originally published in Somatics, Vol VI (Autumn/Winter 1986,7), pp 4-8.

PRINCIPLES VERSUS TECHNIQUES: TOWARDS THE UNITY OF THE SOMATICS FIELD

In l979 I sent Thomas Hanna a draft of an article in which I argued that the use of visual ideal images of the body, specific "character types", and preconceived plans for manipulation based on such concepts, encouraged dependency and self-doubt in clients of somatic therapy, and hampered the creativity of somatic practitioners. He asked me to add to the article a response to this question: if one abandons the organizing principle of external ideals, character types, and manipulative recipes, how might one organize one's work and teach others? I appended to the article, which was published here in Autumn, l980, under the title "Somatic Platonism", the sketch of a plan for educating somatic therapists grounded in a study of the law-abiding processes that are inherent in our bodies: genetic, neurophysiological, anatomical, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual. During the past seven years I have been implementing and filling out that vague outline under the pressures of developing a graduate school program in somatics, and participating in various training institutes. Here is how I now see the situation: the more I have learned about the Somatics pioneers--Gindler, F. M. Alexander, Reich, Rolf, Feldenkrais, Schultz, Jacobson, etc.--the more I have been struck by this paradox: (l) on the one hand, there are radical similarities among the ways these people actually worked, and the discoveries they made about human nature, constituting a field of theory and practice unified enough to justify Hanna's naming it "Somatics"; (2) on the other hand, there are a bewildering variety of somatic methods, the adherents of one frequently criticizing the values of the others. A major cause of fragmentation within the Somatics community is putting emphasis on the techniques peculiar to a specific method, rather than on the underlying principles which generated the method. Principles are found in examining how the somatics pioneers actually developed their work--the puzzles that intrigued them, what they actually did in their work, and how they lived; techniques are what they did in particular instances, and what they say they did in their attempts to communicate simply with their students and the public. I am going to outline some of what I consider to be the principles underlying the Somatics field. I call them "principles" in the original sense of the term, which means "beginnings", the sources of discovery. They are principles in the sense that their pursuit and refinement have generated the various particular methods. Arising in questions rather than in particular answers, they are sources of discovery; once triggered, they enable the inspired person continually to invent creative strategies for working with others. l. SENSITIVITY

Teachers as seemingly diverse as the late Ida Rolf and the contemporary Emilie Conrad, place a radical emphasis on refining one's abilities to perceive both one's inner environment and the subtleties of the outer world. Both in their own lives of discovery and in their teaching, the somatic pioneers without exception developed methods for counteracting ancient social pressures urging us to denigrate the value of our sensuous experiences. They learned to pay careful attention to themselves -- think of Alexander alone with his mirrors noticing what he did to cause laryngitis as he prepared to go on the stage, or Gindler spending months focussing her awareness on one lobe of her lungs. They also learned to pay careful attention to other people, noticing shifts of breath and posture, relief of symptoms, changes in range of movement in response to their touching people, manipulating muscles and limbs, and giving movement directives. Because of this emphasis on the development of sensitivity, Tinbergen in his well-known Nobel address situated the work of Alexander (and by implication, the whole field of Somatics) within the area of natural science. Like Darwin, Margaret Mead, and Jane Goodall, the somatic pioneers devoted their lives to careful observations of human behavior, not at the detached, microscopic level characteristic of the biological sciences, but at the level of immediate perception. They were engaged in what Kurt Lewin called "action research", an inquiry into methods of

changing human behavior by a continual cycle of application of methods, careful observation, revision, new applications, etc. Moshe Feldenkrais argued that this kind of research, which he documented in The Case of Nora, is of its very nature a healing activity. It is not too hard to grasp why the development of this principle is typically shortchanged in training somatic therapists and educators: it simply takes too long to be "covered" in the few weeks or months that constitute the training for most practitioners. Those who have devoted themselves to this aspect of Somatics, such as Charlotte Selver and Ilana Rubenfeld, attest to the length of time it takes to rebuild the bridges to our sensory capacities eroded by decades of anti-sensual education. A person who becomes fascinated by the importance of sensing, and gains some familiarity with ways of refining it, is impelled along the way to a lifetime of research into the problems that life presents. He or she doesn't require techniques for problem-solving, because these will have to be worked out from paying attention to the unique situation at hand. In that sense, "sensitivity" is a generative principle. 2. MY EXPERIENCED BODY/THE PUBLIC BODY Some distinguish between the subjective and objective body. Since these terms have a long history of epistemological traps, I prefer to use words that more accurately describe the dialectic between (l) the images I have of my body (its weight, height, width; the number, shapes, and locations of its parts; their relative significance; the locations in my body of particular memories and fears, etc.) with (2) what can be publicly determined about it through measurement, dissection, and biological science. A frequent phrase in Charlotte Selver's sensory awareness classes is the "Oh!" as one stumbles upon a new experience of the foot, for example. That "Oh!" indicates an insight into the difference between what was a few moments ago experienced vaguely as "my foot" and the suddenly new and more detailed sense of the many joints in my foot. All the somatic pioneers work with this dialectic either explicitly or implicitly. Marion Rosen, for example, places her hands on a person's back and evokes the history of associations the person has with that specific region. Peter Levine might engage a person in a conversation about charged situations in her past and, with gentle touch, gradually help her become aware of the connection between that situation and her experience of tiny movements in her legs or abdomen. The Somatically oriented sports and exercise teachers help their students grasp how their images of their bodies needlessly restrict their strength, speed, and abilities to concentrate. The Rolfer, with his fingers deep within a person's psoas, evokes profound insights by giving the person a literal sense of how that deep muscle, normally beyond the pale of experience, reacts in fear of others, for example. The Alexander teacher or the Aston-Patterner help a person feel how what seems to be the most efficient way to get out of a chair is actually an unnecessarily stressful series of movements, the overlay of effort we typically place on our lives. Freud's earliest essays, which Reich would later elaborate, located the significance of the gap between experience and reality. In his studies of a male hemiplegic, for example, he found that the key to understanding hysteria lay in the difference between the leg as mapped by neurology and the leg as experienced by the hemiplegic man. The man dragged his leg not as one would expect if there were nerve damage; the "leg" he dragged was the leg as understood in ordinary language. To grasp that difference requires the therapist to understand both neurology and the dynamics of body image, both what I would call "internal patterns" in contrast to ideal forms. The dialectic between one's body image and the public dimensions and patterns of one's body can take many directions of specificity. The genius of a particular family of somatic methods can be appreciated as a specific contribution to exploring the dialectic. The structural-functional family, for example, (including the Alexander technique, Rolfing, Feldenkrais, Aston-Patterning, and their various derivatives) can reveal to a person a rich set of lessons located in the gap between one's images of one's body moving in space and the way one's body is actually affected by the field of gravity. The energetic family plunges into the mysterious realm between my experience of deep inner impulses, and their actual movements. The awareness family (Conrad Da'Oud, Selver,

