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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions Instead of Answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zen & Sensory Awareness Retreat, Hesseln, Germany, 2017

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

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

The Door of Sensory Awareness

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

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

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

The Yurt Is Our Zendo

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

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

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

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

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

No Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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