Don Hanlon Johnson

I have spent nearly half a century studying how transformative body practices can enhance personal and social change, and how they can impair it. I came to these practices out of a study of philosophy, which luminously articulates the disastrous social and personal results of the mind/body split enbedded in mainstream thinking and institution-building.

I have tried to find methods for healing these splits in the academic world of writing, pedagogy, and research; in the personal realm of self-cultivation; and in the larger world of social change. At the deepest level, I look to these practices as a source of a spirituality grounded in the flesh of human yearning. My work is centered as a professor in the Somatics Graduate Program, which I founded in 1983, located at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.