fifteen years or so of its newsletters/bulletins. It is really impressive to be reminded of all the accomplishments of Mary Alice Roche—the foundation’s main founder and longtime manager—and the people around her, their dedication, their enthusiasm, their perseverance too, when things got challenging.

This is where I came across Leon’s article, Sensory Awareness: An Approach to Healing. You’ll find it below—well, after another little find from the first CSF bulletin—followed by the workshop write-up. As always, it would be tempting to elaborate on both but I’ll refrain and let you read them as they were written 50 years ago.

Your elaborations are, of course, always welcome. You can comment directly here on Substack or contact me by email.

With many good wishes your way in this challenging time, so in want of the kind of healing Leon wrote about.

Stefan Laeng

Sensory Awareness: An Approach to Healing

by Leon Siegel, M.D.

From the Bulletin # 8 of the Charlotte Selver Foundation, Fall 1976.
© 1976 Charlotte Selver Foundation (now Sensory Awareness Foundation)

My eleven years as a traditional general practitioner (which came to an end four years ago) were marked by a nagging sense of futility. There was caring in it, and deeply human meetings – but also an endless weight of pain I could only numb, suffering I could only, deep down, turn away from.

What was it that was wrong, among the pills, the authoritative instructions, the weary laughter in operating rooms, the long corridors of beds with persons given over to sedation and multiple tubes? It wasn’t clear. I knew only that I wanted out.

It’s more than clear to me today – after seeing the growing evidence that changes in consciousness can be a healing force, after the scientific acceptance of acupuncture, and, increasingly, of psychic healing; seeing the growing list of “psychosomatic diseases” to the point where a list may no longer be needed, as nothing is excluded; seeing the development of psychotherapies based on awareness, and of R.D. Laing’s dealing with “madness” as a natural process; seeing the thriving of nutrition, herbalism, massage, polarity therapy, Indian medicine-man rituals, all the varieties of natural healing we once smugly dismissed as “quackery.” After (to speak personally) my years of studying Sensory Awareness with Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, and my experience in leading this work in groups and with individuals.

What’s becoming clear is that we were all, doctors and patients, plugged into a set of concepts which, when we clutched it to the end, limited and hurt us. “The body” as a machine, to be acted on by drugs or knives. “Body” and “mind” as separate. “Sickness” as a malfunctioning in the machines, to be eliminated. “Doctors” and “patients” in an unequal, manipulative relationship.

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The working title for my biography of Charlotte Selver is “This Was Your Experience - Now Forget it.” It’s what Charlotte would often say after hearing a student’s report on an experience in a workshop. It was meant as a warning not to get attached to a certain outcome and expect to have that same experience again.

As biographers, we of course do exactly the opposite. We collect and preserve memories. Not to hold on to past experiences but to honor a life well lived and to document the history and unique contributions of – in our case – “explorers of humankind” (Thomas Hanna) such as Charlotte Selver and Shunryu Suzuki.

This post is a nod of gratitude to a fellow hunter-gatherer, whose dedication continues to inspire my work on an oral history and biography of Charlotte Selver.

See also: San Francisco Zen Center’s post Remembering David Reich Chadwick,
and the David Chadwick Memorial Page on cuke.com, with contributions from Richard Baker and many others.

And I’m grateful to David for not forgetting but dedicating many years of his life to collecting and sharing stories of Suzuki Roshi and the history of San Francisco Zen Center.

Go to cuke.com for a dive into his vast archive.

I met David only once, on March 13, 1999, as I rediscovered just now in my copy of his insightful biography of Shunryu Suzuki, Crooked Cucumber, which he signed and dated. It was at a reading for his then newly published book. I believe it was at a book store in Corte Madera in Marin County. I went there together with Charlotte Selver.

Few memories remain: The two of them greeting each other with great reverence; the care he took to make sure that Charlotte could hear his reading, which required the usual set up for Charlotte with microphone, amplifier and her oversized headphones – and his effort to keep holding the microphone in a way that made it possible for her to actually understand him, which was never an easy feat.

I also remember David’s captivating blend of wit, sincerity and self-deprecation, and Charlotte’s enjoyment of the stories. All of this stayed with me over the years and may have contributed to me having the courage to write a biography of Charlotte. At the time this was just an budding idea, growing out of the need to organize Charlotte’s papers for UC Santa Barbara’s Humanistic Psychology Archives, and the desire to capture her memories on tape when it became clear that their hope to record an oral history of Charlotte was more than she could handle at nearly 100.

The only other time I saw David was couple of months before his death at a large online event in celebration of his latest book, Tassajara Stories - The First Year, 1967. It was “A Night of Tassajara Stories,” in which he and Edward Espe Brown shared their memories of the early years of San Francisco Zen Center’s mountain center, “the first Zen Buddhist Monastery in the West,” according to the book’s title. It was a touching evening of stories of a lifetime of dedication from both David and Ed.

I was, of course, interested in their memories of Charlotte and her husband, Charles Brooks. With dozens of questions pouring in, there was no time to answer mine but David, being the untiring storyteller he is, took it upon himself to produce a podcast to address unanswered questions from the evening a few days later.

I’m taking the liberty of sharing with you some of his answer to my question, taken from the podcast, More Tassajara Stories from DC (starting at minute 45:02). It’s slightly edited for clarity and shortened because another memory of Charlotte he shared didn’t seem to belong here. If that made you curious, you can go and listen to it on the podcast.

David Chadwick: “Any memories of Charlotte and Charles at Tassajara? Yeah, sure. They’re in Tassajara Stories 1, probably in Tassajara Stories 2, probably in Tassajara Stories 3. I can’t remember which one. I wrote all three books at once and then spent a few months on each, finishing them up to get them out.

Charlotte and Charles would come and do workshops there. It was body awareness work and when Suzuki Roshi was there, he’d join in on it and all students could go [“… Suzuki whom she respectfully treated the same as others in the class,” David writes in the book]. It wasn’t for guests, but I guess guests could go too. Anybody could go, but it wasn’t like one of her paid things.

I can remember lying on the floor and her saying, ‘feel your feet,’ and then focusing on the feet. The classes were wonderful. Charlotte was wonderful and I loved relating with them. One thing she did really surprised me. I was having a problem sitting Zazen crookedly. It’s in a picture that’s used a lot, taking from behind Suzuki when he’s giving a talk in the zendo. That’s 67. And I’m sitting there with my body leaning to the side.

