“What Is It You Want to Learn?”: Somatic Awareness in the Tradition of Elsa Gindler

Abstract: This essay discusses somatic awareness practices created by Elsa Gindler and taught by her students Charlotte Selver, Carola Speads, Susan Gregory, and Stefan Laeng. Gindler’s somatics originated in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and her emigré students continued the work into the context of the postwar US Human Potential Movement and into our own time. Somatic awareness echoes between fascist biopolitics, phenomenology, and liberatory turns to the body in critical and political theory, yet the freedom of body-awareness is uncontainable by any specific politics or context. Embodied knowing is not located but empty, beyond our thinking, concepts, and positions.