“I am so happy that this book is coming out. In a strange way, I have awaited it since 1976 when I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Circumstances had me joining a group of other parents to design a public alternative high school that would meet the needs of the many students who were not doing well in the only existing one. One of the procedures that we put in place was to make class attendance optional, a daring move with teenagers! I was asked to teach a class on experiential anatomy. I had to think very carefully about how to do it in a way that would make students actually attend. To my happy surprise they thronged to the class. Contrary to my fears, they were neither bored and distracted, or silly and embarrassed by the many sensing, moving, and touching exercises. They seemed to drink them in like wanderers in a desert coming upon a spring. That experience informed my desire to return to the university world and to create a graduate program that was a more scholarly version of what I designed for those teenagers, and not unlike some of what Susan Bauer details here. I hope that many schools will adopt the plan proposed by this important book. It will change things that have gone so far astray.”
—Don Hanlon Johnson, PhD, author and founder of the somatics program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco