The Grandmothers can only be with us for a short time. Grandmother
Charlotte Selver was the teacher of Grandmother Elaine Summers who was my
teacher for many years. We are grateful for the lessons that she taught
our teachers. It is our responsibility not to betray the lessons of life
that she taught.
Ray Evans Harrell
September 6, 2003
Charlotte Selver, 102, a Guide to Sensory Awareness, Dies
By STUART LAVIETES
Charlotte Selver, a teacher of sensory awareness who helped inspire the
school of psychology that came to be known as the human potential
movement, died on Aug. 22 at her home in Muir Beach, Calif., near San
Francisco. She was 102.
In classes and individual sessions held as recently as this March, Ms.
Selver taught students exercises focusing on breathing, movement and
touch. She believed that these exercises, which she described as a kind of
meditation in action, helped students shed social conditioning and recover
an innate awareness.
Ms. Selver offered some of her first sensory-awareness classes in 1950 at
the New School for Social Research in New York City. Later in the decade,
she held seminars in California with Alan Watts, the theologian and author
of popular books about Zen Buddhism.
In 1963, she taught one of the first seminars at the Esalen Institute, the
retreat in Big Sur, Calif. Known for its uninhibited atmosphere, Esalen
was the birthplace of the human potential movement, which combined
experimental techniques, like group encounters and primal therapy, with
spiritual seeking.
Two of the movement's leading thinkers, the psychoanalysts Erich Fromm and
Fritz Perls, received sensory awareness training from Ms. Selver.
In 1971, Ms. Selver established the Sensory Awareness Foundation in Muir
Beach. Traveling frequently, she conducted workshops throughout the United
States, Mexico and Europe with her second husband, Charles Brooks, who
died in 1991.
Charlotte Selver was born Charlotte Wittgenstein on April 4, 1901, in
Ruhrort, Germany. She taught physical education at Leipzig University
until being fired in the Nazis' purge of Jewish faculty members. In 1938,
she emigrated to New York City with her former husband, Heinrich Selver,
whom she had divorced seven years earlier. She is survived by her third
husband, Peter Gracey, whom she married in 1999.
--"Ray Evans Harrell" <mcore@nyc.rr.com>
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