Rosen, Proskauer, etc.) close the gap between my fantasies of my body and my immediate experience of it. The different levels of dialectic suggest two subsets of principles, the one governing the formation of body-image, the other having to do with biological and physical patterns common to all organisms. 2.1 Body Image and Personality: the principle that one's experience of one's body is the foundation for his or her psychology and world-view is so commonly accepted that to mention it has become trite. However, what is often overlooked is that one can spend a lifetime of therapeutic work simply elaborating this principle. What I have found, inspired by such people as Moshe Feldenkrais and Seymour Fisher, is that assisting a person in a long and patient elaboration of his or her body image is a work with its own inherent healing and educational capacities. It can include such themes as these: One's current body-image. An investigation into one's sense of boundaries (skin, body parts, hair, nails, clothes, house, car, country, etc.): how big does one feel in relation to others, how wide, how tall? What is one's perception of the various parts of the body? How does one relate to the various rhythms and pulses in the body: cardiovascular, muscular, peristaltic, respiratory, cerebro-spinal, etc. These reflections can be anchored in journals, drawings, movement explorations, photographs, and poetry. The origins of body-image. It is commonplace for somatic therapists to evoke old memories from the people we work with. Somatics consistently reveals how I have come to experience myself as I do: patterns of sickness and health revealed in how I emphasize certain parts of my body and am oblivious to others, physically traumatic events which left scars in my self-image, how I have learned to become a white, American male (cross-cultural and gender studies of body awareness are strikingly absent from Somatics), the ways my family of origin embodied sickness and injuries, how they tend to die. Body-image as the ground for one's behavior and world views. As I become more familiar with my actual body-image and its sources in family and social history, I am in a position to grasp relationships between that image and the way I move, think, love, obey, decide. Stanley Keleman's work, for example, explores in great detail how my experience of the various spaces, pouches, and urges within my body shapes the way I learn to be self-righteous, pretentious, or dependent. Feldenkrais looked into the ways we limit our movements by thinking we can move our arms, for example, only so far and no further. In his studies of fascism, Reich discovered how the influence of body-image reaches as far political systems.

The articulation of one's body image is intimately related to the development of sensitivity: as one becomes more sensitive, one becomes clearer about the maps one has constructed about one's body, and the boundaries one draws with others. The various sensory awareness strategies, visualizations, touching, deep manipulation of connective tissue, and moving of limbs all help a person get a more discriminating sense of self. The work with body-image has a particular importance in somatic practitioners' gaining insights into the kind of work that will be most nourishing for them as distinct from directions that might encourage rigidity. For example, practicing Rolfing for ten years was a constant struggle for me; I felt limited in my creativity, making few discoveries on my own, and was in constant physical pain. The forms of Rolfing fit neatly into old ways I had learned to restrict myself in my earlier years. For other people, the practice of Rolfing has been a liberating and creative process. Similarly in relation to clients. If I base my work with people on understanding their body-images, I will find that different people require different kinds of strategies. For some people, touch will be inappropriate; for others, light touch; for some, heavy penetrating touches; for others, combinations of imagery, long conversations, and touch, etc. Instead of organizing my work around preconceived recipes, I move in response to the person's own images; I develop techniques inspired by the needs of the other person. I think it is easy to see how any one of the above principles can generate endless questions, possibilities of research, possible strategies. They encourage freedom and ingenuity. A fixed set of strategies with its intramural jargon is, by contrast, a strait-jacket placed on the inquiring spirit.

2.2.The Public Body. What distinguishes Somatics from, on the one hand, medicine and physical therapy, and, on the other, from traditional psychotherapy, is its commitment to both poles of the dialectic, the personal and the public. The power of Somatics comes from a constant deepening of our awareness of the experienced body, along with a serious inquiry into the effects of biological and physical laws on personal experience. The public body is described by laws which are common to all physical organisms: the laws of physics, cellular biology and biochemistry, anatomy, and physiology. The more one becomes familiar with these laws, the more perceptive one becomes in detecting subtle gaps between the experienced and the public body. Ida Rolf and her students immerse themselves in a study of the musculo-fascial-skeletal structures of the body, and the ways those structures are altered by gravity. Emilie Conrad and Stanley Keleman allow their methods to be nourished by biological images of cellular structures and their movements. Gerda Boyesen leads people into contact with peristalsis; Lillemor Johnsen and Carola Speads, with respiration. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen generates her work from studies of the neuroendocrine system. 3. IMPLICATIONS

