Charles V.M. Brooks - Sensory Awareness - Rediscovery of Experiencing Through The Workshops of Charlotte Selver (1986)

SENSORY
AWARENESS
THE REDISCOVERY
OF EXPERIENCING
THROUGH
WORKSHOPS
* WITH «
CHARLOTTE
SELVER
BY CHARLES V.W. BROOKS

SENSORY AWARENESS
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FELIX MORROW/Publisher/Great N »V York
Copyright © 1986, 1974 by Charles V.W. Brooks
Published by Felix Morrow

13 Welwyn Road
Great Neck, NY 11021
Originally published by Viking Press, New York
Distributed by The Talman Company
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 86-90455
ISBN 0-9615659-2-6
Cover, frontispiece photos ©

Manufactured in the United States of America
All photographs in this book, except those listed below, are by the author.
PAGE xii: Alissa Goldring. pages 4, 15, and 24: Photo Mariann Reismann,
from Dr. Emmi Pikler, Que suit faire votre bebe, Les Editeurs Frangais
Reunis, 1951. page 27: Ansel Adams page 48: Photo Mariann
Reismann, from Dr. Emmi Pikler, Que suit faire votre bebe, Les Editeurs
Frangais Reunis, 1951. pages 53 and 55: J. R. Harris, Egiiptiau Art,
London Spring Books, 1966. page 60: British Museum. London.
:
PAGE 63: Fotocelere, Turin, Italy, page 70: Gregor Krause. Bali: Volk,
Land, Tanze, Munich Gregor Miiller Verlag, 1926.
: page 71 Vila, Deux :
Petits Ours, Guilde du Livre, Lausanne, 1954. Raphe Guilhmiettc Pictures.

PAGES 77, 78 (left) Photo Mariann Reismann, from Dr. Emmi Pikler.
:
Que sait faire votre bebe, Les F.diteurs Franâis Reunis. 1951. pages
80,81: F. Everling. page 85 (bottom ): J. E. Goldthwaite et aL, Bodi/
Mechanics in the Study and Treatment of Disease, Lippincott, 1934.
page 88: F. Everling. page 89 (top): Heka Davis, page 92: Photograph
by Frances Flaherty, courtesy Flaherty Study Center, page 102 (bottom,
right): Paul B. Herbert, page 105: Vila, Lausanne. 1954 Rapho
Guillumette Pictures, page 135: Alissa Goldring. page 157: Paul B
Herbert, pages 163. 164 Teri Modlin. page 172 (top). Photo Mariann
:
Reismann, from Dr. F^mmi Pikler, Que sait faire lotre bebe. Les Editeurs
FrauQais Reunis, 1951. page 177: M. A. Roche, page 204: B.
Moosbrugger. Rictberg Museum, Zurich, page 215: 'Hollyhock." by
Arthur Dove. page 230: Sophie Ludvvig.
:: : : : :: : : :
I have no parents
I make the heavens and earth my parents.
I have no home
I make awareness my home.
I have no hfe or death
I make the tides of breathing my life and death.
I have no divine power:
I make honesty my divine power.
I have no means:
I make understanding my means.
I have no magic secrets:
I make character my magic secret.
I have no body
I make endurance my body.
I have no eyes
I make the flash of hghtning my eyes.
I have no ears
I make sensibihty my ears.
I have no hmbs:
I make promptness my hmbs.
I have no strategy
I make "unshadowed by thought" my strategy.
I have no designs:
I make "seizing opportunity by the forelock" my design.
I have no miracles:
I make right-action my miracles.
I have no principles
I make adaptability to all circumstances my principles.
I have no tactics:
I make emptiness and fullness my tactics.
I have no talents:
I make ready wit my talent.
I have no friends
I make my mind my friend.
I have no enemy:
I make carelessness my enemy.
I have no armor:
I make benevolence and righteousness my armor.
I have no castle:
I make immovable-mind my castle.
Ihave no sword
I make absence of self my sword.
— Anonymous samurai, 14th century
1
Contents
PRKFACK TO THK TH1KI3 KOITION
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Introduction / 1
1 BEING IN THE WORLD 3

2 COMING TO OUR SENSES 8
3 NATURE AND "SECOND NATURE" 14
4 THE FINGER POINTING TO THE MOON 18
The Four Dignities of Man / 2
5 THE SEARCH FOR STANDING 23

6 STANDING AS RELATING 30
7 A FEW DIFFICULTIES 33
8 WHO IS STANDING? 36
9 STANDING, FROM FOOT TO HEAD 41
10 WALKING: LOCOMOTION AND BEING 47
11 HARA 51
12 FINDING OUR STATURE 54

13 LYING AS AN ACTIVITY 62
14 RESTING AS RELATING 67
15 SITTING 76
Contents
Toward a More Sensitive Relating / 91
16 SLAPPING AS A STIMULANT 94
17 SIMPLE CONTACT 100
18 ACTIVE CONTACT 111
19 WORKING WITH OBJECTS 117
20 WORKING WITH GRAVITY 127
21 DOWN AND UP 132
22 WORKING OUT OF DOORS 137
23 WORKING OUT OF DOORS, CONTINUED 143
24 THE WORD AND THE VOICE 148
25 TASTING 153
26 THE CONNOISSEUR 159

27 YAWNING AND STRETCHING 166
28 REACHING AND SERVING 171
29 GIVING AND RECEIVING 176
30 GIVING AND RECEIVING, CONTINUED 183

31 GIVING AND RECEIVING THE HEAD 188
32 PLAYING WITH BALLS 194
33 SENSING ONE'S OWN HEAD 201
34 TOWARD EXPANDED CONSCIOUSNESS 206
35 SENSORY AWARENESS IN COMMUNICATION 213
Epilogue / 223
Appendices / 227
A ELSA GINDLER ARBEIT AM MENSCHEN

: 229
B NOTES ON ZEN 234
C REPORTS 240
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
To those already familiar with this book un-

der the subtitle "The Rediscovery of Experiencing" it may give the
sense of filling now, in the hands of a
a long-neglected need to see it
third American publisher, qualified as "through the Workshops of

Charlotte Selver."
It was Charlotte who decided on the expression "Sensory Awareness"
about the year 1950. In the more than thirty-five years since, this ex-
pression has spread throughout the growth centers of the United
States, although often not bearing Charlotte's name with it and still less
often conveying the deep sense of her intentions. Now FeUx Morrow,
who suggested the change, has not only brought Sensory Awareness
and Charlotte Selver together in the one sentence where they belong,
but has also shifted the emphasis from a process to a person. In a case
like this, where the process is particularly difficult of definition, and
where the original title must have seemed enigmatic to many people,
the shift to the person whose face now appears on the cover brings to
the author, at least, a reassuring sense of coming back to earth.
It is a face well-known in the Human Potential Movement, belonging
to a person widely loved for her charisma and for her genius in both
verbal and nonverbal communication. Through Erich Fromm, Fritz
Perls and Alan Watts —all so different from each other but all at one
—
time or another her devoted students Charlotte's influence has per-
meated Humanistic Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, a host of other disci-
plines, and the widespread movement in America towards Zen
Buddhism; and in these areas her name has become familiar too. It was
she who in 1963 introduced the experiential workshop to Esalen Insti-
tute— an entirely new development, I believe, in psychology and philos-
—
ophy at the invitation of its founders, Michael Murphy and Richard
Price, who had met her through Alan Watts in a weekend seminar also
attended by Richard Baker, the former roshi of San Francisco Zen Cen-
ter. To all these people, despite her repeated disclaimers that this was
not her work, Sensory Awareness meant simply Charlotte Selver.

Preface to the Third Edition
Sensory Awareness can be called a form of education (or better of

If
re-education), it is certainly no accumulation of techniques or formulas
to be taught by one person to others. Indeed, Charlotte eschews the

word teaching altogether. It is education transmitted only by direct con-
tact, like cold or warmth, even though it may take years of patient work,
gradually recognizing and shedding one's conditioning, for this trans-

mission to occur. Actually, it is communication of a special wisdom, of a
more real and functional way of being— munely, realization of the ca-
pacity to experience fresh for oneself. No amount of training, as such,
can bring this about, any more than training could enable a mother to
communicate the glory of aliveness to her child. I believe it for this
reason that the several Zen masters whose paths have crossed with
Charlotte's have immediately recognized her kinship to them. A highly
personal, utterly untechnical phenomenon.
Although I found "The Rediscovery of Experiencing" a straightfor-
ward title, I believe it may have asked of the browser in a bookstore,
unprepared by a review in any major newspaper, a moment of quiet
thought which he was often* not ready to give. To rediscover (presum-
ably forgotten) experience is not hard to imagine, but to rediscover the
natural process of experiencing is something that may never ha\e
entered a person's mind — something perhaps too improbable to be
considered. "Sensory Awareness" itself is too often translated uncon-
sciously into Extrasensory Awareness, leading inevitably into flights in
metaphysics in the very opposite direction from Charlotte's approach.
Instead of offering the reader still another philosophy (though he may
of course find one if he insists), the new title invites him to a literal
description of activities.
But why "through the workshops"? Why not rather through the uork
of Charlotte Selver? Very simply, because Charlotte would find such a
title inaccurate.
In her mind, as a "work"it is the work of Elsa Gindler, who was born
in Berhn and died there a quarter century ago, the fruit ol Gindler's
lifelong research into the nature of man. And yet one could not call this
book "The Work of Elsa Gindler," for Gindler had other students who
have carried on her work in ways quite different from Charlotte's wav.
What is certain is that Charlotte has given and does give workshops, in
a way impossible to formulate and not easy to name; and it is through
these workshops that my own mind has been reoriented to the evervdav
process of experiencing. This has changed my life, and this is the true
subject of this book,
In the thirteen years that have elapsed since the following Author's
Note was written, there have been subtle changes in the .American mi-
lieu. As a nation, we have gone from Lyndon Johnson's X'letnam to
Ronald Reagan's Central America. But quantitatively the destruction
and suffering caused by our national preference for tantasv o\er sense
is less. More people have the heart to face the realities, and the opposi-
Preface to the Third Edition
The people who come to Charlotte's workshops are also

tion is broader.
emotionallysomewhat opener, somewhat readier to remove their shoes
when asked to and not only their hats. "Creeping Buddhism" and "sec-
ular humanism" are not so frightening to so many people. Even the
words gentle and permissive are beginning to find acceptance. Inciden-
tally, these statements may apprise the reader that our workshops are
not directed to the enlightened few, but to everyone. When the mind
becomes quieter and the deep anxieties ease, we all become more
human.
Charlotte's work also has grown in the twenty-eight years since I first
studied with her, and even in the years since this book first appeared. It
has lost none of its gaiety and lightheartedness, but it is deeper and
simpler now. The impbcit revolutionary attitudes are perhaps clearer.
Ever more attention is devoted to breathing and to gravity: our two
basic relationships with the earth's atmosphere and with the earth it-
possible, it seems infused with even more joie de vivre.
self. If
The work has spread, too, in these thirteen years. Ever since 1&57,
when Erich Fromm invited Charlotte to speak at the conference on Zen
Buddhism and Psychoanalysis at which he and D.T Suzuki presided in
Cuernavaca, Mexico, her connections with Mexico have been main-
tained and growing. But though Sensory Awareness was translated into
Spanish in 1979, soon after the translations into German and Dutch, it
was only last year that it finally appeared in print. We are told that in
spite of the economic crisis in Mexico, people are now becoming ready
for it. And neck and neck with the present EngUsh edition, a Japanese
version is appearing this fall in a land, once saturated with Zen, which
since the war has outdone America in its dedication to commercial sub-
stitutes for Living.We are told that times are changing there, too. Fi-
nally, in Germany, where the work originated, and where it survived
half-underground through all the Hider years, there is a sort of renais-
sance occurring. The German version of the book has had greater suc-
cess than the American; and Charlotte for four years now has worked
every summer with large groups in Europe in her native language.
Perhaps the time is indeed ripe for a new edition here. If so, I am glad
it will be appearing in a new costume. Felix Morrow's choice of the
cover photograph, replacing the rocks and sunsets of the earlier edi-
tions with a figure whose humanity has already enriched the lives of so
many people, combines with the addition to the subtitle to bring the
matter it announces into a better balanced perspective. I rejoice in the
change and hope that others will likewise.
Charles Brooks
Muir Beach, California
June, 1986
AUTHOR'S NOTE
In some three years of intermittent

work, I have finally written a book that attempts to convey the
nonverbal substance of the exceedingly subtle and deep work
to which my wife, Charlotte Selver, has devoted her life. I
have revised it many times, aided by suggestions she has made.
In the process of these revisions, we have found that the expe-
rience of sensory awareness is so individual that any attempt
to bring it into words must necessarily reveal the one who
makes the attempt in his own unique character and approach
to living. There are therefore many instances in which I have
not followed Charlotte's advice but have made bold to assert my
own views and my experience, with all the intellectual and
literary background which I carry with me —
a background with
which I must constantly struggle in such an undertaking.
Nevertheless, I feel there is much here that will be recog-
nized as real anddown to earth. The great bulk of this comes
from Charlotte. With negligible exceptions, the experiments
described are her experiments, the questions her questions. If
here and there have had the good fortune to evoke some of
I
the living context in which these experiments and questions

come alive, it is through the reliving of her classes, which have
been the major force in my life for the last fifteen years.
This is part autobiography, part philosophy, part guidebook
for the student of sensory awareness, and part a fair equivalent
in words of actual experience. Taken altogether, it is my sense
of this work, as fully and clearly as I can state it now.
I never knew the teacher whom Charlotte revered and to
whom she feels she owes her entire work. I know only Charlotte,
xii Author's Note
and to me this work is hers. Perhaps someday it will be the

—
work of many people it is already that of an increasing num-
ber —
for it is a work of love and of reahty.
I am much indebted to a number of friends for helpful sug-
San Francisco Zen Center;
gestions: Richard Baker-roshi, of the
Professor Allen WalkerRead and Charlotte Read; Dr. Bernard
Weitzman; Connie Siegel; Dr. Edward Deci; Dr. Jorge Derbez;
my editor, Stuart Miller. I am very giateful to the late Alan
Watts for his encouragement.
Above all, I must thank Bill Littlewood for tempering the
alloy from which this instrument was forged. Without the love,
the clarity, and the endurance that guided his often Spartan
hand, it would have rung far less true than it docs now.
Motilicqan. Mai})c. 1973

Introduction
BEING IN THE WORLD
A heavy rains last week, we planted

fter
seeds In our garden. They are sprout-
ing already. I know from past exploration how deep and
intimately the little roots are pushing their way, with the amaz-
ing vigor of infancy, down through the dense particles of soil;
and as I look I can almost see the stems and leaflets unfolding
in the same air that I feel bathing me inside and out, under the
same sun that beats on my skin. It sets me to considering the
subject of this book.
Does not all individual life, as with these seeds, begin in
moisture — either in the sea or, as here, in the damp earth, or
on the yolk of an egg, or in the fluids of the womb? In the
womb, when the united cells multiply to the point where some-
thing that one could call consciousness infuses them, the whole
development of the new organism continues to take place in
that total, invisible immediacy of the environment which is the
nature of fluid, which leaves no crack unentered, no surface
unembraced.
Until birth we had no experience of distance: of the possi-
bility of falhng, of the sound of something not adjacent to us,
of warmth either coming to us or going from us. No wonder
that on entering the world outside we clutched at the breast,
with its soft tissues like our own, and breathed the strange air
more easily when held and enveloped in mother's arms.
In this new world, it was for the first time possible indeed, —
necessary — to mother might be here or absent.
be alone:
Gradually, new-found doors began opening. Sounds came and
went, which httle by little could be related to phenomena out-
side ourselves; smells hkewise; what we touched, and what
4 Sensory Awareness
touched us, was always changing. Finally the growing kaleido-

scope before our eyes began separating into enduring, recog-
nizable forms, nearer or farther, with each of which we could
have a different connection.
Though the nerve ends in our skin were in immediate con-
tact only with the air, or with the delicious water of our bath,
or here and there with clothing, crib, and playthings, or now
and then with mother, still we were not out of touch with the
world in the distance. We could hear mother's voice from afar
and see her when we could not touch her, and we smiled in
recognition and pleasure. Indeed, we had a voice too, which
could go out to others and arouse perceptible reactions in them;
and we had hands and feet with which we could reach out to
grasp or kick objects in space. As our enlarging consciousness
embraced a larger and more differentiated world, both near
and far, in the embrace itself was contact, though of varying
kinds. The shape or color which we could not reach was yet in
our eye, the voice was in our ear, the smell in our nostrils.
Gradually, new-found doors began opening.

^
5 Being in the World
And now came a new contact and immediacy as we gained

experience and began storing the past to give larger meaning
to the present. When we saw and smelled mother and heard
her voice, memory was there, and our stomach began to con-
hunger for her milk and our skin to yearn for her touch.
tract in
And the future entered. When we were already hungry, as
mother appeared, the comfort which had not yet reached us
brought our smile of anticipation, as a kitten purrs before the
milk is poured.
Time and space, which had no existence in the womb, appear
gradually to the growing child and to the adult as being every-
where and part of everything, so as to define all objects of
perception. Yet they bring with them no necessity of separate-
ness, except in the particular. This or that phenomenon is now
with us and now apart from us, but the stream of phenomena
still envelops us as did the fluids of the womb. There is no
natural necessity that keeps us from hving our lives as imme-

diately and fully in touch with our environment as any fish in
water, or any deer in the woods, or any plant in our garden.
But all the while that we were developing our connection
with the world, something else was forming in us quite with-
out parallel in any other living creatures. What had been a few
cells, then a few thousand, then a few million, were proliferat-
ing by the bilhons in our brain to receive the messages, relate

and organize them, regulate reactions to them; and the head
which housed these cells was so heavy and unwieldy that,
for us alone among creatures, its movement and rest were a
primary concern throughout our infancy.
It is our fate that it must be a primary concern to us through-
out our lives. For in the superlatively developed cortex of our

brains lies another seed^ —
that of most of our human doing,
1. Cf. A. T. W. Simeons, Man's Presumptuous Brain (New York: Dut-

ton, 1961). Also L. L. Whyte, The Next Development in Man (New
York: Holt, 1948).
2. Since writing these lines, I have read Carlos Castaneda's A Sep-
arate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1971 and 1972) no fewer than five times each. His talk of doing and
not-doing does not refer to purposeful activities, as does my reference
here, but to an entirely unconscious interpretation of perceptions in
conventional terms. These processes seem to me, however, to be so
—
6 Sensory Awareness
and of our undoing. Our unique human faculty of developing

animal vocalizations into the fixed symbols of words and our
fleeting perceptions into circumscribed concepts has given us a
second plane of reality, the conventional, which because of its
endless conveniences comes to supplant, or at least to veil, the

original. For the original can never be captured and possessed,
but only indicated.
The abstract thought and language from which all our con-
cepts arise have made the civilized world possible. They have
divided experience into fragments, of which so many can be
and used that from the percep-
clearly identified, agreed upon,
tions of amyriad of individuals could be compiled the encyclo-
pedia, and from the selected elements of the earth could be
constructed New York City. This seems to be possible only for
human beings. Animals, relying directly on their senses, can
often communicate perceptions and feelings as well as we.
Like us, they doubtless divide the world, in practical ways, into
the secure and the dangerous, the useful and useless. But
lacking the brain that might evolve a language to freeze these
divisions into abstractions, they cannot build consciously, as
we do, on the past, or share our social achievements. They can
only relate directly to the ever-changing present — either fully
and healthily, or sometimes, if so conditioned by us, neurot-
ically.By the same token, in their wild state at least, they are
spared the alienation from nature and the loss of integrity
—
which beset mankind encyclopedia, New York, and all
divided between what we perceive and what we think about it.
Like Hamlet's, our world has become sicklied with thought.
We do not refer to our own experience but to our overwhelming
legacy of the conceptualizations of others. Instead of occupving
our infinite talents in procuring our few simple needs, or in
molding and weaving the earth as do the lilies of the field, we
are endlessly correcting and tampering with the world, and
perhaps, in our explosive exploitation, only making it worse.
How can we do otherwise? For if our actions derive ultimately
closely related,and Castaneda's understanding of them to be so direct

and profound, that for this, as for many other reasons, I would put his
books at the very head of my personal bibliography.
7 Being in the World
from our beliefs —

i.e., our concepts —
we are forever manipulat-
ing a world which we do not directly perceive and therefore
cannot know.
During my have often rejected one authority only to
life, I
accept another. Underneath, I was afraid at the thought of
living in a world where there was not Someone, somewhat

like myself, who knew. But 1 have now come to feel that, to
know what one is doing with life, it is no use to consult
authorities. It is precisely through the veils which authorities
have spun for us that our own ears and eyes and nerves must
begin to penetrate if our hands are to grasp the world and our
hearts to feel it. We must recover our own capacity to taste
for ourselves. Then we shall be able to judge also.
This calls for discipline. One discipline to control the ramp-
ant mind has been evolved in Zen'^ and other forms of Buddhist
meditation. Another, if I dare speak of it in such august com-
pany, is the subject of this book.
3. See Appendix B.
2 COMING TO OUR SENSES
he work which I shall be presenting
here — the life work, first, of Elsa
Gindler and then, as it has come to me and to many hundreds of
others, of Charlotte Selver' — has been spread in the
decade last
throughout growth centers in the United States under the head-
ing "Work on the Body." Yet when Charlotte and I were invited
recently to contribute a chapter on this work, it was to a sym-
posium entitled Workshops of the Mindr
This contradiction brings up a special difficulty, as persistent
as it is annoying, to which I should like to devote a few words
at the very beginning of things.
The venerable and
division of the person into the psychic
the somatic seems to me to be strongly challenged by such an
expression as "sensory awareness," in which the prime psychic
characteristic of awareness is proposed in somatic terms. This
is possible, I believe, because the division is of purely cultural
origin, without biological vahdity.
I know very well that this division as generally conceived
today — the so-called "mind-body split" —refers to the immense
and still-growing separation between intellectual
in our culture
processes and sensory experience. No one can
doubt that this
is a catastrophic fact. On one hand, we have the abstract infor-
mation, as well as the theories, cliches, stereotypes, and fan-

tasies, that are the stock in trade of most people's conversation,
reading, writing, and trains of thought —
in a word, of their
consciousness. On the other hand is experience, which for a
1. See Appendix A for notes on Elsa Gindler and Heinnch Jacoby and
for Charlotte Selver's introduction of this work into the United States
2. Bernard Aaronson, Workshops of the Mind (New York: Doubledav.
1975).
9 Coming to Our Senses
great many people today is practically limited to comfort and

discomfort.
But how "mind" has come to be identified with the intellec-
tual and "body" with the experiential is a question that might
inspire a fascinating history of thought and culture. In such a
division of things, the whole world of art, music, poetry, medi-
tation, and love would have no place.
As a stop-gap, I am going to suggest a semantic relief for
this difficulty namely, that the terms "body" and "mind" might
:
represent quite different categories of thought which could

not properly be put into opposition. I have not always thought
so. I, too, grew up speaking of "bodily functions" as referring,
for instance, to perspiration or bowel movement, but never to

reason or understanding, and classing as "mental functions"
arithmetic or spelling, but never hockey or dance. Now, still
staying with the English language, I think of my "body" as of a
dimension, in the same sense in which one speaks of a body of
water. There is certainly a vital difference between my body
and abody of water, but it lies in the fact that my body lays
out the boundaries of an organism —
or organization of inter-
dependent tissues, none of which can be separated from the
others without the loss of its whole reason for existence. This
organism, visibly and in other perceptual ways definable as a
body, has functions: e.g., metabolism, respiration, circulation,
et cetera, and mind. Mind, in this light, could no more be con-
trasted to body than metabolism could. When either the mind,
which correlates our reactions, or the metabolism, which pro-
duces our temperature, begins to cease functioning, that is the
end of us — except to the extent that we can be kept "alive"
like tissue in a test tube.
But there is another, far more emotionally charged, signifi-
cance to this division: the long human history of dividing the
person into body and soul. "The hopes and fears of all the years"
are related to this — the ancient opposition between the "lusts
of the flesh" and the "aspirations of the spirit." But the origins
of both the words "aspiration" and "spirit" refer to breathing;
and is it not the flesh that breathes?
Are we then to understand this division of the person into
10 Sensory Awareness
mind and body as a practical human artifice, or as a descrip-

which "mind" or "spirit" might control or yield
tion of reality, in
to the "body," or in which the "soul," in death or otherwise,
might maintain its own separate existence?
Why do we not divide animals so? Their brains are smaller,
but their hearts can be as loving and their eyes as "soulful" as
ours.^ With no abstract good and animals take what comes
evil,
and suffer without resentment. Though filled with fears of real

dangers, they have no fear of death. Living to the full, they
—
have no need of a future a fact we instinctively reahze when
we tell our child, mourning his dead pet and asking if it will go
to heaven, that, however intelhgent animals may be, they have

no souls and do not go to heaven.
. A conception of consciousness as sim-

ply a function of any organization of hving cells, ranging in
complexity from the reactivity of an amoeba to the genius of a
Goethe or a Beethoven, leaves us free to disregard such puzzling
and troublesome questions as being of conventional and
semantic origin and not concerning the real matter of living.
Any work in awareness grounded in such an understanding
necessarily directs itself to the whole person, rather than to
any fraction of him. To separate and seek out the "spiritual"
or the "physical" is no longer relevant.^
But are not we in this work precisely separating and seeking
out that awareness we qualify as sensory, and thereby diminish-
ing ourselves? I say no. There is no other direct awareness,
even though our so-called "five senses" are also just conceptual
abstractions from the totaUty of our sentience. We are seeking
the sensory foundation for what may be our many intellectual
edifices, our connection and relationship to the enduring, if
ever-changing, earth; for only on such a foundation can any
organic superstructure arise.
3. CF. note page 109.

4. This conception of consciousness is my understanding of Teilhard
de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper. 1969V
Whether or not I have understood him aright, and whatever similar or
different conclusions it may lead us to, this is the first time my own
intuitions in this matter have been satisfactorily formulated.
!
There is no lack of information in America, but one may say

that there is knowledge of anything except
too httle personal
isolated facts and mechanical and social processes. Our empha-
sis on the sensory will not diminish us. It will refine and enlarge
us.
What might be the awareness of one
of the seedlings growing in our garden, perceivingand reacting
to light and darkness, moisture and drought, warmth and cold
— its roots ceaselessly exploring downward, while stem and
leaves explore upward, everything seeking to satisfy its needs,

the whole constantly tending outward, until finally one day it
will unfold in blossoms and dry up in seeds? The image of
blossoming captivates us, and we speak of knowing others by
their fruits. Have we, too, an organic nature, striving plant-
Hke to explore in all directions, and bursting from the con-
fining structure of concepts and images we have inherited?
Our grandfathers often felt they had spirits striving to free
themselves of fleshly bonds. Are we not flesh, perhaps, striving
to free ourselves of intellectual bonds? For if we consider flesh
neurologically, chemically, functionally, it surely represents
the most "spiritual" aspect of the cosmos
One may say that, like plants, we are sentient; like animals,
we are sentient and intelligent. Unlike these, we are also intel-
lectual. That is why one might accept the term "sensory aware-
ness" as most closely indicating the relationship which we share
with other living beings and which, as I shall attempt to show,
is by no means less than human.
Our study of sensing is simply a study

of consciousness. One can come to feel when consciousness is
occupied vdth thoughts, and when these thoughts arise organ-
ically from our perceptions, or are disconnected and distracting
trains of association. We
can tell when we are open to the
reality of the moment and when, in anxiety or in our eff'orts at
control, we close ourselves. We can sense when consciousness
flows freely, and when it meets obstacles and stops or wavers.
In our study, we come to realize that it is through conscious-
ness that we can allow a meaningful connection with what we
^^
approach and what we do, as distinguished from the "blind" or

"insensate" or mechanical ways in which we so often interact
with our environment. We recognize that clarity of perception
underlies all understanding and all intelhgent behavior. The
saying "Buddha is in everyone" can be understood as referring
not to any separate divinity, but to the potential of full con-
sciousness in every organism according to its nature. This
would restore to the organs of consciousness, our senses, the
dignity which is due them. It would permit us to hve securely
in our real perceptions, shallow or deep as the case might be,
but free of our never-ending speculations.
"Buddha is in everyone."
a
3 NATURE AND
"SECOND NATURE'
ike Zen meditation,^ sensory aware-

ness is not a teaching but a practice.
Though we act on Elsa Gindler's recognition that there is a
natural tendency to order in the functioning and growth of the
human organism,- we have no real theoretical framework, and
our experiments are entirely empirical. Our aim is not the
acquisition of skills, but the freedom to explore sensitively and
to learn from exploration. We propose experiments and ask
questions directed toward the possibility of experiencing.
In the classes, new recognitions and new attitudes come
about as a result of the student's own explorations, which he
must go into for himself, at his own pace, even though working
as a member of a group. We neither instruct verbally nor offer
an example to imitate. We merely work with practical means
toward an adult version of the quiet, open, curious attitude
which healthy children have to the world they are born into —
world they never tire of investigating. The child does not sepa-
rate himself from his world but is just as curious about his own
processes as about any others. Similarly, the attitude we seek is
neither extraverted nor introverted, but one of openness and
consciousness generally. We try to allow whatever becomes
conscious in our present state the time it needs to become
clearer to us.
In this work, we come gradually to distinguish perception
from such other elements of consciousness as thought, fantasy,
image, and emotion, each of which may push to occupy the
stage. These normal human functions have in many of us
1. See Appendix B. 2. See Appendix A.

15 Nature and "Second Nature'
become separated from the experience to which they belong

and now hover in us ready to attach themselves to whatever
appears; so that the state of mind of many people today is
something like an orchestra in which each member would be
playing from a different score. In the current therapies of the
Humanistic movement, there is much concern with extricating
these different functions from the tangle they are in. Work is
done on the release of blocked emotions, on the freeing and
accepting of fantasy, on the self-image, et cetera. Our work,
not intended to be therapeutic, has none of these objectives.
Nevertheless, as we come to more inner quiet and clarity, a
great deal happens by itself which in this light might be con-
sidered therapeutic.
The advance toward clearer perception and more authentic
experience does not lack emotion, any more than the note
Justas curious about his own processes

as about any others.
Struck clearly on a violin lacks overtones. Nor need the clarity

of a sensation suffer when it blossoms into thought or form.
When it spoken out, it may be poetry; when set down on
is
canvas, it may be pure expression. But to seek for sensation is

to seek for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, and the
emotional release that is sought for is elusive and obscure.
And what we very often mean by "thinking" — the repeti-
tive,compulsive occupation of consciousness with loose associa-
tions, cUches, —
and calculations leads us, not toward, but awây
from fuller consciousness. This kind of "thinking" is indeed the
anesthetic and narcotic drug to which so much in our estab-
lished culture is constantly leading us, and to which we have
become addicted since childhood. Withdrawal from it, if not as
painful as from heroin, is surely as difficult, as every person
seeking peace of mind must have discovered. Yet paradoxically,
as the young people have found, to the consternation of their
elders, it is the virtue of the so-called psychedehc drugs that
with their help this narcotic thinking can often be laid to rest.
Then, as in the Zen saying, the waters can become still and the
moon be reflected clearly. We seek this stillness too, though on
a disciplined and organismic basis rather than a pharmaceuti-
cal one.
Attention to sensing quiets what is compulsive in our
thought, so that the mind becomes free and available for its
normal function of perception. When the radio in the mind is

stilled, everything else can come to life. The camper's lantern
is blown out, and the darkness fills with stars as the woods
deepen and widen for him. The primitive world in which things
appear and disappear, bloom and fade, eat and are eaten can be
perceived surrounding us —
and including us. I myself have
feared this world, in which I have had little practice in living. I
have spent much of my life in the half make-believe world of
words and know that, though it may often bore one, it is com-
fortable, and one is loath to give it up. This is the famihar and
the "secure," even in its insecurity. When it seems inadequate,
one can always dwell in the past or add a new dimension like
heaven, or tomorrow. In the world of perception the present is
infinite; the only authority is I, the perceiver. We cannot know
17 Nature and ''Second Nature"
the future, and only the least trace of the past. But when we
breathe the air of the night woods, and let theirforms and
almost imperceptible sounds into us, or when we stand silent
in the sunlight that glows on rocks and leaves and city build-
ings, and perhaps feel the earth sustaining us, we know that we
exist, at first hand, surrounded by innumerable other beings
who exist too. Need we ask more?
The study of this work is our whole organismic functioning
in the world we perceive, of which we are a part our personal —
ecology: how we go about our activities, how we relate to peo-
ple, to situations, to objects. We aim what is natural
to discover
in this functioning and what is conditioned: what is our nature,
which evolution has designed to keep us in touch with the rest
of the world, and what has become our "second nature," as
Charlotte likes to call it, which tends to keep us apart. We shall
discover a spectrum spreading from the perceived to the con-
ceived, in which our upbringing has found us at one end and
pushed us to the other, where it has held us. In sensing, we
shall gradually return to that broad area in the center of the
spectrum where our birthright is balanced with our culture,
and from where we are freer to move in any direction.
^ "
THE FINGER
POINTING TO THE MOON
believe it can fairly be said of work in

I sensory awareness that the longer a
person has been leading groups, the less easy it is to catalogue
what he does. Charlotte, who has been working more than forty
years, is constantly improvising and coming on approaches that
she has not tried before. For the things we do become less and
less techniques as one matures, and serve more and more as
improvisations in which each participant in a class simply gains
practice in coming to his own experience.
It will therefore be important to remember that the follow-
ing descriptions in no sense constitute a manual and will only

lead into blind alleys if followed mechanically. Of course, this
has already happened, over and over. Young teachers, seeking
more eclectic and comprehensive approaches, have "inte-
grated" sensory-awareness "techniques" into their methods. But
there are no more techniques in this study than there are in
love. One cannot "integrate" fresh air into a stuffy room. One
lets the fresh air in, and in its own time the staleness leaves.
Whoever immerses himself in this study wall change, without
any effort or intention to do so, and the change wiU express
itself in all his activities.
it will be understood when I sav that classes

In this light,
seldom take place and follow sequences quite as I shall present
them. This book is a distillation and a blending. To present our
—
work verbatim is a task for the future though, indeed, I hope
for the very near future^ —
an unearthing from the hundreds
of hours of existing tapes. If this account seems to offer a blue-
1. Beginnings have already been made by Benjamin Weaver and by

Appendix A.
the Charlotte Selver Foundation. Cf.
19 The Finger Pointing to the Moon
print, It will have failed. Its intention is merely to convey an

attitude.
Over the years, Charlotte Selver has chosen numerous titles
for her courses and seminars. There are no self-evident titles,
as in a school curriculum. As with an abstract painting, or
with music or dance, a title, when it is not just an identification
for practical convenience, is a cue to the uninterpretable. It
is a verbaUzation of precisely that which in its nature is non-
verbal. In that beautiful Japanese image, it is a finger pointing

to themoon.
One might say something similar of this entire book.
The title of one of Charlotte's early courses in the New
School for Social Research, in New York, was "Walking,
Standing, Sitting, Lying: The Four Dignities of Man." I have
taken this ancient Chinese saying as a heading for the first
part of my description of the work, even though my treatment

of this fourfold subject reflects the practical hmitations of
working conditions, as a glance at the table of contents will
reveal.
Other titles have been "Study of Breathing"; "Being All
There"; "Nonverbal Experience and Communication"; "Awake,
Tune In:Unfold"; "Toward Expanded Consciousness"; "Medi-
tation in Everyday Living"; "Contact versus Technique and
Manipulation"; "Giving and Receiving"; "Entering Experience
in Depth"; "Opening Doors"; "Toward a More Sensitive Relat-
ing"; "The Delight of Immediacy."
It might be useful if one glanced now and then at these titles
while reading the descriptions below, for with few exceptions

every class is concerned with all of them. They are not titles of
diff'erent courses, but diff'erent aspects of a single study. There
is the further consideration, as I have already hinted, that we
are not seeking a correct standing, sitting, breathing, et cetera,

according to any pre-established criterion, but are simply study-
ing the nature of the phenomenon occurs in each of
itself as it
us individually. What is ithappening when we say
that is really
we are "standing" or "breathing"? Since we do not seek a verbal

or in any way definitive answer, this is a study without certifi-
able achievement and without end. Its only interest is the essen-
tial interest in living processes themselves. In it the humblest

student, though he may lack clarity and depth, has as much
authority as the most experienced teacher.
With these cautions, I shall now try to give a taste of some of
the basic and representative activities which we are constantly
exploring.
WALKING, STANDING, SITTING, LYING
The Four
Dignities of
Man
*^ THE SEARCH FOR STANDING
ing. The quieter

o
and
ur workshops normally take place in a
large, bare room with mats
friendlier the better.
or carpet-
Shoes, handbags,
and the like are left outside, and participants are dressed com-
fortably for sitting on the floor (our home base) and for unham-
pered movement.
Charlotte's way of beginning is unpredictable; mine less so.
After a few explanations, I usually just ask the group to "come
to standing."
This an invitation to one of the commonest activities of
is
daily Hving, which perhaps more than any other distinguishes

man from animals, but which our culture does not recognize
as an activity at all. To the participants, it simply means to
stand up —
something they have done many thousands of times,
indeed something they have been told to do a thousand times,
often with rewards and penalties attached. In actuality, what
usually occurs is that one either jumps up; dutifully, perhaps
resentfully, pushes or drags oneself up; struggles to rise; or
rises as one has learned in calisthenics or dance, with some
special technique —
all of which has become second nature and
more or less unconscious. Whatever happens, it seldom fails to

involve visible eff'ort. It is a practical certainty that hardly any-
one, since infancy, has consciously and sensitively come to
standing.
Who, in adulthood, comes to standing consciously, for its
own sake, unless for the relief of "stretching one's legs"? In-
deed who, unless sick or injured, takes the trouble to feel his
way to standing at all?
Yet when a house has been brought to standing, a rooftree
is raised and there is general celebration, just as on that great

occasion in the family when for the first time the child, who
has lain and sat and crawled, finally is seen standing freely on
the ground, with no other support. At least this is the case when
houses, and children, have real significance. We shall work on
this question for months and years, for we must endlessly redis-
cover in ourselves the difference between the constructed build-
ing,which we aim to have erected in the most trustworthy
method and with the most approved techniques, and the living
For the first time the child is seen standing

freely on the ground, with no other support.
25 The Search for Standing
creature, who must find his way each time anew. When this
distinction becomes real to us, we can never tire of exploring it.
We have asked people to enter the work without expecta-
tions, but this is asking a good deal. Probably they will stand
more or less patiently waiting for something to happen. Few
in the group are conscious that a great deal is already going on
inside them, for they are waiting for a cue from the outside.
What will happen if we request the group to shut off the
main avenue and stand with eyes closed?
to the outside
This is quite a step. Immediately there are reactions. A
number of people will feel a loss of balance and the need for
something to hold on to, which is remedied when they allow a
peep again. It becomes clear that these people have been rely-
ing on their eyes for support.
For most of us, indeed, the visual has been much over-
emphasized. We have been exhorted to "see," "look," and
"watch" since infancy, but seldom to feel out a situation. Clos-
ing the eyes may bring restfulness to some, but to others it will
bring insecurity; still others, who have no difficulty standing,
may nevertheless experience a vague anxiety. Since childhood,
we have also been warned to "look out!" For many of us a new
element has introduced itself, though perhaps unconsciously:
is it safe?
So much about our whole way of living may be called into
question by this simple experiment that a few people may be
unable to close their eyes at all.^ For others, standing may
become quite uncomfortable, especially if they continue to
stand out of vanity or obedience. But if we can stay with it for a
while, something may be discovered. For one thing, if the ques-

tion is raised, we may quite possibly find that closing the eyes
has by no means ended the attempt to see, and that behind
closed lids the eyes have remained very active.
If asked whether our eyelids are resting over our eyes, or
whether efforts are needed to keep them closed, we will very

often discover that we are actually struggling to look through
eyelids dutifully held closed.
1. There are cases where this inabihty has survived hterally years of
work.
At this point, one may either open the eyes to find relief, or,
recognizing the contradiction in one's activities, give up some-
thing of the urge to see, which immediately reduces the efforts
in eyes and eyelids and makes one feel easier altogether. In
the latter case, there may be the interesting discovery that,
simply in becoming conscious, a previously unconscious inner
conflict may dissolve, freeing energies for coming to more bal-
ance and fuller standing. The recognition may come to one: /
don't have to use my eyes for standing; I can sense.

