This book captures the essence of Charlotte Selver’s practice of Sensory Awareness like no other publication. It is an invitation to experience life firsthand again, as we did when we were children. In a culture where we have grown accustomed to accumulating knowledge from teachers and experts, it is rare to find a book that actually invites us to trust our own senses again. It is the authors’ intent to give back to the reader authority over his or her own experience and learning processes.
Much of the book focuses on reviving the senses in order to open the mind and body to direct learning. The book imitates an actual Sensory Awareness class, involving the reader as a student, guiding him or her along a journey with and through the senses to a way of living that is in accordance with the natural functioning of the human organism in its environment.
The range of explorations include a renewed connection to the support of the earth as a foundation for trust; the central role of gravity for our health and for finding orientation in life; a study of breathing that promotes health and vitality; and connecting and interacting with other people. A handbook to a more genuine and connected way of living, the work is also a beautifully crafted account of Sensory Awareness, showing these profound teachers at work with their students and with the reader.
Sensory awareness allows practitioners to open their minds, trust their senses, experience life firsthand, and take control of the learning process, free from the influence of teachers or so-called experts. Written by two pioneers in the field, this comprehensive guide mimics an actual sensory awareness class. It leads readers on a journey through the senses to a way of living that reconnects humans with the earth and each other while restoring health and vitality.
“This is a wonderful and welcome expansion of a true classic. It teaches us Charlotte’s and Charles’s remarkable way to be genuinely alive.”
—Jack Kornfield, author of
A Path with Heart and
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry“Only by bringing awareness back to our senses can we renew the forgotten empathy between the human body and the breathing Earth. Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks were the great pioneers in this work, inviting us to drop beneath the churning of thought into the intimate silence of our rapport with the textures and tastes of the real.”
—David Abram, author of
The Spell of the Sensuous