Oh, horrors. And Charlotte noticed it, and she told me – she had this German accent, ‘You’re carrying the trays to the dining room with just your right arm, aren’t you?’ And I said, ‘yeah.’ She said, ‘it’s making you tilt to the side. Use your left arm, too.’

And I went, oh my God. Then I started using my left arm, only until I started straightening up, and then I could alternate. [This story and more is in the first volume of Tassajara Stories, on page 156. The other volumes are yet to be published.]

Charlotte and Charles were wonderful. We always loved having them. Their home was right above Green Gulch Zen Center in Muir Beach. So, I’d visit her. I visited her when she was 100, 101. She was still sharp as heck.

She was very close with Richard Baker. He called her his first teacher.”

(More about Richard Baker’s experience of Charlotte in my post When Bodhidharma Met a German Gymnastik Teacher.)

Thank you, David.

Dear Reader,

This is Part 2 of Charlotte’s early attempts at writing about her work. If you haven’t seen Part 1, you might want to read my introduction there for more context. You can find a link to that post at the bottom of this piece.

The draft is untitled and undated. The address at the head of the piece, 202 Riverside Drive, suggests that it might have been written in 1939 as part of Charlotte’s efforts to rebuild her professional career after her escape from Germany.

It’s not unlikely that she would have shown a version of it to her newfound friend, Lia Singer. Her name begins to appear in Charlotte’s schedule books in March 1939. Charlotte remembered: “One day, when I went to the Refugee Service, the woman at the desk said, ‘Wait a moment. There is a young physician from Vienna who wants to leave to study some more. Maybe you can take over her patients.’ Then a door opened, and this incredibly beautiful woman, Lia Singer, came over to me. She said, ‘I hear you work with people. I’d like to know what you do. Come to me and show me your work.’ I went, and she said, ‘You do it much better than I do. I want to give you my patients.’

“In Vienna, Lia had studied with a man who developed a system based on the movements of animals, encouraging people to move in similar ways. It was quite interesting, though I didn’t get to see much of it because she mainly massaged people. She didn’t leave right away, because she didn’t want to be away from her boyfriend; but when she finally did, she gave me her patients.”

I’ve often wondered how Charlotte’s work changed over the years. In conversations with her, Charlotte seemed to think that it didn’t. But it clearly did. One way to track change is through photographs of different time periods, another through the little she wrote over the years.

People who knew Charlotte later in her life will be surprised by some of what Charlotte writes about her work in this piece – and even more how she writes about it, her choice of words. To mention only one example, Charlotte writes about massaging people, something she would have never done when I knew her. And when she writes that “massage helps the pupil to relax more readily,” people who knew her will be just as surprised to read the word “relax.” It was not in Charlotte’s vocabulary when we knew her—unless to admonish us when she felt that we were letting gravity suck the lifeblood out of us. For her, the American infatuation—as it seemed to her—with relaxation was a vice that she didn’t tire to warn us from, as in “who would want to be given a bouquet of relaxed flowers?”

As I did in my last post, I’m sharing this text as I found it, in the raw, with all its imperfections. It affords us a glimpse into her early attempts at describing her work in a language – and a city – that were still foreign to her in so many ways.

Be well,

Stefan

Charlotte Selver
202 Riverside Drive, Apt. 6a
New York City
Riverside 9-9139

This is a brief account of my theory and technique of physical education together with the experience on which they are based.

About this time while I was studying gymnastics and massage, and especially when I worked in these professions, my opinion about the success of the prevailing methods used in working with pupils and patients changed. When I began to study, physical education was only for healthy people. Girls and boys, men and women practiced gymnastics to keep themselves young and strong, to refresh themselves after work, to have a counterpoise to sedentary occupations, to keep or get courage and elasticity. If they were interested in music and rhythm, they could enjoy the movements and the impulse of music through rhythmic instruction. The combination of music and movement made the lessons joyful, I might even say festive. After the lesson the pupils felt not only mobile in their bodies, but also free in their minds, as if with the training and the aid of the music their psychic burdens had fallen from them. I often heard my pupils say after the lessons “I’m a different person now, much happier!”

But there were several things that made me feel not quite satisfied with the work.

Although my lessons had a temporarily favorable effect upon my students, I was still doubtful as to its permanent value. When I met my pupils on the street without their being conscious of my presence, they seemed to have fallen back into their old habits. I began to ask them how they felt in the interims between lessons. I learned that there was a general transformation only in those few people who were particularly wide awake and susceptible. As for the rest, the effort of the lessons persisted only for a few hours or at best a day or two. That did not seem sufficient to me. I felt that the whole method I was employing tended to make my pupils depend on us.

Physical education ought not only to make healthy persons stronger, but should have corrective results as well. Through experience, I found that in very simple cases this effect occurred, but that in the more difficult ones the work was inadequate.

The rhythmic gymnastics were simply not enough for the special needs of a very delicate persons or for the weak and handicapped.

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Dear Reader,

This is another deep dive into the papers that Mary Alice Roche sent to me in the late 1990s. An undated draft of an early attempt by Charlotte Selver to write about and promote her work in New York City. It came to me in poor condition as a copy of a copy, hard to read. There are actually two different texts from that time. I’ll share the other in the next post.

The address on the second one helps us date them somewhat. On March 22, 1939, only a few months after her arrival in the U.S., Charlotte found a room to rent at 202 Riverside Dr.. The first months after her arrival she had lived with a Mrs. Eleanor Rice for whom she continued to work as a companion even after she found her own place. About the time of living with her Charlotte told me: “I had to accompany her when she went out. I had to sleep in her room to give her the bedpan at night; I had to comb her very beautiful white hair, give her a bath in bed in the morning and massage her to sleep in the evening.

“It was quite challenging because Mrs. Rice was very jealous and didn’t like that her daughters liked me. She seemed to have heart disease and each time she was not happy about something she go a heart attack. Everybody tiptoed around her. The older daughter had scoliosis and when I told her about what I was really interested in doing, she said, ‘why don’t you work with me?’ I did, and she became much better.

