Stanley Keleman: In Memoriam

​Stanley Keleman: In Memoriam
November 1931 - August 2018

Stanley Keleman  died  peacefully in his sleep on Aug.11th, 2018, just two months after completing his latest book: “Forming your Aging”.

David Boadella encloses a personal tribute to Stanley, as a poem to celebrate a close friendship with him over sixty years:

Soul Brother

We were bonded together
through our work, on teaching our trainees
to listen to their bodies and create more ease
so as not to get flooded by trauma.

We swam in the same somatic sea together
and kept truly meeting each other
for sixty years of living our dying,
in a friendship that felt like flying
on parallel tracks, each of us founding
in our own way, our understanding of grounding.

Poems crossed the oceans between us,
and built a presence
for the essence
of contact, which could appear
in the letters which flowed
between us as swimmers
born in the same year.

So far away yet so near
the pain eventually came
out of the blue,
when death claimed you
my soul brother.
No other
man can replace you as a life companion
in creation:
your aging has ended.
Your soma could no longer be mended.

I carry you with me in my heart
as a pulse of remembered life, beyond the dark.
I embody you still in my dreams, at night
as you keep me company on my journey towards light.

 - By David Boadella
(written August 19, 2018)
​
Stanley Keleman was an American writer and therapist, who created the body psychotherapy approach known as Formative Psychology. He was one of the leaders of the body psychotherapy movement nationally and internationally.