An entirely new feehng of security and potency may come
from such recognitions, and a delicious sense of one's own
being, even at the very beginning of our study. It may be felt
that even in such minute muscles as those around the eyes
energies can be bound which halt whole processes in the
organism, restrict breathing, and preoccupy consciousness.
Even purely rational processes may be involved, as in the
I don't have to use my eyes for standing; I can sense.

realization that in closing one's eyes in the first place, the

perhaps unconscious decision was justified that no danger was
present. This is not "body work," as it is so often called, but an
awakening of the person. And when we finally open our eyes
and perhaps find that, at least for the moment, we can continue
to stand, simply seeing, without using our eyes for help, the
sense of being may increase still further.
In the first moments of work, by inquiring into the function
of seeing in simple standing, we have plunged into one of the
most and persistent human conditionings. But another
difficult
question, equally important and perhaps closely related, is apt

to be raised when some student remarks that he feels .his
watching eyes have something to do with thinking. Very hkely,
others in the class will agree; several may report that they
found themselves as distracted by their thoughts as by their
watchfulness.
Now it is no use, when a person's eyes are closed, to tell him
to stop looking. That just invites a new inner attempt at con-
trol, which what the looking is in the first place. One can
is
raise the question; and when he is able, he will find it very

relieving to give it up. It is equally useless to tell him to stop
thinking. But one may ask if the person can feel himself
thinking, and how it would feel to permit more resting in his
mind. Does anything new come to consciousness if thoughts
come more to quiet?
We may also ask: is one fixing one's attention on difficulties
and attempting to correct them? And if so, how would it be
simply to stay uncritical and open for whatever inner changes
might happen by themselves?
I need hardly say what a change in our usual attitude this
would involve. Our whole education has been concerned uith

analyzing difficulties, remembering other people's admonitions,
and making corrections. Now it is suggested that merely by
allowing more consciousness we might be giving things the
possibility of resolving themselves. Besides this, tliere is the
specialproblem with standing that we have been told often
enough that it is "just standing," and is boring and fatiguing
which, when we have heard it from people we esteem, actually
29 The Search for Standing
tends to make it so. Would it not be somehow disloyal of us to

find it otherwise?
For many reasons, then, these few minutes of standing may
have become quite tiring for certain people, while for others
discoveries may have been made that require time to digest.
This is the time for lying down and resting for a while. After-
ward, those who have made discoveries may enjoy sharing
them, while those who have felt "nothing" will be reheved by
saying so.
STANDING AS RELATING
hus far, all of our attention has been

turned inward. But if we continue a
little longer with work on standing, a new direction may be
opened, drawing the attention away from the inner and toward
the outer. The leader may ask, "Do you feel what you are stand-
ing on?" — thus appealing directly to the sensory nerves in the
feet.
Since we have left our shoes outside and many will be bare-
foot, this is an invitation to sensing which, for a surprising
number of people, has not really been practiced since child-
hood. The feet are by nature very sensitive even sensual —
and many people will respond with interest. They do feel the
floor and its coverings. They begin to discover textures, tem-
peratures, the solidity under them. Something is really there
which they had taken for granted but had not experienced.
After a while, we may ask, "If you feel the floor, how are
you relating to it?"
Now who has asked such a question of himself? Does one
relate to a floor? We allow time for the question to sink in.
It may help to be more specific. "Are you simply standing on

the floor —
with your whole foot?"
Again people begin to make discoveries. When they report
laterwhat they found, it will turn out that some were standing
—
mainly on their heels perhaps as though holding back from
—
something and felt themselves not simply standing but also
pressing. When they allowed a more fully distributed standing,
in which more of the foot could participate, there were some-
times unfamiliar and exciting sensations of fuller presence and
connection. Others found the opposite: they were as though
31 Standing as Relating
poised on the balls of their feet, eager to go forward; and in

this they were pressing on the floor and not just standing
either.The report of one stimulates recollections in the others.
Someone found he was trying to grip the floor with his toes,
another that his toes had been avoiding the floor. We may
emphasize the discovery, but we refrain from any suggestion
or interpretation. That is the student's business, not ours. Yet
now and then someone ghmpses that he has a tendency to hold
back or push forward in many situations. When he realizes
this, it is because he is ripe for it, not because we have tam-
pered wdth him; and it can have the force of genuine recogni-
tion.
The feet begin to discover textures, temperatures.

If standing is a task that calls for clear perception of the

support under one, and a clearly functional response to this
support, could one speak of the foot as reacting not only sensi-
tively but even intelligently? Can one identify one's foot with
oneself? Is "foot" indeed just an abstraction of speech, so that
we are not really sensing and reacting through our feet, as we
might through such actual possessions as skis or stilts, but
rather simply functioning consciously all the way down to
where we reach the ground?
Do we stand on our own feet, as we have so often been
exhorted to, or do we stand on the floor?
Very much may begin to become conscious to those who can
live with such favorite questions of Charlotte's, which can
never be answered except as regards the present moment, and
even then seldom with a categorical yes or no questions —
which may be asked at the very outset, and which may well
continue to be asked to the end of one's life.
7 A FEW DIFFICULTIES
our questions have caught a begin-

If ner's interest, the workshop has been
launched. Clearly the genuineness of the questions, as well as
their sequence and timing, is important. If they are just chosen
from notes we have preassembled, they may seem artificial to
the participant, unless, as often happens, he has come so per-

suaded of the esoteric value of the work, or of the leader, that
he will accept anything.
But if the questions arise from what the leader perceives of
the actual situation, they will be felt by the others and may then
have a compelling authenticity. The participant may realize
that for once he is being asked something that he alone can
answer — not something that depends on information or defini-
tion. The question is not, is it a flat earth or a round, spinning
earth that beneath me; not even, is it carpet, or wood, or
is
concrete; but is there something beneath me? Not what I have

heard about it, but what I feel. For instance, will it support
—
me i.e., does it support me? Is it cold or warm, hard or soft?
Does it accept me? Do I accept it?
The realization that the answers to such questions may be

constantly changing — that what felt hard and cold may become
warm and soft, or vice versa — makes them none the less
authentic. On the contrary, it may lead to the insight that
perception relative, an insight generally repugnant to our
is
institutions, and have far-reaching consequences. In such

cases, occurring not infrequently, one experiences the unfold-
ing of sensory awareness into the beginning of wisdom.
Of course, it all goes much more slowly than I make it seem.
An honest question may merely set up a conflict in the hearer's
mind, for he has been conditioned to be conscious of what he

has been taught, not of what his senses bring to him. An exam-
ple of this is the participant's unfailing tendency to translate
the leader's questions into terms famiUar to him. For instance,
"Do you allow your eyes to rest?" becomes "Think of your eyes."
"Do you let the floor support you?" becomes "Let the floor sup-
port you." He has learned since childhood to belittle his own
experience and "learn from the experience of others" — i.e., to
supplant his experience with intellectual processes pleasing to
the teacher. If he is now enough
to dare to experience strongly
so that this pattern and transformation may
of repression
begin to dissolve, we must go slowly and quietly. He must have
plenty of time and be free from any eagerness on the part of
the leader. Otherwise, barriers to experience may be broken
through without being perceived or understood and, like ice
on puddles, will re-form overnight.
Beginners may in any case feel a little hesitant to speak out.
Perhaps someone remembers that he suddenly found himself
holding his breath: is such a trifle something to report? Or that
the floor became less hard: might that not sound absurd?
Or that he felt a stiffness in his back, or in his mind's eye saw
an image of himself standing: could this be interesting to any-
one? Besides, people are always talking, and this was supposed
to be a nonverbal workshop.
But when the first person gets the courage to speak out, he
finds that others listen. Details of real experience are interest-
ing, no matter how "trifling." The others begin to speak too. It
becomes apparent that the group, in its halting, unpracticed
way, has actually been exploring a situation. Someone may
now announce that he has found himself "one with the all," or
has left his body and been floating weightlessly. We are con-
fronted with the sirens of idea and image, for whom plain
sensation is not enough and who will turn up to entice us from
our way the whole length of the voyage.
With a mature leader, each workshop and each session will
be unique. Each beginning has its own inner dynamic, its own
set of genes, which the leader may or may not sense. \Mien the
leader, sensing this dynamic, is not ambitious, but is able to
35 A Few Difficulties
permit it to unfold, rather than follow the familiar course of

control and manipulation, the session will have hfe and validity.
For he is not a leader, when he is working well, but rather a
guide, exploring and discovering with the others obscure
regions with which he is perhaps only somewhat more familiar
than they. To the extent that he takes over, even in the direc-
tion of his own image of spontaneity, the validity is dimin-
ished. The most precious part of the process —
i.e., the discov-
eries of the student himself — is lost or impaired. This is a set

principle which, after years of working with groups, I myself
can only partly follow, but which I find I follow more and
more each year. And I can observe it constantly in my teacher
and colleague, Charlotte.
WHO IS STANDING?
1
doubt if we ever stand naturally until
we begin to recover the awakeness
and wholeness that we had as little children, before we were
taught about the "right ways" and the "wrong ways." Certain it
is that most of us, most of the time, avoid standing at all, and
generally speaking this gets truer as we get older. But I am

very aware of changes in my own sense of standing over the
years, in which, thanks to this work, my standing at age sixty
is closer to what it was at six than perhaps at any age In
between.
I well remember catching my first trout at age six, in a creek
on the California coast near where I am writing now. One had
to wait for them to bite, and this waiting was naturally done
standing, the position of greatest alertness for fishing and
best permitting response. I spent hours in what I seem to
remember as full attention to the ever-present possibility of
sudden action just out of sight in the deep pools or rippling
currents. It seemed pure pleasure to me. No doubt that is why
I relish the scent of nettles and bay leaves to this day.
But such special stimuli are not essential. What healthy

child, out of school, does not spend half his hfe standing?
Whether it is the life of the country or the life of the city
makes Uttle one sees more; erect, one can be
difference. Erect,
anywhere; erect, one is ready for whatever happens. Only
babies cannot stand. Only grownups get tired standing.
Soon, however, other elements appeared. I was short. Mother
was always measuring my height. Had I been tall for my age. I
should no doubt have been constantly reminded of that. Gradu-
ally the comparison between myself and others came to be a
37 Who Is Standing?
regular corollary of standing. Furthermore, certain memorable

moments of standing were moments of trial by my superiors,
in school and at home; it was useless to "stand up" to them and
actually more fitting to slouch. On the other hand, whenever
these superiors took notice of my standing, it was to tell me to
stand up straight and look them in the eye — something I had
always done quite naturally until I learned what an avenue of
aggression the eyes could be and how dangerous it was to
meet that aggression and appear "impertinent."
I heard much, in those days, of broad shoulders and deep
chests. This also became a half-conscious consideration in
standing, for I think it never occurred to me that chest and
shoulders also existed in sitting — which, in Mother's eyes,
seemed mainly a function of the presence or absence of
"backbone." Luckily, I was not a girl; it seems to me I would
not have stood at all had I also been burdened with the cloud of
ambiguities with which my world surrounded the advent of
"curves."
Standing also involved my hands. Since the pants I wore
had pockets, my hands were often in them: occasionally just to
keep warm, but more often to toy with something in the
pockets, a coin or a marble or a knife, or perhaps with my
genitals, or just because it seemed safe and cozy there. In any
case, this offended my superiors, who required me, in addition
to standing straight and looking them in the eye, to take my
hands out of my pockets. Had such encounters truly been an
invitation to my full presence, as was the encounter of God
and Moses on Mount Sinai, I am sure all this would have
happened by itself without being asked for. But such divinity
was absent. After the ordeal, there would be an escape, and
part of the natural reaction would be to slump a little more
than otherwise, look devious, and keep both hands firmly in my
pockets, whether there was anything there or not.
Like everyone, I was once in a while cuffed or slapped by
someone bigger than I. Gradually this experience joined the
other elements present in standing that determined the where-
abouts of my
head and the degree of tension in my neck. This
was also a prime question in any wrestling or scuffling, and in
almost every case when any fist was aimed at me.

or missile
Ducking came naturally and developed into a useful and satis-
fying art; but some of my friends who had to duck too often
never afterward lost the sense of danger quite enough to let
theirheads stand free.
What soon came too was a whole spectrum of images, from
books, movies, and everyday talk, prescribing where and how
the head should be in a variety of circumstances. Heroes held
their heads high and erect; cowards cowered; the villain in
action looked furtively, with head drawn close to protecting
shoulders, and in capture stood with his head hung in shame;
the pious lowered their gaze from a sinful world, or looked up
to theirmaker in supplication. For every condition, it seemed,
therewas a right way for the head to be, especially in standing,
and by this one could judge others and be judged.
There was also the question of vigilance. I was not bom
with a knowledge of the many hazards in the world, and 1
suppose I was often saved from unexpected collisions bv the
warning, "Look out!" For a child, whose attention is naturally
drawn to details of life before he has any experience of what
may may be vital. But the
be in the background, such warnings
child soon learns by himself that a background with potential
dangers is often present, and then the continued admonitions
to keep one's eyes open and be on the watch simply lead to a
generalized distraction and anxiety. Probably English produces
even more difficulties in this respect than the Achtung!,
attention!, or jcuidado! of other European languages, which
have a less specific appeal to the eyes, even when the affec-
tive communication is the same. And probably the worst of
these is the common American mode Watch yourself!
However that may be, in addition to being on the watch for
trouble, I was soon watching myself much of the time and con-
scious that God might possibly be watching me, too. When mv
mother told me that she could tell by my eyes when my young
friends and I had been "playing with ourselves," the circle
was complete, and henceforth my own eyes stood guard over
themselves.
Definitively, from that time on my standing was self-con-
39 Who Is Standing?
scious. But self-conscious standing is not the same as conscious

standing. In the sense of the word that I am trying to develop,
it is not standing at all. It is a reaction, not to the pertinent
realities of one's own inner structure and living needs, but to
the real or supposed judgments of others, either actually
present or remembered in the past. It is the core of stage fright
and of our frequent queasiness about being photographed.
It is thus that work on conscious standing, or arriving at the
point where the felt realities outweigh the imagined opinions,

can be as truly a work on coming to oneself as is the long and,
for the beginning, arduous sitting in zazen.'^
I think my most vivid experience of standing, which for a
moment wiped out the effects of years of conditioning, occurred

shortly after my twenty-first birthday when I found myself in an
expensive mental "retreat." I had been agonizing for months
about what I felt was my essential dishonesty, and I had
reached a point where I felt anything I said about myself was
false. Not unnaturally, this was interpreted as an inclination to
suicide.
The approaches of the psychiatrist in attendance seemed
irrelevant to my difficulties, and since I felt an added guilt in
accepting the luxuries of the place I decided to leave. This
appeared no problem, since my private attendant had
to present
been too uninterested to keep up with me and I had been free to
walk in the countryside as far and long as I chose each day.
But when I finally told him I was going to get a bicycle and
take off, he was jolted awake, and the next day I was taken to
a real retreat with locks on the doors. Since I was no longer a
minor, I could be admitted only with my own consent or by an
act of committal. My whole struggle had been with my own
negativity, but when the papers were laid on the table and I was
asked to sign them, it was with a fully positive sense that I
said, "No!"
I still memory. We had been seated. When I
thrill at the
rose now, I man. The fact that I was being incarcer-
rose a free
ated seemed incidental. The next evening, when the attendants
1. See Appendix B.
were at supper, I dropped my overcoat and shoes through the

few inches that could be opened in the hospital window,
squeezed myself through a square ventilator I had discovered
eight feet above the lawn, and was free, outwardly as well as
inwardly. I had secreted a twenty-dollar bill as I was being
processed for admission; and in no time I was on a bus headed
out of the state and on the first leg of my way to a lonely island
that I had read about, where a new period of growth was to
begin for me after my long self -repression.
My first independence had been
act after this declaration of
to come to standing. Authority was there, as it had always been,
but now / was here. I could feel it from head to foot. Whatever
I might lose from now on, I would at least not lose the taste of
full presence.
Both before and after this event, there were many moments
—
when life, so to say," brought me to myself moments in love,
moments in facing responsibilities and challenges, moments of
full response to situations in which the consciousness of direct
reality overshadowed consciousness of the past and apprehen-
sion for the future.
But it was to be many, many years before I would begin to
work systematically to recover this possibility of presence which
a single clarification of circumstances had once brought me to.
9 STANDING,
FROM FOOT TO HEAD
hough standing is not standing, as I
mean it, except when it is a unitary

activity of the entire person, we can nevertheless work on it
from any one of a number of approaches. One, very naturally,

is through those complex elaborations of the organism nearest
the ground — what we call "feet" — which have evolved specifi-
cally for the many activities which directly involve our reliance
on the support of the earth. At the center of these activities is
standing. On one side of standing, so to speak, are the practical
activities, such as running and fighting; on the other side is
dance. Really to stand can have the same relation to any such
activity as a single sustained note on a flute or violin can have
to a sonata. As our lips are to the flute, or our fingers to the
violin, our feet are to the earth.
Of all human forms of celebration, I suppose dance is the
most ancient and universal. It explores and glorifies the prime
human and animal capacity of movement throughout the
entire organism. As a way of becoming attuned to the mobility
in others, and of sharing vitality, it has no equal. But it does
not even require others. I have more than once spent the night
dancing by myself. Even in solitude, it can have unparalleled
meaning, as in the allusions of Don Juan, in Carlos Castaneda's
books, to the warrior's last dance, when death itself must sit
by, waiting until the dance is over.

But for most of us life is not a dance. We think nothing of
committing our feet to imprisonment in shoes, and even blame
them afterward for the consequent feeling that they are
"killing" us. Many of us quite literally consider our feet inferior
and "beneath us," and are horrified at the thought of entering

a formal room barefooted, as we do barehanded.^
Two incidents from my life in New York throw a strong light
on attitudes toward the feet. Once, when Charlotte and I
opened our studio for a tenants' business meeting, about a
third of our neighbors declined to enter because we asked them,
for the sake of the studio carpet, to remove their shoes. But
in another "studio" —
an ancient industrial loft with ragged
spHnters in each board of the floor —
where a drummer 1 knew
held public calypso dances for a living, young people came for
a thrill they could not find elsewhere. To dance calypso with
shoes on would be like swimming with shoes on. I asked, "How
can you manage with such a floor? Don't they get splinters?"
"Oh they do," he answered, "and they love every one of them."
In the classes, we need not resort to spHnters to wake up our
feet. When anything brings them more to our attention, if we
allow the attention, changes in their functioning may occur
spontaneously, and such changes will always be toward the
more appropriate. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that we are con-
scious of anything more than the vaguest sensation of the
structure and function of the feet, even if we know the names
of the bones and anatomical divisions and have a picture of it
all in our mind from the anatomy book.
One thing we can easily do to make good for this lack is to

sit down and explore our feet directly. With our own hands we
may go deeply into them, discovering and enlivening the many

joints and ligaments of which a foot consists. How fai' and
deep must one go to follow the identity of a given toe until it
becomes lost in the interior? What can we feel of the architec-
ture of the arch? How does the heel seem to our palm and our
fingers, in its aspect as bone and its aspect as padding?-
Of course, we may equally explore the foot of a partner. This,
1. The opposite is true in Zen practice, as was also the case on Mount
—
Horeb see Exodus 3:5.
2. If, at any time in reading this book, the reader should find it be-
coming abstract and remote and requiring effort to follow, I urge him
to remove a shoe and spend five minutes exploring his own foot. After-
ward, if he really wants to get up and take a walk, he will do so; but
if he wants to read, I promise it will become easier for him.
We may equally explore the foot of a partner.
in a new group, can create some tense moments. For who has
held the foot of a stranger in his hand and worked with it dis-
passionately? Can there be such friendliness? Indeed, who has
touched the foot even of a loved one without soothing, mas-
saging, caressing, or simply playing wdth it? Few of us are
able simply and genuinely to explore, as we did in childhood
before we were warned not to, and as we are asked to do now
especially when the exploration is not just on the surface, as
with a sculpture, or mechanical, as with the moving parts of an
anatomy model. When exploration is really deep and felt, very
much becomes awakened. We shall now harvest this awaken-
ing as we come back to standing.
Once again we take time to feel where the floor is. How do we
relate to it? Let us close our eyes again : it may be easier this
time. Many people now feel that they are relating to the floor.
They no longer stand on their feet but on something which they
them from below. The feet feel flexible and
feel really supports
alive, not stood on but free to explore what they touch, as
the hands a moment ago were exploring them. Already the
faces of the group may show the pleasure of this extension of
consciousness to hitherto deprived regions. Perhaps we,too, have
hands down do our cousins the apes.
there, as
Now the leader may ask, "Do you allow the connection with
the floor upward into you?" And a little later, "Do you allow it
through your knees?" Afterward, a number of people may
well report that they found their knees were locked. When they
gave up this locking, readjustments could be felt taking place
in the ankles or the pelvis or higher.
We may proceed upward in all sorts of ways in this question
of allowing a fuller, more organic connection with what we
stand on. For instance, how high above the floor is the pelvis?
As thighs and calves wake up,^ slight changes may occur
3. At some point the reader may become disturbed by an unfamiliar

use of metaphor that characterizes what is certainly always in danger
of becoming a "sensory-awareness jargon." New bottles arc needed for
—
our new wine if such it is, as it seems to me. But until these new
bottles arise from the communicative genius of a whole people, we in
this work must use familiar words in unfamiliar connections with the
hope and steadfast intention of not creating one more "trade" language.
45 Standing, from Foot to Head
spontaneously. Or we may deliberately tighten our buttocks or

our stomach muscles, taking time to notice how this affects our
relation to the support under us, and noticing the changes as
we gradually give up the constriction to allow more connection
through. Reports often follow of an opening, resulting in a
sense of contact with the floor throughout the organism.
Changes may be felt as far away as in neck, eyes, and lips,
together with an increased sense of standing altogether, which
is no longer just a gap in living but is now becoming a positive
activity. Very often breathing changes, as one release triggers

another, or perhaps sets up a constriction somewhere else.
Such deliberate tensing of muscle constellations, when fol-
lowed by a very gentle and conscious release quite diff'erent —
from the nerveless "letting go" so often practiced for relaxation
— can be very valuable in bringing habitual contractions to con-
sciousness, where they may slowly dissolve as the vital proc-
esses which they are inhibiting begin to be felt and permitted.
This requires a fresh and new exploration on each occasion,
as opposed to the technique or exercise which is repeated
always with the same objective in view. For we are working
not with ideas, but with consciousness itself.
Still standing, let us bring our hands gently to resting on
the top of our heads. Through palms and fingers we can feel, if
we are sensitive, not only our hair but also the temperature
and perhaps the animation of living tissue underneath. This is
as far up as we extend, just as the soles of our feet delimit
our extension downward. What is alive in between? Is there
some sense of our existing altogether between the meeting of
hands and scalp at the top and of soles and floor at the bottom?
Somewhere in this extent air enters, penetrates to a con-
stantly varying distance, and leaves; weight is passed on from
bone to bone and muscle to muscle; fluids circulate; metabolic
processes generate ever-changing energies. Everywhere sen-
sory nerves are interwoven and there is the possibility of more
awakeness. Our standing an endless readjustment of these
is
happenings to one another, depending on the clear functioning

of our proprioceptive nervous system and on the flexibility of
our musculature. It is impossible to practice with this too often.
In such trips through one's interior there is ahvays a likeli-
hood of getting stalled; so many toll gates and barricades have

been set up over the years. Now and then, however, a new
path opens: sensation and energy flood through; consciousness
expands to regions heretofore out of bounds. One has a new
and full recognition: I am alive there too! I exist: and I am
standing on something which exists also.
The reader who is interested in such experimentation may
feel like trying it out deliberately as I describe it. This is fine,
if he has the time and patience. Otherwise, 1 would suggest

waiting for some occasion when he is obliged to stand anyway.
There are bound to be plenty of them. Perhaps he is waiting in
line at the bank or in the supermarket, or for a bus, or standing
in the subway or at a cocktail party. Instead of allowing his
energies to sour into impatience or boredom, he may channel
them into some such experiments as the above. He does exactly
what feels agreeable and interesting, merely making the deci-
sion to forgo his customary inertia and to give himself, as fully
as is practical, to exploration. He may explore anything that
occurs to him. The only condition is that he give it his respect
and time. he can explore without hopes or expectations, but
If
with the same kind of care he might give to doodhng at the

telephone, something wdll come of it.
""^
" '
WALKING:
LOCOMOTION AND BEING
herebook by E. H. Shattock
is a little
stay in the Buddhist

describing his
meditation center in Rangoon. For some sixteen hours a day, in
^
solitude, he practiced keeping his attention on his breathing, as

evidenced by the rhythmic rise and fall of his belly. Every thirty
minutes this meditation was varied with the experience of walk-
ing down the corridor, in which full attention had to be given to
the alternate raising of each knee and the consequent swinging
forward and descent to the floor of each foot. Such meditation
is pure sensory awareness. Except for its exact structuring and
rigorous discipline, it could fit into our work as a stream into a

pond. There is none of us in this work whose practice would not
be deepened and enriched by it.
The kinhin in zazen,- a five or ten-minute interval of
meditative walking between thirty or forty-minute periods of
sitting, is, however, closer to our normal experimenting. In the
Soto form, steps are taken exceedingly slowly, and to maintain
a full ease and balance is an art in itself. By the same token, to
see the bare feet of a practiced Japanese priest meet and leave
the floor in kinhin is more exciting to me than watching the
footsteps of a panther.
Unlike standing, walking is so interwoven with every aspect
of daily living that it is very often the first activity in which
students notice changes and make discoveries. Usually this has
to do simply with feeling what one walks on. But as time goes
on, the whole process of locomotion, or transferring weight
1. Admiral E. H. Shattock, An Experiment in Mindfulness (New York:

E. P. Button, 1960; Samuel Welser, 1970).
2. See Appendix B.
from one leg to the other in order to proceed over the face of
the earth, begins to regain some of the interest and liveliness
which it has for young children and which has always made it
a favorite occupation of nature-lovers and meditators.
In the studio, we may begin with just shifting our weight
from side to side, slowly enough to feel how it is received and
allowed down through our structure to the floor. Does the foot
actually give the weight to the support below, or is it merely
The interest and liveliness which it has for young children.
^jj^l^l^ji^'''
"^V^
49 Walking: Locomotion and Being
passive as the weight goes through it? Does the knee, and still
more the hip, just receive and pass on weight as a chair does
when we on it, or do these
sit joints come actively into play with
a sensitive coming to life of all the muscles that invest them?
And the entire leg that is for a moment freed of weight : does it
allow itself to be refreshed in that moment, or does it rather

cling to the attitude of working? In a nutshell, this last is the
whole great question of hving in the present.
We may work for some time on treading, or shifting weight.
As it more and more comes to gain our attention and interest, it
may begin to resemble the day-long or night-long ritual of many
age-old human dances. Were it to involve us more fully, so that
knees, hips, pelvis, and lower back began savoring the elaborate
transfer of weight from side to side, and trunk, arms, neck,
and head began feeling, permitting, and glorying in their ever-
responding balance, to the point of rapture through the entire
organism, we should be led into those beautiful Caribbean
dances, the Dominican merengue and the Haitian meringue.
From foot to head, these are indeed nothing but a sort of fully
felt,rhythmic walk in place, when reactivity in every joint
maintains balance and presence over the full range from
minimal to maximal movement. In such dances, I have seen
couples in their seventies abandoned to the sensation of their
own rhythmic shifting and redistribution of weight for twenty
minutes at a time.
In our studio we do not use rhythms and we are not working
at dance, but we do study to sense spontaneous readjustments
of weight and balance as, first with one leg and then with the
other, we come consciously to the floor in every variation of
our weight. Animals are distinguished by the movement of their
limbs away from and back to the supporting earth —
movement
comparable to the rhythmic, if irregular, movements of breath-
ing. Perhaps this is one reason why Zen practice alternates
sitting with kinhin, and why it can be so fascinating at the zoo
to see a bear or elephant walk, where such great weight goes
hand in hand with such delicacy. Indeed, there is no reason
we cannot find the same fascination in our own walking. It
needs only to be more fully felt and lived.
It can well be imagined that this kind of work demands full

alertness and much time. One cannot hurry through it. And
yet the precision and total presence we work toward may be
seen in the very swiftest movements of animals. Who, in the
country, has not seen a hummingbird, poised at a honeysuckle,
dart instantly and faultlessly to another, twenty feet away?
Whether you watch a cat leaping from the floor and landing on
a shelf or a quarter-ton gorilla swinging from a rope to a plat-
form, you will see, if you look closely, that each limb comes to
easy and utter readiness exactly when it is needed, and not a
moment before or after.
It is always the same question: am I, as total organism,
awake and reactive? Are my limbs merely my property, which
I must regulate and guide, or are they me?
When we have explored these questions long enough, it can

become a matter equally of interest and of delight that it is
possible to leave behind our concern merely with "getting
somewhere" and can now begin to feel how we go. Whether
we get there or not, we exist on the way. Instead of pushing or
dragging ourselves along, we walk. In the exhilaration of the
actual coming to hfe of our legs, we can feel how dance must
have originated. From our pelvis to the soles of our feet we
begin reaching down to touch the earth, as from the level of our
heart we might reach a hand out to a friend. And from where
we touch the earth, our whole precarious structure, which we
can so easily diminish, finds its height and breadth and free-
dom in motion as it can in rest.
Once, in the Zen monastery in Tassajara, Charlotte asked an
old friend how long she planned to stay. "Until I can simply
walk down this road," was the answer. "But you do," Charlotte
said. "No," she answered, "when I am not concerned any more
about what I have done or what I still have to do, not concerned
—
with how I walk this road when I can simply walk it." Tlie
friend had already been walking there a year.
HARA
same
A s we practice shifting weight,
find that the floor has
service for our feet that a partner did for
we may
performed the
them with his
hands. They may feel worked through and greatly enlivened.
If so, coming back to simple standing will be a vivid experience
too.
If, in standing, we now bring one hand to the lower back and
the other to the belly opposite, something may immediately
become apparent. The situation we have been exploring
through feet and legs has at this level changed markedly. No
longer are we a skeletal structure, more or less equally envel-
oped and intertwined with nerves and muscles. We are entirely
different, front and back. Under the hand in front is belly: an
envelope of muscles containing a vague and inarticulate mass,
whose very name is embarrassing to a great number of people.
We have been told that there are many vital organs in there,
mostly having to do with functions that are still not quite men-
tionable in company, so that some of us remain faintly ashamed
of them and have a tendency to pull them in a little farther
out of sight than they are already. Indeed, this also seems pru-
dent since they are not protected with bones like our upper
torso. We have forgotten that this is the hara,^ or seat of
vitahty, of the Japanese, the "wheat field set about with lilies"
of the Bible, and the "guts" of our own vernacular.
Under the other hand, in back, we find quite different
territory, distinct and solid, bone and muscle. Nothing to be
ashamed of here. It is with this that we stand erect.
1. See also the book on this subject by Karlfried von Durckheim: Hara,
The Vital Center of Man (New York: Femhill, 1970).
But let us explore movement here. If we again shift weight

from side to side, we can clearly feel these muscles coming
into play, governing the masses above. Like the shrouds of a
ship's mast, they respond to every rock and pitch. Is that a
mast we have? Let us try something else. First let us come to
quiet standing and then gently explore what may be movable
a httle lower, in hip joints and pelvis. Perhaps we roll the pelvis
—
backward and forward the specific movements of sexual
intercourse. Sideways, movement is complicated by our stand-
ing, but back and forth the beautifully lubricated hip joints
offer no resistance. But the hip joints do not move in isolation.
As we give careful attention, our hand clearly feels other joints
—
coming into play in the sacrum, in the lowest vertebrae of our
spine, and upward.
This could be an important moment. How many of us, men
and women both, have relied since childhood on this region to
hold us firm against the pressures of living: not our back bones,
but our backbone, the mainstay of our character, a rock
against force from without and against tenderness and yielding
from within? And how many others, giving up the struggle,
have allowed dead weight to slump down on these vertebrae
and overwhelm their natural mobility?
Let us raise and lower our two enclosing hands, exploring
how far up and down our back movement is possible. Once we
begin such an exploration, we may get a taste for it and wish to
try it over and over. Even when we remove our hands we can
feel the movement.
Now let us bring our hands back and attend to the belly.
What is happening here? Beneath our clothes we feel it, still a
little vague, somewhat soft, somewhat hard. There are muscles
here too, but not such clearly conscious ones. What were they
doing while we were moving our back, or now that we are
again standing still? Perhaps our hand becomes interested.
Instead of merely holding the belly, it begins to open for it. The
wrist softens, the palm and fingers give up imposing their
shape and seek the belly's shape. And the belly responds to the
now sensitive hand. It becomes alive. It gives up the holding
back or pushing out and seeks its own shape, which the hand
53 Hara
also seeks —rounded, firm but soft, movable, at the center of

the moving organism.
Something has come to life here. Breathing has changed. It
has become spontaneous. Betwêen our hands we feel it, enter-
ing sensitively, finding its own way, perhaps penetrating and
awaking secret regions long closed to awareness. Like the
incoming and outgoing tide, this breathing is patient and
ambitionless, bringing sweetness to whatever opens for it,
insistingon nothing. Deep inside us, as tissues awaken, neigh-
boring tissues stir toward more awakeness too. Consciousness is
contagious.
And now, through the gentle workings of breathing, it may
be that we sense back and belly changing together, freely and
in balance — no longer active and passive, defined and formless.
We begin to experience ourselves as a single organism, where
everywhere are needs and everywhere faculties, with number-
less interconnections to permit adjustments as the needs are
felt. And we may weaken,
find that anxieties ease, inhibitions
as they areundermined by the warmth and life which so often
followhand in hand with consciousness.
Such an experience may come at any time in the work. One
who has had the good fortune to be ripe for it, and the patience
to allow it, will, I think, have learned something of the nature of
love, and something of hara.

m ^Zi FINDING OUR STATURE
M ost Statues in the Western world,

other than the military, are of figures
standing; and in the statuary of ancient Greece and
almost everyone stood. One can equally come to one's
Rome
full
stature in sitting, as both Buddhist sculptures and Buddhist

practice attest. In ancient Egypt, the source of some of the
most marvelous creations in sculpture, significant figures are
almost equally sitting and standing.
Our work, too, is largely divided between these two activities
and among the great number of activities that depend on them,
as leaves depend on the stem from which they grow. But for our
purposes, the division is hardly a basic one. The difference
between standing and sitting, in the more precise sense of the
word which we shall investigate later, hes almost entirely in the
activity of the legs. In both cases head and trunk, or the totality
of organs and organic functioning, are fully involved, either in
discovering and coming to their own well-being, under the
influence of gravity, air exchange, and the support below, or in
obedience numberless inhibitive or distracting elements
to the
of one's conditioning. We work that we may gradually admit
more of all these factors into consciousness, where conditioning
begins to lose on us and to dissolve, leaving room for
its grip
the objective realities. These realities, far from dissolving in
the light of consciousness, become ever clearer and stronger.
The first part of this book will end with a study of sitting,
which is the mode in which most of us Americans now spend
the greater part of our lives. In the meantime, very much of
our work with standing will be equally pertinent as a study of
what can breathe life into that wasteland which usually passes
A study of what can breathe life into sitting.
among us for and of what brings such majesty and

sitting,
peace to the sitting figures of ancientEgypt and of both the

ancient and modern worlds of Buddhism.
In the previous chapter I described an experience in which
the hand, full as it usually is of the intent to mold and control,
became interested in the nature of the belly and yielded to the
magic of touch and discovery. This is, of course, especially
possible for the hand, just as manipulation is, because of the
many joints that allow it to adjust to such a variety of shapes.

But few of us are at all conscious of the many joints in our
spine. It is true we do not use our spine to mold and manipu-
late the world, as we do our hands, but we most certainly use it
for yielding to or for resisting the natural and spontaneous
movements of our own living.
It is the unique character of the sninal column that its many
vertebrae make possible that union of flexibility with structure
and gentleness with strength, which the great statues of the
Orient represent. But the specialization of modern civilized
man has brought a kind of premature arthritis to very many of
us. In our loss of most natural acts, like dancing
flexibility the
and love-making, must often be performed by force of will.
Force tends to rule our lives rather than strength, and letting
go rather than yielding. But it is the tree that has nothing to
let go and merely yields that displays such grace in the gale and
has the resilience to survive.