“She was a writer, and later helped me formulate my first announcement so I could begin to offer my work. Mrs. Rice’s house was very luxurious. One afternoons a week I could do what I wanted to, and I went around New York. I had free eating and free sleeping – everything free. And I earned $75 a month. I still remember going to the bank to deposit my money. I was so proud. But at one of the refugee gatherings, I said I wanted to leave this job to do my own work. And there was a doctor who said to me, ‘You want to leave this job? How impertinent can a woman be! Such good treatment! Such good pay! I will never send you a patient!’ And he never did,” Charlotte said, laughing.

Mrs. Rice daughter, Mrs. Novak, helped Charlotte write about her work once she had her own place. I doubt that these texts were ever used in this form, if at all. They look like early drafts, not polished and the English is … what’s the word? Strained? Charlotte had only just escaped from Germany but immediately ventured out to connect with physicians and therapists in New York City—mostly German Jewish refugees themselves—to promote her work on that one afternoon when she was free.

I’m sharing these texts as I found them, in the raw. I know from Charlotte’s own accounts how she struggled with them and with English endlessly, something I myself, not being a native English speaker, am all too familiar with. They may sound a bit awkward in places but they give us a sense of the depth and expanse of her work with no name—she simply referred to it as ‘the work,’ like her teacher Elsa Gindler did—which would in time become of notable importance in the emerging fields of body psychotherapy and the Human Potential Movement.

I hope you’ll enjoy this little journey into the history of Somatic practices.

Be well,

Stefan Laeng

Charlotte Selver

A New Way of Psycho-Physical Education

Our modern time with all its inventions and our forms of life demands from us he most possible of adjustment in the necessities of life. Our organism, this wonderful instrument, so inimitably adaptable, and full of marvelous potentialities of resistance and recuperation is able to overcome all these difficulties. The history of mankind has shown us man from the earliest time till now changing from primitive to a creature with powers of imagination and idealization, more and more discovering and controlling the forces of nature around him.

But—hand in hand with this marvelous evolution goes a flood of new occupations, of intellectual demands, of […]sing tasks. On the other hand civilization has changed the condition of life entirely. Many of us by profession have sedentary or standing occupations, improvements of modern civilization: cars, elevators, modern means of communication take a lot of occasions away from us which help to stimulate our circulation (walking, climbing, running, etc.). our labor makes little or no call upon our physical capacities.

There remains the necessity to use our adaptability to quite a new purpose: our psycho-physical organism must become so highly sensible as to become able to react even to the finest stimuli, we must learn the art of quick regeneration, we must meet all our different tasks with the utmost elasticity, we must become finer organized but stronger for these tasks, we are confronting now.

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On September 18, 1999, Mary Alice Roche (1917 - 2004) sent me this draft number 8 of her conversation with Ruth Veselko (1918 - 2014), along with some other materials and a note saying that she’ll be curious to hear my reaction. I hope and trust that I did respond but I had completely forgotten that this conversation took place until I found it in my filing cabinet a few days ago, while I was searching – in vain – for a different conversation I knew she had, one with Charlotte Selver’s husband, Charles Brooks.

I read it with delight, not only because the topic is of interest to me but because I deeply cherished the friendship between Mary Alice and Ruth, their untiring enthusiasm for “the work.” Mary Alice, being a student of Charlotte Selver, called it Sensory Awareness and Ruth, who was a lifelong student of mainly of Heinrich Jacoby, preferred not to name it at all or called it simply “unsere Arbeit,” our work. Ruth visited Mary Alice often in her home in Caldwell, New Jersey, where the two spent hours and weeks in discussion, or translating workshop transcripts from Heinrich Jacoby’s workshops in Switzerland, where Ruth was at home.

Mary Alice was the driving force behind the founding of the Charlotte Selver Foundation (now Sensory Awareness Foundation) in 1971, and responsible for most of the many beautiful publications by the Foundation, many of which will have started with conversations like this one.

This is not an academic paper. It’s a conversation between two women who devoted much of their life to the work of Charlotte Selver and Heinrich Jacoby respectively, sharing their personal experience and their thoughts on the role of emotions in Sensory Awareness and the work of Heinrich Jacoby and Elsa Gindler. I believe it took place in April 1998 and then again in June 1999. As you will see, the conversation went in different directions, just as any animated discussion would. I’m sharing it with you as I found it, draft number 8, edited by Mary Alice. As far as I know, it has never been published before.

I hope you enjoy sitting in on their exchange as much as I did.

Stefan Laeng

Mary Alice Roche: In our class last night, the question of emotion came up. In my thirty– five years of experience in the practice of Sensory Awareness, studying with Charlotte Selver and other Gindler / Jacoby students, emotions have seldom been directly discussed – or experimented with. Ruth, you have studied with both Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby who originated the work Charlotte Selver named Sensory Awareness. What has your experience been?

Ruth Veselko: Three times I had a three–week course with Gindler in the last years of her life. But I studied with Jacoby for twenty years, and for twenty years with his colleague, Ruth Matter. Jacoby talked a lot about feelings, but now I realize that much of the time he was talking about emotions. He wanted us to take note of our affects – our emotions – and work with them, not push them away. He told us not to turn away from that which could disturb our peace of mind.

Mary Alice: How do you work with your emotions?

Ruth: Perhaps, if I’m angry at somebody, I can think about how she feels, or why she has done what she did, and then, perhaps, I can understand what she was doing. And that can take away my anger.

Mary Alice: That’s pretty psychological. Is there any other way you might work with your anger?

Ruth: In Jacoby’s classes we had to bring notes about what makes us angry. Often I was angry at myself. Only to note it was a help, to write it down – and perhaps to recognize that it was always the same thing I was angry at. After I wrote it down, I was more sensitive to my behavior. Jacoby said that ambition, vanity, desire for profit prevent us from being “gelassen“ being calm, being present. So did the anger.

Mary Alice: The first thing that really helped me with anger was years ago – I don’t know how long I had been in the work. But one day I was so angry that I went around the house stamping and screaming. Suddenly it hit me what a physical event this was, how it affected every single bit of me. And, in noticing that it was a physical event as well as emotional – sensing its physical manifestations – the anger subsided. Whereas, when I just thought about the anger – what I was angry about – it just grew and grew.

Ruth: And angst, anxiety, is also both physical and emotional. Jacoby wanted us to feel when we were restless, stiff or aggressive. Restlessness usually has anxiety in it. We can be very active, or quite stiff or rigid – to stop being touched by what we are feeling. Jacoby asked us to be quiet, to let things rise to the surface, to let oneself be touched. He said, “When something touches us, it works in us.”