The distinction between principles and techniques suggests an education of somatic practitioners based on a wide range of experiential, theoretical, and practical studies. The groundwork would be a long training in sensitivity, involving a refined awareness of one's inner feeling states, body parts, and various inner biological rhythms. It would also include developing our sensitivity to what is outside our skin: other persons and the planet. Intimately related to the education in sensitivity, would be the kinds of self-study needed to gain a full sense of the many dimensions of one's body-image, coming to grips with how it limits one's interactions with the world, as well as how it fires one's imagination. The self-study requires developing facility to recognizing instances of transference and counter-transference, rooted in a careful study of one's family and culture of origin. Group process skills are central to building a community of explorers. (Robert Hall, for example, included daily meditation and group process in his design of the Lomi School.) Study of the individual somatic methods would focus on principles underlying the techniques: F. M. Alexander's distinction between end-gaining and means-whereby, Ida Rolf's image of the body as an organization of large weight masses affected by gravity, Lillemor Johnsen's distinction between hypotonic and hypertonic musculature, Reich's analyses of projection and contactlessness in relation to one's unawareness of one's impulses as one's own, etc. Learning about the nature of the public body requires the somatic student to engage in extensive studies of the biological, psychological, and social sciences. But for truly effective studies in these areas, we require new methods of teaching these sciences that link them the experienced body, after models that are currently being developed in several of the training institutes. Like any other health professional, the Somatics student would be engaged in a long-term internship where he or she would have repeated opportunities to apply various principles to a variety of people and problems, exercising his or her ingenuity in communication with peers and experienced practitioners. Such an education is far longer and more extensive than any private institute could mount. It requires the same kind of quality education pursued by others who work in the field of human problems: physicians, psychologists, nurses, physical therapists, social workers, etc. If we really think our work is so important, why do we insist on taking so little time to learn it? In the absence of such a comprehensive education, there is no alternative but to imitate techniques created by others. An education based on somatic principles aims at freedom. Learning techniques requires imitation, repetition, and obedience to those considered to be experts in applying the techniques. Principles unleash ingenuity; they evoke my impulses to find out about life and to organize the results of my research into my unique ways of perceiving the world. An education based on principles encourages the student to confront his or her own fears of asking

questions, taking stands based on one's experience, risking error; it invites one to be as courageous as pioneers like Reich and Rolf, who pursued their vision at great personal expense. An emphasis on technique creates a society of disciples and masters; principles generate communities of explorers. In the former, authority derives from the leader of the school; in the latter, from the clarification of experience, the refinement of sensitivity, and the feedback that comes from shared research. Reich called this kind of community a "work democracy". Although Somatics significantly alleviates specific physical and psychological discomforts, its ultimate goals, as formulated by its pioneers, concern truth and freedom. The refinement of sensitivity and the dissolution of the gap between the fantasized and the publicly knowable body bring one into a dazzling contact with the real; the dissolution of images of limitation based on fear expands one's capacities for moving in response to the changing demands of our lives. Fascination with a particular set of strategies, thought to be applicable to anyone at all, undercuts the very principles which generated the strategies in the first place. The field of Somatics is situated within the uniquely Western contribution to a political ideal of freedom, a notion that we are capable, in community, of finding truth based on bodily experience of the sensuous world; authority derives from that experience shared in dialogue. No individual has a privileged access to truth.In this context, I want to say an impolite word about Asian techniques. While it is obviously useful to learn hatha yoga, the martial arts, Ayurvedic styles of manipulation, etc., it would be a loss to abandon the Western vision of freedom based on sensuous empiricism. Despite their sophistication over centuries in compared to our more crude experiments, Asian methods of working with the body are now far removed from their origins in empirical human inquiry, and embedded in social forms that are essentially authoritarian. (There are such notable exceptions as Vipassana and Vietnamese Buddhism.) To follow those techniques requires one to become obedient to the masters who carry on the tradition. Only a few people have succeeded in extricating principles from ancient disciplines. These reflections relate to the future of somatic research. One symptom of the ideological fragmentation of Somatics appears in its lack of "problem" workshops. Health professionals and psychotherapists offer a wide range of such educational opportunities: how to deal with alcoholism, drug addiction, food disorders, sexual disfunctions, etc. Their problem orientation is a sign of a community of practitioners who are sufficiently conscious of their unity that they can address problems collaboratively. On the other hand, offerings for workshops in the area of Somatics emphasize teaching specific methods of body work with little focus on human problems. Within any one of the somatic institutes, there is, of course, discourse about how its method relates to specific problems. But one first has to learn the ideology of the school and its recipes for working with people: there is little sense of a basic unity within the field, of which the various methods are variations on a theme, admitting easy dialogue about the strategies that might be used most effectively for specific problems, and the solid research made possible only by a collaboration among a wide range of practitioners and theorists. The different schools have now been engaged in refining their methods since at least l890 when F. M. Alexander arrived in London. The next step in our work is to engage in the kind of collaborative research into the relevance of our field to such issues as stress, arthritis, autism, various forms of brain-damage, cancer, heart disease, schizophrenia, sexual disfunctions, anorexia, bulimia, etc. Significant research into any of these areas requires a much broader base of theories and practices than any particular school can offer. Moreover, if research is to be seen by the larger world as truly research as distinct from marketing a particular method, it must involve a wide range of approaches, and the risk of showing that some are more effective than others in certain situations. The recognition of the principles that unite us rather than attachment to the techniques that divide would make possible this collective endeavor. If we can engage together on those empirical issues of immediate importance to so many people instead of remaining immured in our internecine quarrels, we may earn the right to speak out our vision of how to redesign our social institutions so that they are more supportive of human bodies whose importance we uniquely appreciate. Chapter in The Body in Human Inquiry: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Embodiment, ed. Vincent Berdayes. The Hampton Press 2004:

Body Practices and Human Inquiry: Disciplined Experiencing, Fresh Thinking, Vigorous Language

