Charlotte Selver

A Fully Permitted Exhalation and an Open House For Your Breathing

By: Charlotte Selver

…Being as busy as we are, with one activity heaped on top of another, our heads have lost their elasticity and freedom. Often this lack of freedom is created through the holding of too much inhalation inside of us, which doesn’t permit the cleaning out, the sweeping out, the renewing that is needed. Only fully permitted exhalation can do this. It would be helpful to give yourself plenty of time to find out whether you allow exahling as needed; that means whatever time exhaling wants to take when you do not do it, but allow it until you have, so to speak, a feeling of satisfaction, of completion.

It is also possible that, having permitted a satisfactory exhalation, nothing further seems to occur immediately in breathing. Don’t be upset by this. At one point breathing will start again. There is no need to worry if inhalation does not come immediately after the exhalation; and please listen to me as I say once more, if it comes, not if you inhale. Who can feel the difference? You know, some people take a breath. Wait until it comes by itself! And allow it to distribute in you as it wants to. In other words, be an open house for your breathing, and don’t manipulate it.

All this is a question of sensitivity, and when you orient yourself, you become a fine disoverer. It is much better when you find out about things for yourself, when you trust your own sensations and learn from them and do not have to be told everything. That is truly “exploring.” And you will be delighted at how clear a language the organism speaks.

Allowing Breathing

By: Charlotte Selver

…breathing comes by itself, spontaneously—if we allow it. Therefore, it is the allowing—the possibility of becoming more permissive—that we want to explore.

When we become more sensitive for what being permissive means, then the whole day is full of opportunities for exercising this possibility of becoming more permissive—or, if I might say it differently, more loving in the way we contact whatever we may contact. As soon as we become more open for something we do, we find that the first thing in which we can recognize this increased openness is our breathing.

…Exploring breathing really needs to be a practice, but a practice which is absolutely new each time—not a repetition of old ways, but a finding out what is going on in the condition and activity in which you happen to be at a particular moment. No moment can be compared with another; in wach there is something new to discover.

Breathing Is Always as the Person Is

By: Charlotte Selver

…Breathing is always as the person is. It is the clearest index of what is happening in the person—unless it is made up. Many people think they should breathe “properly.” Forget it! It is no use, because there is no “proper” breathing. Your breathing indicates very clearly what state you are in. When you are more reactive, your breathing is more reactive; when you are more habitual, your breathing is more habitual; if you are pushy, your breathing gets pushy too, or stops.

Breathing Connects Us With the World

By: Charlotte Selver

We by nature are not isolated from the world around us…and the process of breathing is connected with everything which happens in us and around us, just as plants are connected to everything around them.

All the mysterious interwovenness which is happening in the living organism is coming to expression in every moment in which we are living in our environment.

We are usually not awake enough for it, but sometimes you may have noticed that when something or somebody really interests you, you’re speeded up, even when you were tired a moment ago. Your breathing changes; you are functioning quite differently than before.

From Reclaiming Vitality and Presence: Sensory Awareness as a Practice for Life. Charlotte Selver (1901-2003) was a teacher of the Gindler/Jacoby method of awareness and exercise, a somatic bodywork method she further developed and taught after her arrival in the United States from Germany in 1938 as Sensory Awareness. Her work was highly influential to Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Fritz Perls (one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy). Selver frequently taught at the San Francisco Zen Center and its affiliated centers, and Suzuki Roshi was well acquainted with her. Her Sensory Awareness method has a close affinity with Soto Zen.

We Don't Need to Watch

By: Charlotte Selver

Is there watching and wishing…as opposed to simply being present and surprised by what sensations simply come and are there?  The art is not to watch it or to try to feel it but just to be there in it. 

Most of us are still under the influence of an education in which we were constantly watched, and watching, and judging was constantly asked from us.  It was asked by our parents, and it was asked by our teachers, but they didn’t understand what the organism actually is.  We have very much more endowment for being aware, for being alert, than most people realize.  I must admit that it is not easy to know the difference between letting something be conscious and watching it.  And it doesn’t come by trying to get it.  It will only come if we are hungry for it.  We don’t need to watch; we simply could be awake.  The moment we watch ourselves, we split ourselves in two.

