For some months now, I’ve been thinking about a woman named Elsa Gindler. She’s not a household name but she is an important person in the lineage of somatic education.
Somatic education offers self awareness practices of exploratory movement and self-observation that offers clarity, responsiveness, and authenticity to our lives.
Somatic education has been around since we’ve had bodies. Knowing ourselves through our sensory experience has always been available to us. It is most obvious through dance forms, movement forms like yoga or tai chi, and through ritual where our body becomes an expressive vessel of our inner experience. Our body is always signaling our inner experience. We are quite visible to one another whether we name that or not.
Our somatic experience has not always been valued as a way of knowing ourselves, though. While there is a renaissance in reclaiming our experience as embodied beings, there is no one technique or method that is better than another; it’s all a matter of what you resonate with which is a somatic learning in and of itself.
Frau Gindler’s studio in1930’s Berlin became a place where people investigated how they were actually sensing and organizing themselves rather than living by imposed ideals. This was a radical idea given the era!
As students learned to track and become curious about their own habitual patterns, they discovered they were less driven by external demand and moved more by possibilities within themselves.
She called her work “Human Work” and she taught while under surveillance in a time of terror. Toward the end of World War II, her apartment was bombed and her writings were destroyed but her teachings flowed forward as a living lineage.
Two of her students who carried these seeds of quiet resistance beyond her Berlin studio were Charlotte Selver whose work is known as “Sensory Awareness” and Moshe Feldenkrais, whose methodology bears his name. Just those two people alone have influenced countless peoples’ lives for the better.
Each day I draw strength from Frau Gindler’s quiet defiance as authoritarianism once again casts its long shadow across the world. Authoritarianism by definition is a systemic erosion through endless shocks and crisis that attempts to rob us of our inner authority. There are brighter days ahead and for us to realize them, it will take clarity and effort.
I encourage you to seek and deepen into your inner freedom, a freedom not dependent upon outer permission or circumstances for the sake of yourself and our world. Such intention is part of what Maria Popova calls “sincere, active, constructive hope”.