Husserl's call to return to the things themselves caught my imagination the first time I read it long ago buried in a Jesuit house of study living a medieval celibate life far removed in sensibility from thingness. Like many of my contemporaries, both religious and secular, I sensed the absolute rightness in that call, knowing that my own life and the scholarship in which I was immersed were hopelessly untethered from direct experience. As with other charismatic invitations-to be compassionate, generous, less cluttered in mind and things-I had yet to travel a long way from the inspiration to any semblance of its realization. The problem, which would surface thematically only later in the century, was that dualism and idealism are not simply abstract systems of thought to be changed by thought itself. The institutions shaped by these philosophiesschools, sports, dance, the military, gender practices, religion-engender dissociated sensibilities engraved in our neuromuscular structures, the roots of our mechanistic actions and thoughts. For anyone old enough to read Husserl, there is little likelihood that he or she will have the ample resources of flexibility and sensitivity required to embody his invitation. Those of us who have been schooled enough to approach his arcane texts have typically been successfully educated to feel a primal disconnection between thought and experience, no matter what we think, say, or hope for. Those primal feelings seep into the dissociated climate of academic texts, pedagogy, social structures, and interpersonal behavior, even when they are rooted in phenomenological claims. When the thing itself is our own bodies, the problem is even greater given the incrustations of ideas and habits which aggregate themselves daily onto our experiences of breathing, muscle tension, joint movement, and the endless nooks and crannies of our neuromuscularities. My own upbringing was so extreme in its deliberate shaping me to be dissociated from direct experience that I gained an unusual appreciation for my good luck in finding a community of teachers who helped me recover many lost, or never-known lines of experiential connections with regions of bodily experience. That community encompasses a bewildering variety of body-centered practices developed in the West, sometimes inspired by Asian, African, and Middle-Eastern practices or, more typically, older European practices that have existed in the backwaters of the culture. They include the F. M. Alexander Technique, Rolfing, Moshe Feldenkrais' Awareness through Movement and Functional Integration, Body-Mind Centering, Continuum, the Lomi School, Hakomi, Sensory Awareness, Authentic Movement, the various offshoots of Wilhelm Reich's bioenergetics, and a host of others. They all share a direct focus on bodily experience. There are tens of thousands of practitioners of these methods dispersed throughout Europe, the Americas, and Australia, with many now practicing in Japan and India, with countless students and clients. Many involve hands-on strategies and occur within individual sessions; others are group sessions involving movement and body awareness strategies. To make a living with the work, some schools have linked their work with physical therapy; many with psychotherapy; some with natural healing practitioners and massage therapists. Despite their many differences of strategy, demeanor, and professional presentation, all of them share a foundation in core questions: what happens when we learn to turn our awareness in repeated methodical ways towards the intricacies of our bodily experience? What is revealed about the world? About ourselves? The late Thomas Hanna, like myself a recovering philosopher, succeeded in gaining broad acceptance for a name and theoretical umbrella to the many particular schools: he called the field "Somatics," inspired both by Husserl's vision of "somatology," a science that would unite a methodical knowledge of the body derived from experiential studies with the biological sciences; and by the classical Greek soma, the living bodily person, in contrast to necros, the dead mass of flesh. (1986, pp. 4-8; Husserl, 1980, ppar. 2, 3; Behnke, 1993, p. 11; Martin, 1995, footnote nine for Chapter Five, p. 271) Hanna, like myself and a number of other philosophers who stumbled into these quiet, non-academic practices, saw them primarily as basic methods for recovering from the existential sickness of dualism with all its implications, personal and social. The general public, however, and even many practitioners, view them as alternative medical practices or adjuncts to psychotherapy. This has been an understandable interpretation because of their considerable effectiveness in handling chronic dysfunctions such as low-back pain and

migraines, which are impervious to standard medical treatment. They have also enjoyed a remarkable success in facilitating the psychotherapeutic process, making impacts through Gestalt, the various Reichian therapies, Hakomi, and many others. Yet this view of Somatics within the frameworks of healing and psychotherapy has obscured its more profound aspects. In that deeper level, Somatics is better understood in comparison with older Asian practices-chi gong, tai chi chuan, hatha yoga, vipassana-whose fundamental aim is the cultivation of adult behavior and capacity, and only secondarily the alleviation of specific ills. For that reason, I have often thought of it as a recovery movement for Westerners suffering from mind-body dualism. Like 12-step programs, these practices are aimed at lessening the tenacity of complex set of ideas that are embedded in stereotypical reactions. In what follows, I describe the work of three different schools of Somatics-Sensory Awareness, Continuum, and Authentic Movement-with an eye to illustrating their capacity for transforming a dualistic consciousness into a more direct sense of embeddedness in the body and the sensible environment. I have selected these particular methods because they are among the most radical in their claims to be methods of exploration without a particular therapeutic goal beyond the exploration itself. Although they have enjoyed some success with medical problems, and have been used in conjunction with psychotherapy, their founders and leading teachers de-emphasize these aspects, sometimes with feisty passion insisting that their focus is confined to an inquiry into human experience through exercises of sensing, paying sustained attention to sound-making, breathing and various ranges and depths of body movement, both voluntary and involuntary. While each of these methods has recognizable forms in the sense of repetitive patterns of working, these forms are more functional and have no defined ideological content. By that I mean that although a particular practicelifting a stone, uttering a certain peculiar kind of sound, initiating a specific movement in the knee-is repeated again and again over decades with many groups of students, the practice has no predefined meaning; it is like an experiment, a path of discovery, and with contents found unique to the explorer. The overall goal is to awaken people's capacity to discover the things themselves, unclouded by the endless mental chatter that clouds our experience. I have selected these three works for another reason that is particularly relevant to readers of this collection. The senior teachers in these three methods stand out for their intricate sensitivity to the nuances that exist between experience and verbalization. They immerse participants in the practices with an emphasis on getting them to modulate the rush to speak so that there will be a chance for fresh words to come forth, with the same kind of sensitivity that one gives to the next breath or the movement of the hand. For those of us enmeshed in the intricacies of academic language, this aspect of bodily practice is as important as the actual turn to bodily experience, for our speaking and writing chronically removes us too rapidly from the realm of experience, failing in the last analysis to do justice to our hard-won sensual discoveries. Sensory Awareness Sensory Awareness has its origins in the work of Elsa Gindler developed in Berlin during the early part of the 1900s and brought to this country by refugees Carola Speads and Charlotte Selver in the late 1930s. Because I know Ms. Selver's work the best, I will comment on her version of the tradition. When I was writing the draft of this paper, she had turned 100, recently remarried, still teaching in Germany, Maine, New York, Mexico, and throughout California, a testimony to the vitality embedded in her teaching. Ms. Selver's work could not be simpler. In a typical class, she invites people to investigate sitting and standing. During a period of two hours, people sit-in whatever way they happen to sit-and stand-in whatever way they happen to end up on their feet. The only goal is to become increasingly more awake to the many aspects revealed in paying careful attention to repeated experiences of sitting, coming to standing, standing, and coming back to sitting. There is no judgment or theory about the "right" way to do it or attempts to improve matters; the point is to coax one's interest away from habitual obsessions to the immediate sensations of a particular activity as it unfolds. She typically raises a few questions about the activity, which never seem prepared or repetitive but