Mary Alice: He wasn’t talking about being just physically touched, but also being touched in our emotions?

Ruth: Yes.

Mary Alice: I wonder if all touch includes emotion. I can feel the texture of my shirt, and I don’t think any emotion enters into that. Unless I either like the texture or don’t like it.

Ruth: I remember swimming in the lake, and that gave me an emotion of happiness, from feeling my movement through the water, the water touching my skin as I moved through it.

Mary Alice: The feeling of touch made you “feel good” – and that “feeling good” included emotion. So, “feeling good” physically can also be “feeling good” emotionally?

Ruth: Yes. Jacoby said that happiness is an expression of being well–balanced, in equilibrium, present. He felt that a person who is present will be happy with all he encounters.

Mary Alice: That takes us right to the “no preference” of Vedanta and Buddhism. If I’m truly present I’m not judging whether something is good or bad, and there is happiness in just being there without judging.

Ruth: To feel “Yes!” not just to say “Yes,” or think “Yes.” That was what Jacoby felt about being present for any task. Once he asked: what sensations and feelings are rising up from a task which is given to me or I give to myself? And he said: when we are deeply affected by a goal and its task, when we are connected with it, then it will be possible to do a great deal. He said that the acceptance of a task gives the energy to do it.

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When I accompanied Charlotte Selver on her travels, one of the striking things was that she kept a notebook of her classes. Charlotte was about to turn 94 when we were in Barra de Navidad, Mexico, for two ten day-day workshops in early 1995. It was the first of many trips that year, to workshops in Mexico, the United States, Switzerland, and Germany.

Charlotte was often exhausted and her eyesight wasn’t great, yet she insisted on sitting down after the classes to take notes of what we had just worked on. As I read them for the first time now, I’m newly impressed by her untiring commitment to the work and her students.

Today, I’m sharing with you a few pages from the first workshop in Barra that year but we’ll start with the opening of the second workshop. The notes are just brief sketches, sometimes perhaps a bit cryptic, especially for people not familiar with Charlotte’s work. You might want to read them one at a time, like something to contemplate, to experience, rather than as instructions on how to “do” Sensory Awareness.

I broke Charlotte’s paragraphs up for easier reading. Substack won’t allow me to underline, so I put what Charlotte underlined in bold. Notes in [ ] are by me, as are words I couldn’t decipher. Maybe you can. If you do, let me know. You’ll find the pages below.

The photos are from the same workshops but they are not directly connected to the classes shown here. Unfortunately, I don’t know who took them.

I hope you’ll enjoy this litte glimpse into Charlotte’s process.

Take care in this challenging time,

Stefan Laeng

Barra de Navidad, Group II
January 22, 1995

It was a very, very large group – we were not able to count them, also to able to decide who would be accepted to stay.

I started with Gindler’s sessions in following breathing, quieting the mind. Experiencing “pains”, “restrictions”, “pushings,” not as wrong, but feeling them out. What do they say? When did it happen? What happened? Re-experiencing – is it still acute? Allowing steps into NOW. [….] deeply experiencing.

Korzybski1: Non-verbal levels - Birth of thought based on experiencing in quiet levels [on silent levels, as Korzybski would have said]

We practice sitting in quiet. Using hand on forehead to bring about more peace of mind. (On top of head, over ears)

I asked to do it once more before going to bed.

Sunset – much emotion – drinks –

Group I
January 10, 1995, [3rd session (not 2/10/95, Charlotte’s dating is off)]

We worked mainly on our attitude in touching floor in standing, walking, and lying. In lying [worked] on letting leg come to standing + to lying. Leaving [floor], in moving open to air, in the process of arriving, meeting surface, what surface? In standing of leg.

In all this how it affected us inside, our relating to the surface.

– Not exercising!! Not watching – Being there. Being changeable.

We slapped the holding out of the head. We touched the lower back of head.

Teamwork: our heads, the head of the lying one. Does he/she rest in my hands?

I myself touch the back of neck.

On the legs [standing?]: My head, neck, back, thigh is being stroked. How is standing after all this, how walking?

January 10, 1995, afternoon

I explain Korzybski’s findings.

We try to get more quiet in head – also using touch for it. We touch each other’s head, with two partners.

“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 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.” Charlotte Selver, St. Ulrich, Germany 1995. From Stefan’s class notes.

January 11, 1995

Coming to more quiet in the head.

[Presumably lying down, legs moving from lying to standing (knees bent)]
How one approaches the floor, the other, – does one only do it or is there a relationship to where one starts, in going, in arriving, in being there?

Also, when leg comes to standing or lying: is only the leg involved?

I have again to speak about the total “impregnation.”
[A term borrowed from Korzybski (and photography, see above), roughly meaning that experience (a touch, for example, or a step) permeates and the whole being, every cell of the living organism, as Charlotte might have added.]

January 11, 1995 [presumably afternoon]

The sitting is not only: coming with trunk down, but has to do with our attitude to the crossing of our legs.
– We cross our arms, then gently: one leg comes to crossing, then the other. How does it feel in the sitting? Are we […..…] in hip joints?

Again: how deep are we? Can we allow our depth? Can we allow life? Acceptance for being in our depth?

Giving up “[just?] doing,” allowing experiencing [of?] motion, how it feels, what we feel of it, and where.

Roll of education in our attitude. Allowing time – nothing is “wrong”; but there may early happenings which have settled and still […]

Reliving the source of tensions, restrictions, pressures, [therefore?] create pain. Do we have to continue to live this way, or do we allow to come into the “now”? Can we become opener [more open?] for the “now”?

Again: can we let ourselves “impregnate”[ can we be permeable]? All cells reactive?

January 12, 1995 “A little more”

When one goes deeper into the exploration, one does not just “enjoy” the accessions or one’s own findings, or what I say – one often comes to attitudes and disturbances on which one has to work for years and years – – perhaps never comes to the solution of them.

To meet the task of the moment new: is also such a riddle. So one better does not expect anything, but truly goes into the working out difficulties which arise. [Elsa] Gindler2: “a little more (less)!”

We work on structure of feet, sides, length of toes, arch, “standing,” going backwards, forward. We compare reaching the …. we want to touch, with reaching out for the head of another. Fe feel how it is when we leave the place on which we stand, and the way through air to another place (ankle joints).

