Four decades from the rebellious 60’s, we have learned from neuroscience, the close companion of Gestalt, that it is impossible to do, think, feel anything without impact on others and that what I do, think and feel is born of the impact of others on me. We share this world, this field, in the same way that fish share the waters, or pairs of children share the teeter totter, or dancers share the music and the beat.
Did you ever wonder why we become so dramatic when we are sharing our feelings? What we do with our emotions has a lot to do with the degree to which we failed to receive support or acknowledgment of our suffering. It is paradoxical that the bigger the drama the less we are able to feel our own suffering and the more our ability to be comforted by others is diminished.
My former colleague JoAnne Greenham used to say that some of us were born with a clown in their head. In this way we recognize one another — one of us puts on a rubber clown nose in the middle of an argument and the other stops arguing to guffaw.
One of the values of our training at the GIT is a sense of humour, and this seems to be a rare commodity – bestowed by genes and circumstance on some and forbidden to others.
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).
I trained at the GIT with Jorge Rosner who was not only a master Gestaltist but a shaman of sorts, who often quoted Carlos Castenada, known to everyone it seems in the 70’s but barely remembered these days except to an esoteric few. Carlos wrote about the shaman Don Juan who taught a shamanic view of reality – that reality as such does not exist but is rather “assembled” by us humans. The average human’s reality is what he called “consensual reality” which is the world as we know it complete with our thinking, living, politics, pastimes and eating patterns. He wrote that humans can grow in our lifetime by shifting the way we assemble reality. He called that the “shift of our Assemblage Point.”