Anything that can help sensitize the musculature and restore
the natural mobility of our backs will do much to add to our
sense of freedom and aliveness. A very simple and useful exper-
iment to this end is that of coming from standing to a state of
hanging over, in which the flexibility of the whole length of the
spine becomes involved.
The elasticity of the adductor muscles of tlie legs is, of
course, involved too. That is the reason for the popular calis-
thenic exercise of bending over and trying to touch one's toes,
with which the experiment I suggest could easily be confused.
But here we are not interested in how much we can stretch
and how far we can get, but only in what happens on the way.
If we go slowly and sensitively, we can feci constant inner
57 Finding Our Stature
changes as more and more of the musculature of legs and

trunk yields to the downward pull of the earth, bringing about
redistributions of mass and fluids in the inner spaces and new
senses of weight and of extension. It is the extension of per-
missive tissues allowing their own weight to bring them grad-
ually into an elasticity which feels very agreeable.
But as the back becomes more extended, the belly and inner
organs are apt to become compressed, and circulation of blood
to and from the head may be restricted. Such sensations can
be most unpleasant. At the same time they are an unfailing
A state in which the flexibility of the

whole length of the spine becomes involved.
I
guide. One has only where there is still a sense

to return to
of ease and anew, more sensitive and alert, this
start sinking
time, to the changes that are called for —
not only in trunk and
legs but everywhere.
This gives the chance for very fine distinctions between
achieving, allowing, and letting go. What is allowed feels good
and right in itself; what is achieved feels good in spite of itself;
what is let go simply feels limp and heavy. The allowing is
when the person reacts as a totahty; the achieving is when the
person obliges himself, against his own resistance; the letting
go is when he abdicates.
When it seems one is already hanging, there may still be
developments if one sensitively feels out what slight changes
may still be needed and granted to obtain more room for breath-
ing and for circulation. These may lead to a finer balance
between extension and compression, and to a more appropriate
working together of the muscle systems with the complex
inner organic functioning, so that one system of the organism
is not performing at the expense of others. More giving is often
possible, and more ease and well-being reached, when enough

time is allowed.
But the real delight that may be found in this experiment is
in the slow return from hanging to standing, when at last
standing is not produced but discovered. It does not come at
once. Many attempts may be needed before the subtle and often
deeply rooted tendencies to effort can be sensed and aban-
doned. At first it may seem that one does not have the strength
for it to happen by itself; one has to make efforts to produce it.
At every stage on the way up, as on the way down, one may
need to pause, go back a little to where it still feels easy and
start rising anew —
gradually feeling out in what phase of the
process more energy is needed, or where this or that region is
not fully involved in the activity and must be allowed to join
in. It requires a strong interest, but offers rich rewards.
One may become lost and disheartened in one's own inner
complexities. But when this happens, there is always a thread
at hand to lead one out. At whatever point of the way between
hanging and standing, one has only to give full attention to the
facts of breathing and of the floor, and their power will do all
the guiding needed.

After a while, one may become so fully alerted throughout
that a fresh distribution of space and energy occurs which
allows real inner freedom and a sense of total functioning.
Then, when the work of rising is shared equally among all the
tissues concerned, and is sustained by breathing and by the
sure support beneath one, it can seem no work at all, but
instead simply a yielding to one's own vitality, whose native
energies tend naturally upward toward freedom and balance.
As back and shoulders, belly, chest, and finally neck and head
come gradually into what feel their right and natural relation-
ships, allowing the inner channels to open easily for fluids and
air, it seems hke the response of a thirsty plant when given
water, whose tissues fill until the whole organism stands erect
and fresh. No penis or nipple, no sprouting seed rises with more
totality and presence than does the whole person who has given
full attention to the way from hanging to standing. It is then
that standing can seem the full and natural expression of
being.
Another frequently made discovery, as vertebra after verte-
bra and mass after mass finds its rightful place in the general
unfolding, is that the moment when one feels now I am stand-
ing is always new. One comes to the recognition that there is no
"standing position" for a person in the sense that there is for a
The whole organism stands erect and fresh.

And left only the living being.
building. The positions that people assume, when not in reac-

tion to a specific situation, are assumed in order to conform to
some external model, or to some inner image or idea. The
moment of arrival at standing, when we are occupied with
our sensations, is never frozen into immobility or statuesque-
ness but remains in perpetual, subtle involuntary readjustment.
The sculptors of antiquity, in those enduring works where
the ideational content is the least, cut away from their
blocks of limestone and marble everything that might have
landed in a fixed position and left only the living being. The
same happens to each of us when our minds come to enough
quiet so that we can sense our needs.
13 LYING AS AN ACTIVITY
In twice
previous chapters,
telescoped
I have once or
what might have
been the fruit of many sessions into the form of a single con-
tinuing experience. It is seldom that such sequential expan-
sions of consciousness take place at once. They may, of
course — especially in the thrill of a first experience —
and when
they do, the person isr filled with wonder.
But normally we travel along at an everyday pace. For most
people at the beginning the attention span is short, and if thev
are not to wander off we must now and then shift direction. 1
believe this is the basic difference between our approach and
that of zazen. There the student persists through thick and
thin for the appointed time, hour after hour, despite all difficul-
ties. Our work, which has a similar ultimate objective of full
presence, takes a varying course, with many interruptions,

changes, and times for rest.
What we use for restingwhat most people unhesitatingly
is
associate with resting: namely, lying down. And since we have

only a floor to lie on, that is what we use —
hoping, often
vainly, that when people lie down they will neither get lost in
daydreams nor fall asleep.
But itîs by no means assured that in lying the student will
either remain awake or come to rest, let alone both, regiirdless
of the hardness or softness of what he lies on. So again and
again, paradoxical as it may sound, we work on lying and rest-
ing itself. Indeed, we may remember that lying, which is the
mode we have chosen for resting, is one of the "four dignities"
of the old Chinese saying.
The reader, like the student, will almost certainly assume
I
63 Lying as an Activity
that work on resting means practicing relaxation. I must state,
however, that in certain vital respects it is the opposite. For

most people's idea of "relaxation" is a kind of limpness, or what
Charlotte often likens to a flat tire, or a flower without water,
and this is what the practice of relaxation very often produces.
We have heard too much of the "tensions of modern life" and
have too little recollection of the marvelous tonicity of healthy
living creatures —
for instance, our own young children. So lying
for us will be an activity, just as standing is. And as in all our
activities, we will aim equally at inner openness for our own
life processes and at sensitive contact with the environment.
Whether this leads to more fatigue or to more refreshment is

something each one can discover for himself.
We may start with a clearly practical question. Does every-
one in the group feel he has room enough to lie comfortably?
Even in a large room, many people in a group of beginners are
so unconscious of space and so little in connection with the
others that they will lie down helter-skelter anywhere, crowd-
The marvelous tonicity of healthy living creatures.

ing each other hke so many weeds in a garden and leaving siz-
able open areas unused. It will not be possible towork this way
with any So we will ask specifically if everyone finds
clarity.
he has enough room for both arms and both legs so that the —
air, for instance, is free to enter armpits and crotch, and
there is room for circulation of the blood.

A number of people may now shuffle here or there till they
can lie more freely. But a few may become conscious, if the
question is asked, that in spite of having plenty of room they
are nevertheless pressing their legs together, or pressing their
arms against their sides, or in some way pressing their head or
back against the floor.
If we ask them now not just to "let go" but to feel out care-
fully the difference between pressing and not pressing, they
may find that the pressing is not just a "tension" to be released
but has indeed a certain function. Crossed legs may feel lonely
and insecure when they come apart, or may tend to flop side-
ways. Tightly held arms may be giving one a feeling of protec-
tion. These are valid reasons deserving respect and should not
just be dumped in a compulsion to relax. Nevertheless, all this
is not resting. It consumes energy, even if not a great deal,
impedes circulation, and is in some sense a barrier between

the person and the floor under him.
Cautious experimentation in opening the arms and legs a
little may
permit a certain flow of sensation that has not been
permitted before, and withit a flow of energy that changes the
—
way the limbs are lying indeed the way the whole person is
lying — often bringing with it a new feeling of aliveness and
refreshment. This is something that would not have occurred
if the tension had just been mechanically relaxed, as with the
strings of a puppet.
Something very similar may be discovered if we raise one
leg or arm a little from the floor, stay to feel its weight, and let
it return. How does the surface feel on which we land? How
long does it take until we have fully arrived; and when wc have
arrived, do we really allow resting?
Simple as this experiment sounds, it takes much practice for
most people to follow it through. We have been so trained in
exercises to strengthen muscles or to relax tensions, rather as
Raise one leg a little irom the ground,
stay to feel its weight, and let it return.
:^T
'"^jn
The difference between just touching the floor

and coming fully to rest on it.
one might tighten or loosen the strings of an instrument,

that we work on ourselves from the outside, so to speak, rather
than from the inside. So much emphasis has been placed on
the goals of our actions that we have lost the sense of what it is
to be on the way, to approach and to arrive, as every pilot must
when he lands his plane or brings his ship to dock. What we
usually do is raise the leg, let it most of the way down, and
then drop it, as we might a log on a woodpile and not as though
we were concerned with Uving flesh and blood.
To make the experiment still clearer, we may ask people to
raise the weight of the leg wdthout leaving the floor at all, so
they can feel the difference between just touching the floor and
coming fully to rest on it. They are often amazed when they
discover how far down one must allow the sinking in order to
come to rest. Very frequently someone reports afterward that
the leg in question seems to be lying deep in the floor, inches
lower than the other one. This, of course, is the measure of the
habitual withholding which has now been given up in one leg,
but not yet in the other. Another person may announce the
opposite: his leg feels light and floating, rather than sunken.
This leg was previously heavy and lifeless and has now gained
vitality. Such apparent contradictions merely illustrate the dif-
ferent habitual attitudes diff'erent people have acquired. I

think no one, at any age, who makes such discoveries fails to
be deeply impressed with them.
After a certain time of working this way, most people will
feel the leg used has become more ahve, longer, and, despite
the energy employed, more rested than the other leg. Alto-
gether they may feel greatly refreshed. In every sense, this
could be called work resting.^ What people usually mean by
working is something drawing water from a tank. One has
like
a fixed amount of energy, and after a time the supply must be
replenished. But this is like drawing water from a well, fed
constantly by invisible springs. With each bucket drawn, the
same amount flows up from deep in the earth, cooler and
fresher than what was taken away.
1. Rest Working is the title of an interesting study in gland function-

ing by the Matthias Alexander student Gerald Stanley Lee, pubUshed
in 1925 in Northampton, Massachusetts.
14 RESTING AS RELATING
w we have just explored in raising

hat
and lowering a leg while lying on the
floor may equally be explored with arms or head. Many people
—
have a persistent contraction in the neck a pulling into their
shell —which is usually acquired as my young friends and I
acquired ours, as a childhood defense. In stressful situations
this condition is aggravated, and even in lying it is not relin-
quished. This results in a sometimes painful pressure of the
back of the head into the floor, which is not as compliant with
our peculiarities as a soft mattress and pillow, but instead
resists them steadfastly. Indeed, as Charlotte often points out
and as we may soon discover for ourselves, the reason many
of us awake from sleep more tired than when we went to bed
is precisely because the soft beds we choose allow us to main-
tain our constrictions all night long.

A hard mattress, or, better still, the floor, makes many such
constrictions unbearable and obliges one to give them up, at
least while lying. Something has to give, and the floor will not.
Willy-nilly, the circulation resumes its course and refreshment
follows. During the first year of my study with Charlotte, I soon
came to sleeping on a bare plywood panel, and, despite a few
minor bruises, I never slept better. When two sleep together, if
they love to sleep in one another's arms, such a surface may
not be feasible; but even then it is well worth the trouble of
experimenting how far in this direction two lovers can go. For
the attitude of giving oneself is only enhanced when one gives
to the environment.
To return to work when raising and lowering the head while

:
lying on the floor, it is certainly easier to use one's hands to

help. This need in no way diminish the precision of the experi-
ment. Working with the arms, however, is just like working

with a leg, except that one may find it easier to raise only one
leg at a time, but contrarily to raise both arms together. An
interesting experiment is to compare the effects of moving
both arms together and of raising and lowering them separately.
For many years as a carpenter I overworked my arms and
shoulders. Millions who follow a single occupation have done the
same. It is me to lie on the floor and shghtly
always a delight for
raise and lower my arms, savoring the changes throughout
these toughened regions where the roots of the arms disperse
through the shoulder girdle as they begin to come awake for a
present in which no achievements are asked, but only a readi-
ness to yield outwardly to the support beneath and inwardly
to the grateful play of breathing.
In this connection, I would urge the reader not only to try the
same, but also sometime when he is in bed to experiment a httle
for himself in this familiar situation. Two external factors will
then be present: the resistance of the mattress and the pull of
gravity on limbs and covers. To raise any of the four limbs
alone, or in any combination with another, may allow open-
ings into the whole inner world. The only prerequisites are
patience and interest in exploration, and the willingness neither
to make an exercise of it nor to let thinking crowd out sensing.
When these simple conditions are met, each movement has
effects that may be felt through the entire organism. One may
lie on one's back, on one's side, or on one's stomach; the differ-
Something has to give, and the floor will not.

—
69 Resting as Relating
ent challenges, the different nuances in response, may become

utterly absorbing. And as with every other occasion of giving
complete, sustained attention to one's inner processes — which
is the sense in which I use the word "meditation" in this book
the result is always refreshment rather than fatigue.
Even when lying with another person, one can experiment
this way. Can one raise just enough of the weight of an arm or
leg resting on the other so that it seems to him merely the
sensitive refining of a connection? For that indeed is what it is.
Then it cannot disturb him, but can only make his resting
sweeter.
The reader may already have realized that in all these cases
of how one may whether on the
utilize a "rest" period of lying,
floor, in bed, or on a meadow, the central element is how one
relates to the environment. This is why we are so insistent that

these experiments should not be regarded as exercises. What
most of us mean by an exercise is something done for self-
improvement according to this or that preconception or author-
ity —often conducted in a sort of vacuum, in disregard of the
environment, and leading one away from the real world and
toward a narcissistic goal. Quite a different meaning, however,
can be assigned to the word practice, which to me means sim-
ply the opposite of theory. One exercises certain muscles in
weight-lifting, in order to strengthen them. But one may
practice weight-hfting to explore the activity or to discover
how one relates to a given task. In this sense, one may exercise
one's knowledge of French, as in the repetition of words or
forms to fix them in memory, or one may practice it to gain
the feel of another language and to communicate. Practice,
thus understood, leads us out of the world of fantasy into the
real environment. So, though I enjoy a little "exercise" as much
as the next man, I find it important to emphasize that the word
is thoroughly inappropriate to the activities I describe.
When we and let it come back to the floor, it is not
raise a leg
really different from drawing a bowstring and letting the arrow
fly to the target. Thinking will not help us, nor will reading
the instructions. We can only practice until we become more

and more fully involved with the task. The bow has the power,
How one relates to the environment.
in our hands, to send the arrow to the bull's-eye. Herrigel spent

six years in Japan studying archery until he could let it happen.^
It may very well take us six years too, following our practice
until we begin to feel through and through what we are doing,
when we are with it, and when and where we are still unin-
terested or exaggerating.
Since we are not practicing Zen, we shall not work six years
raising a leg. But in a sense, we do. In a sense everything we
do is the same. This is again how our activities differ from
exercises, which are always directed to particular goals, each
distinct from the others. We are not interested in the healthy
mind in a healthy body. We are interested in the total function-
ing person.
What we seek is to let ourselves be with it. As children, we
naturally gave full attention to everything, though it all may
have changed every moment. Then the authorities told us about
our responsibility not just to do things but to do them right. Since
1. Eugen Herrigel Zen in the Art of Archery (New York: Pantheon.

1953).
• l-'
>i
then, our attention has been divided between what we are

doing and whether we are doing it right. Many of us became
compulsive in our acts,- and many of us became resigned to
failure; but that did not free our attention for the task. We are
not able to give our attention fully; there are too many whispers
of conscience distracting us. We must take the bull by the horns
and deliberately how we do what we do, grad-
practice, feeling
up the cherished notions of the right way
ually learning to give
and the wrong way, which simply lead us away from the task
itself, and coming more and more to feel the real situation
and what it asks of us. Little by little we begin to get with

what we do, now more, now less; and finally, perhaps, comes a
spontaneous action, arising of itself from our full perception
of the situation, when the arrow effortlessly hits the bull's-eye or
the leg comes in full to the floor which offers it rest.
awakeness
cannot leave the subject of relating to the floor without
I
touching on the delightful possibility we have here, too, of using

lying to become more awake in our pelvis. For this we may
enjoy experimenting at length (and the reader may equally
enjoy experimenting) with raising our knees, while lying on
our backs, and bringing both legs to standing with our feet
on the floor. This changes the situation along the whole length
of the spine, allowing the small of the back to come closer to the
floor, and lengthening and opening the spinal musculature. The
head will probably want to find a new and freer lying where the
neck may also come more to resting.
Just bringing one leg at a time up to standing, or extending
one leg after the other sensitively to its full length on the floor,
offers so many opportunities for new discoveries in one's con-
tact with the floor, and at the same time many deli-
invites so
cate readjustments in the pelvis, that one may remain
engrossed in these activities for a long time. But perhaps the
clearest experimenting can be done when both legs are stand-
ing precisely where they feel freest and strongest. If one then
raises the pelvis very slightly, feels how one maintains it in the
air and how this affects breathing, and then feels the way back
2. As in this report from a student: "All this week I have tried very
hard to undo my overdoing."
I
to resting on the floor, there may be very interesting new

sensations. The combination of the many joints between lower
back and pelvis,and of the hip joints between pelvis and legs,
together with the considerable weight involved, provides an
unparalleled opportunity to sense what it is when one
like
allows a gradual settling down and a full coming to rest. One
may never have dreamed that such subtle changes, or such
clarity and delicacy of perception, could exist all through this
vital region, from the lowest spine to the very depth of the
groins.
Next to the head, this is the most crowded region of the
organism. Our most powerful muscles make their connec-
tions here, next to our most delicate sensibilities. The great
functions of reproduction and the vital necessities of elimina-
tion must find passage here, free and easy passage, like rivers
among forests and mountains; and yet here we must have the
strength to move our whole weight freely as we go about our
affairs. No wonder that any refinement of consciousness in
the pelvis, any reawakening of its natural sensitivity and

mobility, will help us in a thousand ways. It will make sitting
more distinct and real; standing, walking, and running easier;
dancing livelier; love-making more sensitive. And any general
Both legs standing where they feel freest.

awakening and freedom of being at this end of us, which we

sometimes wisely call our bottom, leads directly to a concomi-
tant freedom and peace at the top.
Now thatwe have used it as a mode of

working, and have explored some of its many actual compo-
nents, lying can begin to become truly useful to us for its
ostensible, but perhaps hitherto unrealized, purpose of offering
rest.
In fact, of course, any change of activity may be restful. A
vigorous game of tennis may be most refreshing after a day in
the office,and reading an adventure story may be restful after
a game of tennis. When I first worked as a carpenter in New
York, where the union practices of the day claimed many
heavy, unskilled jobs' for carpenters which elsewhere were per-
formed by "laborers," I would sometimes come home too
exhausted even to think of going anywhere in the evening. But
A lying that permits the uninterrupted flow

of metabolic process.
twice a weekwould nevertheless drag myself into the subway

I
and up to "modern primitive" dance at the

the classes in
Katherine Dunham studio. Here, where I first encountered
Haitian and conga drums, and black forms in ancient ethnic
movements, we responded to explosive rhythms with the
speed and energy of dynamos. If one rolled on the floor, a
puddle was left behind. Two hours later, I returned home,
ready for bed it is true, but already as rested and refreshed as
after a hot bath.
All this notwithstanding, sleep is the universal recourse
from the fatigue that finally develops in all activities; and the
active principle in sleep is a lying, mentally and muscularly
quiet, that permits the uninterrupted flow of metabolic process.
This, as we have found,something that we can study, and at
is
least to some extent arrive at, while awake. Now when we lie
on the floor to rest between our different periods of experimen-
tation, we can have some real hope of refreshment, and not of
just being carried away by trains of thought.
15 SITTING
A good deal of our work takes place

—
with, and mostly with-
while sitting
out, chairs. But although we have a largely sedentary culture,
this has not prepared people for sitting on ground or floor, as is
the usual practice in many parts of the world, and as must
have been the practice during the whole period of our evolu-
tion after our ancestors descended from the trees. Certainly
there is nothing in it contrary to our natural structure. On
festive occasions such as picnics and campfire gatherings, we
take this primitive way of sitting for granted. Young people
gathering around a guitar unhesitatingly prefer it to the use of
chairs. Our babies hke saplings, alert and effortless.
sit
But many of us Western adults soon lose this faculty. We

have created a physical scene that no longer requires it, and
even in adolescence our thighs, pelvis, and back begin to lose
their elasticity. When we sit on the floor, our ligaments, even
our clothes, don't give; our backs and shoulders easily begin to
ache; our ankles press; we clasp our knees, slump, or strain,
and we must constantly shift. Of course, we are not very con-
cerned: we have plenty of chairs. But the trouble is that when
one loses the elasticity for sitting, it is lost for very many other
things also.
These facts have been widely recognized, and there are many
useful exercises one can try, especially those practiced in dance
and yoga. But the stretches dance are apt to be forced and
in
not clearly felt, as is also true in yoga; and in yoga there is the
added likelihood that one forms the habit of seeking and attain-
ing rigid postures. One must not forget that yoga originated in
a culture where everyone sat on the ground anyhow and great
I
77 Sitting
muscular flexibility was the norm. As its name indicates, it was

a yoke, or restraint, a liberation not for movement but from
movement, from the shifting sensory world to a union with the
ideal. However diluted, some of this sense of achievement and
self-control is still usual in yoga; and our yoga students, like
our dancers, often find they have much to unlearn in order to
come to a fresh and ahve balance.
Nevertheless, every such exercise done patiently, in order
to explore the changing limits of one's flexibihty, rather than
Our babies sit like saplings.

to attain a position, and done permissively and not with force,

will be helpful. 1
Exercises in flexibility are also less necessary in those cases,
still common in many parts of the world, and with our own
hikers and campers, where modern bathroom styles have not
yet prevailed and where bowel movements are still performed
as they were for our first hundred million years, namely in
squatting. The squattoir, as I liked to call it, was one of my first
vivid impressions of the grand old France of forty years ago;
and the Japanese equivalent, without running water, I found
Equally impressive on our recent visit to Kyoto. It is hardly sur-
prising that those most highly civilized people, the French and
the Japanese, whose customs, at least until recently, have
1. It would not be fair to make these strictures on yoga without men-

tioning that in zazen also, in spite of the Zen (or at least Soto Zen")
rejection of achievement as a goal, new students are taught exactly how
to sit and what position to maintain. After a number of years, those
who continue tend to become free and easy in it, and it loses its rigidity,
as is undoubtedly the case with Indian yogis.
79 Sitting
encouraged such flexibility and forthrightness at the exit of

gastronomy, have been such masters at the entrance. And of
course, among the world's squatters there is no laxative
industry.
Nor is all this in the past. When I recently visited two New
Mexico communes, I literally found some of the most exciting

architecture in the toilets. With an obvious view of restoring
good sense and dignity to these long-degraded functions, both
had and space, equally
structures, exquisitely sensitive to light
divided between a Crane bowl and a simple hole in the floor.
One at last had the freedom of choice either to sit for evacua- :
tion on a seat, approximately as one sits for eating, or to dis-

criminate between these processes like every dog and cat, and
like Moses, Pericles, and Julius Caesar.
But in daily life we normally sit on chairs or, better, in —
chairs. There is a great difference. It is instructive to visit a
museum where a room of the seventeenth or eighteenth cen-
tury is reproduced. All is for sitting on, ^mth only a slight sup-
port off'ered to the back. Compare this with the Grand Rapids
furniture of the last fifty years : the overstuff'ed chair and sofa
designed to envelop rather than support, in which anything
that could properly be called sitting is out of the question. It
is thesame with the Detroit car. When I recently drove a

standard American car, my own Volkswagen bus not being
available, I realized that no muscular activity was required of
me other than the "fingertip (and toetip) control" advertised.
In fact, the seat embraced me like a womb. I felt curled in the
fetal position: ideally, I suppose, that of maximum comfort.
Yet was not comfortable at all. Why? I realized then that the
I
designers had overlooked at least two major considerations.

One I had no umbilical cord and needed to breathe for myself,
:
which in this position was possible only to a very limited

degree. Two: the need for alertness and quick changes in
response clearly distinguished life in the womb from life on the
freeway. In this car, only the head and the extremities were
expected to function, while all the rest of the person was con-
sidered just cargo.
One of the saddest consequences of this general alienation
Long hours at desks.

81 Sitting
What a different sitting when one is awake

all through for the task.
from our real needs is the way we oblige our children to spend
long hours at desks and in seats whose design has no relation
to their organismic functioning. The accompanying photo-
graphs by Friedrich Everling- show some of the distortions and
malfunctioning into which otherwise normal children are led
for long periods in typical schools, affecting their vision,
breathing, circulation, intellectual processes, and worst of all,
their sense of freely existing as persons.
2. A student of Elsa Gindler's who has made experiments in com-

bining classes in nuclear physics, of which he is professor, with classes
in sensory awareness.
In our studio we have nothing but stools. Elsewhere, we try

to have simple flat folding chairs available. We sit on them.
The support they off'er, like their shape, is perfectly distinct. We
let our feet come consciously to the floor, avoid crossing our
legs, and rest our backs against the backs of the chairs. This
last, of course, is not possible with stools, and it gives us the
opportunity for an interesting clarification. It will become

apparent, if the question is raised, that sitting thus on the chair
we are not simply sitting, but are also leaning. Part of our
weight is supported vertically and part horizontally.
Granting attention, we can easily feel how much weight we
give to the back of the chair. (Or does it feel more like pres-
sure? ) Could we say that we relate to it? We may leave the back
of the chair, come to sitting with nothing behind us but air, and
return, more alert and sensitive, to leaning. Are we also awake

for the floor? More openness may have to be permitted in pehis
and legs before we have the sense of really coming down to the
floor. We may
experiment with very slightly raising and lower-
ing our heels, or moving our knees, to become more conscious
in the musculature connecting legs with trunk.
Now let us try coming to actual sitting. We leave the back
of the chair for good, sensing the readjustments throughout
our structure as the support is given up, feeling how we come
more and more into the vertical, simultaneously reaching down
to the seat of the chair and rising up from it.
If now really to relate to what we sit

we are on, we must
become much more awake than usual in the region of us
directly in contact. Let us rise a little from the seat, pause, and
gently find our way back without using hands or eyes. Can we
find it? Ah! There is a definite meeting. Our nerves are as
good down there as anywhere.
The question comes up: are we just padding down there
where our sitting originates, as we may always have imagined.^
By no means! We begin to feel a definite structure, possibly as
firm as the chair itself. To explore it let us raise one buttock
and slip a hand underneath. Somewhat gingerly, we sit now on
our own hand. Something in our bottom is not just firm but
hard. Can we raise the other buttock, to sit on both hands at
once? Ouch! We
had not dreamed there would be such hard-
ness. With we divide our weight between our two hands,
rehef,
so as not to crush either. What is so hard in there? Even our
heels do not seem so hard.
Cautiously, buttock by buttock, we leave our hands and
return to the unprotesting seat. It becomes clear that, what-
ever the singular nomenclature for our bottom, sitting is actu-
ally divided between two sitting-bones. We can allow an equal
or unequal distribution of weight, for more or less pressure on
and of course on our own tissues.
the seat, We can also "walk"
With a little experimentation, we find
with these sitting-bones.
we can walk here and there on the seat till we are quite fami-
liar with it, perhaps discovering a very agreeable perceptive-
ness in our own pelvis. Finally we may perch ourselves on the
very edge of the chair, where our thighs no longer rest on any-
thing, but bridge out into space. By this time our whole pelvis
may be wide awake.
We have now found our architectural base, the sitting-bones.
From here, if awake and free, our thighs openly extend, and
our well-defined, clearly conscious legs come down to the floor.
Our feet rest sensitively and at ease. A platform, which we call
the chair, elevates the rest of us to about the level of our knees,
but from there up nothing outside ourself supports us.
Again we may close our eyes for clearer sensing. What holds
us up? Perhaps we hold ourselves up. Who has ever been told:
sit up straight?
Let us sit up straight. Let us really hold ourselves erect. How
does it feel? We need time to find out; it doesn'tbecome clear
all at once. Someone reports he feels tight in back and neck.
Another finds his breathing shallow. Another says he feels like
an image, not a person. We maintain the posture until it begins
to be tiring and then, very slowly, allow changes for more ease.
After a while, an observer would notice that "ease" means
quite different things to different people in the gioup. Some are
still in a vertical sitting, others deeply slumped. We must
explore further.
We are all asked to slump now. It should be \Nithout exagger-
ation, just what is famihar to us. How is it now? Perhaps quite
Our architectural base, the sitting-bones.
comfortable. It is, after all, what we believe to be "relaxed"; it
has some of the familiarity and comfort of an old shoe.

But let us stay awhile: there is something unusual in this
situation. We are not hearing a lecture; we are not eating at a
lunch counter, where we always sit slumped, or watching tele-
vision. We are not even collapsing from exhaustion. We are
just sitting slumped to feel how it is.
Finally we are asked, "Who still finds it comfortable?" Only
one or two hands are raised.
"What is not comfortable?"
There are many answers. "I can't breathe." "There's no room
for my stomach." "My back hurts." "I feel constricted all over."
What changes would we have to allow now for more well-
being in sitting? But gradually ... let us sense where we go
not just change blindly, as we do so often. Where is more room
needed inside for all that lives there? Not where do we think
we ought to have more room, but where do we feel it needed?
Let us bring our hands to the top of our heads. Room is
needed in the shoulder girdle too, especially if our hands are to
rest lightly on our head, so that the head does not have to press
up against the hands. How far is it, when we are not straining
anywhere, but just awake and open, from our hands above our
head to the seat below our sitting-bones? What may need room
to live and breathe in between?
Subtle changes begin to occur in those seated : tentative read-
justments, half -conscious inner gropings. How \\1de are wc
when we allow our natural width, without stretching? How
much space do we need from front to back? Is there any sense
of life in our backs? How deep do we allow ourselves to be
down to our bottom, till we come to the seat?
To an onlooker, the faces would now be quiet as in sleep, the
habitual expressions gone, eyelids still, but radiating a deep
inner awakeness. No one is in his habit any longer, but is
exploring something new. We let our hands find their way to

rest now on our thighs, so that from the scat trunk and licad
rise freely as high as we Very striking: for the first time,
go.
perhaps, many hands cotnc to restiuq on the thighs as butter-
flies on flowers, without at the last moment just dropping. Our
Where is room needed for all that lives there?
eyes open. On all sides, others of the group sit near us, like the
flames of candles. Each of us feels it in himself. We are alive.
We sit.
On other occasions wework with partners, for there is
will
no end to the work on sitting. One person sits on chair or stool;
the other comes gently with his hands to back and front, finding
the living person. Where is our inner living felt, where we need
room for being? Hours can be filled with such explorations, to
undo the work of the numberless hours of our lives that have
been spent acquiring and consolidating the inhibiting habits.
No time is too much, if we are with it. Only if we do it as exer-
cises for an image of self-improvement does it become empty
and fruitless.
Or we may slap and massage each other; dig with our fingers
into the intercostal or the shoulder muscles to wake them up
Quiet as in sleep,
but radiating a deep inner awakeness.
89 Sitting
Closer to that marvelous sitting of young children,

alive and effortless.
and stimulate their elasticity; work, specifically in sitting, to

—
awaken head and eyes for always here, in what Charlotte likes
to call our "control tower," if peace and clarity come, more
awakeness and freedom will tend to spread everywhere.
As it seems feasible, we will divide our work on sitting
between chair and floor, for gradually, as we become more
awake in our inner living, we will come closer to that marvelous
sitting of young children, which we can see also in our zoos
wdth the apes, where no furniture is needed at all, and we can
exist in peace, alive and effortless, open for the light of our
consciousness to burn according to its nature.
*
Toward
a More
Sensitive
Relating
It is often said that we are born and
die alone, but this is hardly true. The old Navajos, when they
felt their time had come, did indeed ask to be escorted to some
lonely place which they had chosen, where farewells were said
and they were left alone to spend their final hours undisturbed,
coming to peace with the surroundings. But this was in the full
ripeness and at the very end of life. We are born very differ-
ently. No sooner have we left one human ambience than we
seek another, exchanging the darkness, warmth, and quiet of
the womb for the life on earth of crying out and seeking for
the breast. It is in a primarily human environment that we
spend our lives. Whether this human environment is felt as
unique and separate from the general environment or merely
as a special manifestation of it depends for most of us almost
entirely on our culture. But our culture is in a way itself an
environment, which each of us in minute ways is constantly
modifying. How we modify our culture depends on the clarity
with which we perceive it, and perceive through it, and on the
sensitivity and integrity with which we relate to the individuals
and objects without which no culture could exist.
16 SLAPPING AS A STIMULANT
wanimals are kept in a constant

ild
of sensory awareness by the

state
the whole course of evolution has prepared their

—
mere facts of their environment an environment for which
many facul-
ties and which tends tokeep these faculties in constant and
well-balanced activity. We, however, as individuals in a highly
organized society, are obliged to specialize. We become machine
operators, or business executives, or lawyers, channeling our
energies, often very narrowly, during our productive hours.
Indeed, the more productive we become, the hkelier it is that
we have limited our general organismic functioning quite
strictly to those areas which merely serve our social and eco-
nomic roles.
The practice of sensory awareness would revolutionize all
this. I do not mean the classes described here. But I do mean

a quiet feeling through of whatever one undertakes. Just as
we work in the classes with any activity that suggests itself,
so in social and economic living there is no activity that cannot
be performed either mechanically or with full attention and
interest. One is not naturally a machine performing a task,
whether the task laying bricks or computing. Each of us
is
represents anew most highly evolved sensory and cognitive

the
nervous organization in existence. That is why we like to watch
birds and chipmunks. They have their way of living, and we
have ours, and in both there can be such a thing as joie de
vivre during the day, and the weariness after joyous labors
that draws us all to rest at the end of it.
As things are, however, the weariness of a gioup of people
assembled for a class of ours at the end of the dav is in 2;ood
!
95 Slapping as a Stimulant
part boredom, or the condition resulting, notfrom the overwork

from the underwork of others. During
of certain faculties, but
the day, consciousness of the drain on one's vitality consequent
on blocks and imbalances in functioning has been warded off
by a steady intake of distractions: the radio, idle conversation,
tobacco, chewing gum, and the like, and in the evening anes-
thesia is normally prolonged by the chatter of television. How
must it now be to forgo distractions and give attention
difficult
to themuted and unfamiliar voices of one's own senses

Resting on the floor often brings little relief from this type
of weariness. A more effective tonic is stimulation. It is the
same situation as the recess in school. The children have been
cramped at their desks for an hour or so, compelled to focus
attention on matters that often have not caught their interest,
and for ten minutes they are allowed to run around in the
school yard. Who does not know the shrieks and shouts, the
bursts of energy surrounding any ball, any encounter, any
game?
Our students need a little excitement too, to start the arteries
pulsing, discharge the wastes, and renew the oxygen in a —
word to get refreshed after the tedium of the day. If a bear
should now push open the door and enter the room, fatigue
would vanish. Then we might learn what energies develop
when, as in a magnet, all our molecules point in one direction.
In fact, it is the gradual arrival at such a state, where every-
thing in the organism works together, not aimed toward a bear
but toward the central life process of breathing, which makes
it possible for some people to sit in meditation day and night,
without the usual need of sleep for restoration.

But we are neither practicing Buddhist meditation nor in a
situation to relyon alarms and floods of adrenalin. What can we
do — we who are here to come to quiet and to sensing?
One thing we can indeed do is to slap, either ourselves or
others —not as a punishment, of course, but as a stimulant.
Our entire surface is there to be aroused, a continuous network
of nerve ends and blood vessels, all leading underneath and
into the interior.
How we slap is something we shall have to study, just as we
found there is very much to study in how we lie. Most people

can no more just start slapping themselves or another with any
delicacy and discrimination than they can sit down and start
playing the piano. Nevertheless, if the slapper is not actually
bored, timid, or vindictive — and sometimes even if he is — what
he does will awaken nerves and start the blood going wherever
he slaps. So for better or worse, we may as well start right in
and slap ourselves all over, with particular attention to any
areas where waters may seem stagnant and tissues drowsy.
After a few seconds of slapping it may be wise to interrupt
things so as to feel whatwe have done till now and how it goes
on working in us. We might even recognize whether we are
unheedingly punishing or comforting ourselves instead of wak-
ing ourselves up. It is astonishing to see the incredulity and
amusement on people's faces, followed by growing interest and
pleasure, when they are first introduced to this simple remedy
for dullness.
When more stimulation seems indicated, one person may
still
stand with arms extended, or may hang over toward the floor,
while another — or, better, two or three others — rain their
attentions on him. In many cases pleasure now rapidly becomes
delight, as the receiver finds himself bobbing among the slaps
like a speck of cork in a glass of champagne.
How we slap is something we shall have to study.

Since enthusiasm in such an activity comes easily and is
naturally infectious, the leader may often have to caution

against what may well sound and feel like beating, and remind
the slappers, as well as those slapped, to permit their own
breathing. Many people, when aroused, will attack another as
they attack cold water at the beach, plunging in and splashing
with breath held, so as to do as much, and feel as little, as
possible. In such a case, consciously to permit one's own
breathing brings immediate changes, for the stiffness in wrists,
elbows, shoulders, neck, and head that prevents sensitive
slapping (as well as reactivity to slapping) is hardly possible
without the corresponding rigidity in chest and belly that
inhibits breathing.
The study of slapping is a matter of coming awake for the
nature and reactivity of what one slaps. We must become very
present, to feel what we are doing. Since in our experience a
slap has usually been a rebuff or a punishment, we must now
give it special attention.
The which the adult administers to the child in anger
slap
is normally his reactionto some real or fancied threat in the
child's action to himself or to what he values. He hardly feels
the child; he feels his own emotion and its release. When the
slap is given in cold blood, and the adult is not conscious of
anger but only of his duty to enforce the law, he may feel even
less, and the effect of alienation in the child may be even
greater. The comradely slap on the back which friends give

each other may sometimes be mutual reassurance and the
pleasure of contact, but it may also signify, "Our understand-
ing requires you to accept my superiority and my aggression!"
Our slapping, therefore, no matter how friendly the inten-
tion, is apt to have a great deal of unconscious symbolic value
and must be studied attentively. In particular, is it our friend's

back we are slapping, or his head? If his back, is it the sturdy
regions of the shoulder blades or the sensitive area of the kid-
neys? How can one slap, or tap, the eyes, the lips, the many
very different tissues in the vicinity of the ears?one con- Is
scious where are muscles that need a going over, and where
are glands that do not? How deep in the obscure regions
between spine and skull, or between spine and pelvis, can slap-
ping bring a new flow of vitality?
In case the reader should already be impelled to try this out
for himself, I would suggest he start with tapping his head,
where there is a vivid and immediate possibility of exploring

and savoring the difference between the delicate tissues envel-
oping eyes, ears, nose, and jaws, and the solid bone, so close in
the neighborhood, where these tissues are attached. Similarly,
how deep a stimulation do we need between the lower part of
the skull and the back of the neck? But each of us can find out
for himself what feels most needed.
Charlotte convinced that the origin of the practice of
is
spanking children was the primitive impulse to wake them up

for things, and not to punish them. However that may be, it is
certainly the case in. Zen which a flat, heavy stick
practice, in
is used by the priest resounding and smarting slap to
to give a
the shoulder muscles of those sitting in meditation who seem
in danger of wandering or falhng asleep. Sounding in every
respect like a severe punishment, this slap is nonetheless re-
garded by everyone as a helping hand and is often asked for
by the recipient, who bows humbly before and after, as does the
priest who gives it. To give such a blow effectively, with
maximum startlingness and without injury, requires the same
kind of knowledge and dedication, with the same amount of
practice behind it, as a shot to the green does for a golfer.
Such precision is of course not needed for the impact of a hand
on a child's buttocks. But in the impulse behind the action, 1
think every child deeply senses the difference between a spank-
ing administered as punishment for a forbidden act and one
given in order to startle him into a larger awareness.
One can approach slapping either as a performance or as
improvising and do a very good job in either case. But the way
of our work is to feel out improvising: to see the need, feel the
ability, and let the result happen. The energy needed is then
inspired by the desire for and joy in the activity, in which the
actual sensation of what is needed does the guiding. For this
to be possible, a certain selflessness is necessary. One slaps
easily then, gently or briskly or sharply as the need is felt, with
no pursed lips or knitted brows and with breath flowing freely.