to arise out of a genuine curiosity about what catches her attention to our activity: "Is your breathing there for your standing?" "Are you there for the floor?" She asks people to notice what happens if they hear the sound of a gong or taste a grape or lift a small rock. The basis of our work is that when one gradually begins to go into each activity anew, one loses one's habitual stance. And this approaching each activity anew means a person who is awake and changeable. With all this comes movability and elasticity. So that one does not always toot into the old horn. (Selver, 1987 p. 3) Ms. Selver's late husband, Charles Brooks, describes a typical experiment of investigating lying on the floor: We may ask people to raise the weight of the leg without 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 different habitual attitudes different people have acquired. (Brooks, 1986, p. 66) In a class one evening many years ago, Selver invited a small group of us to walk very slowly around the room, paying particular attention to the contact between the soles of our feet and the rush mats on the hardwood floor. I was elsewhere, floating among worries about conflicts from the day's work, my impending divorce, and a painfully stiff neck. Drifting through the room with my attention on that "elsewhere," I suddenly woke up to the sole of my right foot brushing the mats underneath, the solidity of the floor supporting me, the sounds of others, the feel of the air, and Selver's voice saying, "ah, at last, you are there for your feet." Her ability to notice that precise moment when my attention shifted from my self-involved chatter into the experience of my foot gave me a sense of how I could more easily inhabit my muscles and bones, and become less preoccupied with internal conversations. Not surprisingly, given her history as a refugee from Nazism, she is passionate about sociopolitical issues and shares with phenomenologists a link between investigating direct experience and resisting oppression. Like many of her fellow refugees from pre-War Europe, she has a keen nose for fanaticism in its most subtle forms, and sees her work as directly addressing the degradation of the sensible world and the fabric of human community. She will do experiments in which she might read an article from the newspaper on a massacre in Bosnia or AIDS in Africa, asking the students to pay careful attention to what happens to them as they listen. Or she will have them pay attention to the environment including faint sensations of air and sound pollution. How is it that we can help people to become more awake, and how, after they begin to wake up, they learn to trust their own sensations. And how it is that they can discover that they really can see, and hear, and sense; and that this alone can be a very powerful agent in one's life. One can learn not to restrict one's view; to feel oneself as a member of this planet we all live on. It's important that people learn to stop circling around themselves and instead to become open to the world and active. (Selver, 1987, p. 3) Elizabeth Behnke has written an illuminating comparison of Sensory Awareness and Phenomenology, which might be a blueprint for a collaborative project between phenomenologists and body practitioners. She argues that both Gindler and Heidegger share the same fundamental orientation towards experience which they identify as Gelassenheit, a methodical and paradoxically active 'letting things be'. Where they differ is in what happens after the experience arises. Sensory Awareness, as an ongoing working community, simply leaves the experiments as they are for each person, with individuals applying it in their own particular communities outside Sensory Awareness-architecture, schools, political activity, spiritual teaching, psychotherapy; the phenomenologist inquires further into it within the community of phenomenologists, studying its implications, writing about it, engaging in the academic discourse that is grounded in it. (Behnke, 1989, pp. 27-42)

### Writing should aim for a lively, physical expressiveness that resists the passivity of the civilized sign: "the vigorous and expressive language of our muscles and our desires, of suffering, of the corruption or the flowering of the flesh." (Kristeva, 1996, p. 252, quoting Marcel Proust's Contre Sainte Beuve) Crossing the thresholds from experiencing to speaking and writing presents a daunting challenge. What Julia Kristeva calls 'the passivity of the civilized sign' haunts academic literature, deadens the enthusiastic explorations of graduate students. How can our scholarly work do justice to "vigorous and expressive language of our muscles and desires"? To write about the things themselves within the academy presents dangers similar to those that tortured Paul Celan, who was constrained by his native German to write poetry in the language of those who engineered the death of his family and friends. Academese is a language of encrusted forms, typically Graeco-Latin in origin, fraught with posturing and mandated formalisms, distant from the polyglot of the streets where the things themselves lay strewn. Part of the struggle to return to those fragrant moist things involves extricating ourselves from the sticky web of formal language that pulls us away from direct experience just as we begin to taste it. Selver has something to contribute to us who are struggling with this crossover. She has a genius at evoking the numbed spirit of wonder with the continually fresh question leading into language emerging from experience rather than commenting on it. "When you come to standing, are you there for the air around you?" "Does the floor support you?" "Is your hand there for your partner's shoulder?" Many teachers in the Somatics field and many meditation teachers emphasize turning attention towards sensation. But their work, tinged with many preconceived answers and strategies, does not approach the truly experimental quality of Selver's open inquiry. The simplicity of her questions demands a simplicity of answer, that the speaker pare away the embellishments, the pat answer, the exaggerations, and get to the spare expressions only of what was experienced and no more. These and other body practices, when combined with concerted attempts to enter careful speaking and writing, provide a sensory matrix that can distract the experiencers from the rapid onrush of already-used words and allow new words to emerge along with new sensations and new movements. Authentic Movement As a body in motion, the writing-and-written body puts into motion the bodies of all those who would observe it. It demands a scholarship that detects and records movements of the writer as well as the written about, and it places at the center of investigation the changing positions of these two groups of bodies and the co-motion that orchestrates as it differentiates their identities. This ambulant form of scholarship thus acknowledges an object of study that is always in the making and also always vanishing. It claims for the body, in anxious anticipation of this decade's collapse of the real and the simulated into a global "informatics of domination," an intense physicality and a reflexive generativity. (Foster, 1995, p. 16) Even to imagine "ambulant scholarship" or an "ambulant psychotherapy" or an "ambulant medicine" strains the imagination, accustomed as we are to centuries of sedentary intellectualism and science. The great ideas that have created the modern world and its professional disciplines have arisen from quietly sitting bodies, hunched over manuscripts, lecterns and desks, typewriters, and computers. What would happen to our ideas about things if we moved more, not randomly, not simply as isolated individuals, but as a conscious community of intelletuals inquiring into the results of deliberate movement practices for our thinking and writing. The late Mary Whitehouse (1911-1979), one of the founders of the field of Dance Therapy, created a practice now popularly known as Authentic Movement, sometimes "Moving in Depth," which provides clues on how to construct an ambulatory intellectualism. What I began to understand during the beginning of my work in movement in depth was that in order to release a movement that is instinctive (i.e., not the 'idea' of the person doing that movement nor my idea of what I want them to do), I found that I had to go back toward not moving. In that way I found out where movement actually

