Intimacy and Emptiness: The Evolution of the Inner Witness in the Discipline of Authentic Movement

with Janet Adler

Intimacy and Emptiness

The Evolution of the Inner Witness in the Discipline of Authentic Movement          

Excerpts from the Letter of Invitation to Janet Adler’s Crew House Gathering:   

June 15, 2019, Retreat Cove, Galiano Island, BC, Canada  

Dear Each One of You:

.....Janet has asked me, as her assistant, to write to you now because she so values her work with you in the past and very much wishes to meet you one more time in studio practice. Thus, this letter of personal invitation to join her in the Crew House overlooking the pond, on the Smith College Campus, Sunday, September 22nd, from 9 until noon. At the same time as she is stepping back from her full teaching practice, she will be returning to the East Coast to the Crew House, to the people (she can find) - colleagues and former students - who were each one such an important part of Janet’s experience of the development of the discipline. This synchronicity feels for her to be a “blessing”, a closing of a circle for which she is very grateful. 

…….Time together will include some studio practice and some time for Janet to name the historical development of the Discipline of Authentic Moment in relationship to her current experience of this way of work. She is eager to discuss with you and your colleagues why individual consciousness is not enough at this time that calls so urgently for embodied and conscious ways of participating in the collective body. And there will be time for discussion sourced in participants’ questions.

……..For those interested in this way of work but for whom there will not be space in Janet’s workshop, Bonnie Morrissey and Paula Sager, faculty members of Circles of Four, have offered a workshop on Monday morning in which they will be introducing the Discipline of Authentic Movement. 

Sincerely,

Lindsay Williams

Video

Biography

JANET ADLER has been teaching the Discipline of Authentic Movement in solo and group retreats since 1969. She founded and directed the Mary Starks Whitehouse Institute (1981), the first school devoted to the study and practice of Authentic Movement and Circles of Four (2013), an international post graduate program which guides people who wish to teach the Discipline of Authentic Movement. She has created two award winning films: ”Looking for Me” (1968) which is about her work with autistic children and “Still Looking” (1988) which is about the evolution of her work in the discipline.  
 
Inner Traditions International published her books, Arching Backward: The Mystical Initiation of a Contemporary Woman (1995) and Offering from the Conscious Body: The Discipline of Authentic Movement ( 2002). Many of her essays appear  in two volumes of work concerned with Authentic Movement, edited by Patrizia Pallaro (Jessica Kingsley Press 1999 and 2007) and in Ins Nichtwissen Eintreten: Discipline of Authentic Movement, edited by Anke Teigeler (Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2018). Janet received a doctorate in Mystical Studies in1992. She has been an interfaith hospice chaplain since 1999. ​

Slideshow

photographs by Mandy Kimm and Susan Bauer