In the same way, an African drummer can play hour after
hour, his tones and rhythms returning incessantly like the ever-
varied waves of the sea, with never the lifeless monotony of a
metronome, and without fatigue. Seeing such a drummer, one
often sees a man in full meditation, transported and absorbed
by the reaction of the drum to his touch and by his own total
interaction, through the invitations of the drum, with the
responses of the dancers.
Such a scene can be rapturous. All present may be carried
along on the living rhythms, which rise and react to the motions
of the dancers as the dancers react to them. Every face may
glisten with sweat, but no one is tired. Eyes are at rest, breath-
ing joyous; every joint and muscle comes into its own, as each
single star does on a clear night. All the drummer does to the
drum is slap it. But in his slapping he may glow with such
devotion as Buddha does in his enlightenment.
God forbid thatwe feel our partners as drums and use them
either for rhythm or for self-expression! That happens all too
often. But we can let ourselves be tuned in for the slapping
with eyes at rest and breathing sustaining us, and perhaps at
moments become one with the living tissues we are working on.
17 SIMPLE CONTACT
o ur classes are of no lasting value

unless they inspire the student to con-
tinue sensing for himself. As one begins to feel the possibihty of
hfe's being an endless exploration, any moment can become a
moment of being, full of its own significance. At such moments
distractions are not needed, or even interpretations. The pres-
ent experience is sufficient. Living is its own justification. This
is why have given so much space to the experiments in our
I
classes which we do alone, and which the reader can equally

try at home if he has the patience and interest.
Nevertheless, we do not live alone. Every glance, every tone
of voice, every letter is a form of contact. Every figure in the
supermarket or on the sidewalk is an energy field with which,
willy-nilly, we come into some kind of relationship.
People come together, or hold themselves apart,
in an infinite
variety of ways, complex and simple. All this, one way or
another, can be our study. But I should like to start at what
seems to me to be the beginning.
Almost from the moment of birth, a baby's life falls into a
certain rhythm of action and quiet, of which I suppose the most
significant, and certainly the most variable, part is in connec-
tion with his mother. In the United States the actual connection
may be very slight; in the Mexican countryside it may be con-
stant, with the baby either nursing or resting in his mother's
shawl against her breast all day long.
In our competitive culture, the experience of inactive, quiet
connection is normally restricted to rare moments of falling or
being in love, as when two walk holding hands or
lovers simply
lean against each other on a park bench. With or without
101 Simple Contact
actual touch, such communion occurs more often in youth and

in old age than in the "prime" of life. This is a phenomenon
very well suited to our study. So I shall begin with the descrip-
tion of a class exploring simple physical contact.
We may take a few moments at the start feehng out our
standing. To come quietly to ourselves first is really a prereq-
uisite for coming to another. Then we will take partners,
preferably someone we don't know and do not choose. One now
stands at the side of the other; and when the other signals that
he has come to a quiet standing and is ready to be approached,
the first person brings his hands somewhere to the other's
front and back. Let us say one has come to the other's upper
chest and to the back opposite, between the shoulder blades.
What does each feel between the enclosing hands? Time will
be needed to come to enough quiet so one can really tell. Does
anything change under the touch? If there are signs of hfe
between his hands, does the toucher touch in such a way as not
to disturb what he feels living there, yet without diminishing
his connection to it?
In actual working, if such questions are asked, long pauses
are allowed after each so that everyone has time to let an
answer come in its own way. Is it possible to give oneself to
sensing without thoughts? Can one feel the difference when
now and then thinking is given up — as well as the effort not
to think?
After a while we may move. We may come to the lower chest
or to the diaphragm; to opposite sides of the head; to the belly,
in front —
and back or at the sides resting in between and
renewing our standing, so that we may be fresh for each experi-
ence.
It has been made clear that one partner will bring his hands
to the other but will not manipulate him. This may not be easy.
One may understand that the hands are not to be active: for
instance, that we are not to stroke or massage. But simply to
come into full, permissive contact with another person is some-
thing many have been conditioned against since early
of us
childhood.We have been taught that we must be in control of
ourselves and of our contact with the other even if only —
With flexible and quiet hands a dimension enters
consciousness which the eyes alone cannot provide.
103 Simple Contact
through trying to convey the message that we like or dislike

him. Unconsciously, we may control our contact and in so
doing interfere with our own sensations and direct the other's.
Although unconscious, this is already manipulation.
We are actually working when we touch one another work- —
ing to try out our hands not as agents of our will but as organs
of perception. For this all their native sensitivity and flexibility
must be gradually rediscovered.
Even when we have gained freedom to find and adjust our-
selves to the structure of the other, it may not be easy to sense
and adjust to his balance. If we come to him rigidly, the fine
nuances of balance are lost. If we come openly and sensitively,
it may help him to a release in which his balance changes,
which we must then follow. There is constant change, for this is

no mechanical equilibration but the ever-renewed coming into
equilibrium of living beings.
Indeed, however we touch him, we may somewhat disturb
our partner's freedom. Our hands may feel hard to him, or
heavy, or light and fluttery. He may feel "handled," restrained,
pressed, or — sometimes a very disappointing experience — not
really touched at all. Accordingly, one might expect such con-
tacts to be often unsatisfying, if not downright inhibitive. But
in a great majority of cases it is just the opposite. The mere
fact that one comes to the other quietly and without overt
manipulation is normally very moving to the person touched.
He feels cared for and respected. And the one who touches, if
he is really present in what he does, is apt to feel something of
the wonder of conscious contact with the involuntary, subtle
movement of hving tissue.
It is probably on the basis of these experiences more than of
any others that "sensory awareness" has swept the country in

the last few years. A nation of doers, who seldom touch one
another without a specific purpose in mind, and whose touch,
if not simply careless, is first consciously and then, as it
becomes habitual, unconsciously controlled, are asked to come
together just to experience. They are not slapping each other's
backs to give reassurance or to show approval, not furtively
feeling the other to seek reassurance themselves, not trying to
correct or relieve the other, or punish or seduce him, or

touching symboUcally as in kiss and handshake. They have
come together only to experience the other, to permit contact in
which, even through their clothes, an exchange of vitality
occurs simply because we are all alive and give off energy and
have the senses and consciousness to perceive aliveness when-
ever we arrive at the degree of quiet that makes this possible.
When even a little of our usual purposiveness is given up, so
much aliveness comes through that we are all affected by it.
To permit simple contact is to permit, and necessarily to

experience, the natural reinforcement that the living has for
the living. It is the experience of mother and infant after
breast feeding, when she perhaps rocks him quietly in her
arms. It is the shared experience of two survivors of a catas-
trophe; the experience of peace after a sexual connection that
was not maneuvered. It is the experience of just stepping from
the inanimate world of the indoors into the living world of a
garden. Now, perhaps for the first time, it is asked of one
specifically, as simply as one would ask another for a glass of
water. No wonder almost everyone is "touched," in fact
"moved"; and no wonder we can and do work at this for years,
gradually finding a freer opening of those intricate inner pas-
sages which inhibit or permit the flow of experience.
It may any point be helpful, during such experiments, to
at
make time an interlude of exploring our own hands, or the
for
hands of another, exactly as we explored our feet in an earlier
chapter. Though we have not kept our hands packaged all day,
as we have our feet, but may have been constantly using them,
we have tended to use them over the years in ever more chaiac-
teristic ways, so that we can often tell one another by our hand-
shakes almost as by our tones of voice. But if our hands ai*e

really to find their way to the shapes they come to, they must
begin to give up this acquired character and regain their
natural potential. For thorough digging into their struc-
this, a
ture and kneading through of the musculature can be very
helpful. The pleasure that attends rediscovery of one's native
mobility is a powerful antidote to the habit that always tend- is
ing to diminish it. Then, when we come back to seeking the

The natural reiniorcement that the living
has for the living.
contours of our partner, there is the added interest in feeUng

ourown yielding.
Any number of variations are possible on the basic experi-
ment I have just described. It can be a great joy to let one's
hands come fully and feelingly to another's head. So much
sensation is latent in the contour of a forehead, or in the com-
plex joining of bone and muscle where neck meets skull. Here,
where so many headaches have their seat and so much misery
may lodge, is also tissue that rejoices in contact, as every
mother knows who has supported the heavy head of her baby or
laid a quiet hand on his brow when he had fever. Every owner
of a dog or cat knows these spots also, and every lover of a horse.
Our habit, of course, is to stroke or scratch or pat, and cer-
tainly much of our reward is the animal's active response. But
if we would try just coming into contact with the same care
and interest that we work toward in the classes, bearing in

mind that our pet's sense of time and rhythm is very different
from our own, we might find an astonishing new depth of
relationship and an unfamiliar equality.
There may be an equal richness in holding another's feet or
enclosing his knees. Then one may learn why photography can
never replace sculpture. For with flexible and quiet hands a
dimension enters consciousness which the eyes alone cannot
provide, no matter how deep their gaze or how fine their focus.
Contact may equally be explored when two touch each other:
for example, in standing, with each bringing his hands to the
hands of the other, or to the other's shoulders. The eyes may be

closed, or our gaze may be lowered, so that we see only our
partner's form and breathing.* Conscious to permit our own
breathing, we may compare the way we come to the other with
the way we come to the floor, heedful of the question: are
such comparisons made with a critical mind and eye, as we
have been taught, or just through sensing?
And if the two partners come to movement, is there a move-
ment possible in which neither one leads or urges, where eyes
and mind are at rest, where the two become one living bridge
1. Students of Zen may readily see a connection between this attitude
of the eyes and theirown practice.
Are such comparisons made with a critical mind
(compare brows) or just through sensing?
from the floor beneath the feet of one to the floor beneath the
other?
But do our eyes not meet? Do we avoid this consummation of
contact? In any such class as I describe, certain people wdll
find it extremely uncomfortable to forgo looking the other in
the eye. In this age of encounter, the reader may well wonder
why I suggest deliberately keeping the eyes closed or lowered.
Furthermore, when I suggest a nonvlsual or semivisual
human connection — especially one that may come into semii-
voluntary or even involuntary movement — does not so fully
sensory a contact lead to the sexual? I feel I should end this
chapter with a few words of personal opinion about ocular and
genital contact — the
two modes which seem to me the most
all-pervasive in one sense, and the most highly focused and
vivid in another. In these modes, too, the distinction between
simple and complex is relevant.
Like our sexuality, I believe the use of our eyes has become
compulsive. Impatient with the fears and hesitations implicit
in so many of our childhood backgrounds, we seek break-
throughs rather than feel our way with quiet and forbearance
into more natural organismic paths. In our modern American
belief that there is a shortcut to everything, there is a very
widespread tendency to try to achieve deeper contact through
direct use of the eyes — a sort of cutting of the Gordian knot. It
is true that this may have powerful, often immediate, effects.

But it is not sensing. To gaze into another's eyes, except in love
or in long-tested friendship (when it is sometimes, but rarely,
needed as reproach or as reassurance), results in a suspension
of sensing, not a deepening of it. To gaze so is more often to
declare oneself to another than to perceive him, and to challenge
rather than invite the other's response —
not to speak of those
many occasions when one simply tries to outstare the other. For
we Americans seldom have the eyes we had as young children,
innocent of competition or intent. We have not the simple fierce,
friendly, or evasive eyes of simpler cultures, or the open,
inquiring eyes of animals. We can work toward this most
natural of all modes of contact, but I do not think we can hurry
it. In our classes, when we have gained the courage to feel it is
-
109 Simple Contact
not evasive to avoid the other's eyes, we may venture a glimpse

of them as we might venture a ghmpse of the sun, adjusting
the shutter speed of our camera to theenergy that can pour
instantly through these apertures on a clear day and more
slowly on an overcast one. In my feeling, more than that is not
generally useful for this study — at least not until very advanced
stages of it. "Eyeballing," however useful it may seem as a
technique in the field of encounter, calls for a different film
from the one we use: an emotional rather than a sensory
one. On ours, the result is less likely to be a clear image than
plain overexposure.
The eyes were once called the "windows of the soul." When
we have worked with ourselves as totalities to the point where
we can let our eyes be open to the eyes of another as windows
open to the comings and goings of the air, without inhibition
to our heartbeat or to our breathing, or to that of the other,
then and then only, I should say, can we see with our eyes as
true organs of perception and not as instruments of interaction.
This, too, we could call "simple contact."^
might seem a similar evasiveness when I say that this
It
work with quiet and reciprocity between partners is neither

sexual nor nonsexual. Surely it could be fundamental for love
as it could be for friendship, or for dancing, or for a multitude
of practical work such as paddling a canoe or moving
situations,
a piano or setting rafters in a roof —
to name a few of which I
have experience. But just as we can work over the long haul
toward recovery of our innate capacity for a free meeting of the
2. Cf. the extraordinary technique, in Castaneda's books, of scanning

a terrain with crossed eyes to perceive differences unnoticeable in normal
looking.
3. Our friend Ann Dreyfuss once invited Charlotte and me to the zoo
where she worked with disturbed children, encouraging them to come
into contact with young animals. It was dusk when she let us in among
her animal friends. They showed no signs of fear. Rather, I felt only an
intensity and totahty of silent presence in the waning light, which in
memory I can compare to no other experience. Though the aliveness
seemed everywhere, its purest flow seemed to come to me through their
alerted heads and especially through their eyes. I have no doubt the
actual contact with these animals —
even their mere presence had a —
therapeutic effect on the children not unlike that which the presence of
.the Zen master has for his students.
work with simple contact leads ultimately toward

eyes, so our
an equal and parallel freedom in that other prime facihty
for relationship, our sexuality.
In a culture where sexuality, like watching, has been sharply
isolated for the child from the rest of organismic functioning
usually first prohibited and later urgently required — it cannot
so easily find its rightful place. But among people who have
come to regard orgasm, like a full meeting of the eyes, as
something not to be permitted but to be achieved, the study of
simplicity in contact can be revolutionary.
—
18 ACTIVE CONTACT
common
o—
flow of energy
f course, it is a stirring
all the more so it is

experience to
find oneself yielding with another to a
when not with one
person but with several. Who has not thrilled to the sudden,
spontaneous wheeling of a flock of birds? In group song or
—
movement choirs or work gangs chanting, tribes dancing
often irresistible energies may be released, either to be absorbed
naturally into the environment, like waves breaking on the
shore, or sometimes, if directed by a common need, to work
wonders of achievement. In simple contact with another
human being, as described in the last chapter, this mutuality
may also be discovered, and a similar, if quieter, heightened
sense of being may come with it.
But a far commoner life situation is when we are intention-
ally doing something to or for someone else: when our contacts,
in other words, are not simple and mutual, but are vehicles
through which one person acts and the other is acted upon.
This is the specific situation with regard to doctor, nurse,
therapist, masseur, et cetera, and patient; counselor and client;
teacher and student. Indeed, it is the normal function of most
everyday interactions, in the house and out. Above all, we are

constantly doing things to and for our children. And all of this,
of course, always with the best intentions.
When we on the many cases in which underprivileged
reflect
children havegrown up to be healthier than the "privileged"
namely, when the parents, though unable to provide material
goods or avenues to success, have yet simply enjoyed and
trusted their children as human beings — we must reconsider
and review all our good intentions. Indeed, as we have heard,
it is with good intentions that the road to hell is paved — and

not only with the intentions that were never reahzed. but per-
haps even more with those that were.
How sensitively and appropriately we act with another per-
son is therefore a vital part of our study. It will be seen
presently that this is scarcely different from how we act \Nith
things. It is only more complex. In both cases, what we do is
functional only to the extent that our perception is unbiased
and our reactivity uninhibited. Hank Aaron hitting a ball for a
home run and a wide-awake mother gently and surely picking
up her baby are functionally the same phenomenon: the full
and direct response to a given situation.
In our groups we have many ways of acting upon another, or
of setting up situations in which we could call ourselves "help-
ers." For example, one person may lie on the floor, while
another raises and lowers his arm or leg, rather as I have
already described a person raising and lowering his own leg.
Of course, there are many more possibilities in the present

case, for the one lying can accept the help offered, or resist it,
or do the work himself, or go through any combination of the

three together. The helper may also act in a great variety of
ways, very often unconsciously.
In this experiment, the person lying is asked to take time to
become and comfortable, and to signal when he feels

quiet
ready for the other to approach him. This obviates the reflex
reactions which might be expected at an abrupt approach. The
other, having kneeled or seated himself where he can work
easily, then takes the foot and quietly raises the leg a few inches
from the floor, sensing its weight. This weight may change per-
ceptibly while the leg is being supported, as the one lying en-
trusts it more perhaps retracts it; the helper
to his helper, or
may even see flexings or relaxings in gioins and thighs, and
changes in breathing. He supports the raised leg, if possible
feeling what is going on in and between leg and trunk, perhaps
gently moves it a little this way or that, careful not to force it,
and then lowers it to the floor. That is the whole experiment,
taking perhaps five minutes. Nine times out of ten, the one
lying feels eased, lengthened, and more alive in tlic leg, and
113 Active Contact
He quietly raises the leg a few inches irom the floor.
often throughout the whole side, that was worked with. But
what actually happened?
Again, as when we just touched each other, the gratitude at
being handled with care by another at simply not being —
grossly manipulated — can be overpowering. The mere careful
giving of attention is experienced as love. We are still far from
any art of loving, as Erich Fromm entitled his book: this is
what we shall work at. But in studying this art we shall not be
Studying techniques, nor shall we be occupied with thoughts of
love.For in a garden we do not plant flowers: we bury seeds. If

we care for the soil, the flowers will appear by themselves.
When we ask what was experienced, there may well be mov-
ing statements about trust and kindness. But we must explore
specific details. Was the leg heavy or light? Often it was very
light, when one on it, and indeed the helper may recall
reflects
that the lying one did much of the work himself, instead of
letting himself be carried. Was the lying one conscious of this?
Usually not. But perhaps there is a memory that the helper did
not offer enough security, or seemed unsure, or shifted position
while helping, or perhaps gripped too hard, any of which may
have made a full entrusting of the weight difficult. Or he may
have moved too fast, not giving the one lying enough time to
sense the situation fully and to accept and permit the move-
ment oflPered. So thie latter controlled it, either by resisting or by
doing it himself.
If so much was imperfect, then, why in so many cases did
it move the one helped — now
and then to tears? Perhaps
because, taking time, the helper sensed what was inappropriate
and allowed a change, which caused the one helped to allow
change too. And for just a moment a door, which no one knew
was there, opened to allow a glimpse into the world of real con-
nection.
Just as the leg may have seemed too light, it may have
seemed too heavy. This is almost never because someone is
physically unequal to the task. In either case the person lying

was probably unable at that moment to aflow something to be
done to him. Either he guided the activity, or the muscles in
his pelvis locked against it. For his part, the helper, meeting
the unwillingness to yield, may have been impatient and tried
to shake the leg or break through the resistance, thus only
increasing it.
Furthermore, a great many people have never really prac-

ticed lifting anything, and neither any other
in sitting nor in
way have adjusted themselves what the task calls
carefully to
for. Struggling, as a consequence, with what they do, tliey are
unable to off'er the calm and security which invites yielding.
Finally, a few people will find their leg was pushed unpleas-
115 Active Contact
antly into the hip joint, instead of being gently freed there.
Yet, after a few attempts, in which people have had time to
get over the novelty of the experiment and come a little more
sensitively and discriminatingly to what they are doing, almost
everyone will enjoy the experience. When it is really worked
with, this can be a very full and beautiful experiment. For with
the acceptance, even if only tentative, of another's support,
with the beginning of a free yielding to the other, comes the
recognition, deep in the tissues, that human contact is not
necessarily manipulative, but can be supportive and giving.
I have said that we shall not be studying techniques or seek-
ing a "correct" way to do it. Our study is the soil in which the
plant grows. If this soil seems hard, we can find means to loosen
it; if we see weeds, we can pluck them. We shall simply work at
coming to more quiet and fuller presence in a task, with fewer

thoughts and senses more open. In such a task as lifting
another's arm or leg, we can see with our eyes and feel with
our hands what is asked of us.
Very simply, the question is none other than the title
Charlotte once chose for a workshop: being all there. Not just
An entirely new connection afterward with the support

of the floor.
there mentally, as this phrase is often Intended, but all there in

back, belly, arms, legs, mind, and heart for what one is about
to do. When this is true, breathing will be there also.
For instance, many ways of sitting will be inappropriate.
They will make a full participation in the task impossible. But
as one's interest grows and one finally becomes fully aroused to
the task, most people will begin to work from a sitting or
kneeling in which the act of raising the leg naturally entails a
certain gentle pull away from the trunk, this being a position
which also brings all the faculties of the helper into play,
including the free flow of his energy and unhampered breath-
ing. The experiment will then be experienced as easy and
pleasurable by all concerned; and the one helped will usually
feel clearly liberated and in an entirely new connection after-
ward with the support of the floor.
This last is of the greatest importance, for the sensations of
giving and receiving with another person are just part of the
larger question of how we give and receive generally in our rela-
tionships,and in particular with the ever-present air around us
and the support under us. The helper is just a means, albeit a
living one who feels and enjoys his part, to awaken us to the
whole environment.
19 WORKING WITH OBJECTS
I
often
of seeing
we find it
M ost of US are interested
tion to
difficult to
by the
work with another person. But
be fully present in the task. Instead
and feeling the one we work with, we are occupied in
invita-
self-evaluation. Are we doing it right? Are we being sensitive?

How do we come across to the other? Do we communicate
friendliness, strength, caring, and so on?
All these considerations are barriers between the two, reflect-
ing the attention of the helper back upon himself and diminish-
ing his contact. Equally obstructive is the tendency to apply
some technique one has learned for handling others. And a
major obstacle is a critical attitude toward the one helped. To
recognize our partner's muscular reactions to our offer of help
is essential. This is his nonverbal, usually unconscious, com-
munication to us, which speaks directly to our intuition. It is
only by such recognition that we can proceed appropriately.
But to criticize or evaluate, as we have been trained to do, is to
interpose thought formations between ourself and the other,
and thus to lose the direct and full connection which is all we
have to guide us.
It may be helpful now to begin working with inanimate
objects, which cannot preoccupy us so. Any object will do. In
fact, the idealchoice would be the things we work with anyhow
in daily living: knives and forks, packages, furniture, china-
ware, zippers, as well as all professional and playing materials.
Charlotte and I find it very convenient and agreeable to work
with stones, of which so many beautiful examples may be
found on beaches and in river beds all over the world.
What can one learn of a stone? In the first place, it is just
there. Ithas no useful purpose, reveals no Intention or direc-

tion, and has no interest in us. But it very definitely exists.
If we hold the stone where we can see it clearly, it may have
an engrossing form and pattern. But if we close our eyes, all
changes: pattern and color are gone; very likely, it suddenly
becomes cold. We probably feel something of its form, and we
also feel its weight.
How could we feel its weight more clearly? Many people will
jiggle and grip the stone, trying to calculate. But are there
changes we could allow in ourselves that would let us feel more
clearly? For instance, does the wrist let the sensation of the
stone through? And the elbow? And the shoulder? Perhaps it
involves our way of sitting altogether. Does it involve breath-
ing?
This may become difficult and tiring. Instead of feeling the
weight of the stone more clearly, we feel our own difficulties. It
is the old problem of being conscious of ourselves, not in

ourselves.
Let us open our eyes and pass the stone to the other hand.
To the new hand, it has a fresh form and clearer weight. What
do we feel of it now, when we do not look at it? How do we

hold it? We may notice now that we are gripping the stone
with thumb and fingers, or clutching it, when allwe are asked
to do is support and feel it. If we relax our grip, we can still feel
What can one learn of a stone?

119 Working with Objects
We must neither grip nor lose touch.
its weight on our open palm, and the stone still has the mere
surfaceit needs under it to be kept from falling.
But now something else has happened. Where is the shape?
We lost it as we relaxed. Yet its shape was just what gave it
individuality.
We realize that to find the stone we must neither grip it
nor in any way lose touch with it. We must feel and give up
our tendency to choose between controlling and withdrawing.
Indeed, the recognition may come, to one who is ripe for it,
that to find the stone we must at the same time find ourselves
— our own flexible, sensitive, inquiring nature. In palms and
fingers,some of us now begin to seek the stone, as perhaps we

once sought our own belly, or another's shoulder, coming to it
everywhere, without stress, for finer perception.
After a while, we may want to pause and rest. Then we will
come to a fresh sitting and take our stone again. Someone
remarks that the stone's temperature has meanwhile changed.
So a stone is not changeless. Also we find its shape changes as
we come to it we hold it on one side,
differently: rounder, if
flatter if on the other. make an experiment. Let us
Let us
squeeze the stone. It resists the squeeze. What do we feel of it
now, other than its hardness and the pressure we have created
on our own tissues?
Let us gradually give up the squeezing until the stone again
just rests in our hand. Has anything happened to its weight?
Many people will probably report that when they squeezed the
stone hard it had no weight at all.
virtually
Such experiments can be of prime importance for us. We are
immersed in a culture of statistics, standards, and measure-
ments, in which we approach the world only indirectly, as
through a Sears Roebuck catalogue. It is not just that it is
undoubtedly convenient to buy and sell by the pound, or to
take an invalid's temperature. We seek the abstract symbol for
its own sake: baseball scores, personality-assessment ratings.
To find the stone, we must at the same time find our

own flexible, sensitive, inquiring nature.
Our sense of its form and weight.
body counts. In the words of General Semantics, we mistake the

map for the territory.
In other words, we judge things not with our senses and
experience, but by reference to some third, purely conventional
factor. Our stone will always bring the pointer of a well-made
scale to the same point, which clearly proves the contrary of
what we have can change.
just discovered: that a stone's weight
But as children, our experience was unequivocal that the
same snow was at one moment a delight and at another a
misery, that the walk to school was short one day and long
another, and that a stone which weighed very little when we
were feeling well might be heavy indeed when we were sick.
And we find that everywhere, just beneath the surface of our
conventional "objective" world, lies waiting a forgotten world of
overwhelming authenticity, which is not ahen but is ours.
It has become clear that what we perceived of a stone de-
pended on how we behaved to it. When we found our way to a

gentler and fuller connection, we perceived more, just as was
the case in working with a partner, and just as the floor became
softer, or more giving, as we gave more ourselves.^ Our sense
of its form and weight, which tended to disappear when we
either acted on it or tried to relax, reappeared as its essential
characteristics when we felt out what was needed just to
come to it perceptively and in support. When we go now to
wash our dishes or our clothes, or to prepare our raw ingiedi-
ents for cooking, these important tasks —
which our culture
has labeled as unpleasant and menial, and which Industry
1. Cf. page 30. The American man's (and very often the American
—
woman's) fear of softness being a "softie," seeming "soft" on crime,
communism, et cetera, with its frequent imphcations of effeminacy and
—
sexual impotence is matched only by the assiduousness with which we
shun hard furniture; "hard" tasks and chores, for which we seek ma-
chines; inclement weather; "hard" facts; and other hardships taken for
granted in healthier cultures. I am sure this is associated with the pro-
found and very widespread misconception which associates phallic
hardness not with the tonicity of the organism but with the hardness of
the musculature. The consequent association of softness and yielding
with weakness, and of hardness with strength, may account for a great
deal of the insensitivity and cruelty of much of our foreign policy, for
our anesthetic furniture and automobiles, and for many of the fears and
rigidities Charlotte and I are faced with in our classes. It also explains
the reactionary rage against "permissiveness."
123 Working with Objects
—
would deprive us of altogether may become quite as interest-
ing as driving a car and much more satisfying than television.
Truly, when we come awake for what exists in space, there is
no need to "kill time."
Some years ago in New York, Charlotte gave a joint seminar
with Alan Watts on the Japanese tea ceremony. Alan spoke first
in the morning, dwelling on the history of the ceremony and its
relation to Zen. Then, for an hour, Charlotte worked with the
group on coming to quiet, coming from standing to sitting, and,
when sitting, reaching out to touch a stone on the floor. In the
afternoon there was a similar division of theory and practice.
The second morning, Alan put on his Buddhist robes, set out the
hibachi, bowls, dipper, and other paraphernalia of this ancient
ritual, and demonstrated the nature and function of each item.
Charlotte then worked, as I have just described, on sensing the

weight of stones, picking them up and setting them down, and
finally giving and receiving stones among the group, bowing to
one another meanwhile. By noon, the quiet elation and sense of
connection among the different people was very marked. In the
final session that afternoon, Alan asked three people to sit in
front of the group opposite him, on folded legs, Japanese fash-
ion, while he brought the water to a boil, formally cleaned the
bowls, measured with the sliver of bamboo the bright green
powdered tea, ladled out the scalding water with the bamboo
dipper, whisked the tea into a froth, and, raising each bowl
like a sacrament, offered it with a bow to his bowing guests.
Few of the participants had ever seen anything like this out-
side a cathedral. They were watching in awe. When it was over,
there was a quarter-hour interval while people stretched their
legs. In the meantime, helpers brought two large bowls of
water into the studio, one soapy and one clear, a few dish
and a platter of cookies. The group
towels, about thirty plates,
reassembled. When were seated, Charlotte asked one per-
all
son to reach over and take a plate, try its weight, and pass it
on. When each could allow his breathing to be at ease for the
plate he received, he was to set it before him on the floor.
Another person then offered the platter of cookies. Each
recipient brought his palms together and bowed in the Japa-
nese gassho before taking a cookie, and each held the cookie
until all were served. Then all took one bite, tasted, and finally
ate. Many reported later that they had never really tasted a
cookie before.
Of course the dishes were not soiled, but it was now that the
most significant part of the experiment began. The person
nearest the bowl of soapy water took his plate there, washed it
with a dish cloth, dipped it in the bowl of clear water, and
carefully dried it with a towel. All the others watched spell-
bound. When he had set the dried plate on the floor, folded the
dish towel, and come back to sitting, the next one arose.
With thirty people, there was, of course, not time for each to
go through the whole procedure alone, so presently a short line
had formed by the bowl of soapy water. Charlotte asked if
those standing in Kne were only waiting for their turn, or
whether they could become more fully present for the plate in
their hands, letting arms and shoulders open for it, letting
breathing support it.
There was no need to think. Each could see for himself that
whether in the marvelous equipment and ritual of the tea
ceremony or in the simple washing and drying of a plain china
dish all the elements of sensing and reacting were involved, all
the grace and magic of a human presence.
Later, in very different circumstances in Los Angeles, we
encountered one man who had never been present at any such
seminar. It was in a glorified lunch counter that specialized in
steaks and salad. The man was the cook, and his domain was
the whole area including the counter where we sat, the adjoin-
ing counters where plates were stacked in self-leveling sinks
and where great bowls of salad stood, the oven full of baking
potatoes, the refrigerator full of a number of different kinds of
steaks, and the black grill, framed in gleaming stainless steel,
where anywhere from six to a dozen steaks might be cooking
at once. In and out sHpped waitresses, taking orders which
they tucked silently into a revolving rack, and serving the
dishes, while two helpers carried new plates in and old ones
out, slit and buttered the potatoes, and now and then boldly
flung a steak on the grill.
125 Working uuith Objects
All the men were black, tall and muscular; they might have
been either prizefighters or dancers. Some of the waitresses
were black, and some were white. But though all were alert
and fully occupied, with the ceaseless flow of customers in and
out, and had obviously been hired for their speed and efficiency,
the whole scene was as though staged for the central figure of
the cook, who moved as effortlessly as a brook rippling among
the rocks, in every direction, often in several directions at once,
with each arm acting on its own as the many details of his job
presented themselves, while still in concert with the other.
The whole man stood or moved with the utter equilibrium of
a fish in water, and though his movements were as swift as
those of a fish, there was no hint of haste or urgency. When
one could see his eyes, they were perfectly calm. His lips and
cheeks were at ease, his whole form the very image of well-
being. No furrow of concern marked his brow, no sign of
thought or concentration. But each steak was flipped or
removed exactly at its moment, and each laden plate was set on
the counter for the waitresses not only without clatter, but
without a sound. One could see that each movement of this
man was felt and enjoyed through to its very end, while the
end of one movement flowed into the beginning of the next
with the ease and inevitability of a sleeper's breathing.
For years, each time Charlotte and I were in Los Angeles, we
sought out this scene and waited, if possible, for ringside seats.
If life is thought of as a dance, I had never seen a more con-

summate dancer. On the stage, in a setting where he could
have been judged by connoisseurs, he might have become a
world figure. But in fact he was only a perfectly efficient cook.
One year, when we came back, he had been promoted. It
appeared that everyone had felt in him the detachment and
presence which he evidently had for people as well as for
things, and he had been made manager. He stood, smartly
dressed, in the vicinity of the cash register, acknowledging
customers; and we could see that his eyes were dulling and his
waisthne swelling. He still stood with grace, but his tools had
been taken from him and the significance of his activity
destroyed. To everyone else, it was a sign of success; for us an
occasion of mourning. Thenceforth, the steaks lost some of

their flavor, and we gradually ceased going there.
This man had related to the many concrete aspects of his
job as we work to relate to the stones. He reacted fully and
immediately, without thought, to all he saw that concerned
him, and he felt everything he touched. He did not do the work;
he merely responded wholeheartedly to what the situation
asked of him. His senses were open, his mind quiet and alert
in the background in case of need, and his energies freely
responsive.
Seeing this man at work, Charlotte and
were brought deep
I
into the reality of what we aim toward, a state where work in

the studio and life outside it would be basically akin.
20 WORKING WITH GRAVITY
there was one aspect that could have

Ifbeen singled out from the total func-
tioning of the cook I have just described, it might perhaps have
been his intimacy with the force of gravity. The attraction of
the earth on him and on everything he handled was as per-
fectly matched to his expenditure of energy as the two lenses
of a binocular match when they are brought into focus.
Nowhere in his movement was any uncertainty, nowhere an
excess. The extension of his arm and the delicacy of his power-
ful hand when he turned a steak on the grill might have graced
the Parthenon; when he set a plate on the counter, the instant
when china met formica was exquisitely felt. What made it so
stirring to behold was that this perfection was obviously in no
sense intended as a performance, but came simply and inevita-
bly from the man's connection with the forces he was dealing
with.
It isa misfortune that most of our work must necessarily be
done in an empty room. Things come so graphically to people
when they can work with their familiar, everyday activities.
Once at Esalen Institute we managed to try an unusual experi-
ment. Normally, there was a kind of running battle there
between the staff of employees, who tended to feel that Esalen
was their private commune, and the "seminarians," who left the
square outer world for weekends of what the staff may have
often justly regarded as avant-garde slumming. In our case,
this battle seemed to express itself in a little extra clatter when
tables were set in the adjoining room and chairs moved for
sweeping.
One day, the kitchen staff was shorthanded, and we were
able to arrange that at a given moment our class would come

into the dining room and set all the sixty or eighty chairson
the tables so the staff could sweep. We would then replace the
chairs on the floor. was such an obvious saving for the staff
It
in time and energy that the offer was accepted. The class had
been working with stones, and when the moment came it was
simple and natural to go from stones to chairs. Each of us took
a moment to come into touch with the weight of the chair and
to find a good connection with the floor, so we could let it help
us. Though any mention of noise or quiet had been carefully
avoided, it was almost without a sound that the chairs rose and
landed on the tables. Of course, a number of the kitchen staff
had come out to watch how the square seminarians would fare
with a real-life task, and what they saw surprised them.
Pensively, the sweepers swept, and we were called in again.
Again the same. As if by their own impulse, the chairs in our
hands left the tables and came softly and surely to their places
on the floor. We would all have been hired on the spot; and for
a day or two the war between the groups noticeably abated.
I wish it might have been practical to do the sweeping too,
and gradually to work our way into all the activities being
carried on in our neighborhood in dining room and kitchen. In
the complexity of Esalen, and the brevity of our stay, such
an invasion would of course have been quite impossible. But in
the Zen monastery at Tassajara, Cahfornia, where we work
for a week each spring, a few of our students do find their way
into every work activity, mingling as harmoniously with the
Zen students and monks as the different rivulets that mingle
in Tassajara creek. What in most cases would be felt as an
intrusion into kitchen, shop, and cupboard here becomes a
natural union. So people work when the work is noncompeti-
tive, based only on a common perception of need and sense of
capacity. Elsa Gindler, the originator of our studies, often worked

with her students on sweeping and mopping the floor, relating
the energy mobilized to the work to be accomplished.
But we can work with our stones. Gravity has no preferences.
The same forces and elements are involved. So if we sit again
and take a stone, we can come to a new start.
129 Working with Gravity
As we hold the stone in our hand, sensing its shape and

weight, we may quietly feel first what changes might need to be
allowed in our sitting for more inner freedom and easier
breathing. This may also bring about changes in the weight of
the stone. What is the weight? Not how much, but what? As
it begins to occupy our attention, it may occur to us that the
weight of our stone is merely its tendency to lead us some-

where, stronger in one stone and weaker in another. Where
would it lead us, if we should follow it? To follow, of course,
would mean not to interfere with it. We make the attempt: it is
not so easy not to interfere. We have too many knees and
elbows, too much of our own weight to contend with: perhaps
there is just too much of us altogether.
To what is happening, we may ask someone to sit in
find out
the middle and work alone, letting the stone follow its weight to
the floor while the others watch. The stone descends irregu-
larly. Another person tries. This time the stone clearly goes
down on a slant.
What is the problem? We study the experimenter's behavior.
Is he with the experiment? Not altogether. For one thing, he
is frowning. That means that something is busy controlling
something else, not following the stone. Also, his shoulder may
be cramped, as though pressing something under his arm
which isn't there. He seems somehow uncomfortable in sitting
and perhaps distracted by this from the slight changes needed
as the stone sinks. Or perhaps he is judging its course down-
ward with his eyes, as though he could see where weight should
lead, thus dividing and distracting his attention from where
it does lead.
We realize thatit would be a miracle if anyone were so
flexible and so reactive throughout that he could fully allow

the stone to lead him.
Then why work at it, if it is an impossible task? . . . But let us
try once more.
We sit, holding our stone, eyes closed. Where does it lead?
Now the leader may ask, "Are your eyes quiet?"
No, they are not. Behind our closed eyelids, we can feel the
effort to see what is going on.
Or he asks, "Do you allow breathing?"