Giving Up On Doing Things the "Right Way"

By: Charles Brooks

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 then, our attention has been divided between what we are doing and whether we are doing it right.  ….. 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 practice, feeling how we do what we do, gradually learning to give up the cherished notions of the right way 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.

A Relationship of Respect and Wonder

By: Charlotte Selver

There’s a certain relationship which we have to have with our inner functioning. That of respect and that of wonder. When we are quiet enough and positive enough that we can follow these fine indications inside which lead us to more functioning, we will find out what precious qualities we have which we don’t usually use.

Nonthinking: Charlotte Selver

By: Charlotte Selver

...Many people have learned to say to themselves, ‘Stop thinking,’ and then they control their thoughts and try to stop their thinking. Like somebody who is being choked, thoughts are being choked off. [But] we are sometimes very desirous to come to quiet....this state of quiet is something wonderful. Quiet is not dullness. .... Quiet is also not forbidding thoughts. Quiet is a different state into which we gradually ... come. You cannot stop thinking from one moment to the other without violating your thinking, but you can – when you feel you would like to rest — gradually allow the giving up of thoughts...let me call it allowing peace inside."\

... it’s not a command with the expectation that right away something will happen. It may be a long way which we have to go until we can gradually allow – altogether – more quiet..."

Note: Charlotte Selver was a transformational teacher of a practice which she called Sensory Awareness. She frequently taught Zen students at the San Francisco Zen Center. Sensory Awareness has a wonderful affinity with Zen practice, and there are a number of quotes by Selver on this Readings page of our website. The quote above is from her book Waking Up. There are several links on the Resources page of our website to Sensory Awareness practice.

Finding Out For Yourself

By Charlotte Selver

I don’t want to take away from you your discoveries.  I don’t want to give you pre-chewed knowledge.  I think you have enough of that.  You have to get going yourself.  One thing you probably have noticed—not only in what we say but in what we do in class: that the emphasis is on finding out for yourself.  Not saying, “This is right,” and “This is wrong,” you know.  Not giving instruction as to how to accomplish something, but giving the person an occasion to find out for himself.  This is very basic in our work!  Giving the honor to the person to explore, and not to teach him how things “ought” to be.

Reclaiming the Baby's Awareness

By Charlotte Selver, from Reclaiming Vitality and Presence

I wish you would once in a while look into the eyes of a healthy baby, and would see with what earnestness, interest, great power of concentration—a basic saying yes—such a child has. The child doesn’t yet want anything special; it is equally interested in everything that comes. When the child takes something and looks at it from all sides, or when somebody goes through the room and the child’s while attention follows…that is how we started. And it is also what we can come to—when this natural inner drive for full relating is unearthed and set free.

We wouldn’t be all the time so full of expectations and wishes, but we would be seeing more clearly that any world in which we live can be as astonishing as the world of the baby. And then all things are precious.

Something In Us Can Teach Us

From Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence:

In Zen they say, “Buddha is in everybody.” That's not a shallow statement. It means something. Buddha is in everybody. Buddha is in you and in you and in you and in you. Buddha is in all of us. That means something in us knows. Something in us can teach us. Something in us can inform us how it wants to be. So that we can feel whether we are coming in touch with another person in such a way that we can be open for the other person, or whether we are not open for the other. We can feel whether we speak the truth or whether we go a little off the truth. We can feel whether we're putting pressure on something or whether we only give our weight to it. We can feel whether we allow our breathing to function as it wants to function or whether we manipulate it. We can feel whether we're dealing with a person and letting the person have his own way of being or whether we manipulate him. And so on and so on. In other words we have the ability within ourselves--if we become more awake--to feel more clearly what our own nature has to tell us. That's the thing that interests me.

We Have Nothing to Teach You

From Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence:

We have nothing to teach you. We only help you to discover what is already there, inside you. Our method is that there is no method. It is a very sensitive inquiry, a very sensitive discovery which everybody makes for himself through his own experimentation into what we actually become aware of when we begin to use our biological equipment more sensitively, more sensibly. It's not an empty phrase to say, for instance, when something doesn't fit fully into reality that it is nonsense. And this sensing -- this possibility of becoming more alerted in our senses, and using them more fully and more altogether -- this is the content of our work.