This post is in celebration of those serendipitous moments that appear unexpectedly even in challenging times.
It comes with many good wishes for the holidays and the coming year, and with the trust that even in seemingly hopeless times like ours there are still these cracks in everything “and that’s how the light gets in.”

(By the way: You can listen to these posts when you view them on the Subsack app on your phone. The automated readings are surprisingly good.)

Charlotte Selver, having herself studied photography in the early 1920s, documented her work with photographs at different times in her long life. The photographs I’m sharing with you today are from her gorgeous studio in Leipzig in the early 1930s, taken by Charlotte’s close friend, the photographer and weaver Edelgard von Wulffen.

I love these photos which give a glimpse into Charlotte’s work at a time of transition from the heavily choreographed, piano or tambourine-accompanied “Ausdrucks-Gymnastik” (Expression Gymnastics)1 she was trained in to the more self-directed, explorative somatic approach she was studying with Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby.

The images are accompanied by a brief excerpt form the chapter “Success and Demise” in the manuscript of my biography of Charlotte Selver.

Charlotte Selver remembered: “I went to meet with the director of a large girls school, the Erste Höhere Mädchenschule in Leipzig, as I was hoping to teach there. The director was a large square-shouldered man with an enormous bald head. I told him about my work and he, sitting at his desk, explained, “This is the First Girls’ High School, where the daughters of Leipzig’s important, well-to-do families attend. There is also a Second Girls’ High School. That’s where the daughters of the fat Jews go.’

When he was done, I said, ‘Mr. Headmaster2, I can’t teach at your school.’ He asked, ‘Why?’ and I told him, ‘Because my father is one of those fat Jews.’ You should have seen him. He sat there, and his huge head went down. After a long silence, he raised his head and said, ‘You just taught me something. Of course, you’ll teach at my school!’

Then he reached for the phone and called his wife. ‘There’s someone here who will give you lessons.’ He sent me to the gym where I had to demonstrate my work in front of all students. It must have been funny, because everyone laughed. Then they hired me on the spot and the students soon began winning races and other competitions.” This was the beginning of a collaboration that lasted some years, until the Nazis came to power.

The photos in this post show the students at Charlotte’s studio at 1 Augustusplatz. Finding that studio was another serendipitous event to which Charlotte attributes much of the credit for her success. Charlotte initially taught adult education classes for the city in the gymnasium of the Women’s Trade School, though when she told this story at Green Gulch Farm in California, she said the gym at the University of Leipzig was where she was teaching when these events took place.

“It was the dead of winter, and the gym was very cold. There was a grand piano that had only two legs, so the keyboard was leaning toward the floor. When I wanted to play it, I had to rest the keyboard on my lap,” Charlotte said, laughing. “That day, it was so icy cold, my fingers nearly froze, and by the end of the session, desperate, I called out to my students, with tears in my eyes: ‘Can anyone help me get a studio where I can work?”

Whenever I heard Charlotte tell this story—and she loved to tell it often—I couldn’t but wonder how a prestigious university like this didn’t have the means to provide a decent piano to its teachers or to properly heat its buildings. However, there’s no reason to doubt these events took place, but it does seem more likely that it was at the nearby Women’s Trade School. In any case, this was a time of enormous economic hardship and political disarray in Germany, and many educational institutions struggled to fund their programs.

Charlotte continued, “A woman in class I’d never seen before said to come with her after class. So we went outside, and there was a Rolls Royce waiting. We got in and the chauffeur took off. The university was located on Augustusplatz, one of Europe’s largest squares at the time. The theater was on one side of the square, the art museum on another. Here was the university, and across the square was a building owned by a man who produced linoleum. That’s where the car stopped. The driver opened our doors and we exited. The woman entered the linoleum showroom and invited me to come with her.

A tall, hefty man greeted us. She said a few words to him, and he came to meet me. He looked down and said, “This little woman is a teacher?” I nodded, gravely. “Oh”, he said, “then we must help her.” He called the property manager and together they looked at building plans. He would say, “No, not this, not this, no, not this.” And so they went through all the spaces in the building until he stopped and said, “Here! This will be good, but we’ll have to tear out two walls to have enough space for her teaching. That company has been there for forty years. Maybe they can move to other side of the stairs, where they’ll have an office in better shape.’ Let’s go ask him.“

So the Kommerzienrat3 Keffel, that was his name, my new student who was his wife, and I went to see Dr. Kötteritsch in his office. Forty years and nothing had been done to it. You can’t imagine the shape it was in. Chalk was falling out from the walls and there were deep grooves where the chairs had been. The firm’s owner kept bowing and saying, “What an honor, Herr Kommerzienrat, what can I do for you?”

Kommerzienrat Keffel said to him, ‘We have a beautiful new office just like yours on the other side of the building. Would you consider moving there?” And the man said: “If you pay for the move, yes.” Keffel agreed, the company moved, and the space was immediately converted into a studio for me. Two walls were removed so I had a big space with six windows on one side. There were dressing rooms for women and for men, showers, bathrooms, and a massage room. It was heaven.”

“Keffel was so thoughtful,” Charlotte remembered as we were sitting in her living room to record her memories. “He asked me, ’Do your students go barefoot? Then we’ll have to level the floor. And to make it nice and elastic under your feet, we’ll cover it with a layer of cork and then another layer of linoleum.’ All of this was done. It was a miracle. He also gave me an apartment on the same floor. We lived there, and I only had to go across the hall to my studio. I remember coming back after these lively classes late in the evening into this very quiet atmosphere of Heinrich studying, the air fragrant with the smoke of his pipe.”

Charlotte had that apartment and her studio until 1935, when her German citizenship was revoked and she was kicked out of the University of Leipzig because she was jewish. Much more on this time of success and heartbreak will be in the biography.

Supporters of the Charlotte Selver Biography blog can see many more pictures below. Thank you so much for your generosity.

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In 2004 the Sensory Awareness Foundation held a conference at Fort Mason in San Francisco. The theme was “Exploring the Roots of Peace.” This was done not in discussions but through a series of experiential classes offered by Sensory Awareness leaders. I had the honor of giving the opening talk which I’m sharing with you here. It seems to be as relevant now as it was then, a year after the United States invaded Iraq. Tempting as it is to rewrite and reconsider the questions I raised, I’m leaving the talk largely in its original form, though shortened and with some small changes where it seemed relevant.

