Sensory Awareness

Charlotte Selver developed Sensory Awareness based on the work of Elsa Gindler. It is not about acquiring skills but is about developing freedom to explore sensitively and learn from exploration. This somatic practice is interested in the total functioning person and the development of a person’s responsiveness toward life.

Sensory Awareness is about sensing what is happening in whatever you happen to be doing. You recover your capacity to sense for yourself through the discipline of controlling your rampant mind.

There are no structured movements, guided images, or breathing exercises. The teacher outlines experiments in which you can become aware of sensations.

This somatic practice is an inquiry into experience. You let yourself be with what you are doing. For example, standing. What sensations do you feel when you stand? How can you stand without effort? You can study to sense spontaneous readjustments of weight and balance.

Through this exploration you can learn how you restrict and hinder yourself. You do not attempt to change but let change occur naturally by letting your body assert its needs. You come to full presence, aiming equally at inner openness for your own life processes and at sensitive contact with the environment.

You can find a sense of what it is like to be on the way, to approach and arrive, not just to reach a goal. It requires patience, an interest in exploration, and a willingness not to make an exercise or let thinking crowd out sensing.

For More Information

Sensory Awareness: Rediscovery of Experiencing Through the Workshops of Charlotte Selver by Charles V. W. Brooks.

Body, Spirit, and Democracy by Don Hanlon Johnson.

Discovering the Body's Wisdom by Mirka Knaster.

"Interview with Charlotte Selver" by John Schick in Bone, Breath, and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, edited by Don Hanlon Johnson.

Waking Up: The Work of Charlotte Selver by William C. Littlewood.

The Sensory Awareness Foundation