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

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

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

Charlotte was wonderfully humble about being a student of Elsa Gindler, but I think what gets lost is her uniqueness. The uniqueness of Charlotte was not sensory awareness but her ability to question close to experience. I thought her questions were just amazing. And the reason that seems significant to me is that those questions open the work up to larger applications.

A Conversation with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

by Stefan Laeng

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

A conversation with Carol Buck

From a June 14, 2008 interview by Stefan Laeng for the Charlotte Selver Oral History and Book Project.

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

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

Stefan: But before you knew Charlotte . . .

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

Stefan: How did you discover that?

Carol: Well, I had to! I had to.

Stefan: That’s marvelous.

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

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

“What on deeper levels we all long for … is a feeling of contact or 'continuity' with our environment.”
Charlotte Read

“Central to Elsa Gindler’s work was to become quiet,” Charlotte explains at her summer workshop in St. Ulrich in the Black Forest in 1992. “As long as we are preoccupied with ideas and expectations we cannot be there for what is happening, for what could be happening. Alfred Korzybski’s central question, stemming from his personal experiences of World War One, was, ‘why must there be wars?’ After years of research, which led him to the study of the origins of language, he concluded, ‘Because people don’t listen to each other.’”

Welcome to my new web site. It is still under construction but I decided to go live now, in this time of constant change and uncertainty, because it gives me more freedom to make changes quickly. So, please forgive me if some things are missing here or not working properly. This page in particular still needs to be populated. I’ll add more and more in the weeks to come.

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

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

A conversation with Sophia Rosoff

New York City, June 15, 2008

At age 87, Sophia is still active and sought after as a piano teacher. She took the first workshop with Charlotte in 1948, which makes her the earliest student I have been able to interview to date. Here she talks about how she met Charlotte and what working with her meant for her piano playing and teaching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A conversation with the pioneering Buddhist Teacher Ruth Denison

by Stefan Laeng

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

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

A Conversation with Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen

Stefan Laeng: Tell me a bit about your work.

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

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

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

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

April 21, 2010
What Should We Be Tasting Now?
Edward Espe Brown in an interview with Stefan Laeng-Gilliatt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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