When I first started working on this talk, my plan was to review the history of Sensory Awareness in light of the title of the conference, Exploring the Roots of Peace. But I soon realized that this is too ambitious and would require a lot of research. Still, I decided to take at least a glimpse at the topic. As I was getting deeper into it, I started to see that along with the commitment to social justice which many of its proponents had, came other time-bound dispositions. Some of those traits are certainly still beneficial but others might “not be needed anymore,” to repeat a phrase Charlotte Selver liked to use with respect to certain behaviors we might have acquired in times of distress.

Sensory Awareness is conditioned by the historical and cultural circumstances in which its originators found themselves a century ago. In my talk I pose questions that may sound provocative to some close to Sensory Awareness, Charlotte Selver, and the work of Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby. However, they grow out of a deep respect for our teachers and their findings.

Within the framework of Sensory Awareness, there has been from the beginning an emphasis on practices which have a calming effect – spending much time in silence, lying down and letting ourselves be supported by the floor, using the touch of our hands to help calm the head and the mind, and so forth. Charlotte’s teacher, somatics pioneer Elsa Gindler understood that quiet is a prerequisite for discovery and change. Healthy activity has its basis in a calm nervous system, from which we can respond skillfully to the often disquieting happenings around us.

When we look at the time and place in which Sensory Awareness has its roots, we will find that it was in a chaotic Germany in and between two horrific wars. The time between these wars was also a time of great creativity and renewal. In the nineteen teens and twenties a number of ‘Gymnastik’1 schools emerged in Germany, which were devoted to overcome the rigid forms of physical education and find a more natural way of caring for ones health. One of the pioneers of this movement was Elsa Gindler. This is not the place to discuss how Gindler developed her way of working but I find it intriguing to reflect on the fact that what much later came to be known as Sensory Awareness developed in a time marked by extreme difficulty, poverty, hunger, chaos – and danger.

In a draft for a talk Gindler gave at a meeting of the “Deutscher Gymnastik Bund” (German ‘Gymnastik’ Association) in Munich, in February of 1931 she wrote: “It is high time to bring an end to the “belligerent actions” (die “feindlichen Handlungen”) in the field of physical education. Together, we should focus on ending practices which have really nothing to do with physical education. It is time to stop evaluating running only by measuring time or the distance run. We have to also take into account the condition in which the runner crosses the finishing line.”2

I don’t want to suggest that I understand the complexity of that time or how Gindler’s approach emerged from it. Still, I look at that time and place and I wonder how it all came together. Munich, where Charlotte Selver studied Bode Gymnastik in the early twenties, was a breeding ground of National Socialism and by the time Gindler wrote these lines, it had already spread throughout Germany. Some of Gindler’s peers collaborated with the Nazis—as did Charlotte’s early teacher Rudolf Bode and her Bode Gymnastik colleague Hinrich Medau.

But others did not collaborate. When the “Deutsche Gymnastik Bund” was forcefully dissolved in 1933 and its members integrated into the “Reichsverband Deutscher Turn-, Sport-, und Gymnastiklehrer im NS-Lehrerbund” (The national socialist association of physical education, sports, and ‘Gymnastik’ teachers), there was a meeting to mark this occasion in Berlin. At the end of the gathering the “Horst-Wessel Lied” was sung – the anthem of the Nazis. The Gymnastik teachers of Berlin stayed seated, none of them raised their arms to the “Hitler Gruss” and they refused to join the association. Gindler retreated from public life but continued to work quietly.3 She helped many people who were persecuted and put her life on the line for them.

Are these dramatic circumstances, in which Sensory Awareness has its roots, still reflected in the work today? I would like to propose that they are. We may be tempted to think that our practice, which deals with the exploration of “our nature” and natural phenomena such as movement, breathing and the natural functioning of our senses, is somehow free of conditioning. But quite obviously this isn’t so at all. Not only are we as individuals conditioned, but science itself—Gindler and Jacoby understood their work to be scientific in the sense that it was based on inquiry, personal research, rather than a belief system—is shaped by the time and place out of which it emerges.

Sensory Awareness in many ways still has the flavor of a response to a particular time and place.4 What is still relevant for us today that was crucial in the early 20th century in Germany?

There are similarities for sure. We are in a time of great divisiveness in a country governed by people who openly flirt with totalitarianism [2025 edit]. But there are also many differences and I wonder if some of the conditioning with which this work is being offered, some of the basic assumptions about who we are and how we “naturally” function, are no longer accurate and need to be revised.

When we were preparing for this conference [in 2004], I received an email from a fellow Sensory Awareness leader. In it, she described her experience of a nine-month study group with Charlotte Selver in the 1970s at San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm: “Charlotte was quite clear that she wanted her students to meld with the Zen practice as much as possible. She cautioned us not to “interfere” with the Zen students’ practice. She urged us not greet them or engage in conversation, to make the least noise possible (”Is it necessary to clink your fork on your plate while eating?” she’d ask.). We were asked to help out at Green Gulch (“don’t be a burden to the community”), and to pretty much mind our own business. She also told us specifically that any emotions that might emerge with the Work were to be “left alone.” A show of comfort or empathy was not appropriate to the Work. As a result, our group became one of determinedly separate individuals who had little idea who their partners/housemates/classmates were in the entire world outside our classroom.”

At first glance, this makes some sense. As a long-time student of Buddhism I understand that minimizing social interactions simplifies life and supports the practice. But then it occurred to me that Charlotte’s most intense time of studying with Gindler, the years between 1933 and 1938, were a time of great danger. Charlotte’s world became smaller and smaller. Having been fired by the university of Leipzig and stripped of her citizenship in 1935, she couldn’t work anymore. She moved to Berlin and lived with her estranged ex-husband Heinrich Selver at the Jewish school where he was the principal. To study with Gindler, she had to drive her car through the city to Gindler’s studio, fearing for her life as she was passing through Nazi road blocks. Once in the classroom, the students worked together but they did not socialize. They tried to know as little about one another as possible as to not endanger each other in case they were questioned by the authorities. Could it be that this war-time setting became deeply ingrained in Charlotte and somehow carried over into the way she was teaching?