As each question sinks slowly into us, something does awaken
inside us and perhaps seeks unforeseeable new adjustments.
We seem to open inwardly for the stone. It becomes more
present to us; we can sense where it would lead us and begin
to follow it. That is not all. Having given up something we cher-
ished, some of our control, we have also become more ahve.
This has happened because we have begun to give ourselves to
a task. Perhaps to fulfill the task is not so important as just to
give ourselves to it, seems impossible or not.
whether it
To a casual onlooker, the slight inner changes might be

unnoticeable. But to one who could see —
even though the
stones may still slant and falter —
each of us might now radiate
an aura of quiet and presence.
We can take another approach: we can have the stone on
our head.
In preparation, we come Standing has some-
to standing.
thing to do with letting our weight go down to the ground. If
we feel that in some way we interfere with this, we take time to
sense through and give up what we can of the interference.
Changes in balance may follow, more granting of freedom in
neck or back, more elasticity in ankles and feet, and so on.
If we now place the stone on our head, could this slight addi-
tional weight also be allowed consciously down through us to

the ground? Whether we hold it up or not, the ground receives
it anyhow. It is only we who come into strain when we resist
the passage. Obviously, we can no longer grip the stone, as we

could when we held it in our hand. But someone may now feel
that his neck is gripping his head, so as not to let the stone fall
off. Or that he is holding his breath, or in some other way
behaving apprehensively. If we become conscious of anything
like this and find that we can give it up, there is a sensation
of relief and many changes may occur simultaneously.
Of course, if we just try to "relax," we will lose not only
unneeded tensions, but needed ones also; in short, we will lose
touch with floor and stone. Unless the stone is quite flat, it will
probably fall —
a happy consequence, since it may startle us
awake. But if we give up only what interferes with sensing our
131 Working with Gravity
way into fuller connection with stone and floor, this will lead us
to a more balanced standing and into a clearer relationship
with the whole environment, including ourselves, in which
we are not so much holding the stone up as merely permitting
ourselves to rise under it, as we rise naturally in our reaction to
gravity.
Our weight, plus that of the stone, is allowed down to what
easily and surely receives it beneath us; our full natural stature
is allowed up. On top of all rests the stone. Beneath lies the
earth.
21 DOWN AND UP
w it that we have discovered so

hat is
working with our stone? Among

far in
other things, the stone had temperature, form, and weight,
each of which properties was perceived according to our own
condition. To each of these aspects of its existence we have
corresponding modes of sensing, and the joints and muscles
needed to bring us where our sensing is effective.
We have been working mainly with weight, and we found
that when our attitude to the stone changed, the sensation of
its weight changed correspondingly. But this was not true of
the direction in which its weight led us. Whether the course
we followed seemed irregular or slanted to those who watched
us, to us it always seemed down. If our sense of direction does
not agree with that of others, there must somewhere be an
impairment of perception. For if we let the stone drop, it is
clear to everyone, including ourselves, that it falls in one
direction only. Our impairment is evidently not visual, or in our
sense of verticality, but must be in our kinesthetic sense, or
ability to feel our own muscular activity and simply give to the
weight of the stone. We are not sensitive enough to be able to
tell just when we are yielding to gravity, and when we are
exerting another force of our own.
Anything so ever-present as this pull of gravity, which leads
the stone always to fall in the same direction, must be worth
our study. I should more properly call it the pull of the earth,
for that is all that concerns our personal experience. In its sub-
tleways, this pull is at work on us all the time. Furthermore,
with a little reflection, we may realize that the direction of this
pull, in which the stone falls, and in which, with more or less
tl
Anything so ever-present as this pull of gravity.

clarity, we can feel ourselves being drawn also, differs in this
respect of constancy from all other directions whatsoever. Day

or night, fog or sunshine, it is always there, independent of
compass, or rising and setting sun, or north star. It is unrelated

to any of our five senses at all and is perceptible to us only
through that all-pervasive inner reactivity, the proprioceptive
or kinesthetic senses, without which we could not stand erect
or relate to anything around us. When we take time to come
to more quiet and awakeness, these senses begin to come to
life within us everywhere.
We can be sure that every child and every animal reacts

we see that plants respond
instinctively to the pull of the earth;
to a balance between the pull of the earth and the source of
light. The direction of this pull is unequivocal. Indeed, it is
the only direction in which there has always been something
there for us to come to — something, in fact, that with sensitive
adjustment we could come to rest on. Perhaps this is one of the
reasons why the earth has been called mother, and why some-
thing in me, at least, yearns to return to her. This basic direc-
tion, down, which always is ultimately down to earth, is where
the stone would lead us, surely and truly, if we yielded to it.
But in working with the stone on our head, we have also
discovered something else. When we began to, approach the
flexibility and balance needed simply to allow the weight of the
stone down through us to the ground, we at the same time, of
necessity, began to allow our own stature up.^ The inner
passages that opened in response to the pull of the earth upon
the stone opened also for the flow of energy needed to maintain
the height and breadth and depth in us that our organs and
tissues require for free functioning. Against our own acquired
tendencies to control and constrict, we were obliged to yield
upward and outward to our inner needs at the moment when we
1. Cf. "Finding Our Stature," page 54.
Knowing down, we know up.

yielded downward to gravity. In this, we were no different from

any healthy flower or any blade of grass.
Equilibrium, for human beings as for all other terrestrial
creatures, is thus not just a lateral balancing, as of weighted
scales, but involves an equally critical balancing of two forces
in the vertical, a process which is entirely spontaneous when
not impeded by illness or conditioning. What we must yield to,
when we are borne upward involuntarily against the pull of the
earth, is the spontaneous generation of energy in our own
organism. Much of the working of this metabolism, as it is
called, can be felt. It is what gives the sensation of lightness and

well-being. Unless we are sick, the energy needed for standing
is supplied automatically; we have only to sense and give up the
eff'orts and constrictions that impede the natural circulation of
this energy through arteries and veins. We stand as all animals

stand, even elephants, with our full weight, yet freely and
effortlessly, and to our full stature, yet with no straining
upward. When we tell a child to stand up straight, or to stand
taller, as in so many cases we were told ourselves, we are try-
ing to impose voluntary processes upon the fully sufficient

involuntary processes given us by nature. This is gilding the
lily.Those of us with a military or "aristocratic" bearing, should
they practice yielding, would lose none of their stature. All
they would lose is their subservience to an image and their
isolation from the world of actuality.
In standing, with or without a stone, all that is important is
the sense of how

our native energies can be allowed free circu-
lation, and of the direction to which they must respond. With
this, on our head can be of help to us. As we become
the stone
quiet and present for it, we feel its weight constantly pressing
down through us, eliciting an equal and opposite energy of our
own, bringing our limbs and inner masses into a natural align-
ment toward the earth, which at the same time pulls us
toward itself and supports us against its own pull.
Knowing down, we know up. Knowing up, we freely stand:
not otherwise. Sensing and allowing what is needed, we begin
again to experience our deep inner capacity to relate to the
world.
c^c^-
WORKING OUT OF DOORS
he best place to study gravity is not in
our classes but in daily life: climbing
or descending stairs, carrying bundles, setting the table, serving
and washing dishes, getting up and sitting down, dancing, or,
perhaps best of all, walking on uneven ground. Our summer
students in Maine have often learned more from the rough,

woodsy paths and rocky headlands than from anything we
could offer them in our studio. Indeed, our chief contribution
has been to get them there and then induce them by one means
or another to give up both "practical" concerns and daydream-
ing, and to allow the immediate present to occupy them. In
this, we are powerfully aided by the vivid presence of nature.
In walking, one's concern is with the way; but this does not
mean being on the lookout for stones and roots, even though
that may be prudent and helpful to start with. By and by, we
are no longer caught in the opposites of absentmindedness
and vigilance. If I "kept my eye on the road," as I drive down
Seventh Avenue in New York, it would be as fatal as if I drifted
off. In New York traffic, I have had to learn to be open and
alert for everything, still or moving, on all sides and behind me

as well. I don't look : I only try to be all there.
It is same walking through the woods or over the rocks.

the
We no more need to "look where we are going" than does a
deer or a goat. We have the same faculties as they; we may only
lack practice. When we are alert, we see what we need to see
and do not stumble. In the same way, we need not struggle up
the slopes or hesitate down them. We may want to go a little
faster or slower here and there; we may leap down the rocks
and come back up them using hands and feet; but as we see
the terrain our balance and our energy adjust to it automati-

cally.
We take this for granted in skiing. Without the instantaneous
readjustments in balance and energy to the swiftly changing
slope, no skier could ever get down a mountain. Skiing, I
suppose, is the best of all possible sports for studying sensory
awareness. But we are all skiers, in one sense or another, when
we allow ourselves to be and take the time for it. The gentler
our eyes and the smoother our brow, the more hghtly and
easily we get there.
Now and then, on the Maine seacoast, we give a whole class
out of doors. The group meets in front of the little hotel, and,
when we are assembled, we may set out for the great spruce-
covered bluff called Burnt Head. It is agreed we will walk the
whole way there and back in silence.
As we take the dirt road up the hill, perhaps thirty people
altogether, become conscious of my legs, Hke those of the
I
horses I have ridden, coming powerfully into action. The

others, climbing silently on all sides, make it seem like a caval-
cade or a pilgrimage. But these associations are fleeting, soon
lost in the complex sensation of the changing terrain under-
foot, and of the varying energies I and the others mobilize as it
becomes now steeper and now easier. I feel breathing become
stronger as I cHmb; I sense it in the others. In the absence of
talk, it is easy to allow less effort, more economy. Walking
becomes an experiment in sensing.
The road leaves the houses and shrinks to a trail on enter-
ing the woods. Many of us remove our shoes. There are changes
underfoot: grass, damp earth, spruce needles, roots, stones.
Freed of shoes, we are conscious of each new surface we
encounter. Here and there, someone pauses momentarily, test-
ing the dampness or savoring the refreshing coolness of the

ground. There are changes in acoustics and temperature too.
Among the growing trees, there is not simply an
thickly
absence of sound. Quiet has a living immanence. One is con-
scious of a multitude of organisms: trees, undergrowth, plants,
grasses. One can almost feel them growing; one can feel their
silence and presence. We can feel our own silence as we walk:
139 Working Out of Doors
each of us with a new dignity when he just exists, breathing,

walking with care for the path.
his heart beating,
One after another, we emerge from sheltering woods to
granite ledges high above the ocean. Among them, exposed
to every weather, stand small, pointed spruces. In hollows and
crevices, grasses and bayberries grow. There are tiny meadows,
with wild roses and daisies among the grass. Everywhere, some
hundred feet below, is the vast ocean, a glittering surface
wrinkled into endless waves, endlessly approaching, each one
at lastblossoming in explosions of white foam along the rocks.
As the foam recedes, dark seaweed marks the tidelines. Above
and beneath us, gulls soar against the blue of the sky, or the
darker blue of the sea and gray of the cliffs. The air is in move-
ment on these rocks, and the sea sounds. At so slight a dis-
tance, another world from the woods we have left.
it is
We have come silently, each one for himself, to some

vantage point for sitting or standing, or perhaps for stretching
out on the sunwarmed rocks. No one speaks. It is not just our
agreement: we are filled with the power of the scene.
And yet soon, in spite of the quiet, and even awe, before
nature that has been apparent in the group, cracks begin to
appear. Some people are already plainly being lulled to sleep by
sun and wind. Others have lost their connection and are now
wondering, "What next?" For many, perhaps, the scene begins
to shift in and out of reality, becoming more and more a picture
postcard, the stereotype of conventional "beauty" and "inspira-
tion"— no longer one s own experience. Here and there, an old
cigarette butt,browned by weather, testifies that for others too
this place may have been too strong to take pure.
What way is there of coming back to ourselves, of finding a
common ground? The question answers itself: our common
ground. What could be more fitting, after this flood of sensa-
tions from without, than to ask everyone to close his eyes,
wherever he may be, and feel his way up to standing on what-
ever is under him, whether bare rock or living vegetation?
The request brings us back into a sense of interaction. We
are not merely passive. For some, it may be necessary to survey
the terrain first; for others it is secure just as they are. One
element all share in common: the absence of any man-made

floor.
Wherever we uneven: we must
are, the earth's surface is
find individual adjustments for each foot and leg, and corre-
sponding adjustments throughout ourselves altogether, coming
gradually to an unequal standing that might yet be effortless.
Our bare feet, practiced in classes, are now awake to find the
shape of rocks and grasses to which we can give our weight,
finding contact and using the support for standing freely.
With the visual shut out, we may become very conscious
of the feel of the wind and the sound of the surf below. We
experiment with covering our ears. Muffling the sounds outside.
Awake to find the shape of rocks and grasses.

141 Working Out of Doors
we are overrun with our own interior murmurs. After a time,

we remove our hands from our ears. The roar of the sea fills us.
Even the earth under us hardly seems as powerful. We allow
our eyelids to open. Equal vastnesses of sky and sea spread out
before us. Our feet seek assurance in the support beneath. It
isno postcard any more.

With open eyes, we may turn slowly where we stand, taking
time to feel each new surface as we come to it and to allow a
sensitive meeting. The panorama changes as we turn. Every-
where are other living organisms, some like ourselves, turning
and finding new adjustments to gravity, others straight as can-
dles in a candelabra — the little spruces, with their outspread
rings of branches and tips shooting skyward. The wind moves
through the spruces, engendering a multitude of slight move-
ments in their twigs, from which they return ceaselessly to
rest. We, too, may be aware of our unceasing inner response to
the presence of the air, the delicate commotion of inhalation,

and in exhalation the momentary but unfailing pause, also for
rest.
It is time to communicate in words. We sit in a close group,

while a few verbalize the experiences they wish to share. Then
perhaps we all lie down on the many variations of surface
which the earth offers.
Though it may be unawares, we have been studying modes of
perception. Starting in a situation where sensory impressions
are too multitudinous to absorb, we limit ourselves to specific
avenues, as one might with a camera. The gestaltev} form and
dissolve, each in its given time taking the stage and withdraw-
ing: now we feel the support of the earth and our adjustments
to it; now the world comes to us through the threshold of our
ears; now it enters through our eyes. Even in the exchange of
our experiences we are being focused, this time by words and
voices.
Someone has just stated, "I could feel the earth receiving
my weight, and myself receiving the air."
1. Organized phenomena, the study of which is the field of Gestalt
psychology, and whose dynamic, together with much of sensory aware-
ness, underhes Gestalt therapy.
It is not his usual tone of voice: he speaks with a directness

and simpHcity that draw us to look at him. This is a statement
that could easily sound pompous or fanciful, but in his expres-
sion is the same genuineness as in his voice. It is as though the
experience itself is speaking through him, to which his ordi-
nary mannerisms have yielded. We believe him. Deep in us,
something responds. He has brought us again, for a moment,
into consciousness of that greater world from which, though
we seldom realize it, we are inseparable.
^
23 WORKING OUT OF
DOORS, CONTINUED
Inmay these inviting circumstances,

work with many variations of
one
our work indoors. But there would be no sense in ignoring the

surroundings for which we came here. So we stay with what
is specifically offered. The terrain is irregular: we may take
hands in a ring and with eyes closed circle over it to right or
left, alert not to trip or stub a toe, awake for the hands and the
balance of both of our partners, steadying and being steadied
without stress or exaggeration. Now, as so often, is a fine
occasion for sensing breathing and allowing it free play. Or we
may all walk at random over rocks and slopes, feeling through
and through the common courtesy of occasionally giving one
another a helping hand when it is steep or slippery. Or we may
move up and down the slopes on all fours, sensing the redistri-
butions of weight and energy when it may actually be helpful
to use hands as well as feet.
We may practice over and over with seeing, closing our eyes
and allowing more restfulness in the space between them,
giving time for the eyehds to come to resting too, and then let-
ting them open quietly, without looking, to admit the leaves
and grasses of the foreground, or the waves churning far below
against the rocks, or the horizon between sea and sky. We
might borrow from formal studies of meditation and spend
five or ten minutes looking only at a single object a twig or —
flower, perhaps —
following the metamorphoses that occur
when our thoughts become quiet and we let ourselves be led
into its strange world.
1. I am indebted for this nonchemical psychedelic experiment to Claudio

Naranjo, who used it in a joint seminar we once gave together.
Many willbe delighted if we avail ourselves of another possi-

bility in our surroundings and pick sprigs of spruce needles
and bayberry them in our fingers to release
leaves, crushing
their fragrance and smelling them ourselves or offering them
to others. This too, for all its deliciousness, is an inquiry into
our nature and our upbringing. For example, do we sniff
actively, as we have seen everyone do when he judges some-
thing, and as we have seen animals do constantly, or do we
just let it come to us?
What would happen if we didn't sniff? We renew our offer-
ings to find out. The aroma comes to us on quiet inhalation, all
by itself, as surely as that of a pie baking in the oven. We have

only to be present and awake for For comparison, we actively
it.
sniff again. Indeed, we smell the fragrance this way too. But
there is a difference. In sniffing, the scent is somehow restricted
to our nostrils, where it is judged. Our eyes are not at rest;
breathing is controlled. Once again, we just let the scent come
:t^*;^s»^
145 Working Out of Doors, Continued
to us. Itcomes slower, perhaps more faintly, but it pervades us.

Something of the essence of tree and shrub mingles with us.
We begin to find that even in smelling we have the choice of
being either open to the world or manipulative.
As with food at a picnic, almost everything is enhanced in
the presence of the fresh air and vegetation, the rocks, flowers,
sea, and the lonely, swiftly passing gulls. This is no achieve-
ment of ours. It is a free gift. But it can only be given if we are
freely there to receive it —
which we cannot be if we are occu-
pied in trying to capture it.
When the group was asked to make written reports on one

such class, a member wrote, "I am enjoying myself thoroughly.
But asking me to report my experience is like asking me to give
you a cup of that surf we saw yesterday foaming on the rocks!"
Coming from a very articulate landscapist and architect, this
was certainly the keenest report of them all.
It so happens that at Burnt Head, besides the rocky ledges and

the woods behind them, there is also a little meadow, of per-
haps a quarter of an acre, of grasses, wild flowers, and bayberry
shrubs. Into this a path leads and disappears. After an hour on
the ledges, we may pass through the trees into the meadow for
another taste of nature.
Here, wherever we stand, sit, or lie, it cannot but be in a
certain sense an act of violence. Not only is this no wooden
floor, or bare rock or earth; it is not even a lawn of trimmed
and resilient grass, or a pasture grazed by animals which has

grown up underfoot. Here the earth is already fully occupied
with hving things, striving upward in the fight and air; we
have no choice but to superimpose ourselves upon a scene that
was already complete without us.
As we leave the little path and spread out in the meadow,
some of us may again be occupied with thoughts and be "absent-
minded" to one degree or another. Under these wanderers, the
grasses are crushed heavily. But others, whose senses have
remained alert, now step fully present into the sun-dappled
leafage and quiet of the meadow. For them, a new lightness stirs
in blood and limbs, and, for all their weight, they step with a
gentler tread. The vegetation is still pressed to earth, but after
these more buoyant steps it recuperates faster. One might say

these plants have been injured but not insulted.^
As we assemble, and each finds a place to stand, the present
tends to come into focus for us all. Something of the life process
of the myriad living things environing us, some sense of their
interaction with earth, air, and light, steals into our blood
stream; some of their chemistry intermingles with ours.
Here and there, someone becomes aware of a new subtlety
in breathing, or feels an intimation of the exchange between
the air and the pores of his skin. Perhaps we are all now asked
to closeour eyes and sense breathing. In the growing sense of
coexistence with nature, we may notice strange inner readjust-
ments. In someone's pelvis, perhaps, or in neck or shoulder
1. Since this writing, publication of The Secret Life of Plants by Peter

Tompkins and Christopher Bird (New York: Harper & Row, 1973^
makes this statement sound quite reahstic.
With bare hands, as with our bare feet on the meadow,

we come sensitively, in seeking and accommodation,
not with intention.
147 Working Out of Doors, Continued
girdle, an old knot may loosen slightly; standing shifts; the ice
of some old anxiety thaws a little, releasing rivulets of energy
that bring moisture to the eyes or streamings of sensitivity to
the soles of the feet. One feels impulses of love for life and
for living things.
When we open our eyes now, the meadow may seem radiant
in we walk a little here and there, we step with a
its stillness. If
new sensitiveness and respect, in more conscious connection

with the air and with our own weight, and more aware as we
come into contact with what we step on.
It may be that two people will come together now, the hands
of each coming somewhere to the other. Here too is life. With
bare hands, as with our bare feet on the meadow, we come

and accommodation, not with intention.
sensitively, in seeking
Our eyes are not probing, but quiet. Our pores are open. Our
energies flow back and forth, as gentle and permeating as the
air flowing through our nostrils. Life needs our conscious per-
mission to function freely, and we are practicing permissive-
ness.
No one finds it difficult to keep our pact of silence when the
group finally dissolves into its constituent individuals, who
remain meditating where they are, or go off among the trees
to the rocks or to the village.
24 THE WORD AND THE VOICE
In the last chapters,

reports
I mentioned two
by students of their exper-

iences. The first, in the simplest words, reported the sensation
of receiving the air and being received by theThe sec- earth.
ond, in writing, stated that the experience could no more be
verbalized than one could capture the foaming of sea water in
a cup. Both were genuine and direct communications; and in
the one that was spoken, the speakers words could be sub-
stantiated by his tone of voice. As a rule, most of us spend our
lives avoiding both of these alternatives. We neither remain
silent in the presence of something really inexpressible in
words, as children do, nor do we simply let the experience find
its words. This is why the sound of our voice, as well as the
facial expressions that accompany it, tends to come from every
level of us except our depth.
An however swift to change, are per-
infant's expressions,
fectlyunambiguous. No arch smile, or brows knit in concern,
stand between what he feels and what we see. No meaningful
laugh or sarcastic tones interpret his feelings to our cars. He
speaks directly. Yes is yes, and no is no.
But this state of affairs is not normally of long duration.
Unlike the instinctual vocal communications of infancy such
as screaming or cooing, which convey feelings, speech, con-
sisting of the discrete sounds which we call
conventional
words, is But as we learn to imitate the
entirely imitative.
words we hear, and the combinations of words, we uncon-
sciously imitate at the same time the modulations, tones of
voice, and variations in emphasis that represent individual or
cultural attitudes behind the words. This, of course, is the rea-
149 The Word and the Voice
son one person's accent can raise the hackles on another's neck.
It is also one reason why our words so seldom correspond with
our own deep feelings. Yet speaking was, I suppose, the first
uniquely human mode of communication, is still of unique

importance, and involves a variety of useful nonverbal compo-
nents far outranging anything available to animals.
It is possible to work on this question. Once, when I was
studying in Switzerland with Elsa Gindler's colleague, Heinrich
Jacoby,^ the group spent the entire three-hour morning session
on speaking out a single sentence. Jacoby began by asking
someone to make a statement; and after a number of unsatis-
factory attempts, it being a brilliant day with the Alps snowy
white in the distance, someone said, "On such a clear day,
one can see the mountains."
We worked the whole morning on sensing what each of us
was nonverbally adding to or subtracting from this statement
when we tried to repeat it. Each of us could begin to hear
when it rang more or less true in the others. Gradually, when
it was our turn, we began to feel what was happening inside
ourselves.
Of course, any gesture or statement is apt to feel less natural
when it seems one is on stage. How, before others, can I repeat
an observation as though it had really come from me, sponta-

neously, then and there? Indeed, if the reader tries it out alone
it will probably still seem to be before an audience.
But we were not trying to achieve spontaneity. We were just

repeating a simple statement, whose validity each one of us
could verify for himself, and trying to become conscious of
what actually happened in us when we did so. What did hap-
pen was not simply the effect of self-consciousness before a
group; it was each one's particular self -consciousness, express-
ing itself a little differently from everybody else's. In fact, it
was what happened anyhow in our normal speaking, only
exaggerated in certain ways. The constraint and embarrass-
ment which these exaggerations represented could, of course,
easily be felt, but the form their expression took, though easy to
perceive in others when one really became interested, was very
I. See Appendix A.
hard to recognize in oneself. We have heard our own manner-

isms so often that they have become all but unconscious.
The study of one's own voice can be vividly enhanced by
using a tape recorder. I still recall an experience from the sum-
mer of 1948, when wire recorders were just beginning to be
used. My first wife and I, together with my parents, had been
invited for dinner with my brother and sister-in-law. The six
of us sat there talking merrily while, known only to our hosts, a
wire recorder was at work under the table. After dinner, at a
pause in the conversation, my brother announced what he had
done and asked if we would like to hear the results.
There was not much high fidelity in those days, but no one
failed to recognize everybody else's voice in all its normal tones
and mannerisms. Only his own voice, to each one of us. came
as a shock. And what we had supposed was a civilized con-
versation sounded like a battlefield. It was as though no one
let anyone else finish, but charged in helter-skelter as soon as
he thought he could be heard.

My father turned pale. My stepmother, whose voice was
amazement and disbelief. For my
also "cultivated," listened in
part, was overwhelmed. Traits I disliked in the modulations
I
of my father's and brother's voices came across even stronger

in my own. Only my brother and his wife, who knew what was
coming, were delighted. Except for them, none of us had ever
before heard his own voice coming to him through the same
channels as the voices of others.
Many readers will recognize here an effective form of ther-
apy which has lately come into widespread use self-confronta- :
tion through the use of videotape. But audiotape alone can pro-
vide great revelations. Our voices, unconsciously imitative, are
unnatural. We are used to them, and so is everybody else; they
have become "second nature." But on a tape, we hear them not
only from the outside rather than, as usually, from the inside,
but also removed from the context and situation which occu-
pied our attention as we were speaking. So our own voice comes
to us objectively, so to speak, and we are for once able to hear
not only our words but also all unconscious overtones
the
accompanying them, all the mannerisms wc have built up to
—
151 The Word and the Voice
getby in our particular milieu. Since this is only another way to

speak of our conditioning, such a study leads us directly into
our basic social attitudes.
Speech is only a special mode of making sound, and in our
classes we can work with "sounding" just as can any teacher of

voice or singing. But as always, we proceed in the opposite of the
usual manner, feehng out what happens and disregarding all
accepted standards. We may practice just allowing exhalation

to carry sound ah, oh, ohm, or whatever — perhaps feeling
with our hands wherever the spontaneously arising vibrations
can be felt in us. Or we may bring our hands to another to
feel the vibrations in him. It is surprising to find the great range
of vibrations possible in one's own vocal cords and the extent
of the tissues in us that resound to them. Natural harmonies
form readily when such sounding is practiced in a group, even
when it is agreed that no one will fall into his familiar pat-
terns. From here to voicing sound is a very natural step: again
with the agreement that, with no attempt to be original or
different, we will nevertheless strictly avoid the familiar and
known, and stay with exploration.
It is only one more step from vocalizing to verbalizing. Word
sounds may now perhaps for the first time, as not only
be felt,
conventional but also organismic expression, in the same way

as sounding and singing. Each person has his own individual-
ity. For each, there is a timbre in the sound of words which is
natural to his own individual jaws, larynx, shoulder girdle,

diaphragm, and interests in short,
belly, to his real feelings —
to himself. We have always known something a little like this.
We can tell our friends more clearly by their voices than by
almost any other mode of expression. One may recognize a
voice on the telephone that one has not heard for years. But
what we have not known is that each of us has another voice,
equally ours — indeed, far more deeply ours — that appears once
in a great while, like some rare but inconspicuous flower, at
certain moments. Such moments may be forgotten immedi-
ately, or they may linger in memory with the unaccountable
some trifling dream fragment. But these are
persistence of the
-moments when we have spoken spontaneously, not from the
eruption of inner pressures, but from the same sense of simple

contact that we were exploring in touch. This is when all need
to conform has momentarily slipped from us, and we have
been simply ourselves.
Just as we may work for years to recover and re-establish
the capacity for simple contact, so we may work to find our own
voice. With the voice it is more difficult, for we are used to using
it constantly, in every kind of situation; while consciously
touching another is already something rather special. The first
step is simply to begin to hear our own speech.

In a class, one may once in a while call the roll at the begin-
ning, and later, after working, call it again, noticing what are
often striking differences in the quality of response. Or, stand-
ing in a perhaps hand in hand, or arms over each
circle,
other's shoulders, one after another may speak out his own
—
name in many cases a name he does not fully accept. As
reinforcement, when one speaks his name, the others may
repeat it, each one letting the name be more fully and simply
allowed as sound. We might work at this until everyone has
said his name
several times —
not because it is his "turn." but
just because he feels the need to try it. This can be very helpful.
It is not always easy to say one's name clearly and simply. And
few indeed can speak their name to a group without a touch

of defiance or, more likely, humorous deprecation. In courtlier
times, the act was made easier by adding an "at your service,"
as is still true in Latin countries today. But when this basic
hurdle is over, all other statements become a little easier to
make.
25 TASTING
o ne Easter week, in the early years of

Esalen, Charlotte and I were giving a
workshop. Mild spring air, bearing a faint scent of ocean and of
aromatic shrubs, flowed through the open doors of the big room
where we were gathered. Outside, a broad wooden deck lay
bright in the sun, bounded by a dense mass of cypress and by a
light iron fence through which was visible the distant meeting
of sea and sky.
On this morning, Charlotte had been working on coming to
quiet in the eyes and on sensing breathing. For many of us,
breathing dominated consciousness. We sat in rapt attention,
almost oblivious to sounds from the kitchen and to the passing
of occasional curious strollers across the deck.
After perhaps a half hour of such quiet working, Charlotte
asked us to lie down. was reluctant to interrupt. Others
I
also, as I learned they could have continued such a

later, felt
practice longer. But her good judgment was apparent when I
felt myself gratefully accepting the support of the floor along
my length.
We lay resting a few minutes and then, at Charlotte's
behest, sat up in a circle. In the center of the floor had
appeared a small platter of shelled almonds and a bowl of
oranges.
Charlotte was all With the joy of a hostess, she went
smiles.
over to the platter, took from the floor, and offered an
it
almond to everyone. Some, at the mercy of old reflexes, ate

theirs immediately. Others held it in their fingers, or smelled or
nibbled.To those whose almond was already gone when she
had finished the round, Charlotte offered another, this time
with the caution not to eat it yet. An air of expectancy filled
the room.
"Can you feel the weight of the almond in your hand?"
Charlotte asked, when she had replaced the platter on the
floor and sat down herself. After the dehcacy of our previous
work this morning, it really seemed we could.
"How close must you bring it to your nose to be able to smell

it?"
Everywhere among the group were visible expressions of
interest.
"What can you feel of the inside of your mouth?" Amused
smiles; here and there the half -perceptible movement of a
swallow. The saliva was already flowing. Charlotte was hke a
little girl holding a goodie just out of reach of a dog, teasing it.
She was exploiting the magic of contact to the full, and yet,
with all her tantalizing, she was working very seriously with
consciousness.
"Can you feel your teeth? . . . Your tongue?"
"Try the almond," said Charlotte. "But tastingly! What hap-
pens to it after it enters your mouth?"
I could feel the half almond I had bitten off being crushed
between my teeth and mingling with my saliva. The faint
spice of its initial flavor disappeared, leaving a strange, almost
bitter residue. I was not sure I liked it. Indeed, it was usurping
consciousness; it was becoming an intrusion.
"How long can you taste it?" Charlotte asked.
Though the taste had changed from its first savor to some-
thing quite different, it had not diminished. I wished it would.
Furthermore, I was not ready to swallow. Swallowing didn't just
happen, as it had always seemed to. It was waiting for an act
of will. I took the other half of the almond, and as I began to
chew, the thin paste already there, with a curious, half-
volitional reflex of the larynx, slipped off into my interior.
"Please raise your hand when you have finished eating,"
Charlotte said to us. Slowly, after quite a period, hands began
to rise. It was several minutes before the last stragglers joined
with the rest.
"How would you like to eat like that all the time?"
155 Tasting
Expressions of astonishment, even of incredulity, were now

voiced among
the group. "It would certainly cut down the
grocery someone observed.
bills !"
No one had suspected that an activity we had repeated so

many thousands of times contained such a possibility of new
experience. For me, what I had assumed was the taste of an
almond had to be discarded as a superficial outer covering,
leaving my true sensory connection with it something yet to be
explored. If there was a "natural" taste and a "natural" moment
in the process of chewing in which the incorporation of this
foreign body into me happened by itself, I had never yet felt it
out. What might it do for digestion and nourishment if I did?
When the comparisons and discussion had subsided, we
slapped ourselves lightly all over. Then Charlotte asked people
to take the oranges, start to peel them, and pass them to
others who would continue the peeling. As thumbs and finger-
nails dug into the thick rinds with varying success, a pungent,
bittersweet aroma spread in the air. The oranges passed from
hand to hand, each person retaining the fragment of peel he
had removed. Then, finally stripped, they were split and resplit
until all of the thirty odd people present had at least one seg-
ment, as well as one bit of peel. The fragrance of the fruit and
sharp bouquet of the rind were perceptible to all.
"Does the odor come to you," Charlotte asked, "when you just
allowit to? Or must you sniff it?"
The predatory mien which had been induced in a number of

the group by the preparation of the oranges relaxed a little
and became more meditative. Eyes softened, expressions

quieted.
"What happens when you bring it closer?"
Again I seemed to become all nose and mouth. Contrary to
the experience with the almond, the presence of the orange
was very strong. Saliva welled around my tongue and through
my teeth.
"What happens when you bite into it?"
This bite was more complicated. The skin momentarily
resisted my and then broke, the juice spurting in my
teeth
mouth. In the sweetness was a hint of sourness, and as I now
chewed it the dehcate flavor faded among the various textures

of pulp and Reducing this unequal mixture to a consist-
skin.
ency that my gullet would accept, I became suddenly conscious
of the equivalence between my own teeth and saliva and the
teeth I had seen dripping in dogs and grinding in horses. These
teeth were truly made for rending and destroying. But just as
truly they were designed to prepare organized tissue for its
next stage of life.
It was and serious occasion. When we had finished,

a joyous
a paper bag was passed around into which each morsel of
refuse was dropped in full awareness. Charlotte finally received
and set down the bag, ending the class. She bowed slightly
with palms together, as is the practice in Zen, and the rest of
us bowed almost involuntarily in response. She had found a
way of bringing consciousness to what, next to breathing, is the
most everyday of all activities, which is at the same time per-
haps the central mystery the passage of life from one form to
:
another.
It was indeed merely another facet of "Meditation in Every-
day Living," or giving attention to what we are constantly doing

anyhow. But several times, when I have met participants after-
ward, this has been the experience they remembered most
vividly.
The scope of sensory awareness can

well be illustrated by a contrast between the morning class
which have just described and the class led by me that same
I
afternoon. This class had its beauty and interest too, but in a
basic, if perhaps subtle way, it clearly departed from the realm
of perception and entered that of symbolism and philosophy.
In this crucial respect, the following description differs from
all others in this book. I set it down not at all as just another
description of the work, but as an example of the kind of
deviation from plain sensing which is all too tempting to many
others besides myself.
In the afternoon, as I have said, it was my turn to conduct.
The slopes at Esalen are covered with aromatic shrubs and
trees: sagebrush, pines, cypress, and eucalyptus. I prepared
157 Tasting
two or three trays, and we offered leaves and twigs to one

another to smell. The class flowed very naturally from the
morning experiments in tasting, only now everyone also became
a host and a guest, a giver and a receiver.
Finally we went out on the deck. Salt air rose gently from sea
to mountains. From the slope just above, a host of Cahfornia
poppies glowed down on us. We walked over, and each picked
one. Returning to the deck, we stood a moment with eyes
closed, feeling the stem of the poppy in our fingers, sensing the
faint fragrance borne in on breathing. Quietly, we allowed our
eyelids to open. From our own fingers, the golden cup of the
flower opened on us like a sunrise.
But it was not only a fine spring day in a lovely setting. It was
Good Friday, the last day of our workshop but the first day of
the Easter weekend. The urge to preach, even though without
words, overcame me. It was to these facts of the calendar, and
Does the odor come to you when you just allow it to?
all the emotional values associated with them, that I addressed

my next actions. These, as will be readily seen, were not based
on experience, either past or present, but on strictly philosoph-
ical considerations —
a fact which remains unaltered by the
additional fact that I managed to embody these considerations
in vivid sensory experience.
We stood for some time where we were, gazing into the
flowers in our hands, and then I asked each person to crush
his flower, seeing and feeling the changes as this form in
full bloom was reduced to a speck of almost colorless pulp.
We walked slowly to the bank and tossed the remains of our
flower into the vegetation. Again we closed our eyes, and after
a moment allowed them to reopen. From the bank the multitude
of poppies glowed at us.
A might have asked, why crush a flower for no reason?
child
But I was no
child, and neither, I thought, were the partici-
pants in the workshop. Yet as we returned, all I could think of
was to ask the group if they could give up thinking and just
give their attention to the changes in the environment. Bare-
foot, we stepped from the cool earth to the hot, flat boards of
the deck and entered the room, whose walls shut out the sea,
the flowering slopes, and the breeze, defining the space that
was now only there for us. Here too, where smells and sights
were so reduced, was still floor to stand on, air to breathe, and
the living centers of perception and function which were we.
After what was probably for many people a confusing detour
into a private symbolism of the Crucifixion, I began now trying
to invite us back to our senses, from which Charlotte never
had departed.
—
26 THE CONNOISSEUR
hese experiments with tasting and
smelling led me to certain recogni-
tions. After the change in almond and the orange,
flavor of the
it became obvious, for one thing, how much
of what I had con-
sidered taste was volatile and actually smell. Of course, I had
often heard this said, but now it became experience. I had
taken a step, in this modest respect, toward becoming a con-
noisseur.
I began to experiment more consciously with flavors. With
oranges, it became clear that, apart from their fragrance, what
was pleasant to me was almost entirely a factor of sweetness
granted that this sweetness was always given character by a
certain acidity. With shelled almonds, taste was scarcely a fac-
tor at all: I enjoyed the faint aroma as I crushed them, but
mainly just the way they crunched between my teeth. Once
chewed, they were of no interest.
It became apparent and smell which ani-
also that taste —
mals, notwithstanding their preferences, seem to use more for
identification than for pleasure —
have less and less function in
a world where more and more foods are processed and labeled.
Few people today have occasion to smell whether something is
fresh, as was commonly done before the days of refrigerators,
quick freezing, and mass processing; and though a great many
doubtful smells may have disappeared from the larder, an
equal number of delicious smells have disappeared with them.
Flavors, which were once a matter of every individual's
research, are coming to be adjudicated by computers, which
have neither taste buds nor judgment.
But with each child born, a whole new possibility begins.
My own standards of taste go back consciously more than fifty
years. Ihave seldom had peaches or blackberries to match I

those I picked then. This is not just the enchantment lent by
distance, for I remember Spanish oranges in 1934, an ItaUan
persimmon in 1937, apricots from a friend's tree in California
in 1947, and even a German pork chop in 1930, just as an old
Burgundian may remember wines. These events are memor-
able for a very real reason I seldom get fruit that someone has
:
picked because it looked and smelled just right.

