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.”

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.

If you have ever asked a friend: what do you think of me? Then you know the tension that can hang in the air while you wait for a reply. We long for some appreciation or awareness of how good a friend we are, how “just” a human being, how interesting is our character, and at the same time we quiver with apprehension that our deepest fears and doubts about ourselves are about to be exposed. Well this blog is not about that — in the blunt words of one of my friends: “Enough about you!”

Hard as it is to ask the question above, I am asking you to imagine asking instead: How am I doing with you? This question opens the door to our interactions — to the other person.