We might conclude that there are further ramifications resulting from this need to be invisible. It could well be that one reason Sensory Awareness is so little known despite its influence on many somatic practices we are familiar with today, is because for many years its proponents, namely Gindler and Jacoby, had to be careful not to draw the attention of authorities? Both Gindler in Berlin and Jacoby, who lived under challenging circumstances in Switzerland since 1933, had to keep a lid on their teaching careers and could only work privately with a small circle of students. This tendency to work in secrecy seems to have carried over into the present and may have also furthered a kind of self-centeredness and even isolation, coupled with a sense of exclusiveness.

To be visible as a practice alongside other somatic practices, to be successful and make a living as a teacher, is still frowned upon by some. Although many professionals in related approaches know about the importance of Gindler and Selver, few in the general public have ever heard of Sensory Awareness. Visibility is seen to be synonymous with “watering down” the purity of “the work.” Charlotte, who thankfully was quite successful, paid a high price for her achievements: In the fifties, when her practice really took off, some of her students urged her to start a foundation. These first attempts to create an organization much like the Sensory Awareness Foundation today, which would publish writings, audio tapes and other materials, possibly even have a center, offer training programs and generally promote the work, were completely discredited by Charlotte’s teachers. Reasons given to Charlotte were that Gindler had long determined that training people was not the way to go, and that as long as Jacoby had not published anything, how could anybody even dare thinking about publications. And, more generally, they argued that the development of the human potential could never be achieved by appealing to the masses.

The rebuff and subsequent falling out with Gindler and Jacoby was very traumatic for Charlotte. She remained conflicted about success and the validity of her efforts for the rest of her life, especially when it came to passing on the work to future teachers. Is this past still haunting us today? I very much think so. While I can understand Gindler’s concerns to a degree, I do think that it is time to revisit some of these assumptions.

If, indeed, being on ones own and not collaborating with the world at large or with representatives of related practices is part of the belief system of Sensory Awareness, how can it have an impact in a time that is already marked by tendencies of fragmentation and self-centeredness?

2025 thoughts on training programs for Sensory Awareness teachers/leaders:

To offer a clearly formatted, time limited training for Sensory Awareness leaders is frowned upon to this day (as ist the use of the word “teacher” which would be more easily understood, as in Yoga teacher. Charlotte felt that we are guides in a process, not teachers of a method, hence the term leader. But it is a bit confusing … and disastrous if translated into German). For many decades, the only way to become a Sensory Awareness leader was by receiving transmission, for lack of a better word, from Charlotte Selver, which would often happen after years, if not decades, of study—if at all. It was completely up to Charlotte. To want to become a Sensory Awareness leader was considered to be sign of ambition that would get in the way of maturing to “embody the work.” After her death, those of us who were authorized by Charlotte basically agreed to continue this practice of “transmission.” Gindler, Jacoby, and most of their students have handled succession similarly. One result of the lack of a clear format is that there are only few people left to carry on these practices and Sensory Awareness might well soon just be a footnote in the history of somatic practices. With no clear prospect to ever be authorized, many see no path forward. This is why some of us decided to train people in a more formal format anyway, hoping to pass Sensory Awareness on to a new, thriving generation of practitioners.

Could Sensory Awareness help us explore our interdependence as well as our nature as individual organisms? Our individual freedom is very dear to us. As individuals and as nations, we have a tendency to believe that we have to be the first, the fastest, the strongest, if we are to survive. But this is not how nature works. Natural processes are very much based on interdependence and mutual support. In a way, this knowledge has always been a central part of both Gindler’s and Jacoby’s work, as its emphasis on gravity and the support offered by the earth shows so profoundly.

It may now be time to put an end to the “belligerent actions” against the greater organism of our communities and the world community. It may be time to stop measuring success only by the achievements of an individual, an individual practice, or a single nation. Maybe we need to take into account in which condition we find ourselves and the world, as we pursue our interests.

It seems hard for us to really get that our well-being depends on the well-being of our neighbors and the world in which we live. It may be time to examine such “isolationist” tendencies and explore new ways of working together.

What does the world need today? What does the practice of Sensory Awareness have to offer to the world? When I was working on the introduction to the conference a colleague wrote me: “I guess I am trying to find links from our offerings in this peace workshop to people who are engaged with social change. [....] Also, it’s hard to use the word “Peace” in times like these. All the time, I think of the Iraqis and the American soldiers, and I wonder why we don’t jump up and put out the fires, somehow, before we continue to meet in meditation groups and in these peace conferences…”

I believe that both are needed. Political action without an understanding of our personal, cultural, and biological conditioning will not effectively address the roots of destructive tendencies in us and in the world. That is where our practice can be of immense benefit. I believe that we can learn much about being in the world as we explore our nature – as individuals and as community – through Sensory Awareness. All the while, we also have to act from our place of limited understanding and do the best we can to help alleviate suffering in the world.

We live in a world filled with conflict. We have conflicts within ourselves and in relation to others. How can we find peace? Sensory Awareness is a practice of inquiry. It can bring us to our senses, so that we can see, and hear, and taste, and gain a sound understanding of what is going on. From that place we can act – not by following instructions or ideologies but by learning to recognize “what is needed”, as Charlotte Selver often put it.

Dear Reader,

Here’s a little Thanksgiving treat from one of those surprise friendships of which there were many in Charlotte Selver’s life. I hope you enjoy it. Maybe you even treat yourself to Eric Carle’s delightful Pancakes book. It so lovingly shows the intricacies of getting food on our tables.

With much gratitude,

Stefan

“There is so much about Charlotte that is not so easy to specify,” Eric Carle (1929 - 2021) wrote to me 2008. “She is an unforgettable woman, she will always remain both a spiritual and down to earth presence in my life. I know she is adored and respected by many because of her work. In our relationship that part was of no direct importance, at least it was not anything that we discussed. The specialness of our relationship is that I showed so little interest in her work. Still, looking back, we were in many ways of the same cloth. There was no need to discuss certain things, it was simply understood.”

I never met Eric Carle in person but I remember well dialing his phone number occasionally to connect him with Charlotte, or opening a package he sent to her with his latest book, usually signed with a delightful drawing.