In my childhood I heard a good deal about "acquired tastes,"
meaning adult refinements that the naive taste buds of a child
could not appreciate. But in my travels later among the earthy
working people of Latin countries, I seem to remember nothing
prized by adults —
except, perhaps, alcohols —
that was not also
prized by children. There, food was food, and good food was
good food.
A perfect example of acquired taste is the taste for tobacco,
which, of course, is not taste at all, but smell. I gave up smoking
many years ago, after a quarter-century of convincing myself
that cigarettes tasted as the advertisements said thev did; and
the one or two I have smoked since then have had the very
same nauseating quality they had when I first struggled man-
fully with them at the age of twelve. I had been told then that
cigarettes were bad for me, and was alreadv well aware that
much of what was supposed to be bad must really be good,
inasmuch as most of the grownups plainly found it so. Con-
versely, much thatwas "good for me" was obviously bad. In
this, my experience was the same as Tom Sawyer's and I sup-
pose that ofmany milhons of my countrymen. Unfortunately,
such a beginning requires a lifetime to correct —
a luxury not
everyone can afford.
In the world of taste of my childhood there were two univer-
sally acknowledged horrors: castor oil and cod-liver oil. Every-
one my age had to take them: castor oil as a remedy for
stomach-ache, but usually with much emphasis on the folly
that had caused the stomach-ache; and cod-liver oil for "good
health," but with equal emphasis on the general rule that good
was achieved only through suffering. My young friends and I,
77
161 The Connoisseur
whatever "good" we came by, were soon resigned to the inevi-

tability of the bad.
A generation later, life brought startling revelations about
both my old enemies. came when my own child was
The first
prescribed percomorph oil. This was administered by the drop

instead of by the spoonful, being many times more potent
than the oil of my own experience. But it was even more
unpleasant, as I found on trying it, and once in one's mouth,
the taste hung on and on. Yet when our child was offered it, he
took it with delight. In our little progressive nursery school,
almost all the children liked percomorph oil, and many would
savor it like a bon vivant sipping wine. What was the reason?
Simply that the oil had been offered them like anything else,
and never urged on them.
The other revelation came when I first saw Robert Flaherty's
beautiful documentary film, Nanook of the North, the pioneer
in its field. At the trading post on Hudson Bay, on one of the
days when the white man's treasures arrived and were sold, a
little Eskimo boy of six had stuffed himself with candies till he
felt sick. Fortunately, relief was close at hand. An enormous
spoonful of castor oil was poured and brought to his lips. He

opened; the spoon was gently advanced; he drew in the thick
liquid a little at a time. In my seat, I braced myself against
empathy. But even as I could feel the oil spreading over his
tongue and filling his nostrils, an expression dawned in his face
that unfolded into unforgettable delight. Whatever happened
to his sickness, and to the offending candies, at least for the
minute that the camera was on him all ill was out of mind and
life was good.
English lacks the distinction between the two kinds of
knowing of Latin languages: between the savant, whose mind
is full of information, and the connoisseur, who knows the
world as one knows a person. The savant is a man of learning,

the connoisseur a man of discrimination. The former has
accumulated a world of other people's sometimes doubtful
facts, the latter a world of his own sensory experiences.
A former student of Charlotte's had the insight and presence
Of mind to capture the expressions of the baby shown on these
pages. In the glass, in the first group, is the famihar orange

juice. The totality of inner preparation for the experience, the
total reception, and the full savoring and tasting out show, with
that fine clarity of infancy, the process of allowing oneself
time and occasion to come to know something, as knowing is
implied in the French word connoisseur. The photos in the sec-

ond group tell a different story. At what point in life does
"knowledge" begin to separate into these two categories of
information and experience? Probably in the midst of one of
those many situations for which a million years of evolution
have already prepared me, when I am nevertheless told for the
first time, "Mother knows best."
One can taste out such photographs just as the baby himself
tastes out the juice. One will need much more time than the
baby needs, and equal quiet. We have stereotyped reactions
that must be put aside, if we are to discover what is there:
the presence, the alertness, the sensitivity. There is nothing
"cute" about these pictures. For beneath the stereotypes, far
beneath, is
—
where we exist ourselves present, alert, sensitive
— when we come deep enough. In the baby, we see ourselves
as we have tasted —
as we may taste again. This is the func-
tion of art: to reveal life to us through the sense organs of
others, which are no from our own: the taste buds
different
of the baby, the eye of the photographer. The artist only uses
his equipment as we have perhaps not yet learned to use ours.
The magic of taste, which everyone who knows the word
respects, either by compulsion or genuinely, and which com-
mands so high a price on the market of art, design, decoration,
and fashion in the United States, is no secret painfully
acquired from others. It is the universal and perfectly com-
monplace magic of our sensory nervous system, at the center
of which are the taste buds, constantly discriminating
relishing or rejecting — when they are permitted to, endlessly
making fine observations and judgments which are only too
often overruled by parents and teachers whose own taste buds
have been dulled and whose native discrimination has been
superseded by the standards of others. From this simple animal
function, which civilization has merely refined and com-
165 The Connoisseur
plicated, comes the one word used to denote that judgment

of human achievements from which there is no appeal.
It is thus an error to think of connoisseurs as a rare and
privileged group of adults who have had the leisure and inter-
est (or do we think of it as time and money?) to spend their
lives in fine comparisons of food and drink, and of the arts. No
household would be without its connoisseur, if we parents had
the good sense to respect him. We would all be connoisseurs
ourselves if we only respected our natural gifts. No art-lover
sensing out a painting, no lover of music savoring a fine quar-
tet, indeed, no ordinary sensitive person pausing at the song of
a bird or relishing a sunset, is engaged from a baby
differently
tasting his juice when he is do so. One cannot
just allowed to
be taught to taste, for it comes naturally; one can only be dis-
tracted from it.
Would not explain why every primitive culture produces

this
such exquisite form and color? No experts are
artifacts of
needed here to point out values which everyone can see for
himself.
Our sensory awareness classes exist to cultivate the con-
noisseur in each of us. But far better,if one had to choose,
would be to study and let oneself be influenced by one's own

child. Such a study would mean giving up one's preconceptions
and taking whatever time might be needed to come to know
the child's way of being. One who could do this would, I
think, truly become a connoisseur of living.
YAWNING AND STRETCHING
seen a baby yawn

A
—
nother thing babies can teach us
how
yawn. Whoever has not really
to
or, indeed, still better, a cat or dog has —
is
missed a full organismic experience. When I first attended

Charlotte's classes in New York, and for the first time was
encouraged not to hide a yawn but to permit and enjoy it, I
became painfully conscious of the very limited degree to which
yawning was still possible to me. The impulse came often
enough, but each time it seemed hke a bud starting to open in
all promise and then mysteriously blighted. There was the
opening of jaws and throat, the intake of breath, and then, as

neck and shoulder girdle began to become involved, came an
abrupt ending, as with a boat starting to drift in the breeze and
stopped short by its anchor. It began so sweetly and was so
rudely halted. Struggle was futile. I seemed to stand impotent
on the edge of opening. (The sexual connotations of these
statements, especially for women, seem to me so obvious that 1
shall proceed without further mention of them.

Once I asked Charlotte if she thought we New Yorkers could
ever learn to yawn like dogs and cats. Her reply was immediate
and Delphic: "Dogs and cats are also New Yorkers." This was
a hard message to take, but I have pondered it and pass it on.
The firm hand on my shoulder which arrested the budding
yawn within was the hand of a form of law and order which,
though absent from many cultures, is highly developed in ours.
We conceal our yawns not only because they sometimes express
boredom, or because we are ashamed of admitting sleepiness,
but also because not to conceal them would reveal a yielding to
the involuntary which our social rules can hardly sanction. In
—
167 Yawning and Stretching
fact, we commonly speak of "suppressing" and even "stifling"

yawns — as one does with an insurrection.
But if we would accept and take heed of our need to yawn,
it could become a very reliable safety valve and guide, giving us
the clue when it is time to start afresh and come to a better
balanced activity, or a more genuine communication, as the
case might be. When everyone in a situation recognized the
authenticity of a yawn, we could have a good yawn, or a good
laugh, all around.
Laughing is in a sense the other side of the coin. It is a
celebration of survival and well-being, whether alone or with
others, in a world and absurdities. Yawning and
of perils
laughter, as everybody knows, are equally contagious, and are
two of the best lifeboats we can share on our long voyage.
We shall no more attempt to work directly with yawning
than we should with laughing or weeping or making love. These
basic reflexes, like "the truth," can be approached only indi-
rectly. We shall work on our house to have it ready for them, in
case they should visit us, but they belong to a deeper order of
things than our ideas and intentions, and they will not stand
urging or improving.
There is, to yawn-
however, an activity very closely related
ing, and even which represents
to a certain extent including it,
a kind of general and universal aspiration toward freedom,

and which almost everybody already works with who concerns
himself with "movement." This is stretching, in which lions,
wolves, and babies are as eloquent as in their yawns. Who has
not noticed the relish and power with which a cat stretches and
bares its claws, or the gusto of a dog stretching limbs and back
before arising? We, too, on waking in the morning, while our
minds are still half in that world we cannot aspire to control,
and we still smell of sleep, often spontaneously stretch out of
the position we have lain in, savoring our flexibility and exten-
sion to the full and involuntarily readying ourselves for a new
day.
As with however, we shall probably have to work on
lying,
stretching before it can become restful to us again when we are
wide awake. Very many of us have been taught how to stretch
as though there could be a correct method for this simplestand

most spontaneous of all expressive movements. We
must start
in an entirely different way. We must first come to enough I
inner quiet so that we can feel what may really be needed at
this moment. Then stretching will become discovery and not
performance, a meditation instead of an exercise. When we
have come closer to real stillness, in which we can feel the very
beginning of a movement, we will let it begin at its own time
and then follow it as it evolves and gains power, leading us on
its own path into virgin territory, where no experts have been.
To stretch with subtlety and sensitiyity.

169 Yawning and Stretching
This highly intuitive stretching, which would only be a con-

scious equivalent of a process which simply happens in babies
and animals (but which we could never find by a mechanical
imitation of babies or animals), can be practiced by anyone at
any time, even when among other people. Much of what one
can feel of oneself is so hidden from sight that it can move and
stretch itself unnoticed. In fact, it is well worth trying when
among others. One is then obliged to stretch with subtlety and
sensitivity —
a practice which will also prove its worth when one
is alone, or working on stretching with a group, when one
might be tempted to go into all sorts of exaggerations. Such

exaggerations blur the distinction between what is actually
sensed as needed (and can be allowed), and what one imagines
is needed, and brings about by force. A stretch that extends
itself only as the tissues invite it, and does not force its way
through, becomes an awakening for proper functioning and

brings genuine well-being.
I believe the reader can obtain much relief and pleasure if
he will take ten or fifteen minutes once in a while just to

explore stretching. would suggest standing as a point of depar-
I
ture, though any other will do. It can and should be practiced
as a real meditation: that is, as something to which one gives
full and unreserved attention. To fling oneself here and there
in an image of "abandon," as many people do, or to relax every-
thing possible in an image of "letting go," is as much a form of
self-control as following any other pattern of behavior. It may
be satisfying, just as it is satisfying to feel that one has done the
correct steps of a tango, or has jumped loosely to rock and roll,
but just as merely doing the steps is not dancing, this "abandon"
should by no means be confused with the sensitive feeling out of
oneself which is spontaneous movement.
Each moment the reader will really give himself to his dis-
coveries will be a memorable one. As in all meditations,
strength and patience are required, for the voices of the past
will be clamoring to have their way: the advice, the techniques,
the examples of people one has seen and admired. It is hard to
shut these voices out and wait in the unfamihar emptiness
until the organism speaks its needs. But one must hold firm to
the emptiness and wait for this voice, which can always be
recognized because it never commands or urges, but says
merely, "I am here." One can recognize it by the pleasure one
has in hearing it — and in allowing the hand to open and
extend, if it is the hand, or the sacrum if it is the sacrum,
or the jaw and windpipe if it is a yawn, or little by httle the
whole organized skeleton and musculature, if it should lead so
far.
i
28 REACHING AND SERVING
little we yawn and

A nother closely related practice in our
classes
stretch,
is
reaching
reaching.
is
However much
something we are con-
or
stantly obliged to do in daily living. What we are not obliged

to do is to reach wholeheartedly — like the people in these pic-
tures — and we seldom do.
Now if we sit cross-legged on the floor with a stone lying a
little away from us, we cannot reach for it without the move-
ment's bringing our trunk and hip joints into play. Even the
muscles of our legs will be asked to give. It may be necessary to
make a conscious choice either to remain as inert as the situa-
:
tion permits —
perhaps even straining ourselves to avoid
—
unnecessary motion or to accept the invitation to a more
total response. This is clearly not a mechanical problem, but a
psychosomatic one. It is a question of attitude.
Perhaps we are just asked to pick up the stone. One single
task, as spoken or written, and a single task if given to a
machine. But proposed to twenty people, it elicits twenty differ-
ent responses. One person is eager to obey, another is reluctant,
one aggressive, another diffident, one light, another heavy. To
at least some degree, the individual mood and character of each
is apparent in the movement.
All, however, share the relative mechanical difficulty of
reaching out while sitting cross-legged on the floor. Our basic
choice, regardless of our individual differences, is whether to
perform the minimum which is literally required of us or

whether, in addition, to feel out what we are doing. Nothing is
gained by just picking up the stone, but to sense how we go

about it may bring valuable discoveries. This may bring into
173 Reaching and Serving
relief how little accustomed we are to yield where we would

have to in order to reach freely, without constriction all
through our interior. It may dawn on us that for years we have
performed such tasks in spite of ourselves, so to speak forcing —
ourselves, even if only briefly, and straining back and belly
against increasing resistance in pelvis and legs.
Faced with such a choice, some of us will begin to reach for
our stone with a deliberate stretching and exercising of the
pelvis, such as is often done in dance exercises and in yoga.
Now comes the question already discussed,^ to what extent
we will allow ourselves to be led away from the task of reaching
freely for the stone into a mechanical forcing of sluggish
muscles so as to become more limber. This is a very delicate
and subtle question. At its simplest, I would say the alternative
is between following the idea of a correct reaching, in which
one simply trains oneself as one might a dog, and taking time
to explore where one could yield more fully, as a living, breath-
ing organism, to a given task.
This alternative may not really exist as we begin. We may
have to start with what I am again calling "exercise." But as
soon as we have started, the alternative does appear, and the
two possibilities presently become clearer and more separate.
As in all our practice, the way of exploration becomes con-
stantly more from the way of authority.
distinct
But the reader need not sit cross-legged on the floor to experi-
ment with reaching. Before he sets down the book or reaches
for the lamp, let him give attention to his own breathing until
he feels where ithim and perhaps where it would still
goes in
like to go more Then as he reaches out for whatever
freely.
purpose, he may go slowly enough to sense how the movement
affects him, and how possibly a more generous and open move-
ment might influence breathing. This, in turn, will aff'ect the
way he picks up or sets down whatever is involved, regardless
of its weight.
We are constantly reaching during the day while standing
or walking: opening and closing doors, selecting and replacing
1. See page 69.

articles, pressing elevator buttons, shaking hands. Above all,
the housewife is involved in reaching when she cooks and

serves — or the househusband, as is often the case with Char-
lotte and me. He may be setting a full pan on the stove or reach-
ing out to get plates from a shelf. Or he may be placing a dish
on the dining where the important thing is its relationship
table,
and to the people. It was in the instanta-
to all the other plates
neous, unthinking, and perfect resolution of all these matters
by our Los Angeles cook, in which he allowed himself to be
equally and totally involved throughout his person, that his
great beauty lay.
I would advise anyone who is interested in either movement
or social relations to get a job as a waiter. Half the fine dancers
I have known have earned a living as waiters or waitresses.
Kinesthetically, it is the perfect occupation. But he should go
either to a lunch counter in midtown Manhattan, where at noon
every second is weighed in gold, or, conversely, to some remote
Savoyard village, where the food comes from the garden and
from the stream outside the back door of the restaurant, and is
precious to him who prepares it and to him who eats it. For no
waiter can be entirely free of the brutish and alienated attitude
to the ritual of eating that prevails in so many American
restaurants. Unless he is reminded by circumstances of the
intrinsic value of his work, he can hardly give himself to it with
all his heart.
But for the sensitive waiter, in a milieu where there is
respect for this most basic of all organic processes, in which
one form of life is prepared for and consumed by another, his
work becomes full sensory awareness. Its intrinsic social and
individual significance is probably why, in good restaurants all
over the world, the waiter wears the simplest possible costume
of white and black, representing cleanliness and unobtrusive-
ness and allowing psychological freedom. What shall we say of
what America does to her own waitresses, dressing them in
miniskirts and even baring their breasts to distract us and them
from their real function?
We cannot all become professional waiters and waitresses.
But I wonder if the reader has not himself felt now and then a
—
175 Reaching and Serving
certain exhilaration in serving his friends, his children, or his

mate. If so,was it just the joyful sense of offering a gift
—
perhaps the work of his own hands and of setting the gift
down before the recipient? Or was there still another ele-
ment, the joy of movement, which was equally present when he
removed the dishes and carried them to the sink with care, —
in respect for the others' presence, but perhaps swiftly and
efficiently nonetheless. Here there was a choice of dumping
—
them at random of giving up and letting go, one might say
— or of addressing oneself intuitively and unhesitatingly to the
situation, sorting and scraping here, perhaps rinsing there,
without ever neglecting the company at the table. If one has
had this experience, was there not a very satisfying sense of
functioning in it?
Perhaps when he next sets the table or carries dishes to the

sink, the reader will make a deliberate experiment for himself.
He may take time to sense his own breathing as he moves, or to
feel the weight and shape of the objects he handles. What if he
merely gives attention to his own relation to the floor in mov-
ing, or to his passage through the spaces of the room? These
avenues of sensing can be interchangeable. All such activities,
involving the placing and removing of objects in accordance
with a sense of the entire situation, requiring mindfulness but
seldom requiring thought, can be studied just as one studies
reaching for a stone.
Would this not lead to an unbearable narcissism in serving
others, when hungry people might wait while we perfect our
movements? By no means. Does gravity wait while a skier
perfects his style? All our actions, if functional, are directed to
the central aim of the moment — in this case, serving nourish-
ment to others. In such a light, studying will not diminish
one's connection with other people present, but can only
enhance it.
29 GIVING AND RECEIVING
H
with other people, more mindful
aving
jects,
practiced with inanimate ob-
we may begin again working
now of what is really involved.
There is so much to learn about another through conscious
contact, and especially through what is called "physical" con-
tact — through the open, sensitive coming into connection, even
through clothes, with the flesh and blood of another person. I say
"even through clothes," but I have felt it through the twenty-
foot length of a floor beam, when one end of the beam was on
my shoulder and the other on my partner's, as we walked out
on twelve-inch walls, high above the ground, to set the beam in
place. Unless each feels the other through the length of such a
beam, neither survives. A contact of skin with skin may be
delightful, but the deep inner nature of a person must come
through the skin, and it will come through the clothes too.
One year, I spent half an hour or so every afternoon wTest-
ling with my five-year-old son when I came home from heavy
work in the shipyards. It was a delight for him and a gieat
restorative for me. His friends began to join in, until on occa-
sion there might be quite a group of us. was an extraordinary
It
discovery for me how clearly each child's character became

apparent through the veils of behavior with which I was
already familiar, already so strongly formed at that early age:
one joyous and generous in his use of force, one sly and relent-
less, one anxious, one fearful and mean —
each test of strength
more revealing than months of everyday encounter. Tlie opin-
ions I had formed of them could be discarded, for in wrestling
I felt that I came to know each little boy as he really was
behind the social fagade he had learned at home and as he —

might never know himself.
177 Giving and Receiving
In our experiments, which so far have only skirted wrestling,

something of this may still appear with adults. The forces
beneath the surface make themselves felt. A shy person may
have a warm and positive approach, while a big talker may be
timid and awkward. One who acts self-confident and omni-
scient may be helpless in real action. Experts on sensitivity may
be cold, experts in expressive dance exaggerated. Someone
who feels and appears incompetent in the stresses of social
Our experiments, which so far have only skirted wrestling.

livingmay, on the other hand, really come into his own when
he works quietly with another person. Careful perception of
what actually happens may teach us much about the discrep-
ancy between surface appearance and inner reality.
Real human relationships consist of constant exchange. Con-
sciously or unconsciously, one is always giving and receiving.
Sometimes it seems more one or more the other, and sometimes
both simultaneously. Actually, in a sense it is always both at
once. A warm hand and a cold hand come together: the one
gives of its warmth, and the other receives. But the cold hand
gives an invitation to the warmth, and the warm hand receives
the invitation. Either may be reluctant and hold back, or be
accepting and give freely. One gives the other a glass of wine,
but the recipient gives the giver the occasion. The guest gives
the host a better or poorer reception for the meal he is given.
One cannot separate these functions; one can only be more or
less present in them.
Ways of working together are innumerable. When it fully
dawns on one that this work is indeed not a body of techniques
but the exploration of a new approach to living, new ways
appear like the new leaves in spring, spontaneously, from the
But some activities are so well suited to a studio,
situation itself.
and so general and dramatic in their usual effects, that I should]
like to describe them here.
One interesting study, which could easily be tried by the I
reader and his friends as a sort of parlor game, is to explore

what happens when one person stands and others offer to sup-
port his arms. Three people work together, one standing alone
with arms extended to the sides, while the other two stand
behind him ready to offer their support. When all feel ready,
the two bring their hands under the elbows and wrists of the
other, who is invited to give them the weight of his arms. He is
not to lean on the helpers. He is to let his arms be carried, but
in all other respects to stand normally.
The helpers, meanwhile, stand patiently offering a support
which of course they cannot give until the other first gives his
weight. When, in their judgment, they are receiving all or most
of the weight of the other's arms, they may move them gently
here and there, feehng whether the other lets them do the
moving, or resists, or perhaps tries to do it himself. Finally the
helpers carry the arms down come to hanging and,
until they
when they feel they are no longer needed, come quietly away.
Very often, at one point or another, a helper may feel his
offer of support is not accepted. He may want to say so, or he
may wait quietly, just staying there. After a while, if still no
weight is given, he may deftly withdraw, leaving the arm,
which presumably was resting in his hands, to remain magically
outstretched, unfelt by the person himself until his attention is
brought to it. This is most apt to happen when the arm is being
lowered, but often no weight is ever given at all.
People are almost always impressed with their discoveries in
this experiment. But what is significant is the changes that may
take place, from not giving to giving, or vice versa, whether
noticed by one, two, or all three parties concerned. One very
cultivated and intelligent woman who has worked with us for a
number of years without losing much of her obviously rigorous
self-control exclaimed recently in delight, "This is the first time
I could really give myself." When her partners were asked how
it felt to them, both agreed that she had not given any weight
at all. She was quite taken aback, but then conceded that she
had not given herself at first. "But when I felt I could trust
them," she said, smiling warmly with moist eyes, "then I gave."
The partners, asked to reconsider carefully, did remember that
each, at a certain point, seemed to feel more contact. How
much weight was involved they could not tell: certainly not
much. But it was true there had been a change.
It would be hard to find a clearer example of the relativity
of experience. The few ounces which seemed nothing to the

helpers were, to the person who granted them, the first stone
loosening in the wall, which seemed to her like a landshde. As
the greatest sinners were the most welcomed in heaven, the
person with the greatest stone wall between himself and the
world may find the most delight as one after another, in their
own time, the stones begin to slip away.
No matter how fully or how little one is able to give of one-
self, arms to another in rest, and
the least yielding of one's
even more when they are being moved, is perceived as freedom
— often as weightlessness and even flight. People come back to
standing as from a magic carpet, exhilarated and softened.
They are grateful to the ones who gave the help, and in the
contagion of exchange the helpers are grateful too.
When a group can be divided into units of four, six, or eight,
another vivid experiment can be made in giving and receiving.
Half —
let us say four of eight —
will stand holding hands in a
circle.The other four will sit or kneel behind them, one behind
each. The four who stand take time to come to a good distribu-
tion of their weight and an easy connection with each other.
Then, using each other's hands for balance, they raise their
heels from the floor, coming to standing on the balls of their
feet. The helpers at this point quietly slip their hands under the
raised heels,which are now offered a very diff'erent support to
return Those who stand are asked to come gradually back to
to.
easy standing, with the balls of the feet on the floor and heels
and insteps on their helpers' hands. The helpers, who, if pru-
dent, have removed their rings, are to speak up if it hurts;
otherwise, those standing are to give their full weight. When
they feel they have indeed come to standing on what is under

them, they are to rise again, allowing the helpers to withdraw,
and find how the floor feels now when they come back to it.
While they are feeling out what is usually a fresher and
livelier connection with the move a quarter of
floor, the helpers
the way around the circle to the next person, who presently
rises again with his comrades to allow the new helper's hands to
slip under him. With four standing and four helping, each has
three new opportunities for readjustment and fresh approach,
in which he can explore the best way to offer his hands or to
give his weight to another without crushing him.
Afterward, when all compare their findings, it is sometimes
the heaviest who are felt as lightest, and the lightest as heav-
iest. Only part of this discrepancy is due to fear of crushing the
other; much is in the way the weight is given. A rigid person

either does not give his weight at all or gives it rigidly in the
form of pressure, which will probably also be true of a less
sensitive person. But helpers who wring crushed fingers after
their first offering may find their way to a quite different and
perhaps much fuller approach as they continue, and one much
less painful.
Far oftener, however, helpers find that they can take much
more of the other'sweight than they imagined, and that they
experience it not as an imposition on the part of the other, but
as a giving which they find pleasure in accepting. The givers
also,who can choose how much weight to give to the floor
and how much to their partners' hands, gradually come to more
and more standing on the offered hands and are amazed both
at the capacity of the hands to receive them and at the sensi-
tivity in their own feet which can tell them whether they are
giving or imposing.
In the chapter on lying, I described the experiment of raising
one's legs to standing and then slightly raising the pelvis from
the floor in order to explore what may be a long way back to
rest.i This same experiment, when undertaken with a partner,
gains an added liveliness. When the pelvis is raised, the partner
1. See pages 72-73.

Helpers who wring crushed fingers after their first offering

may find their way to a much fuller approach
as they continue.
slips his hand underneath to receive it when it is allowed down

to rest.
So much that is movable, and so much often unrealized
matching the
sensitivity, reside in the lowest part of the back,
and sensitiveness of the hand, that the coming into
flexibility
union may be very fully felt and savored, and the very consid-
erable weight given and received, without injury or even stress.
And when the pelvis is again raised to free the helper's hand
and again finds its way, perhaps now with every nerve awake,
to the flat and solid floor, the yielding that is asked of it and
the support that is offered may have gained very much in
reality and value.
—
30 GIVING AND
RECEIVING, CONTINUED
ply to let
o
them exchange
ne of the best ways of getting a group
into a sense of interconnection is
objects with each other. As Charlotte

sim-
and I are seldom without stones, which we even take on planes

and through customs, these are what we often use for this
purpose. The exchanges in our classes have this great advan-
tage over the exchange of Christmas presents that our gifts
are temporary, cost nothing, and are unfailingly beautiful.
We have only to ask participants to stay in touch with the
stone in their hand as they give it over to another person for the
exchange to become significant. Something real is passing from
one person to the other, and the manner of its passing is
entirely dependent on the two people concerned. When aware
of the stone, one also feels the other receiving it. The receiver,
for his part, may be conscious of how the stone is given
whether with care and feeling, or otherwise. When 1 say "care
and feeling," I do not mean concern and affection, though it is
quite possible these emotions may be generated as a conse-
quence. I mean the maintaining of interest in the transaction
until it is completed feeling when it is completed
: — when form
and weight have been fully transferred to the receiving hand
and withdrawing at the appropriate moment without hurry or
reluctance. All this can be felt by the receiver. He, too, feels
the weight of the stone as it is given to him, and he feels
whether it is simply the weight and nothing else, or perhaps
includes some additional little push — as if the giver wanted to
get rid of his stone, or impress him with it — or some unwill-
ingness to leave, as if the giver clung to it.
One or two questions to the class may be helpful. For
instance, do people really just stay with the transfer of the

stones, or do they little by become carried away in self-
little
image and fantasy? Are their movements, however sensitive,

also simple and practical, or do they become gestures?
In order to facilitate exchange, we usually ask everybody to
walk at random through the room until he feels an impulse to
give away his stone and receive another. The use of the eyes
immediately comes into question. Do I look for a suitable per-
son for my exchange? Perhaps there is some other way of
sensing him. How can I tell whether he also is ready to
exchange? Instead of the usual questioning and answering with
glances, is there a way of revealing my desire and sensing his
simply through kinesthetic awareness? As these possibilities
begin to arise for people in the group, the whole activity
.
becomes quiet and charged with alertness. When the encounter

occurs, growing into the exchange and consummated by it,
care and feeling blossom into a greater sense of presence.
Again we are expanded to our potential: able to be, without
reflection — able simply and fully to exchange.
In our NewYork studio we have many beautiful stones for
such uses, just the size for our hands. But we have large ones
too— ten or twenty-pounders from Wyoming, California. Can-
ada, Mexico. One stone, like the egg of a roc out of the Arabian
Nights, brought to us from Nova Scotia, weighs sixty pounds.
With this stone, marvelously rounded by North Atlantic
storms, it is a joy to work on lifting. This is my hobby. I ask
someone just to bend over and clasp this stone to let its —
smooth ends fill his hands as he stoops to where he can feel it
—
most comfortably and then gradually to take a little of its
weight. As the person works, he is to be sure to accommodate
his breathing, to let his back and belly have freedom, and
not to strain. In fact, the task is to explore the difference
between working and straining. If he wants to take more
weight he is free to do so, but under no circumstances is he to
lift this really heavy stone from the floor. And yet, even with
little old ladies in these New York classes, the stone does leave
the floor —no one knows how!

The heavier stones, like the smaller ones, were chosen for
185 Giving and Receiving, Continued
their beauty, and they stand in a good hght on our window sills
as objects of art. Over the years, they have accumulated till
there is hardly room for them.
One morning 1 had form a circle and then asked
the class
one person to go to the window, take one of these heavy stones
from among its surroundings, carry it back to the circle, and
give it to the person nearest him. This exchange had to be
careful, for if the stone had inadvertently dropped on someone's
foot, it might have meant real injury. The recipient, with some
concern and doubtfulness, accepted the weight, turned and
passed it on cautiously to his neighbor, and finally went himself
to the window to get another stone. Soon a number of heavy
stones, interspersed with flower pots and other objects, were
traveling around the circle —
each very different in shape,
weight, and character from the others, and each giVen and
received with as much concern for its weight as interest in
its individuality. Little by little, doubtfulness disappeared.
Standing eased, breathing became freer. When the first stone
reached the last person in the circle, that person returned it to
its place.
The hour and a half which a New York class takes was soon
over. Except for a preparation in sensing with our usual stones,
:
it had been entirely consumed in taking these heavy stones
from their places, carrying them over and giving them to the
waiting hands and energies of another human being, and,
finally, receiving a stone in turn and replacing it where it had
come from. At the end of the class, one woman came to me in
tears. Through an oversight, she had not been asked either to
:' take a stone from its place or to return it.
One night found us working at the

other end of the continent, with Charlotte conducting the final
session of a San Francisco Zen Center benefit attended by two
hundred people. She had been working at sensing breathing
while sitting, standing, and coming into movement an activity —
especially appropriate to these circumstances in which she
could relate the central concern of Zen practice to everyday
living. At a certain point she paused, and, in accordance with
careful prearrangement, fifty candles in saucers were brought

into the room. These were then distributed among the people
present and lighted by whoever had matches, until points of
light could be seen flickering on all sides.
The hall was now darkened and each bearer of a candle

asked to walk at random through the crowd until he came to
someone to whom
he felt impelled to give it. In the semidark-
ness of the great room, a sea of hushed forms began to move,
opening a little and closing around the wandering lights, while
here and there someone would give his candle to some momen-
tarily illuminated stranger, or receive one from him. Every-
where eyes were on the moving flames, which, flickering,
irregularly as they were carried, yet warmly lighted each
transient encounter that formed and dissolved. Each person
present alternated between the anonymity of the slowly mov-
ing, darkened multitude and the moment when the candle was
in his own hands to carry. Accepting so clear a role when it
came to him, and relinquishing it when he felt it was the
—
moment feeling out the rightness and inevitability of each
— invited a profound sense of rhythm and seemed to confer on
the faces of the participants a glow beyond that radiating from
the light. Among the two hundred persons milling in the room,
some with some without, spread a gradual exhilaration
lights,
that did notseem to diminish as the time passed.
After half an hour, Charlotte asked all those who had can-
dles to set them down in the center of the floor. Even with
these students and others interested in Zen, for whom simplic-
ity is paramount, this process occupied a considerable time.
When it was finished, those nearest the center sat or knelt on
massed behind them, could see over
the floor, so that the others,
their heads. Finally, Charlotte asked someone to come forward
and blow out a candle. The room filled with expectancy. In the
corners of their eyes, people could see the ring of figures sur-
rounding the fifty candles, whose flames lighted the banked
faces on every side. A young man arose, his eyes fixed on the
glittering pool of light, and stood an instant, as though taking
heart. Then he walked forward, knelt, blew out the nearest
candle in one breath, and returned to where he had been.
187 Giving and Receiving, Continued
Before everyone's eyes, one of the white candles stood still,
tipped only by a small black wick. Finally another figure

arose, and from the opposite side still another. The task had
begun; hesitation was evaporating. Without haste or confusion,
three or four now approached at once, blew out a candle
each, and returned to their places. Each moved with the assur-
ance and grace of a deep inner motivation.
Presently only some dozen candles were left. Charlotte
struck a small bell she had brought with her. The movements of
the figures that were just arising halted as the tone of the bell
shivered through the room in gradual diminuendo. At the
center of everything, the remaining candles burned steadily.
Charlotte stepped forward, brought her palms together in the
Zen greeting, and bowed, ending the session.
GIVING AND
tJl RECEIVING THE HEAD
o f all the which we

more usual ways in
work together, probably the most dra-
matic is when we lift one another's heads. In this experiment,
one person lies on his back on the floor, while the other sits or
kneels behind his head where he can easily reach it. If we have
already worked with someone's leg, as described earlier, or
supported his arms, we will be prepared for some of the
possibilities.
Will our partner entrust his head to us? Will we, for our
part, be able to see or feel any of the changes which his reac-
tion to our offer of support may
induce in him? Will we be able
we entrust our head to him?
to feel if
Firstly, we are more concerned now with how we approach
the task. We take time to get settled where we shall not be
working at a disadvantage. We also wait until our partner
signals that he is quiet and ready for us. Then we gentlv slip
our hands under his neck, exploring through the hair to find
where neck enters skull: the region where we shall be able to
lift the weight of the head securely without a tendency to push
it into the trunk.
We allow time to get the feel of the other and to let him
get the feel of us. Then we begin to lift. Our eyes are on our
partner's whole person. Every change in breathing is visible,
every fluctuation in the musculature of throat and chest, every
flutter in the eyelids. According to these clear messages we
proceed, raising the head a little distance from the floor, sup-
porting it as our partner may or may not become more confident
in us, perhaps very gently moving or turning it if he permits.
Finally we lower the head until we feel the floor has fully
189 Giving and Receiving the Head
received it and we are no more needed. We leave quietly, as a

mother might leave a sleeping baby, with no disturbing
farewell.
But this is not the end. For some time, the one lying may
continue to feel changes taking place in himself, and some of
these may be visible to the helper. Or the thoughts may be so
clustering in him that there is no room for sensation; and
this too will be visible in his expression.
This experiment is, in fact, apt to stir up so many energies
and so much one has to interrupt animated
interest that often
conversations between partners and ask them to share their
discoveries with the group. Most frequently, the question will
be, did the lying one yield his head or did he move it himself?
With a little reflection, however, much else may come up.
Someone may recollect that at the first full contact, before the
head was even raised, he felt powerful changes in his connec-
tion with the floor. He could accept the invitation to rest in
another's hands, and as he did so, he felt his groins open up
and his legs come to fuller lying. This openness may still be
felt afterward, even after coming up to standing. Another may
have felt mainly the fearfulness of being dropped: his partner's
hands never seemed secure to him, even when they gripped
him. All the possibilities in working with a leg are present
here too, with a drama added by the special value we attach to
our heads.
One of my
most striking recollections of early days in Char-
lotte's was during a weekend seminar when this experi-
classes
ment was tried. On this occasion, it was my own head that was
raised; and the hands that raised it seemed so timid, and the
whole person behind them so insecure and frail, that it required
all ipy resolution to give my weight. I felt that at any moment
I might be dropped, and it was necessary to remind myself that
it was only an inch or so down to the floor. As these quavering
hands held me, my mind's eye, quite unable to rest, reviewed

the thirty figures I had seen in the room, and I decided that my
helper must be one of two elderly and seemingly infirm ladies
whom I had already noticed. I could not wait, after the attempt
was over, to see who it was. My eyes strained backward to the
figure kneeling behind me. To my amazement, I saw the out-

line, and then beyond any doubt the face, of the most jo\aal and
self-confident member of my regular evening class, a one-time
college athlete who could still lift a weight equal to his own two
hundred pounds, and a leader in his business community.
As I write this, some fifteen years later, it is only two wrecks
since my head was raised again, on a similar weekend, by
hands so gentle and secure, bespeaking a person so confident
and strong, that, had there been a Japanese wrestler in the
class, I should have been sure it was he. I have learned, in these
fifteen years, to stay with sensing and not to wonder or imagine
who may be working with me. But after all was over 1 had an
opportunity to see, and so unusual was the impression made
on me that I availed myself of it. It was a slim, fragile-looking
young girl.
Working with hundreds of such experiments, I have learned
that one of the questions that most often occupies partici-
pants is whether women and men come through differently as
helpers. To me this question has always seemed irrelevant.
We allow time to get the feel of the other.