started. It was when I learned to see what was authentic about movement, and what was not, and when people were cheating, and when I interfered, and when they were starting to move from within themselves, and when they were compelled to move because they had an image in their heads of what they wanted to do; it was then that I learned to say 'Go ahead and do your image, never mind if you are thinking of it,' and when to say 'Oh, wait longer. Wait until you feel it from within.' (Whitehouse, 1999, p. 23) Authentic Movement shares with Sensory Awareness a radical simplicity of approach to experience; its strategies are exploratory, some deliberately designed to inhibit extrinsic interpretation and theories of content. But unlike Sensory Awareness, which may take on any field of sensation, this practice is explicitly oriented to experiences of moving and being moved. And while Sensory Awareness surgically excises any inquiries beyond the sensory, Authentic Movement like Phenomenology is open to the entire range of experiences associated with the movement: images, thoughts, emotions, and words. The practice involves teaching people how to wait for movement to arise and evolve as one gives oneself to it within an atmosphere of quiet attention, often with one person acting as a non-interpretative witness for the other. It is a sustained, tutored, disciplined waiting for movement to come from the self, instead of from habitual movements or moving as others would have us. A word about what this way of working with the body requires. There is necessary an attitude of inner openness, a kind of capacity for listening to one's self that I would call honesty. It is made possible only by concentration and patience. In allowing the body to move in its way, not in a way that would look nice, or that one thinks it should, in waiting patiently for the inner impulsive, in letting the reactions come up exactly as they occur on any given evening-new capacities appear, new modes of behavior are possible, and the awareness gained in the specialized situation goes over into a new sense of one's self (Whitehouse, 1995, p. 250) These teachers do not use words like 'instinctive' and 'natural' in the technical academically charged senses, but in a more ordinary street usage to describe commonplace experiences of the difference between posed, predictable, habitual, or stereotypical movements and those that surprise us as fresh and spontaneous. Authentic movement is movement that is natural to a particular person, not learned like ballet or calisthenics, not purposeful or intellectualized as 'this is the way I should move' to be pleasing, to be powerful, to be beautiful or graceful. Authentic movement is an immediate expression of how the client feels at any given moment. The spontaneous urge to move or not to move is not checked, judged, criticized or weighed by the conscious mind. (Adler, 1999, p. 122) It is a very commonplace feeling that some of our movements just happen, they just 'run off' in the sense employed here by Husserl: The kinaestheses can run off in a forced/compulsory way-alien to the I, as it were-as when my arm is passively pushed or is made to jerk by an electrical discharge. But the kinaestheses can also run off in the form 'I move,' and indeed in the mode of kinaestheses set into play voluntarily, actively proceeding from the I, or else in the form of being freely allowed, indeed not willed by the I in its own fiat, but allowed to happen without turning toward it, aware of it in the background and permitting it, so to speak (as when I let my child play while I'm occupied with something else). . . Or even breath, which I can inhibit and then set into play once again, but in general allow to run off. (Husserl, 1927, p. 446) As far as I know, no one within the Authentic Movement community has noticed that they use 'authenticity' in nearly the same way as Heidegger does in Being and Time, returning to the Greek origins of the word, 'selfposited.' Dasein is mine to be in one way or another. Dasein has always made some sort of decision as to the way in which it is in each case mine. . . And because Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility, it can, in its very Being, 'choose' itself and win itself; it can also lose itself and never win itself; or only 'seem' to do so. But only in

so far as it is essentially something which can be authentic-that is, something of its own-can it have lost itself and not yet won itself. (Heidegger, 1962, #42, 43, p.68) 'Inauthenticity' . . . amounts rather to a quite distinctive kind of Being-in-the-world-the kind which is completely fascinated by the 'world' and by the Dasein-with of Others in the 'they'. (#176, p. 220) Just as we are our own, to dispose of within the 'they' world of gossip, trivia, and opinion; so too, our movements are ours to give over to preconceived notions about how I should carry myself, gesture, or make specific movements; or, I can wait in silence until movements come from myself. "When movement was simple and inevitable, not to be changed no matter how limited or partial, it became what I called 'authentic'-it could be recognized as genuine, belonging to that person."(Whitehouse, 1999, p. 81) In his manual of instructions for teachers of Focusing, Eugene Gendlin cites Isadora Duncan as an example of this practice of waiting for the new: "For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded between my breasts, covering the solar plexus. My mother often became alarmed to see me remain for such long intervals quite motionless as if in a trance--but I was seeking and I finally discovered the central spring of all movements, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversities of movements are born..." (Isadora Duncan, My Life, Liveright, N.Y.: 1927, p.75.) Isadora Duncan stands still, sometimes for a long period. She senses dance steps she could move into, but they don't feel right. What would feel right is not sure yet. She is "seeking," she says above, looking for, waiting for the right feel to come, willing to let it come. This seeking, waiting for, looking, and letting is a kind of action. It is a way of relating to, interacting with ... What? Where? It is interaction with a right feel, a new kind of feel which will come in a new place.(available online at http://www.focusing.org/process.html, VII, A, introduction) I have freighted this section with a number of quotes both from the side of phenomenology and Authentic Movement as one way of countering the tenacious view that body practices are primarily forms of psychotherapy or medical alternatives. The tens of thousands of people who are engaging in these practices are moving into the foundational rethinking of their lives in relation to others, the earth, and social institutions. In that sense, body practices, like phenomenology, have implications for the reshaping not only of psychology and medicine, but also many other aspects of our social world ranging from schools to spiritual organizations. What Whitehouse and Adler articulate about the nature of their movement practices reflects a principle central to many body practices, the search for fresh bodily expressions as a gateway to liberating us from the stale ideas which continue to dominate our social thinking. Continuum Sensory Awareness and Authentic Movement are restrained, elegant, spare in their aesthetic. An ambulant scholarship formed by their works, though having revolutionary potential for our thought processes, would not seem wildly out of place in the university. Continuum practices, however, reflect the fertile imagination of their creator Emilie Conrad, a child of Sephardic immigrants to New York, some of whom were deported from Salonika to die in Auschwitz. Growing up on the streets, she became attracted to the African dance community, studying with Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus. Under their inspiration, she eventually moved to Haiti where she studied voudoun for five years. Over some three decades after her return to the States, she performed as a dancer and began to apply what she knew as a healer, eventually simplifying her work to the point where it became the method of exploring bodily experience which she has now taught formally for over twenty-five years. Continuum aims at deconstructing the old formalisms of body movement and awareness shaped through Medieval Christianity and the Industrial Revolution, leading it into more organic, amoeba-like realms. While many body practices have verbalized their works either within ordinary vocabularies of body parts, or older anatomical models of the body--bones, muscles, lungs--Continuum reflects a contemporary sensibility shaped by the

