What does it mean to you to be depressed? And how would you compare that to the experience of being joyful? For most of us the experience of being down is one to be avoided and the experience of being up is one to hold onto for as long as we can, often keeping ourselves “up” long beyond the passage of the joy inducing stimulus. To be down is to be down on ourselves, and it’s best endured alone, away from the judgment of others. We seek diagnosis and definition for the state of depressing, but we don’t seek the same for joy – it just is.

When I was a child (a million years ago) there was a television commercial for aspirin. It showed a mother taking a stress break from her day by taking an aspirin and lying down on a cot in blissful serenity. Even then I knew that what she really needed was a break and the aspirin was the excuse to take one. Now I and everyone I know live in a world where stress is the norm. I can’t remember the last time I took a simple lie down in the middle of the day (as compared to a crash after overwhelm).

Four ways to balance yourselves   Emotional: Speak what is absolutely true from your heart to someone in the moment   We have two voices we can use when we want to answer the question how are we doing? One is what Fritz Perls called the phoney voice, that is careful to not hurt or […]

I was recently confronted by a Gestalt colleague with this statement: Aren’t there many definitions of respect? The question stunned me. I realized I have a body sense of what is feels like to be respected and a body understanding of what another person means when they let me know they do not feel respected by me. These are times that I listen attentively to their truth of the experience and make what amends are possible.

One of our Gestalt elders directed me to a TED talk on the theme of vulnerability which is not a word we use in Gestalt, but which underlies the foundation of what we do. We don’t use the word in class because in the popular understanding it means to be wounded. What we teach our students is to be “porous”, meaning to let the other’s responses to us get beneath our skin, even if it hurts, without defensiveness, which is our protection from hurt.