But for those interested, these experiences would be worth

considering.
The one who has helped may also report experiences. Quite
possibly he noticed changes, shallow or deep, in his partner's
breathing. Often it was unaware of
turns out that the partner
them and, in the latter case at least, when breathing had deep-
ened, remembers only a sensation of security and trust that was
very satisfying. Or the helper may have noticed strong pulsa-
tions and struggling in his partner's throat, indicating a desire
to yield and the anxiety preventing it. In such a case, if he was
able more and more quietly, gently, and surely to continue offer-
ing support, letting his own pores be open for these signals of
response and distress, so that he could feel more sensitively how
his help was needed, he may have made possible at last a
moment of giving for which the other was filled with a mysteri-
ous relief and gratitude. Often, when all went well, the one
helped remained lying in a delicious well-being, which he
remembers as a new openness for existence inward and outward.
Because of the questions raised by this experiment — the
Then we begin to lift.

yielding of one's most complex and valued extremity, for most

people the very seat of their identity, to the hands of another
this is exciting to everyone. It has become one of the most
popular "sensory techniques," and is often used merely for its
value as sensationalism. But when worked with sensitively, it is
a study demanding much time and care and offering significant
rewards.
A useful variation is to require two signals from the person
lying: the first when he has come to enough quiet to be ready
to begin, and the second when his partner's hands have come
into a connection where he them, at which
feels secure with
point the partner can begin to now, the helper is suffi-
lift. If,
ciently aroused and present for the task, the other's head may
leave and return to the floor as inevitably and imperceptibly as
Lying in a delicious well-being.

—
driftwood on a sheltered beach is raised by the incoming tide,

buoyed, perhaps moved, for whatever time it is, and then
silently given back to the firm sand.
As in raising the legs, a steady, gentle pull on the head an —
invitation to give up its clinging to the neck and shoulders
follows naturally when the head is raised from the base of the
skull. If this invitation is of such a quality that he can avail
himself of it, it will offer an entirely new freedom to the person
lying. I believe it takes us back to the time we lay, or at least
needed to lie, in our mother's arms. That time may have meant
for us feelings ranging anywhere from anxiety to bliss. As with
those haunting smells which once in a while speak to us of a
time almost before memory, such an occasion as the present
one may offer us a taste of the half-forgotten bliss, or a possibil-
ity for disinterring and compensating the old anxiety.
To me, in these connections, images of natural forces come

readily. I see the tide rise, and I feel some equivalent in myself.
Two other such forces speak in that fine fable of Aesop's, which
I think could well stand as a maxim for all our work with one
another.
The Sun and the North Wind met over some ancient Athe-
nian slope and made wager as to which of them could
a
soonest get the coat off a traveler walking on the earth below.
The North Wind, full of action and purpose, tried first, but the
harder he blew the tighter the traveler pulled his coat around
him. Finally exhausted, he stopped and allowed the Sun his
turn. But the Sun did nothing special; as always, after a storm,
in those clear Greek skies, he merely smiled down on the
traveler in his full presence. He was still smiling as the traveler
walked on coatless down the road and the North Wind blus-
tered off back home.
This kind of presence we can work to cultivate.
32 PLAYING WITH BALLS
remember that when I first worked

I with stones in Charlotte's studio Iwas
so enchanted that afterward I could not wait until I had a
stone of my
own. On each trip to the country I searched until I
finally came on one, well rounded and just the right size, that I
took home, where it became my companion in action, my pil-
low, or my burden, as the fancy led me. But if Charlotte has
favorite objects, they seem to be balls.
The first problem in working with balls is to survive the
explosion of reflexes that tends to follow immediately upon
their distribution to a group. For many people, difficult as it is
to be quiet and attentive under any circumstances, with a ball

in the hand it is impossible. As well ask a dog to be quiet with a
bone.
Whereas a stone has a certain silent presence that in\ites
contemplation, a ball asks to shape is
be played with. Its
geometrical, ideal, and without individuality. reason Its entire
for being is action, and this action may be the very giving and
receiving which we are studying. So when Charlotte has rolled
out a basketful of balls among a group, and each person, ha\ing
taken one in his characteristic way of taking, now stands
there, seeing and feeling it in his hands or more likely
it —
diddling it or tossing it or bouncing it or teasing his neighbor
—
with it our task will be to begin to feel what we are doing.
First, then, we shall wait to feel what we have in our hands
and not rush to do something with it. We shall take time to
sense our relation to it. In a group there will be gieat individual
differences in relation to the ball. There will beyoung fellows
who have been playing baseball or basketball the day before and
195 Playing zuith Balls
who, through long habituation, are more swiftly and fully

focused by a ball than by anything else they touch; they are
galvanized the moment a ball comes near them. And there will
be others for whom old obligations to play ball have brought
frustration and defeat. Then there are many who simply
haven't had a ball in their hands for years.
So to begin with, we will all try to come to quiet. Let us
specifically take time to allow more quiet in the region of our
eyes: for many of us, just to have a ball in the hand means to
be on the watch. Then we may sense our breathing. Here, too,
we may clearly feel excitement, and any changes of the excite-
ment toward calm. We take a reasonable time, letting it be or
change as it will.
We will all try to come to quiet.

In any case, we now start to bounce the ball. How does It

bounce? The reaction of the ball to the floor Is a function of our
own energy. We can bounce it higher or lower. Some of us have
so much pent-up energy that it is hard to forgo this chance to
let it out: our balls fly high. Very good. But what about breath-
ing? Could some of the suppressed energy be allowed out in

that? Not forced: allowed. Do we perhaps hold our breath to
force out energy to bounce the ball? Let us now not
. . .
bounce the ball without at the same time sensing breathing.

We may give some time to let breathing gradually become
freer as we bounce the ball. We may work to let our lips and
brows become freer too. Many of us frown and purse our lips
with' each effort. Need it be an effort? Is there perhaps energy
which could arise all by itself from our depths, as does a deep
inhalation, without being caught and held in our expressions?
But bouncing a ball is not just throwing it at the floor. It is
also receiving it as it returns. Here is perhaps a still more
interesting study. If we were to pick out individuals from a
group, many would show more anxiety in receiving the ball
than in throwing it. Often we grab and clutch the ball as it
bounces back to us, letting it take us off balance, suddenly
becoming rigid all over as our arms stretch out for it and our
hands close on it.
We have to go slowly as we begin to study receiving the ball.
To clarify this a little we may now begin tossing the ball into
the air. This requires somewhat more precision — in what I
^
197 Playing uuiih Balls
might now call the giving of the ball to space than the —
bouncing did. Everyone is looking up now; there are apt to be
collisions. One must toss the ball with a sense of direction, more
or less straight up. What can we sense after tossing it? Do our
hands and arms remain outstretched, stiff, anxiously awaiting
the ball's return? If so, the ball will often simply bounce out of
our rigid hands. We act as though receiving and giving were
separate. Though we focus now on the moment of receiving
the ball, in that moment we must also give to it.
It is not hard to get the idea of giving to the ball. Many people
begin receiving the ball with bending arms, bending back, even
deeply bending knees. It seems a little ostentatious. Indeed, it is
not giving to the ball; it is one's idea of giving. Perhaps it is for

the benefit of the group, perhaps for that of an unconscious
inner audience. In any case, it represents a mental image of
the "correct" way to do it. It is not functional.
Yet it is a beginning. We shall at least not become atrophied
when we exaggerate. And it may be easily helped. When
Charlotte, for instance, mimics such exaggerations before a
group, the lesson is brought home immediately. A more difficult
case, indeed, arises with experts, who also like to embellish
their movements. An expert can be deeply involved in perform-
ing. With him, the embellishments may be very graceful and
subtle, but this is still not giving to the ball. This can be a
slippery and difficult question to work with. But such difficult
questions are sometimes the most interesting and rewarding.
This may be the time to add a new dimension to our study.
Instead of merely giving the ball to space and receiving it as it
returns, we may turn to giving and receiving, by means of the
ball, with each other.
A ball is the go-between par excellence, a messenger convey-
ing a statement of attitude from one person to another. This
attitude may be cooperative, competitive, hostile, friendly,
exploratory — or any blend of these. It may also be lively or
1. Some of the fascinating range of the word give, with its inner
positive and negative polarities —
from the ferocious "Give it to him!"
—
of a prizefight to opposite variations give away, give in, give up
becomes apparent here.
dull, deeply felt or shallowly. However it is, it can be illuminat-

ing to make a study of it.
For this purpose, let us divide the group into two halves,
lined up opposite each other along two walls of the room. There
is one ball for each pair; and the two simply toss it back and
forth. Presently one group moves one place over, so that every-
body has a new partner. These two play together for a while;
then all change again, continuing this way until all partners
have had perhaps half a dozen changes.
We will inquire now what anyone may have noticed. Were
there differences between the different partners' ways of throw-
ing and catching? Probably all were so involved in the demands
of the play itself that they noticed very little. Sometimes the
ball was harder to catch, sometimes easier. Once in a while, of
course, there was an accident. That was all.
Let us continue, but this time with only half the group.
The other half one end of the room to watch, while
retires to
those selected themselves more amply this time
distribute
along the two walls. Again the balls fly back and forth. They
have quite diff'erent trajectories, some high, some low, some
slow, some fast. We stop: one side moves over one place. We
begin again, and so on.
By now several of the watchers have noticed that the fast
balls tend to be thrown by the same persons, regardless of the
partner. The fancy catches likewise tend to be made by the
same persons, regardless of how the ball comes to them. This
is not a simple, functional exchange. There is something extra
in it.
The onlookers make their reports and then line up opposite

each other to play in their turn. No matter what they may
have noticed and reported about the first group, all this is apt
to be forgotten when they come into action themselves. Such
idiosyncrasies do not come from carelessness or ignorance, but
from deeply ingrained personality traits. But at least as far as
others are concerned, the group may already be becoming
more discerning. It is not just fast balls and fancy catches that
stand out. Certain persons, as before, will be seen to frown
with every catch or press their lips with every throw. Others
199 Playing with Balls
seem always startled or excessively cautious. The peculiarities

become more complex.
We can try another approach. The whole group now returns
to the two walls, facing each other. This time, before we start,
each thrower takes care to see his partner not looking at his —
eyes or his expression, not looking critically or with calculation,
but yet seeing him fully. Then he tosses his ball to that person.
The receiver is asked to let himself be more open and more
there for the ball he receives. It goes slower now. With such a
new orientation there may be many slips; that doesn't matter.
We are eliminating what is competitive and habitual and begin-
ning to play ball cooperatively.
As the pairs change to new pairs, this cooperation may well
express itself in some cases with throws inviting a welcome
reaching out by the receiver which for another receiver would
be asking too much. Such possibilities are readily discovered
and joyfully exploited. They are what gives the fun to playing
and what gives the chance to each player to respond more
vividly.
But let us see if a fuller cooperation is also possible in the
simplest and easiest give and take —
we can be as awake and
if
present when the ball is simply handed to us. The two groups
are now asked, as they continue tossing the balls back and
forth, to come closer to each other. Throws that would make
extra demands on the other would now be extravagant. As the
members of each pair approach each other, with ever-
shortening tosses they become more and more awake for the
ball and for the other. The time comes when no more space is
left. The ball must pass directly from hand to hand. We go very
slowly and finally pause. The presence of each can be felt,

through the ball, by the other. We start backward toward the
walls, continuing to toss —
but in our tissues we now know
something of who it is we toss to.
We work again, though perhaps not in this same class,
shall
with exchanging balls. But this time we will not bounce or toss
or throw them. We will simply approach another person and
give our ball to him, and feel how we receive it when a ball is
given to us. We have already done this with the more beautiful
and interesting But when we have allowed time enough

stones.
for preparation, this act of giving whatever is in our hands to
the hands of another can become a true act of giving, one in
which the intrinsic value of the object given means less than
the sharing of a common humanity. Caring, seriousness, and
joy show in the faces of people so engaged.^
One of Charlotte's favorite ways of ending a workshop is to
leteach participant stand by his ball as it rests on the floor. He

then nudges it with his foot, and as it rolls he follows it as if he
were its shadow, to right or left, fast or slow, through the
thick of things till finally both ball and person slow down, per-
haps wobble a little, and at last come to rest.
Nothing could require more attention than this. One's
response must be immediate, instantaneous. At first it seems
impossible to lessen the gap between what one does to the ball
and how one follows it. One is asked to supply energy as one
throws a switch. Yet there is no magic in it: every bird in a
flock, every fish in a school moves this way. Every skier must
respond in this way to the changes in the slope. As we are
neither in danger nor in competition, there is nothing special to
achieve. When we fail to follow the ball, it doesn't matter. But
when we begin to feel what is asked of us, we may have a
revelation.
1. See Appendix C.
33 SENSING ONE'S OWN HEAD
he essence of sensory awareness lies in
distinguishing our actual experience

from our thoughts and fantasies. Yet it is rather with the latter
that we have generally come to identify ourselves. We like to
think of intellectual processes as bringing us nearer to a cosmic
order and harmony than is the case v^dth our fellow creatures.
This presumption, I suppose, must remain forever questionable.
For what Blake saw in the eye that dared frame the tiger (which
perhaps was the tiger's eye itself), and what we may see in
every alerted eye that beholds us from the zoo,^ may be the very
wonder we feel also when consciousness plays freely among all
the organs and tissues of our head, and is not restricted to

reasoning.
Nevertheless, though we all agree in desiring keen senses,
and take much satisfaction in clear vision and acute hearing
and sensitive love-making, this is as nothing to the importance
we attach to clear and keen thinking and to the admiration we
feel for it, either in ourselves or in others. "Reason," we are con-
vinced, and perhaps rightly, is the crowning glory of man.
But how we arrive at reason is another matter. We have been
taught that clear thinking depends on concentration, or the act
of shutting out irrelevancies, and that concentration, in turn,
depends upon an act of will. Since childhood, we have been
urged to pay attention and to think. Obediently imitating our
teachers, we frown and purse our lips when confronting a
problem in arithmetic or morals, just as we did when tossing
and catching balls. Tightened jaws and contorted brows follow
—indeed anything forceful to give us the feeling we are in
1. Cf. note page 109.

control of things and are confining ourselves to problem-solving.

But unfortunately, all this does not do what it is supposed to; it
only distorts our perception and helps make thinking rigid and
compulsive. This is why it is shocking to compare the efforts
so. often visible in the face of a schoolchild doing his home-
work with the tranquillity that could be seen in his face a

few years earlier and that can still be seen in the portraits of
Einstein and Shakespeare.
It is not our concern here that "geniuses" follow deep
natural interests, while the schoolchild may be occupied with
the very opposite. We are not concerned with a critique of
education, but only with our reactions to the educational
methods of prodding and insisting to which, through no fault
of our own, we were. all exposed.
The trouble is that we have been led into creating a problem
where none exists. As a cat is totally alerted, and its attention
focused, by the appearance of a mouse, so our minds focus
entirely by themselves when a real occasion presents itself. It is
just our fantasy that one must "grasp" an idea as one grasps
a stick, or "cudgel our brains" to make them work. But this is
what has happened to us; and it is to unveil for ourselves som.e

on just under our
of the consequent incessant activities going
scalps and fagades that in our classes we sometimes work on
sensing our own heads.
Standing or sitting, we may close our
eyes and let our head come to more resting on the tissues below
it.
We may be asked, as Elsa Gindler used to ask, "Do you feel

anything where you suppose your head is?"
Sensations are apt to be very vague. We are allowed ample
time.
"Can you feel anything in the space between your ears;*'' . . .
More time "Between your temples?"

. . .
To one seeing a group in this situation, their expressions are

striking. The mask of daily living is already fading, an
unwonted attentiveness and quiet spreading over each figure.
"Can you feel the distance between your eyes? ... Do you
allow the room needed for whatever exists tlierc?"
203 Sensing One's Own Head
In the time allowed for sensing the region between the eyes,
a whole microcosm may begin to stir into consciousness. Very
slowly we proceed.
"Can you feel anything of what exists between your cheeks?
... Of where the air enters?" Much time. . "Of the space
. . . .
across your jaws?" "Can you feel the roof of your mouth?"
. . .
Every facial expression with which we have learned to greet

and confront the world, or to mask ourselves from it, has its
roots below the surface. Now that our attention has been led
to the soil where these roots intermingle, astonishing connec-
tions begin to reveal themselves. A tangle of deep-lying muscles
may stir, shift, give way, as the various features and organs we
were born with begin striving, after years of conditioning, to
find their natural places and relationships. From our faces
deep inner releases are draining the characteristics by which
others know us. One seeing us now might find many of us
blank, our features as yet unable to fill out the elusive freedom
they dimly begin to sense. This will take long practice. Yet in
us altogether an atmosphere of growing inner awakeness
is
and presence. Consciousness has not been lessened but rather

heightened; it has only been turned inward.
We may now be asked to open our eyes and look around. For
a moment, the scene is like a fresh morning, with dew on every
flower.
In reporting experiences, many people will have discovered
tensions around eyes, nostrils, et cetera, which began to dissolve
by themselves when
attention was maintained and time
allowed. Some have noticed accompanying changes in
will
breathing and greater freedom in standing or sitting, as the
case may have been. Also the muscles of the scalp may have
become conscious here and there, giving some sense of dimen-
sion and of the mass in the interior (occasionally giving up the
contractions that had been causing a headache); while every-
where in the head interweavings of muscle tissue and organic
function were felt to some degree. Constrictions around eyes,
ears, nose, and throat, and everywhere in between, becoming
conscious, became also to some extent reheved.
A fascinating element in this sensing of the inner head is
Consciousness has not been lessened but.
rather, heightened.
205 Sensing One's Own Head
the common recognition that the head consists of the same Hv-
ing tissues as the rest of the organism. In fact, in complexity at
least, it may be felt to be our most densely muscular region and
may, indeed, be that region where the greatest variety of
voluntary muscles habitually works involuntarily. These invol-
untary workings, or reflexes — our characteristic facial expres-
sions — tend, with our characteristic ways of speaking, to iden-
tify us to other people. They aflPect our sensations, our attitudes,
our thoughts, which can literally be felt changing and coming
to a new life precisely as the muscular basis of these expres-
sions begins to become conscious.
When the proprioceptive sensory nerves are awakened, so
that the eyes, ears, and nostrils for once become the objects of
sensation and not, as usually, just sensors, consciousness begins
to flow as naturally throughout the organism as the circulating
blood. As inhibitions relent in the musculature of these organs,
and their vigilance ebbs, releases may be felt in all the related
muscular systems everywhere. No longer is it head and body, no
longer mind and body.- This mind is not the function of the
computing brain, nor is it at home only in the brain's neigh-
borhood, near the special senses that orient us and give us our
everyday perspective on the world. It is a function of the
organism altogether. The ten billion cells of the brain, occupy-
ing that great area inside our head where we can feel nothing,
can be only its infinitely complicated switchboard.
2. See Introduction pages 8-10.

TOWARD
t3^jt EXPANDED CONSCIOUSNESS
awareness" was
E Isa Gindler's
N achentfaltung — the
first name
Charlotte Selver later called "sensory
for
"unfolding afterward."
what
Frequently, the after effects of classes are the most significant.

During my first years with Charlotte in New York, when I
worked during the day and attended classes in the evening, I
would often walk afterward for half an hour or so down the
dark streets, savoring the quiet exhilaration of just being alive.
I could feel with joy my own movements in walking and the
ceaseless activity of my own breathing. Great dark office build-
ings lined the almost empty avenues north of Times Square;
against the background of their walls and the unbroken pave-
ment, I sensed the aliveness of the few figures passing me.
Once in a while at night, and sometimes even more among
the crowded streets by day, it would come to me that all these
people, no matter how unconscious of it, shared with me the
great fact of being alive at this moment. Each, me. was a
like
bud had formed this year on the tree of life,
that unfolding and
growing in his own way before dying, no matter how condi-
tioned by circumstances. In this light, each of us seemed to
have a preciousness beyond all good and evil, and beyond any-
thing that one of us could do to the other. At these moments,
something in me bowed invisibly to each passer-by.
Years later, a weekend of very concentrated work brought a
somewhat similar heightening of consciousness. Tliis time I
happened to be the leader. The experience lasted six hours or
more, and I could and did avail myself of an opportunity for
recording it. I offer it here approximately as it was noted down
at the time.
—a
207 Toward Expanded Consciousness
In April 1971 I was invited by the only

psychiatrist in a southern Idaho town to give a weekend work-
shop in the population center of this farming country, which
had once been a sagebrush desert traversed by the Snake River.
All the participants were local. It was raining on my arrival
Friday afternoon and still raining when I left on Sunday —
very unusual event for this arid land. During the weekend, I
took a few short walks on the farm road among the large and
at this season —rather characterless fields, getting a little fresh
airmixed with snow flurries and rain. Otherwise my attention
was entirely given to the workshop, my hosts, and my own
periods of resting.
The work with this relatively unfamiliar group of profes-
sional peopleand their wives, from a generally conservative
farming region, did not go as clearly and compellingly as I
should have wished; and on Sunday morning I felt a great need
to get something across in the short time still available. We
worked with the feel of a stone resting in our hands, and then
with coming freely to sitting on the folding chairs. At the end
of this experiment, one sat while another touched his chest and
diaphragm, feeling what could be sensed of living process
within, for which room might be better allowed in sitting.
We lay down briefly to rest, and came up to standing. It
seemed that everyone could still feel his existence where the
other's hands had come to him, and could feel the possibility in
standing of allowing life there. A circle formed by itself, and
we held hands in farewell. Everyone seemed moved, as I was
also.
The departure of the only plane back left no time for linger-
ing. I packed, had a little lunch, and was driven to the airport
in the slightly exalted state I feel when conscious of acting
swiftly, but unhurriedly and economically.
All went on schedule, and I was soon airborne.
Twin Falls-Boise, 2 p.m. Overcast and

rain, high enough to permit view of country, but not full sense
of distance. Hoping to see the Sawtooth Mountains, I was able
to take a starboard seat. As we took off and gained altitude,
the farmlands lay plainly to be seen: each different field, and

each house and yard in its space among the fields the house —
sheltered more or less with trees, so that the feeling of what
was there for living, in relation to the house, was so clearly
different from what was there for earning a living. Here, they
had told me, all had been sagebrush and desert; now it was all
either for each man's personal enjoyment, or for his wealth
and society's loss or gain (losing the beauty of the desert, or
gaining potatoes and alfalfa, however one might see it).
No mountains came into sight as we climbed: only the

gathering denseness of the clouds we now began to enter. Then
through the mist I saw the Snake River canyon, a long gash
worn deep into the plain. As I looked, it dimmed and disap-

peared, and I was left with undifferentiated gray light outside
the window. Inside was the clear and unchanged (but now
isolated and unrelated) interior of the plane, to which the
visible world of form was now reduced.
Would I still see the mountains, which I had not seen since
my arrival forty-eight hours ago? Or was reality what I saw
and felt now, so much reduced as it was? Without effort, I
felt inner changes leading consciousness away from imagina-
tion, away from thought, to my own breathing. A need to leave

the contoured back of the seat led me from it into a gentle
stretching of back and pelvis and into the more independent
sitting toward which we had been working in the workshop that
morning. I loosened the seat belt. More and more, conscious-
ness grew to include the felt with the seen — the latter still
present, though so much was only a uniform giay light.
of it
Could it be that this washad asked the gioup about the

it, as I
stone to which each one was invited to give his attention a few
hours earlier? The words of Suzuki-roshi came to me: "Zazen
sitting is Enlightenment." More and more I felt the gentle pleas-
ure of existing, free of the seat back, in my back and pehis,
the pleasure of sensitive, unplanned movements in spine and
organs, the pleasure of the gentle movement of breathing.
I was sitting relatively upright in the plane, and 1 realized
that I had never sat so in a plane before. Tliere was another
passenger in the aisle seat of my row, but I sensed that I was
in no way blocking his view or even intruding on his awareness.

It did not seem that my unusual posture was noticed by anyone
in the plane. But it was now not important that it was "un-
usual"; it was merely conscious and delicious.
In the background of consciousness hovered the recognition
that "Enlightenment" might be no mental or verbalizable pro-
cess of any sort, but mere "physical" sensation. I felt a delight-
ful absence of heaviness: it was as though it was light in me
(in either sense of the word), while outside of me all was
light in its two aspects: pure and without form out the window,
only forms in the interior.
The cloud was thinning now, and we emerged above it, my
eyes filling wdth lovely soft forms, whitish and grayish, spread-
ing out beneath clear space, traced with vapors still well above
us. Higher still, the clear speck of a long-distance jet plane

appeared and was lost. Then we nosed gently back into the
cloud. I pulled out my watch we were just over half way, fif-
:
teen minutes from take-off. We would not climb higher, even if

the mountains were high enough to be visible above the over-
cast.
Again all was forms in the plane's interior, light without
form out the window, and the living me. Still I felt the pleasure
of inner movements in sitting, free of the back of the seat, as
the recognition came that this is why one sits in meditation,
instead of leaning or lying.
The plane was sinking. Now we were emerging beneath the
clouds. A new landscape appeared, houses less cozily planned,
it seemed to me; a big town to the north; not far away, snow-
capped mountains. A few giants appeared dimly in the dis-

tance. Really, they were not so interesting: it was more my
idea about them than the visual experience that had affected
me.
Perhaps something else out ahead was far more real if so, —
a reality fast approaching. / might be killed in the landing.
Fear gripped me, slowing my breath, which I then deliberately
permitted. But as I permitted breathing, the sharpness of my
recognition slipped away.
I tried to get it back. Could I accept imminent death as a real
possibility? It came to me strongly that "full enlightenment"

would include a full acceptance of this possibility, which 1 could
feel so much of me pushing back into the world of the intellect.
Could I accept it — the present with a clear possibility of death
in a moment? What was death? It involved others, who per-
haps needed me. But would be a now, including "death,"
it
without qualification. Dimly I sensed the inner readjustments

that might constitute such acceptance: readjustments that
seemed more "physical" than "mental," if I were to use such
words. Now the moment was at hand. I tried to realize that
it really might happen now. All my knowledge told me this was
SO: could all my organism admit this contribution of "mind," as

the blood stream admits the contribution of the stomach? I
shivered; but it was already too late to tell. My division into
mind and body was still too strong. We were touching down
we had touched down: the odds against catastrophe were too
great. It could only be imagination now. The chance was lost.
Forget it! The now, for better or worse, had left behind this
particular chance for accepting the whole, if indeed it had
ever been a chance.
Now the reality was that I could put some of the experience
into words, if I would take the trouble. There was a two-hour
wait —time enough. As I entered the airport building, I saw the
waiting room entirely empty. I chose a seat in the far corner
and took out paper and pen.
When I reached San Francisco, there

was an even longer wait for the short flight to Monterey.
Notes written in San Francisco airport, 8:30 p.m. At six p.m.,
the limousine into the city. I walk through empty Sunday streets
toward Chinatown. The green grass and palms of Union Square
a background for blazing colors of rhododendrons and prim-
roses. A few stragglers from the peace march. Along Grant
Avenue to the Yee Jun.
At a tiny table, I order seaweed soup and asparagus beef.
On a column beside me hangs a mirror; glancing, I see my own
face and eyes. They are real and content me.
A great bowl of seaweed soup is set before me, steaming in
the chill that flows down the open stairway from the street. I
realize I should not have ordered anything else, but it is too

late. I begin. The soup's heat and its ingredients enter my
mouth. My eyes, though lowered, feel powerfully open. A roar-

ing energy of the restaurant, the sounds and movements of
closely packed, hungry, eating people, seems to come to me
through ears, eyes, and all my pores. Equivalent to this energy
from the environment, my own inner energy becomes con-
scious: a power in my own breathing which carries me along
with it; a giant in me stirring, overpowering habitual resist-
ances in me with no sense of effort.
There is hardly room in me for eating, despite my empty
stomach. I eat notwithstanding: the hot broth, the mass of sea-
—
weed, tough bits of gizzard but without my usual ravenous-
ness. Habit urges me to gobble, but breathing and awareness are
now so much stronger that to follow my habit would be a vio-
lence against myself. The hands of the clock turn: my time
for the return limousine is running out. I will not be able to
look for a Chinese gong. But perhaps only one errand is impor-
tant —
the oranges from the stand at Stockton and Jackson. If I
catch the Stockton Street bus to the limousine terminal, there is
time for that. It is wonderful how my overwhelming new
awarenesses leave room for awareness of all practical neces-
sities. These are not dimmed but very clear.
To limousine, ten minutes early, with oranges. Seated before

me on the right, two homosexuals, one newly barbered, with
sallow flesh in face and throat, the other ruddy. On the left,
the loud aggressiveness of two square heterosexuals. A pale,

quiet figure sits beside me. There is no tension between its
hormones and mine. My bag of oranges tips on the floor, and
one orange rolls against its feet. I turn to excuse myself as I
reach down for the orange. It is a young woman. She has a
Mexican bag, hke mine. Should I speak to her? There is no
need for it. No sense of aggressiveness from or toward her,
positive or negative. Beneath her quiet, perhaps her colorless-
ness, I sense a living being and feel its validity, even its
perfectness.
Again I realize I am in a far higher state of awareness than
usual. Out the limousine window, I see trees bowing before

the wind and a dense fog bank creeping down over the San
Bruno hills. But I realize I only see them and do not experience
them I am becoming the reporter.
:
In the airport, I get my bag of stones from the locker, add the
bag of oranges, and sit waiting for the Monterey plane. Before
me is a sickly woman, berating two sickly little children in straw
hats, with toy guns and flags. They move away. A young man
and woman sit where they were. The young man's hand grabs
and drums on the woman's sides and back. Irritation at his
insensitivity disturbs me, but evidently not the woman. On the
contrary, she leans closer to him. Seeing them now together, I
feel what she feels of his desire for her through his roughness.
My irritation leaves. My eyes are on them; they realize this, but
are not disturbed. My sense of their sense of each other becomes
stronger, overpowering. They get up and move to seats a little
less in the center of things, and I can feel the genuineness and
simplicity of the contact which I can no longer see.
On the plane from San Francisco to Monterey I make these!
last notes. The plane is late for its brief flight; it is already]
almost dark. As I glance out the window westward, there is an^
extraordinary sight: a rim, as of rose wine, to the horizon, and
set in it the least sliver of a moon. Between it and the plane
billows the same pure sea of clouds I had seen over Idaho, but
now many shades away from white and nearer black. But as
with the wind and fog outside the limousine, I know, as I do not
usually know, that I cannot now experience it, even though I
find fitting words. I am writing, and my cup is already full.
As I hurry to get these last notes on paper, the stewardess
announces our descent to Monterey, and 1 must snap on my
seat belt.
^3
t3cl
K SENSORY AWARENESS
IN COMMUNICATION
H eightened consciousness arising from

an end in itself. Don
meditation is
Juan, in the books of Castaneda, simply saw.'^ But there are

others who see (including Castaneda himself) who need to
communicate. For them a medium is necessary, in which they
can find some equivalent to their perception.
Words, the prime medium of man, which we all learn as
children, may tell our story. Oftener, they lead us away from it.
Color, line, and sound are surer. But, using these, we are on
the open sea. We cannot look up a color or a tone in the dic-
tionary. So art and music schools work hard to create such
dictionaries, studying and pinning down the "techniques" of
great painters and composers, and setting up authorities, while
others who also seek to show the way petrify the experience of
their authorities in symbols.
But no one's experience can be found in a dictionary, or in
a cross or a mandala.
Thus Suzuki-roshi entitled his book Zen Mind, Beginner's
Mind,^ and starts out, "In the beginner's mind there are many
possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."
During the last half -century, communication has become the
subject of widespread study. It is no longer taken for granted,
as was true formerly. Psychologists, philosophers, and artists
have pushed off from terra firma into unknown seas. In this
book, various means have been explored to study the phenom-
1. Op. cit. See pages 5-6.

2. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind (New York: Weather-
hill, 1971).
ena of perceiving and relating, the twin functions from which

communication arises.
Now, in conclusion, I should simply

like to offer an example. I wish to set down now a few recol-
lections of the artist and the man who, of all men, made the
greatest impression on my hfe; who affected my earlier years as
Charlotte Selver affected my maturity. He approached his
canvases as she approaches her classes. In his mind, as in hers,
as he began a work, I believe everything was possible, for it
was all new. This man was the American painter Arthur Dove.
In our studio in New York, one small painting hangs on the
wall. It depicts a single hollyhock. There may be a few branches
and flowers in the room, there is a much-loved weaving, and on
the floor is a heap of stones from the beach in Maine. But
nothing has the intense individuality of the Hollyhock, or
glows with the life and movement of its few hnes and colors.
I was in the same room with Arthur Dove in the summer of
1935 when something impelled him to begin the single black

line on a piece of paper which grew in zigzag, curling, drop-
ping, climbing to its completion. The hand that drew followed
some deep inner rhythm, pausing here and there in its course
to sense a moment before looping off. There was no haste, no
hesitation. Then a brush dipped briefly in watercolor, a calm,
sensuous spreading of red and green, and it was over.
The next year when I bought the Hollyhock from Stieghtz's
gallery, I could only write Dove that it gave me a sensation of
joy and quick movement in my insides. It was like the kick of a

baby in the womb or a calypso dance.
It was in the early twenties, when Dove was trying to make
ends meet by raising chickens and catching lobsters in Con-

necticut, that his son and I became bosom friends. Few real
experiences were shared by the men and boys of the commu-
nity, and it was a vivid interlude when Dove took three of us
camping. There was no fuss or formality. We just took what we
needed and walked a mile and a half out of town to the wilder-
ness of an abandoned millpond. For us twelve-year-olds, a
quarter-mile of our own still contained the world. We had our
215 Sensory Awareness in Communication
tent, our our food, and no adult programing. Dove was just
fire,
present in his way as the woods were in theirs, and his presence
gave a cohesiveness and depth to the experience which it
would have lacked without him.
I have no other memories of Dove at that time. He soon
separated from his wife, remarried, and moved to Long Island.