advances made in imaging the living body and its microscopic elements. Conrad articulates her work in terms of cells, membranes, fluid exchange, neuropeptides: the structures that situate us within the world of all living organisms with their shared primal movements.

In my own quest, I was seeking movements that were not 'culture bound' but were more biologically based. Would such movements allow for a more universal connection to life? Would it be possible for human beings to feel in such resonance with their biosphere that we could become planetary beings primarily and cultural entities secondarily. (Conrad, 1997, p. 64) Continuum shares with Sensory Awareness and Authentic Movement an emphasis on experimentation rather than defined protocols. Ms. Conrad constantly invents new strategies for locating unfamiliar, unused regions of the body-tiny muscles in the spinal column or the fingers, the soft tissues of the larynx and the nasal cavities, the outer realms of the lobes of the lungs. She invites students to examine the most remote regions of experiences by initiating peculiar kinds of stimuli. Sometimes she has people make the tiniest possible movements in various parts of the body-knee, shoulder, tongue, eyebrows, and wait in silence to observe what happens throughout the body as a result. Or she will have them initiating unfamiliar yet very specific sounds, followed by long silent periods of waiting and observing. The core of this work involves long periods, often hours, paying attention to the results of those miniscule movements, like watching the results of tossing a pebble into a lake. Continuum workshops typically take place over several days, often in a retreat setting, where the sessions go on twenty-four hours a day, with participants eating and sleeping quietly on their own. ### Because of the misleading popular image which lumps many kinds of different things together under the umbrella of "New Age," with connations of frivolity, hedonism, and thoughtlessness, I want to emphasize the kind of atmosphere you might find if you were to observe sessions of these works. They have the feel of a library filled with quiet readers: deeply reflective, inquisitive, intent on studying their own experiences and the insights occasioned by the experiences shared by the group. The language is spare, close to bone and neuron. You might be able to get a faint taste of the profundity of this movement practice if you know that it is typical for a small group of people, perhaps ten or fifteen, to spend a number of days together in silence, except for meals and deliberate periods of verbal reflection, exploring these kinds of movement together for hours at a stretch, and over a period of years. These communal practices are as powerful as any meditation tradition, and as far-reaching in their implications for understanding consciousness and the nature of intersubjectivity. A Science of Subjectivity The Somatics Study Group is an instance of how the ideas presented above might take shape. In 1987, I gathered a group of creators of nine different schools of body practices with the purpose of initiating a collaborative inquiry into the nature of our various works, how they might be more thoughtfully articulated. We meet periodically with biomedical researchers, philosophers, spiritual teachers, and social scientists. Typically, one or another of the Somatics teachers demonstrates his or her work followed by a discussion with the eye towards gaining a better understanding of how these works intersect with other humane strategies, and how they might be better conceived and taught. At one point we came up against the strange fact that despite the widespread existence of these works, beginning in earnest in the 1950s and earlier, there is virtually no detailed documentation of what actually occurs in sessions of these works and their long-term results, apart from some fairly thin self-help books laced with anecdotes. At the same time that scholars like Michel Foucault were spawning a vast array of books on the body, these practitioners produced virtually nothing in academic or scientific literature. Yet, by comparison to ethereal academic studies in which the use of the word 'body' often seems no more than an empty formalism, these works contain treasures of discoveries about the nature of persons negotiating the intricacies of a physical world, wisdom about human development, ecological consciousness, parenting, education, spiritual practice.

