What is wrong with this picture? Googling "Eckhart Tolle" provided 5,790,000 results; googling "Janet Adler" 15,500.
Motivated by a desire to get rid of books and other things I no longer need, I look once again at Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening Your Life's Purpose. Tolle is greatly lauded by Oprah Winfrey: "Eckhart's simple spiritual teachings in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose were the focus of the groundbreaking webcasts he did with Oprah back in 2008." Groundbreaking indeed! For her, maybe. Not for me.
I don't like to write in my books. I grew up with a reverence that I still can't shake. However, when I was reading A New Earth, I couldn't help myself. I was irate that Tolle was being held in such high esteem when his understanding was so shallow from my perspective. Some examples: "[I-thought] becomes identified with a gender, possessions, the sense-perceived body, a nationality, race . . ." My note in the margin: "Not the correct order of self-perception. I is first sense-perceived body, before it has a name", etc.
Tolle speaks of identification with the body: "Firstly, the body is male or female". Seems to me that perception is incorrect. While we may be male or female from the beginning, I believe that our first sense of ourselves is oral. Firstly, we are beings who have mouths. Babies explore what something is by putting things in their mouths. Babies exploration of bodies seems to happen first in looking at and moving their fingers and toes. I notice from about 3 months old that if I move the part of the body babies (who do not know me) are moving, they are fascinated. It's quite some time (2 to 3 years) before our sense of ourselves is grounded in our genitals. So firstly, I would say we are animals.
Tolle described himself at 25 y.o. as "an intellectual in the making, . . . convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of human existence could be found . . . by thinking." Watching him on Oprah told me that he may have changed his thinking, but he had not yet integrated his body into his thinking. He spoke with chest concave, gesturing from his elbows out. No posture gestures mergers evident in his live presentation as he spoke about being in the present moment.
Perhaps what disturbed me most in reading is Tolle was something that he may have been right on about. "No ego can last for long without the need for more." I think it enraged me that it was he, clearly unable to be in the present moment in his body, was the one invited to be a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show to talk about being in the present moment. She who can and has done so much to change the world can not see the value of being in and speaking from the body. She is blinded by the words.
By contrast, Janet Adler is the person from whom I have learned the most about being in the present moment. I had the opportunity to be in an Authentic Movement group which met annually with Adler in western Massachusetts for about 5 days in the autumn every year for about 4 or 5 years. These descriptions of Adler's book Offering from the Conscious Body speak my understanding of the moments of grace which come from being in the present moment in an embodied way within a community of witnesses:
"The exploration of the direct experience of healing and of the divine through the witnessing of movement becoming conscious."
"Offering from the Conscious Body reveals both the theory and practice of a unique body-based process that is cathartic, creative, healing, and mystical--as presented by Janet Adler, the presiding voice in the field. This Western awareness practice encourages the individual to experience the evolving relationship with oneself, another, the collective, and the divine through the natural impulses of conscious movement, compassionate witnessing, and clear articulation of experience."
So why is Tolle and not Adler made more famous by Winfrey? I think the answer comes from Tolle's understanding of the ego - his ego, not Adler's, needs more. Janet Adler, this so very wise woman, began her training by telling us not to put her on a pedestal. She has done all she can to remain on and in harmony with the earth. She does not need to be recognized. She needs to be in the deepest relationship she can be with what needs to come through her embodied experience of the world.
Sure would be wonderful if Ellen DeGeneris would invite a dance movement therapist to be on her show. I think she would get us. It wouldn't have to be Janet Adler.
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