But about 1930, I began to go on Christmas vacations with his
son to visit him. We went for perhaps three visits of a day or
two each to the teetering old "yacht club" on a harbor in the
Sound, where he lived rent-free with his wife. Reds, in
exchange for keeping the rowboats tied up during winter
storms. Inside, a coal stove glowed against the draughts and
rattles, while Arthur and Reds seemed to me like the glow of

life itself. We boys brought cheese and bootleg wine which
we picked up on our way through New York, Reds had a
steaming stew, and Arthur produced his homemade gin. When
we were full and had talked a while over the wine, we wrapped
up in all available covers and slept.
The next morning after breakfast, in that bright winter sun-
light, with snow on the deck and the gulls soaring and wheeling
just out the windows, Arthur would bring out his year's work.
They were oil paintings, not very big, with brilliant, uncom-
promising colors and strange forms that baffled and somehow
frightened me. This was not the world I had spent my twenty
years learning and coming to terms with, but something very
different that I could not explain to myself or understand. Nor
was Arthur any help. Once he explained to his great friend, the
painter Alfie Maurer, who had come out on the train with us, that
some painting was " like holding an egg in your hand." Though
these words have stayed in my mind for forty years, at the time
he might as well have spoken in Chinese. So I looked and looked
and said nothing, and felt great relief when the paintings were
put away and we could just go back to being such warm human
beings together.
Soon afterward, Dove inherited a tumbledown old farmhouse
in upstate New York. It had an outdoor privy and a pump
outside the kitchen door for water. One winter morning, on a
visit there, when I tried to pour the water from my bedroom
pitcher into the bowl, I found it frozen solid. To my young

urban eyes this was quite romantic. It was long before I realized
how much the Doves were both paying in privation and effort
for the privilege of living close to nature and working as they
chose.
Then one evening by the coal stove we had a talk on art. I
said that for me there was one painter, Rembrandt; and Dove
said there was something else. I had in mind the engravings of
the Crucifixion, and I spoke of what seemed to me, an atheist,
the overwhelmingly wonderful religious feelings of Rembrandt
and his depiction of man's relation to the Unknown. Dove main-
tained that art had another function, but what it was he was
perfectly unable to clear to me. He was not a naturally

make
verbal person, and must have assaulted him with theories and
I
interpretations. In any case, the effort was too much for him,
—
and about nine-thirty an hour past his normal bedtime he —
fell asleep.
In the morning, after breakfast, I felt very quiet. The others,
including Arthur, had things to do, and when I found myself
alone I went straight to the little upstairs bedroom which was

his studio. There was no furniture, the walls were bare and
white, and a pure north light came in through the shaky win-
dows. Here, in a world of their own, hung this year's paintings,
blood brothers of all the others that had so confused me before.
The colors were strong and brilliant, the forms strange. I
stopped before one a little less remote to me than the others it :
was clearly the morning sun over a ploughed field, with what
must be trees or shrubbery in the background. I had seen one
somewhat hke it by Van Gogh. But Van Gogh's distortions I
recognized as power of emotion, as struggle, love, rage, apoca-
lypse. Here I could find no clue for interpretation only some- —
thing that held me. Then in the center of the sun itself a black
splotch caught my eye; and as I began to look at this splotch
and wonder why it was there, I began to feel sunburned. Noth-
ing like this had ever happened to me. I could feel the sun
burning me from the canvas. Furthermore, there was a feeling
as though I were standing in a shower with streams coming
—
down on me. Streams of something perhaps sunbeams or the
rays of the plowed field. My questioning vanished, leaving me
with a sense of quiet and exhilaration. Here was something
that could simply be felt. It did not need to be understood.
Across the little room, I now noticed something quite different
but equally easy to see. It was a sun setting behind clouds on a
calm evening. The clouds, in gentle hues, were silhouetted over
one another, line beyond line, and as my eye ran along their
edges I felt the living lines, just as I had felt the living linear
movement Brandenburg Concertos. And just as I had
in Bach's
and without the need for
listened to these merely with delight,
"understanding," this was now possible for me for the first time
before a painting.
Still another painting now caught my attention. This was

more difficult. Unlike the others, it was flat areas of color, no
gradations or nuances, just bald statements. Across the colors
rose the jagged form of a black iron bridge. The day before, I
could not have endured to look at anything so stark and tone-
less. This seemed an aggressive wasteland. And then before
my eyes it began to move, in great rhythms rising and crashing

like a Beethoven symphony —
a totality of rhythm with which I
could only live for a few moments.
I left the room and walked for a little by myself. These
paintings were the very substance of the man I loved to be
near. They were not something he could explain, but something
he had experienced and cherished and given on. They were no
philosophy, no religion, no scenes from nature: they just were.
When I saw him, I asked if what he had painted was the
Bach and the Beethoven. I didn't use these names, but tried to
express the quality of movement by gestures. A joy of recogni-
tion flowed between us.The door had opened for me.
Later I tried to play Beethoven records to him, but they
bored him. All he liked in music was Louis Armstrong and rag-
time.3 And when I read him the chapter in Moby Dick on the
Whiteness of the Whale, which for me had something of the
same wonder he had himself, he fell asleep. Perhaps to be really
oneself in the 1930s was a full-time task that could admit no
historical influences. And, except for one or two Zen roshis.
Dove seems to me almost the only man I have ever known, at
least in the United States, who was really himself.
In the evening he showed me paintings from other years. I
had entered their world, and wherever my gaze fell was living
form and color. Strange shapes and figures greeted me with
the movements of my own experience, with the tones of my
own and affirmed. These were no fantasies,
feelings, enlarged
no symbols; they were representations of the real world as Dove
had experienced it, and as I experienced it through him. Thirty
3. Dove was probably Louis Arrjistrong: Swing Music,
Stieglitz's favorite
now in the Art Institute, Chicago. When I worked in 1962 with Char-
lotte's teacher Heinrich Jacoby, in Zurich, the only thing he asked me
about the United States was, "Were there any other Louis Annstrongs?"
It seemed recordings were hard to get in Switzerland.
years later, I would have similar experiences through our own
classes, and once or twice under LSD. They stilled my thoughts

and directly aroused my perception as no art ever had before.
In the few years that followed when I was in or near New
York, I never missed a Dove show at An American Place. As
nearly as possible, Alfred Stieglitz let things speak for them-
selves. It was a gallery of utter simphcity, a few blocks across
from the fashionable Museum of Modern Art. Few people came,
and there were several small, bare, white rooms where one
could be alone with a painting until one had come to the quiet
of mind that would permit it to speak. These paintings were cer-
tainly nothing one could take in at a glance. Nor were they
even anything one could study, or interpret or compare criti-
cally, as I in my first experience had with composers. One could
only be alone with a painting, and when the commotion one

had brought along with one had died down, it would begin to
be.
In the summer of 1935, the summer of the Hollyhock, I
again visited the farmhouse and found Arthur and Reds full of
excitement about a new Have you ever seen Farre-
painting.
hique, the film of a year's changes on a French farm? Later it
was skillfully imitated by Disney in his Living Desert. Through
an adroit use of the camera, plants grow, buds swell and open
as you watch. It was very sensitively made and is thrilling to
see. But Farrehique was about 1950, and the time I am speak-
ing of was long before.
There was a conspiratorial tone in the Doves' voices as they
spoke of The Goat, and as soon as I found myself alone I went
upstairs to see it. A small painting, as I realized many years
later when I saw it again, but that afternoon it looked like the
whole wall of the room. In fact, there was space in it for a
snowy mountain range, at one end of which floated sleeping a
full moon —
only really it was a goat's head, eyes closed, and the
mountain range was the brown and white outline of his
back, silently undulating from head to tail, where my eye
plunged down the thigh and leg and came upon a chasm, above
which a great, curving, brownish shape grew, filling the pic-
ture. I caught my breath as I saw it was the goat's erection, or
rather the whole goat becoming erection, growing and swelhng

toward a vast cleft, warm and deep as the night or as the earth
itself.Ebbing from the closed eyes and brain of the moonhke
head, life flowed along the gleaming heights of the back, and
down, down through earthy loins into an infinitely sensitive
growing edge that hovered above an equally sensitive unfolding.
What a masterly cinematographer did later with the life in
plants. Dove had done here in motionless oil on canvas with the
ultimate relationship possible in all animal life.
This is the only painting I have ever seen, from any period,
in which the act of love is not in any way illustrated or symbol-
ized, but is fully felt through and reproduced in materials. As
Stieglitz called his photographs, this is truly an equivalent.
I find it fascinating that so much of the organismic and
orgastic trend in the avant-garde philosophies, poetry, and

psychotherapies of the last two or three decades should have
been fully anticipated in the deeply grounded and unrelenting
connection which, in his isolation, Dove established with
natural process.
Dove died long before anyone in my world had ever heard of
Zen. But I would not hesitate to describe him as a Zen master. I
believe that, whatever his intellectual development, in his long

maturity he painted in quiet, practically without theory and
with full attention. And there was nothing in the world of
nature from which he shrank. He and Reds were a full world in
themselves; they lived secluded and in the humblest way, see-
ing hardly anyone. But at the Ketewomoke Yacht Club, where
every rowboat owner was Captain Jones or Captain Smith, it
was once said to — —
him the overseer of the fleet "I like to go
yachting with you. Commodore!"
For with Dove people came into more connection with die
reality of thewater beneath and of the wind around and of the
rowboat in the midst of it. Not through anything he said;
little
simply through his presence, as it had been with us twelve-

year-olds in the woods. This was not just a visual or imaginary
connection, as with most people and most painters, but a con-
nection of the total organism, as between the two elements in
The Goat. That this connection could reach the canvas, and
through that me and others, was possible only because between

world and canvas was interposed no preconception and no
calculation, but only the hving pathways of a man.
The war came and went. After seven years away, I saw
Arthur again in 1946, three months before his death. He and
Reds were living where I had seen them last, in the little aban-
doned post office they had finally bought on the pond in Center-
port, Long They had raised the floors after being
Island.
flooded in a hurricane, and they had insulated the walls so it
was at last warm and cozy. For Reds, who had roughed it so
long with her frail health and unflagging spirit, it was a home
at last. But Arthur was bedridden. In order to paint as he
had to in a world which had little interest in the message of the
senses, he had never spared himself. He and Reds had
accepted all the challenges and insecurities that had con-
fronted them over many years and in many dwellings where
disaster was often about to strike. At last, for him everything
—
had given in together lungs, heart, and kidneys. They had
made new friends: the local doctor, who refused a fee, and
a nurse from the state hospital who lovingly helped Reds to
care for him. But the man who had always done everything for
himself, from grinding his own colors to keeping his own
habitations afloat or standing, could no longer walk across the
room. And yet, immobilized, he was as much all there as when
I had first met him, as fully present in the real world with
which he never had lost touch, as most of us do. He still painted.
One of the most moving of his paintings had been done while
he was ill in bed. This was Neighborly Attempt at Murder,"^
and I doubt if any work of art ever sprang more directly from
the soil of the present.
Into the house nearest the Doves had moved an unhappy
family. Often there was shouting at the two young children and
quarrels between husband and wife. One night instead of
shouts there were shrieks. For minutes and minutes, perhaps
hours, there were shrieks, first of rage and then of terror. Later
Reds learned that the woman had fought off the man and
4. Collection of William Lane Found., Leominster, Massachusetts.

succeeded in killing herself, and had almost succeeded in kill-
ing the two children.

Arthur had lain in bed, unable to move. The next day he was
unable to speak. The second day he was still unable to speak.
On the third day. Reds assembled paints and canvas for him,
and he worked without a word until all was set dowm.
Neighborly Attempt at Murder is a combination of pure
tone and movement. Unspeakable depths and relationships take
form and color. Perhaps it is something hke what Rembrandt
might have done with the Crucifixion, had he been present on
that occasion and had it been possible in that epoch for him to
come to painting without preconceptions, with a lifetime of
experience and work, but with a beginner's mind.
Epilogue
In working sensory awareness,
periods in
even
together for very short
a group
of people develop a sense of respect and affection for one an-
other which is not often met with. For we are working on our
common humanity, on those fundamental attributes which
antedate our many divergent cultures. Though our groups
seldom afford the drama (and melodrama) of "encounter
groups," with their verbal confrontation, a very direct and deep
meeting of people, in sensitivity and quiet emotional honesty, is
possible, using no techniques, in the usual sense, at all. In the
longer workshops, many of our students form good and friendly
relations with the people in the community, no matter how
conservative the community may be in other respects. For we
are beginning to lose our ideas about our behavior, and begin-
ning to feel how our behavior is. Though our work, in its nature,
tends to subvert and undermine every institution, it is only to
let in the fresh air and sunshine which institutions keep out. To
the extent that he can accept the sunshine, everyone feels he

becomes a little more human; and as he accepts a little, he be-
comes able to accept more. Finally he finds he can accept the
city with the country, or the country with the city; and the night
with the day.
As I have said, despite the immediate delights, the work is
slow. Distraction alternates with perception, and resistance

with insight. The attention flags; one tires. The road can seldom
be direct, so we must be prepared for detours. In other words,
our sessions are work and require discipline. But if the disci-
pline imposed by the leader, it will defeat its purpose. He
is
must instead, by his own presence and experience (or, lacking

226 Epilogue
that, by his skill) arouse the interest in the group which will
guide their attention and tide them over the shallows.
We have, therefore, a difficult task, though a delightful one.
We must seek the aliveness in ourselves which awakens it in
others. If we instruct and explain, we do what has already
been done in our usual education, even when it seems to con-
tradict this education on the surface. We merely substitute a
new authority for the old. If we play games, using techniques
which we have found are sensational, we fall into another pit,
where perhaps everyone has had fun, but little insight has
been gained. Of the two sidetracks, the first may have an
intellectual influence, with possibly some political or social
value, while the second may shake people out of certain habits
and entice them into new pleasures which may be felt as liber-
ating. I myself have oscillated between these two sidetracks in
years of teaching. But it is like that muddy water which often
must be pumped from a well before the clear water flows.
And the fact that the muddy water may be useful does not
mean that one should not continue to seek the clear. When the
clear water begins to come (and it may come, and disappear
for long periods, and come again), it is unmistakable.
Such clear water, flowing everywhere among a gioup of
people, may — as Charlotte says it is her only task to do
penetrate through their skin and stir them awake.
Appendices
—
A ELSA GINDLER:
ARBEIT AM MENSCHEN
he term "sensory awareness" has

become widely used in recent years,
often with Uttle knowledge either of its significance or of its
origin. It was first coined by Charlotte Selver, about 1950, as a

name for her version of awork originated by Elsa Gindler in
Berlin, some forty years earlier.
Gindler was a teacher of physical education, who fell ill of
tuberculosis in her early twenties and was given up by the
doctors, being left with the advice to quit the city and spend
her remaining days in the pure air of the Alps. For a young
teacher of working-class parents, this was out of the question.
There was then no technique of collapsing the diseased lung
to allow it to rest. But Gindler had the intuition that with quiet
and patience she might be able to sense something of her own
inner processes and find ways to encourage healing rather
than hinder it. The tissues involved being those of one side of
her lungs, she felt it was her task to become so sensitive in
breathing that she could allow breathing in the healthy side of
her lungs only, while the seriously infected other side could
remain relatively at rest.
This self-imposed task might almost be considered a defini-
tion of what Zen Buddhist students now call "meditation"
total —
involvement with breathing although in 1910 Gindler
had certainly never heard of Zen and was experimenting
entirely on her own. Since breathing involves more of the large
musculature than any other basic life activity, this meant an
awakening to her own inner flexibilities and processes on a very
general scale. Indeed, it meant an alerting of the entire sensory
nervous system, for, like a pebble dropped in water, an excita-
230 Appendix A
tion at any point in the organism tends to set up reactions every-

where. In so critical a situation, every disturbance in breath-
ing was acute. On the other hand, when the inner functioning
could be sensed, hindrances could consciously be allowed to
dissolve and cease interfering with the organism's innate tend-
encies to regeneration.
This discovery and practice of Gindler's is the basis of our
entire work.
In a year, Elsa Gindler had indeed healed herself, to the
bafflement of her academic doctors, one of whom, meeting her
by chance on the street and asking her to come to his office for
an examination, turned red in the face at her explanation of
the cure and exclaimed gruffly, "Wonders can sometimes
happen!"
But from then on she felt unable to continue teaching
calisthenics. She was fired with the recognition that to learn to
Elsa Gindler, 1945.

231 Elsa Gindler: Arbeit Am Menschen
sense one's own functioning, and, beyond that, to sense and

allow changes in the attitudes accompanying it, was not only
possible, but could in become an approach to living

fact
entirely different from learning methods and practices handed
down by others. What had at first been an intuitive therapeu-
tic attempt became a Weltanschauung far beyond any bounds
of therapy. Until her death in 1961, she pursued and explored

this approach in practical experiments with many devoted
students and without giving her work any more formal or
specific name than Arbeit am Menschen (work on the human
being) or Nachentfaltung (unfolding afterward ).i
The last thirty years or so of Gindler's life were spent in
intimate collaboration with another extraordinary pioneer in
the processes of human learning and creativity named Heinrich
Jacoby, whose classes in Zurich, exploring improvisation in
music, acting, and the arts, finally became merged with hers in
a long series of summer vacation courses in Switzerland. At
the time I become mainly
studied with him, in 1962, he had
interested in education, and his class young teach-
was full of
ers from the public schools. Jacoby's conviction was that the
way children spontaneously learn to talk was the prototype of
all organic learning. Since this was hardly the method in the
public schools, some of his students began to despair of their

careers. Finally one asked him what she should do, since she
now realized how unnatural, and even destructive, it was to
teach as she would be obliged to. I shall never forget Jacoby's
answer. "Why should you quit?" he said. "Someone less con-
cerned will only take your place. Continue as you are, and don't
1. The utterly compassionate and realistic character of Gindler's attitude

is evidenced by the fact that she not only continued to give her classes
throughout the bombing of Berlin in World War II, but also gave special
classes for her Jewish students, at the risk of being sent to a concentra-
tion camp if she were discovered. She even concealed a number of
these students in her basement, feeding them with her own and her
other students' scanty rations. By a tragic irony, a week before the
arrival in Berlin of the Russian armies a Nazi youth flung a fire bomb
into her building. The ensuing holocaust destroyed all of Gindler's
records as well as the shelter of the Jewish students, who were promptly
taken by the Nazis and killed. This, I have reason to believe, was the
hardest blow of Gindler's life, far overshadowing the months of bombing,
or her own early medical death sentence to tuberculosis.
232 Appendix A
worry about it. But there will be times, once in a while, when
you instruct more than is truly required of you. Be alert for
those times. Then, instead of the usual instructing, you can
slip in a seed that will sprout into independent exploration." He
died the next year.
Jacoby published one or two brief monographs.- Voluminous
tapes of his classes are still in preparation for publication in
Germany. It was his belief that there are no ungifted people.
Charlotte Selver was one of a few students who brought the
Gindler work to the United States before World War II. Since
1938, Charlotte has been actively developing her approach to
Gindler 's work in this country. During the early years among
new people with a new language, she finally settled on the now
well-known expression "sensory awareness" to single out the
awareness of direct perception, as distinguished from the
Intellectual or conventional awareness —
the verbalized knowl-
edge — that is still the almost exclusive aim of education, both
in the family and in school.
Charlotte's work caught on very slowly. Her first advisers
were agreed that Americans would never have the patience for
it. But in the forties a number of New York psychoanalysts,
most notably Erich Fromm, Clara Thompson, and Frederick

Perls, became interested and began to study with her. Perls
later incorporated much of what he discovered in his study
of sensing into his Gestalt therapy. Then, in 1956, Charlotte
Selver met the philosopher and Orientalist Alan Watts, who
exclaimed as he worked with her, "But this is the living Zen!"
Thereafter, the two collaborated in a long series of joint semi-
nars, first in New York and then in California.
In 1963, introduced by Alan Watts, she gave the first experi-
ential workshop at the newly founded Esalen Institute. This led
swiftly to a wide dissemination of popularized and often mis-
leading versions of the work throughout the country. "Sensory"
interludes were soon being given to all the psychological and
2. Heinrich Jacoby, Muss es Unyniisikalisclie Geheii? (Zurich, 1925).

Although Gindler and Jacoby assembled a great deal of material, almost
none of it has been published. Most of Gindler's was destroyed in 1945.
as mentioned above.
233 Elsa Gindler: Arbeit Am Menschen
sociological discussion groups who assembled on that lovely

ledge above the Pacific, and the fame of the relief from talking
that was provided by these nonverbal experiences spread far
and wide. This was also the year in which, after five years
of study, I began to share the teaching.
In 1966 a collaboration was begun between Charlotte and me
and the Zen Center in San Francisco, based on the experien-
tial and nonconceptual elements which sensory awareness and
Zen hold in common. This collaboration has augmented yearly.

The most recent development in the dissemination of this
work was the setting up in 1970 of the Charlotte Selver Founda-
tion, at 32 Cedars Road, Caldwell, New Jersey 07006, a non-
profit organization dedicated to the transcription of tapes,
publication of bulletins and other literature, registry of sensory
awareness teachers, possible establishment of a Center, and
general furtherance of the work in the United States.
B NOTES ON ZEN
or the steadily diminishing number of

people who have not even an
as yet
intellectual famiharity with Zen Buddhism, let alone an experi-
ence of the Zen practice of sitting called zazen, it may be help-
ful if I attempt to clarify the frequent references to Zen and
zazen in this book.
There is a fascinating hterature on Zen, which the interested
reader may find in many libraries. It is the least intellectual
and most experiential form of Buddhism, as it finally flowered
in Japan. 1, myself, have Httle scholarship in this field, and
not a great deal of experience — merely a strong sense of kinship
and respect. Many readers may know more of Buddhism than
I, and a fair number will have had longer, or deeper, experience
in zazen. My references are simply a consequence of this feehng

of kinship, which has been reciprocated by many people in-
volved in Zen practice. It is to clarify what is comprised in this
kinship, and what may not be, that I wish, even at the risk of
seeming presumptuous, to express myself on certain important
and subtle matters.
Buddhism, in the West, has always been classified as one
of the "world's great religions." It might thus be presumed to
have a creed, as for instance Christianity does, and a cosmology,
as all the religions do, including Hinduism. Its "Eightfold
Path" might well be equated with Divine Commandments, its
"meditation" with that in Christian retreats or in patristic the-
ology,its forms and ceremonies with the symboHc rituals of
Church, Synagogue, or Mosque.

Inasmuch as sensory awareness, as practiced by Charlotte
Selver and myself, brings into question all established patterns
235 Notes on Zen
both of gesture and of thought (whether estabhshed by gradual

development in the culture, or by conditioning in the indi-
vidual), it would be important, in this connection, to know if
Zen does Hkewise. Also, since many insights and recognitions

arising from our practice are of the character which has often
been called "religious experience," it would be important to
find what the word "religious" might mean to us. It is these
questions which I hope a few words on my admittedly limited
understanding of Zen may clarify.
To begin with, 1 should not hesitate to say that Zen Buddhism
can no more be explained than life itself. There is no frame of
reference that it fits into. But one can speak of a good many
things which it is not.
Zen Buddhism is not a religion, as 1 would use the word. At
least, as 1 understand it, it has no divinity or creed, and in
the Christian sense neither revelation nor hierarchy. Nor is
it a philosophy, in our traditional sense of systematizing exper-
iences into a conceptual structure, or of organizing concepts
into a system. But though neither philosophy nor religion (and
neither physical nor metaphysical), it occupies the place in
consciousness for its followers that these disciplines do for
Westerners.
I would call Zen Buddhism an attitude, reached intuitively
through example, intellectual self-discipline, and clearly recog-

nized experience, nonverbally or semiverbally communicated,
flowing easily into relativity, which to me is at basis no doctrine
but a recognition.
Zen Buddhism has rituals, as sensory awareness does not,
but rituals without symbolic value. Unlike the Eucharist, for
example, the Japanese (or, for practical purposes, Zen) Tea
Ceremony^ has no significance beyond what is immediately
expressed and perceived. It is fully in the here and now and
has no reference to past or future or to other worlds. The Tea
Master, being simply what Abraham Maslow might have called
a "self -actualized" human being, must of necessity give far
more of himself than need the priest, who can rely on a super-
1. Cf. page 123.

236 Appendix B
natural power delegated from "above," and as a person can be

negligible.
Buddhist scriptures, also, are not "divine revelation" and do
not function as the basis of faith in what has not been experi-
enced. Buddhist vows are dedications, not the submission to
a Lord'scommands. Buddhist grace at meals gives acknowl-
edgement for sustenance brought through "the labors of other
people and the suffering of other forms of life," not thanks to
the personal kindness of an "Almighty" who has placed all
other beings at the service of man. In this absence of authori-

tarian structure, there could, I suppose, be no "psychology of
Buddhism," as Freud's of Judaism and Christianity. On the
contrary, psychologists are more and more turning to the study
of Zen, not in order to explain it in their terms, but to help
understand themselves it its terms.
There are sects in Zen, differing mainly in emphasis, and
there is organization, so I suppose the word must be spelled
with a capital. Existentialism, humanistic psychology, and
sensory awareness, Western movements in this direction, can
still be spelled without. But these movements lack the many
centuries of human dedication which has developed the form

of Zen —
which Buddhist texts call the same as emptiness.
Zazen is the name for Zen Buddhist "meditation." But this
choice of words may very easily lead to a misunderstanding,
just as the reader may easily be a little puzzled by my use of
the word "meditation" throughout this book. The traditional
Western practice of meditation, as I think most of us under-
stand it, has consisted in pondering the conceptual mysteries
of "life" and "death," "good" and "evil," "God" and "man," et
cetera, which at bottom, as the Greek root of the word "medi-
tate" declares, means thinking about them. But zazen is the very
opposite of this. Surely it would not have come to be called
"meditation" at all were it not that the "meditative" man. in
Western eyes, is he who has taken what seems the only alterna-
tive course to thought and action for worldly gain. Certainly the
practice of zazen lays up no treasures on earth, even if the
Chief of Police of Rangoon, as Admiral Shattock- writes, de-
2. Cf. page 47.

237 Notes on Zen
voted six weeks a year to the Burmese equivalent, while in the

next cell was the owner of the local milk monopoly. Though
it may
be an unparalleled instrument for fuller living, as hinted
by the samurai statement at the front of this book, it is still a
full turning away from "practical" affairs. Its difference from
Christian meditation lies partly in that it seeks no gain at all,
either in this world or in any other. Thus it is equally a turning
away from the prime considerations of our rehgions, which
have always been how to find and obey the revealed will of an
external God, and at some time in the future to be admitted
to his heaven.
in sitting silent, motionless, and thoughtless
Zazen consists
on a small cushion on a mat for extended periods. One sits if
possible in full or half -lotus position, or at least cross-legged or
on one's calves, though this is not absolutely necessary. The
eyes are partly open, but lowered, and though wide awake, and
of course seeing, they do not look; neither, as often in yoga,
are they controlled: only the impulse towander is controlled.
In thesame way, motion is not controlled, but only the itch to
move. Nor is thinking controlled, but only the compulsion to
think.
Thus the organism is freed of its habitual drives to act, and
is left available for perception. But for perception of what?
It is not just the thought reflexes, and the muscle reflexes and
observation, that are held at a minimum; it is reflexes from
the whole sensory apparatus. If there is a sound, one does not
listen; if a smell, one permits no association. Pain in the legs
should not lead to judgment or to thought. Then what is per-
ceived? Sensorily, everything; intellectually, nothing. What
sounds is heard, but purely, for itself, as if it had never been
before. Pain is experienced, but without anxiety or concern.
If a recognition comes it comes, but it is not pondered.
But all this is not the "purpose" of zazen, which is stated as
Enhghtenment. This, Uke Zen itself, is ipso facto indefinable.
I might think of it as the full experience of existing which, —
strictly speaking, is a meaningless thing to say. It is significant,
nevertheless, that a beginner is instructed to give full attention
to his breathing (and in fact often to count it from one to ten),
without allowing anything else, except his posture, to occupy
238 Appendix B
his mind. In this case, obviously, all sense perceptions other

than the proprioceptive and the sense of gravity are distrac-
tions. No one expects the beginner to be free of them, but his
attention is to be directed only to his sitting and his breathing.
Such attention is central, if not exclusive, in our work also.
All over the world, I suppose, breathing is associated with
the central fact, or essence, of living as in such words as —
spirit, animate or animal, breath of life, last breath. It also
represents our most regular and intimate relationship to our
environment; and its uninhibited functioning involves more
of our flexibihty and musculature than any other organismic
activity. Finally, it is the only major such activity governed
equally by the voluntary and involuntary nervous systems.
The concern with breathing in zazen is not for the purpose
of improving it, but simply that one may become more and
more conscious in connection with it. Of course, such con-
sciousness can easily become "self -consciousness," which always
entails a split in the personality and an involuntary self-control.
But in zazen, just as in the practice of sensory awareness, one
may feel after a while that one is not so much conscious of
breathing as conscious in breathing. One becomes identified
with breathing and no longer an observer of it. Then whatever
becomes conscious as an inhibition of breathing becomes an
inhibition of oneself, whether it is a force from the "outside
or from the "inside": self -consciousness, self -observation, intro-
spection become a restriction, just as a halter might. More,
it is not a restriction of oneself; it is a restriction of life. One
is no longer divided between oneself and the other, between
observer and observed; self-criticism —
in fact, anv criticism
is no longer possible. It is not even one^s breathing: one is
breathing. Breathing is what one is.

But breathing does not occur in a vacuum; it requires air,
just as it requires a living organism. Breathing is not the air,
nor is it the organism: it is the interaction between them. If
one is breathing, one is interaction. One is somehow both the

inside and the outside.
As theory this need not concern us. But as experience, it
could illuminate for us the actions of those Buddhist protesters

239 Notes on Zen
in Vietnam who burned themselves ahve, perhaps because they

felt the reality outside them as more than equal to their own
self-sacrifice, and who may have taken this ultimate step in
reaction to a recognition rather than under pressure from an
Idea. It could also illuminate the attribute of Buddha as the
Compassionate One, and the strange-sounding Buddhist vow
to save all sentient beings. The difference between one who
looks to a Savior for such a purpose and one who vows it him-
self must be the difference between one who maintains the
division between himself and others and the one who feels the
division can be given up. The meaning of saving all sentient
beings can be only the feeling that between all sentient beings
and oneself there is no real boundary.
But this statement could not be made at all in a Judaeo-
Christian context of absolutes. As in the recognition of Einstein,
it would be the relativity and interrelationship of everything
that alone had significance.

So may be understood why I have a semantic objection
it
to the term "religious" as qualification for those deeper and

seemingly truer experiences which artists, poets, musicians,
dancers, and lovers have shared in common with many his-
torically "religious" people, and with many who patiently fol-
lowed any form of meditation, and which may also be the
fruit of the patient and loving practice of sensory awareness.
This is a practice which gradually sheds belief, symbol, and
symbolic ritual, leaving us, as does Zen, free of rewards and
punishments, prayers and judgments, hopes and regrets, fully
in the here and now.
REPORTS
he following are included because the
direct and vivid quahty of the writing
seems to me to make a valuable addition to what has already
been written.
A (A psychologist and group leader) In

one of the first sessions, Charlotte spent over an hour with us
working on what appears on the surface to be a very simple
thing: one member of a pair simply lifts the other member's
hand and then returns it to rest. But as Charlotte worked with
us, and with mild suggestions gently led us to strip away all
kinds of activity unrelated to the pure task of lifting the hand
and letting it down again, there came to be a kind of clarity in
my experiencing of myself. I found myself able to give up all
the other kinds of associative activity and unrelated muscular
activity and simply allow my hand to be lifted or to lift my
partner's hand. I was led to give up concern about the partner:
I gave up feeling close or distant, or attracted or repelled; I
gave up being reminded of other times when my hand was

lifted or I lifted another person's hand; I gave up sexual con-
notations of the touch; I gave up concern as to whether I was
holding my body right; I did nothing other than allow my hand
to be lifted, and then later to lift my partner's hand. And in
that moment of clarity, I think I experienced what Charlotte
means by 'TDeing fully present for what you're doing" and 1 got
some glimpse of the wonder of being able to live so that one is
fully present for whatever is going on. There was an incredible
clarity to the event, a startling simplicity in just allowing the
other to lift my hand or allowing myself to lift my partner's
)
241 Reports
hand; but at the same time, there was the recognition of an

immensely full and complex process which is ordinarily
obscured and confused by the process of association, of mus-
cular holding, of trying to attribute meanings and intentions
and transferred emotions to that specific concrete situation
that really have no business there.
For a brief time during that experiment, I was a whole
being, functioning in a hohstic manner. I was no longer mind
carried by body. The experience was illuminating. I was also in
no way beclouding the existential event of having my hand
lifted, by expectations from the past, or plans for the future. I
was simply being in the present, and I experienced a burst of

energy, of great heightening of awareness and an excitation of
creativity in those few minutes that I recognized from previous
times but the nature of which I had not understood so clearly
before. There were many other experiments that weekend but
that particular one stands out as a kind of moment of under-
standing which is in no way intellectual and which is so badly
communicated by intellectualizations. ( S.K.
B One day you asked

(A photographer)
us to go down and come up I didn't know
again, to squat.
what to do; I was almost petrified. This was something I had
not been able to do in years. I knew I would fall over, or have
to go down on all up again. But, gritting my
fours to get myself
teeth and holding my down and up as fast as
breath, I did it —
I could. I didn't go down very far, but I went down and got up
again without falling over. How did it happen?

We did it again and again. Each time I dared to go a little
farther down, a little more slowly. Strangely, the slower I
went, the more easily and smoothly. I began to feel the change
of balance in my torso, the bending in my hips and knees, the
tightening of the muscles in my thighs. It was still frightening
and a little painful, but how exciting! To actually squat dov^ni
—
and come up again something my head had told me I couldn't
do; and I couldn't do it before, not until I stopped listening to
my head and let the whole body take over its normal func-
tions. Much later I discovered that I could also kneel and sit
242 Appendix C
back on my heels, something that had previously been agony to

me.
After many experiments, I began to realize that my immo-
bility was the result of fear-constricted muscles, which in turn
constricted breathing and There was fear of falling,
circulation.
fear of pain, fear of failure and ignominy, and these fear-
constrictions were holding tight all the muscles that had to give
for mobility. These realizations came in the muscles them-
selves, in those occasional experiments where this holding was
given up and I could move freely, with a blissful feeling of
well-being.
Parallel to these realizations about the "inner world" came
the understanding that when these inhibiting muscle/breath-
ing/circulation-constrictions could be given up, there resulted
a more open relationship to the "outer world" as well. Naturally,
these newly rediscovered abilities to kneel and squat were the
greatest delight to me in gardening, where I had formerly
grunted and groaned in getting up and down, and suffered
considerable backache and often nausea from hanging over
with all the organs scrunched up in the middle of me. (Ex-
periments in hanging made me recognize this fact, and learn
how good it hang from the hip joints, with plenty of
feels to
room in the torso for breathing and circulation.) Now I enjoyed
getting up and down. It was wonderful to experience the feel-
ing of strength and ease as I moved, and I gave myself plenty
of time to appreciate it.
Ifound that, in being open and unhurried to the delicate

changes within me, I was beginning to be open and unhurried
in my relationships to everything around me. I was able to
recognize the differences in the weeds I was removing, and
respond accordingly: to allow time to follow a long, brittle
stem of the chickweed through the grass to the small, clutch-
ing root, pull it out, and lift the long tangle of stems without
breaking them; to pull out the long, heavy root of the dandeUon
in just the right direction and with just the strong, steady pull
needed to get it out without breaking off a piece to send up
another plant; to get just the right hold on a clump of slippery
wire-grass to be able to pull out its big clump of roots. And to
243 Reports
be able to do this without damaging the flowering plants the

weeds were crowding out. None of this was intellectual; it was
purely sensory awareness.
In hke manner, I was more considerate of plants
able to be
I was putting in the ground, observing at exactly what depth
they needed to go; that they were not too crowded for their
future size; that they would get the amount of light they
needed. And was more open to the beauty of form and texture,
I
light —
and shade the fragrance of the flowers, the foliage, and
the earth.
So where does it end? Does it end? As I became better able
to sense and respond to the plants according to their needs, I
became better able to listen and respond to my children, my
friends, anyone.
As you said, after we had squatted and come up again, "It
feels good, yes?" Yes. (M.A.R.)
C (A professor of medicine) Fm sure

you must be fully aware of how much your Tassajara workshop
meant to me. The beauty of the experience must have been
written all over my face, my bearing, my very being. But I
really want to put down in writing some of the feelings which
emerged.
I have always come naturally to being sensorially aware. As
a child, I would like to blur my vision and watch the abstract

forms and lights dancing on water, or hsten to night sounds, or
smell old houses, or whatever. But you opened up unimagined
vistas. Instead of asking myself, what can I see, what can I
hear, what can I smell, I am now open to the experience of
experiencing, whatever the experience may be — within myself,
the natural world external to myself, or my relations with
other persons. I have a long way to go, of course, as mindless,^
untrained, unlearned, unprogramed experiencing is such a
1. I believe the word "mindless" could here be considered the exact

—
equivalent of the mindfulness of page 47 i.e., full attention without
intellectual activity. This points up the great difficulties we so often
come into when we use those many words (usually ones we value
highly) as to whose precise meaning there is little real agreement. Such
words can only be read intuitively, in a context. [Author's note]
244 Appendix C
new idea to me that I have just begun to open up to this

whole new exploration. However, this is as nothing compared
to the awesome discovery, while passing the ball back and forth
from my hands to my partner's hands,- what it really means
to give, to receive —
without a contract, no negotiation, no
expectations, no past, no future —
just giving, just receiving.
What flows? What is it like? What happens? Fifty-three
. . .
years I have lived, and I don't think I ever received anything

from another human being, that is, was not able within myself
to receive — simply, fully, gracefully, gratefully — until about six
months ago; but the full impact of this marvelous capacity of
one human being to give to another human being, and to
receive from him, did not get to me until passing the ball. Sud-
denly found myself, literally transported into another world of
I
being. The tears flowed. I was a little self-conscious, although

not embarrassed. Or, better expressed, it was an intensely lyri-
cal moment for me; it was personal, and I did not want to be
on display. I sat quietly in back, hoping no one would notice.
Suddenly I was aware that J S was next to me,
quietly, her fingertips just touching my arm, just to say that she
was there if I needed her, and I pushed my head hard into her
lap so that I could sob convulsively without making a sound,
and I could share this moment with J only. But, of course,
I want to share it with you, as you brought it about, and it
expressed, more than any words I could write, what had hap-
pened to me during the beautiful week of the workshop,
culminating in that magical moment. (A.B.)
2. See pages 199-200.

SENSORY AWARENESS
The Rediscovery of
Experiencing
Through Workshops with Charlotte Selver
Happily once more back in print is this classic celebration of awareness of the senses, of inner
awakeness. Charlotte Selver's original name for now become
her work, Sensory Awareness, has by
so much a part of us that it is widely employed for all the various psychophysical disciplines.
The author has studied and taught Charlotte Selver's way of work for thirty years and here
succeeds in describing what it can do for those who give themselves to it: its natural and self-
regulating way for growth, for freeing and encouraging the correcting messages that come from
within, for more constructive and fuller living. The flow of life is altered in positive ways and
the basis for chronic problems that beset us is eliminated.
"This book is one of the most important contributions to self-awareness in the last years.
It presents the essentials ivithout frills or false claims, yet it is so penetratingly and beautifully
written that it holds the attention of anyone who is seriously interested in experiencing
awareness. It is one of the very few books which can truly teach even the beginner.
"I know Charlotte Selver's work, having studied with her for several years. I have found
it of greatest help to myself. I consider the principles on which this work is based of great
significance for the full unfolding of the personality."
Erich Fromm
"In my opinion it is the only real book on awareness. I have been recommending it to all
the members of my seminars. It deserves the widest possible circulation and study and is
essential for anyone who is trying in any way to change human beings."
vîrginia s.^tyr
Originator of Conjoint Family Therapy
"If you have ever meditated, danced, studied one of the Eastern arts, or warned to 'be
here now', this book is highly recommended."

New Age Journal
"Charlotte Selver conveys the actual sensation of some of the things which I try to express
in mere words— above all the organic relationship of man with the whole world of nature."
Alan Watts
"The work of Charlotte Selver and Charles V.W. Brooks is the inner experience of entire
being, the pure flow of sensory awareness when the mind through calmness cecLês to work-
deeper than mind-made awareness."
Shunryi' SUZI'KI ROSHI
CHARLES BROOKS, a longtime

teacher at Esalen Institute and at the
Tassajara Zen Monastery, and a faculty
member of the New
School for Social
Research, has led workshops for more
than 25 years throughout the United
States, Canada and Latin America.
ScKcr
FELIX MORROW/PubIisher/13 Welwyn Rd., Great Neck, NY 11021

Distributed by The Talman Company

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What is the main subject of the book according to the preface?

What is the main subject of the book according to the preface?

What does passing the ball back and forth symbolize for one participant?

What does passing the ball back and forth symbolize for one participant?

SENSORY

BY CHARLES V.W. BROOKS

Published by Felix Morrow

Originally published by Viking Press, New York

Distributed by The Talman Company

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 86-90455

Cover, frontispiece photos ©

Petits Ours, Guilde du Livre, Lausanne, 1954. Raphe Guilhmiettc Pictures.

1 BEING IN THE WORLD 3

The Four Dignities of Man / 2

5 THE SEARCH FOR STANDING 23

12 FINDING OUR STATURE 54

Toward a More Sensitive Relating / 91

19 WORKING WITH OBJECTS 117

20 WORKING WITH GRAVITY 127

21 DOWN AND UP 132

22 WORKING OUT OF DOORS 137

23 WORKING OUT OF DOORS, CONTINUED 143

24 THE WORD AND THE VOICE 148

26 THE CONNOISSEUR 159

29 GIVING AND RECEIVING 176

30 GIVING AND RECEIVING, CONTINUED 183

A ELSA GINDLER ARBEIT AM MENSCHEN

To those already familiar with this book un-

third American publisher, qualified as "through the Workshops of

not her work, Sensory Awareness meant simply Charlotte Selver.

Sensory Awareness can be called a form of education (or better of

re-education), it is certainly no accumulation of techniques or formulas

to be taught by one person to others. Indeed, Charlotte eschews the

gradually recognizing and shedding one's conditioning, for this trans-

The people who come to Charlotte's workshops are also

In some three years of intermittent

the living context in which these experiments and questions

and to me this work is hers. Perhaps someday it will be the

Motilicqan. Mai})c. 1973

A heavy rains last week, we planted

touched us, was always changing. Finally the growing kaleido-

Gradually, new-found doors began opening.

5 Being in the World

And now came a new contact and immediacy as we gained

natural necessity that keeps us from hving our lives as imme-

ing by the bilhons in our brain to receive the messages, relate

out our lives. For in the superlatively developed cortex of our

1. Cf. A. T. W. Simeons, Man's Presumptuous Brain (New York: Dut-

and of our undoing. Our unique human faculty of developing

endless conveniences comes to supplant, or at least to veil, the

closely related,and Castaneda's understanding of them to be so direct

from our beliefs —

accept another. Underneath, I was afraid at the thought of

living in a world where there was not Someone, somewhat

mation, as well as the theories, cliches, stereotypes, and fan-

great many people today is practically limited to comfort and

represent quite different categories of thought which could

for instance, to perspiration or bowel movement, but never to

mind and body as a practical human artifice, or as a descrip-