To address this striking gap between the wisdom embedded in the practice and the absence of expression of that wisdom, we have initiated a writing project among the practitioners of various methods of body practice. The focus is on writing carefully described narratives of working over an extended period of time with students or clients: Who is this person? Who are you? What exactly went on in each session, when, in what context? What have been the results over time? We sponsor workshops with professional authors to teach practitioners how to write such narratives. Each year we hold a symposium during which each school offers its finalists to present their narratives to the group of teachers and practitioners, with outside scholars awarding prizes for what they judge to be the best accounts of actual work. Slowly, slowly practitioners are learning how to stay close to what they experience, and inhibit the too-speedy grasp of ready-to-wear words that are not tailored to the nuances of what they actually do. This kind of writing is crucial for any serious research agenda. Despite the enormous body of literature about qualitative research in the human sciences, it has gained little ground beyond what it held a century ago when Husserl began to conceive of a dual science that united subjectivity and objectivity. Reductionism grows in power beyond what anyone might have imagined even fifty years ago. The Genome Project claims the ability to map the mechanics of all human behavior; the Artificial Intelligence community claims to be on the verge of downloading consciousness into cyborgs replacing what they arrogantly consider to be our poorly designed bodies; and the Visible Human Project (originally boldly entitled 'Adam and Eve') lays out in the most intricate detail every observable nook and cranny of the body, readily available to anyone with a high-speed modem and a large amount of RAM. By contrast, issues about validity and replicability continue to bedevil the myriad attempts to formulate qualitative studies. I have had a number of frustrating experiences in which very thoughtful, creative, and open-minded scientists have told me that these bodyworks are wonderful, but they are in the realm of poetry, essential to the life of the human spirit, and perhaps to health. And yet, they conclude, because of their emphasis on subjective experience and idiosyncratic strategies, the practices have no scientific significance. In response to those challenges, certain points can be made. The body practices significantly advance the possibility of a science of subjectivity. There is an identifiable replicability in each of the schools of work despite their idiosyncrasy and the emphasis on individual variation. Thousands of people experience predictable, tangible, observable results from practicing these works; these experiences are simply not documented. Husserl's method of bracketing, viewed in light of these practices, is a significant key to articulating a more intelligible model of a science of subjectivity which might address issues of bias and replicability. While Husserl's notion is experiential, subsequent scholars attempting to articulate a phenomenological approach to human research typically describe bracketing as a mental exercise. A typical book on the application of phenomenology to psychological science defines bracketing as a set of "attitudes or postures to the phenomenon through which a certain series of presuppositions. . .are held in abeyance. (Shapiro, 1985, p. 84) Another defines it as "making explicit attempts to put aside expectations and biases during all phases of the investigation." (Braud and Anderson, 1998, p. 246) Both of these brief and vague definitions are virtually all that appears in what are extensive books on qualitative research. Neither author addresses the daunting problems posed by attempts to hold our pressupositions "in abeyance," or "put aside expectations and biases," necessary to articulate "objective" descriptions of any experience. Here is where there is a need to give careful methodological guidelines about how other investigators might go about finding similar experiential results. In comparison to the elaborately detailed volume of methodical processes by which results can be checked by others in the empirical sciences, these attempts are at best frail. No wonder that there is little serious interchange between the two kinds of science. To make bracketing a "mental" exercise, without experimental directions for others to repeat one's own bracketing processes, removes it from the empirically replicable world that is essential to scientific inquiry. By contrast, the fundamental moves in the three methods above and in many other body practices are actually methodical, observable, teachable ways of bracketing. In defined steps that can be repeated by others, they slow down the rapid pace of thinking, draw attention into experience, weaken the tenacity of preconceived ideas and emotional self-interest to the point when, after long practice, the ideas and the biases wither in the face of the vitally pulsing things themselves. (Johnson, 2000, p. 479-490)

Eugene T. Gendlin in an unpublished draft of a call to develop an experiential science suggests a method that revisions both qualitative and quantitative methods, using Focusing and other experiential processes such as I have described: The third [in contrast to qualitative and quantitative models], is a MODEL OF PROCESSES. It stems from a philosophical shift: Instead of analyzing what people experience, we define different kinds of experiential processes, different ways of experiencing. In this kind of science the precision comes neither in units nor the whole; but in precise ways to identify whether the process occurs, also the conditions under which it can be brought about, and its results. One of the events in the history of our Somatics Study Group seems relevant to the readers of this volume. In 1991, we conducted a week-long conversation between our group and a group of phenomenologists, including Edward Casey, Elizabeth Behnke, Drew Leder, Kay Toombs, and others. It was a surprising romance between two very different cultures. The phenomenologists were able to respond to the sensory awareness, movement, and hands-on practices with a depth of understanding that we rarely experience in giving classes and workshops. That rich response, as you might expect, evoked from the practitioners the capacity better to express their own understanding of their works. And the phenomenologists, as much as I can speak for them, seemed to appreciate the significance of these works in implementing their own life projects of returning to the things themselves. That meeting offered a blueprint for sustained collaborative work. But the pressures of other professional commitments and the absence of funding made it very difficult. That blueprint is once again revived in our collaboration with Eugene Gendlin's project on First Person Science. It is difficult to develop the kinds of collaboration that are necessary to withstand the poisonous forces that increasingly threaten our planetary life. The academic world as much as the political is rent by nasty debates. One important achievement of the body practices is to develop methods for luring us out of our divisive, self-centered ideas into the realm of sensing and feeling where we exist together, breathing, pulsing, gesturally interacting; a palpable matrix for the building of a more humane social order.

References Adler, Janet (1999). Integrity of Body and Psyche. In Patrizia Pallardo, ed., Authentic Movement: Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Behnke, Elizabeth (1989). Sensory Awareness and Phenomenology: A Convergence of Traditions. In The Newsletter of The Study Project in The Phenomenology of the Body 2:1(Spring), pp. 27-42. Behnke, Elizabeth (1993). On the intertwining of phenomenology and somatics. The Newsletter of the Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body, 6:1 (Spring). Brooks, Charles V. W. (1986) Sensory Awareness: Rediscovery of Experiencing Through the Work of Charlotte Selver. Great Neck, NY: Felix Morrow. Conrad, Emilie (1997). Continuum. In Don Hanlon Johnson, ed. Groundworks: Narratives of Embodiment (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books), p. 64 Foster, Susan Leigh, ed. (1995). Choreographing History. Choreographing History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hanna, Thomas (1986)"What is Somatics?" Somatics (Spring/Summer), pp. 4-8.

Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Husserl, Edmund (1980) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Third Book. Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. Trans. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund (1927) Phnomenologie der Intersubjectivitt. Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928, p. 446. Jan 26, 1927, lecture working notes.) Unpublished translation by Elizabeth Behnke. Kristeva, Julia (1996). Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia Univ Press. Johnson, Don Hanlon (2000). Intricate Tactile Sensitivity: A Key Variable in Western Integrative Bodywork. Saper, Clifford, and Mayer, Emeran, editors. The Biological Basis for Mind Body Interactions. The Progress in Brain Research Series, vol.122: 479-90.) Amsterdam: Elsevier. Martin, Dale B. (1995) The Corinthian Body, (New Haven: Yale). Selver, Charlotte (1987). Interview with John Schick. The Sensory Awareness Foundation Newsletter, 273 Star Route, Muir Beach, CA 94965 (Winter) p. 3. Whitehouse, Mary Starks (1995). The Tao of the Body. In Don Hanlon Johnson, ed., Bone, Breath, and Gesture, (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books), 245. Whitehouse, Mary Starks (1999). An Approach to the Center; and C. G. Jung and Dance Therapy. In Patrizia Pallardo, ed., Authentic Movement: Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.