Charlotte’s old friend Söre Popitz – a Bauhaus trained graphic artist who designed promotional materials for Charlotte in Leipzig in the early 1930s – connected the two when Eric moved to New York in 1952, long before he became the author of such beloved children’s books as The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Born to German parents in Syracuse, New York, in 1929, the family moved back to Germany in the mid 1930s. After the war, Eric studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. “On my first job after graduation I became a Hausgrafiker [graphic designer] of the Beyer Verlag, a fashion and crafts publisher in Wiesbaden. There I met Söre who worked on the layout of the magazine. She was a prickly type, thin and intense, and we started out having a very disagreeable argument. Nevertheless we became very friendly despite our age difference.”

Charlotte showed Eric around in New York City and they quickly became life-long friends. “She offered me her apartment on 57th Street where I stayed for about a month while she went to Mexico. It was a wonderful place, facing an inner court yard with a splashing fountain. This was very convenient because I worked for The New York Times on 43rd Street and every morning walked down Broadway to my job. Her father, Herr Wittgenstein, lived in the same building. He was a kind of Grandpa Moses. A wonderful, entertaining man. Even though he had been kicked out of Germany, he remained a Prussian through and through. ‘We Germans have to show the Americans how to do things,’ he would tell me, for instance.”

“One time, Charlotte and her father took me for an elegant dinner to the Russian Tearoom, next door to Carnegie Hall. Of course I was very impressed. Here I was, a young, fairly unworldly man from post war Germany that was still suffering from the aftermath of a horrific war. Now elegance, fancy waiters, delicious food, incredible deserts – it was like heaven. I was very impressed by the tip she left.”

“At the end of 1952 I was drafted into the US Army and after basic training sent back to Germany.”

Eric and Charlotte wrote each other frequently while he was stationed there. In one of the letters he describes himself as a “particularly bad soldier, useful only to paint signs.” In a letter from November. 11, 1952, shortly after he joined the army, he wrote:

“I feel physically fit and enjoy the training. But when I think about what we are training for, I feel unhappy and sad.

The bayonet training, for example, goes like this:

Instructor: What’s your name?
250 unmenschliche Stimmen [inhuman voices]: Aaaaaa …
Instructor: What are you here for?
We: to kill!
He: What are you?
We: Killers!

It’s just awful …”

He was eventually assigned to a Special Service division of the U.S. Army in Stuttgart, where he designed posters for the various cultural events that were put on for the troops.

“I got married in Germany while stationed there. When my young bride arrived in New York, Charlotte drove her down to Pennsylvania on a short vacation to show her a bit of the US. When we got divorced 10 years and two children later, Charlotte and Charles were very kind and they tried to make us understand what was going on, but we were young and psychologically not astute. Charlotte talked about her own heartbreaking divorce from Heinrich Selver whom she seemed to have loved very much. She tried to make me understand and accept what seemed to me the unacceptable.

“When I got married again, after 10 years of bachelorhood, it turned out that my new wife and her brother had been students of Charlotte .... small world.”

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 our way home to Santa Fe from an extended stay with Charlotte Selver together with my then fiancé, Sarah, 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. 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 us to stay at her home in Joshua Tree.

It was largely thanks to Alan Watts and Henry Denison that Charlotte came to work in California. Charlotte gave her first workshop in Southern California 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.

Telegram from Henry Denison to Alan Watts in advance to Charlotte and Charles’s first visit in 1961.

Charlotte spoke always fondly of Henry and never failed to mention how handsome he was: “He looked like a Spanish grandee,” she would say. I’m not really sure what a Spanish grandee 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. While Ruth was preparing lunch for us we had a lovely visit with him in which he recalled Charlotte with much fondness.

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

Readers with a paid subscription can listen to the full, unedited interview with Ruth at the bottom of this post. Thank you for your support!

“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. Henry brought us to his porch with the beautiful view deep down to a lake [Hollywood Reservoir]. We waited and sat there while he was preparing lunch for us. And then he came with a beautiful, thin wooden bowl with fresh salad. He invited me to help myself when a bird began to sing in the tree under which we were sitting. I stopped taking 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, and in came two little dogs jumping around Henry 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 was a noisy lady when I came in into this peaceful, quiet atmosphere of highest delicacy and sensitivity with the barking 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.”

Ruth Denison at the Sensory Awareness Conference at Mt. Madonna Center in Watsonville, California, 2006. As you can see, Ruth had a great sense of humor as well. Here riding a participant’s electric wheelchair. The photo at the top is from the same conference.
(Photos by Stefan Laeng)

This was in July 1961. 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.1

“I had met Henry only recently, and 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 offer 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. 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 Charlotte’s work was really a great breakthrough for many. 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 merely as a 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,” Ruth continued. “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.

Henry and Ruth Denison, early 1960s. Charlotte Selver may have taken this photo.

But when you come into Vipassana it’s a different story. That can hold up in Sensory Awareness – 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 payed attention to. In Sensory Awareness the goal is to come to a greater harmony and to better feelings and to more wholeness.

I came 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”, I interjected.

“Yes. Well, one works actually only with the first and the other three one awakens naturally to. Because feeling pleasant and unpleasant, states of mind, and contents of the mind depend on our paying attention to bodily 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 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 dukkha2 you do learn to know, how much pain is involved in it, 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 chuckled.

“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 it 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 structure 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 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.

Henry and Ruth Denison, photographer unknown. Attached to a 1968 letter Ruth sent after the two had attended a Zen sesshin with Yasutani Roshi in Honolulu.

So I would let my students stand – I hear myself sometimes saying, like Charlotte did: ‘Please come to standing.’ Not to stand up 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 some Vipassana students who came from Goenka [the best-known disciple of U Ba Khin] thought I was playing around. One got up, ran to the door, opened it and screamed into the silence of the room of our explorations: “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 more ground work for sitting still, practice in a different way, through movement. In my seminars I would also let them lie down on the floor and do things Charlotte did, like working with touch, working with partners. Or I would let them hold a stone 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, watching their nervousness, their fidgeting, 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 with their feet, with their standing and with the wholeness of their being. It’s a practice in not being distracted and so much over there in the experience of the other, but rather staying in awareness of the fullness of your own being and then to take in the other person.

Or how to pick a flower, or how to smell the ground. I took them into the mountains, let them take in 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, 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 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.

1. For more about Ruth’s life read Sandy Boucher’s biography Dancing in the Dharma, or watch by Aleksandra Kumorek’s documentary, Ruth Denison – The Silent Dance of Life.

2. Dukkha: unsatisfactoriness, to use just one awkward possible translation of a complex Pali term.

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