1. What Gestalt Therapy Attends To
In Gestalt therapy, we value noticing what is happening, and how, in our relationship with others or with the environment right now, and deepening our awareness of that experience.
Every day, we live in relationship with the people and the environment around us. Within that, various sensations arise in the body, feelings stir, and thoughts and actions are born.
Hearing someone’s words, the body tenses. We want to argue back. But, worried about how the other person will react, we swallow our words. Or we try to put a little distance between ourselves and the situation.
In Gestalt therapy, we attend not only to the content of what we are feeling but to the process itself: how that experience arises and changes. This is what we call “awareness.”
Experience arises where we meet others and influence one another. We do not observe this coolly from the outside. While living the experience directly, we come to know from within what is happening here and now. Automatic reactions and ways of relating that we had been overlooking become clear, and new possibilities for choice open up.
2. Basic Principles of Gestalt Therapy
As a guide to understanding this practice, here are a few basic perspectives.
- Awareness
A direct sense of what is happening now: bodily sensations, feelings, thoughts, wants, and the surrounding situation. It does not mean understanding something intellectually, in the head, but directly living the present experience. - Contact
Our concrete engagement with others and the environment. Hearing another’s words, responding, drawing near, keeping our distance: in these living exchanges, our experience arises and changes. - Contact Boundary
You want to speak to someone but hesitate. You see the other person’s reaction and your body tenses. Moments like these happen where self and other (the environment) meet, and Gestalt therapy calls this meeting place the contact boundary. It is less a line that separates us than a living place of exchange, something like a cell membrane through which energy passes back and forth. In Gestalt therapy, we turn our attention to what is happening there, between us, right now. - Figure / Ground
We experience many things at once. Among them, what matters most to us at the moment rises to the forefront of awareness; this is called the “figure,” and what recedes into the background, out of view, is called the “ground.” For example, the moment someone’s words startle us, the surrounding sounds and scenery recede into the background (ground), and those words come into focus (figure). What becomes figure and what becomes ground changes from moment to moment with the situation and with our relationships. - Experiment
Trying something out, tentatively, in order to make our experience clearer or to try a new way of relating. The aim is not to do it well, but to see what happens in us and in our relationships when we try it.
3. The Process Group as a Setting
In Gestalt therapy workshops held in Japan, the “hot seat” format, in which one participant works one-on-one with the facilitator, is widely known. It is an approach that goes deeply into an issue or concern that one participant brings and helps that person become more aware of their own process.
In the “process group” we work with here, by contrast, our primary focus is on the relationships among participants and what is happening in the group as a whole in that moment. As we engage with another person, we turn our attention to what unfolds between us, at the contact boundary.
Neither is better than the other; they differ in how they make use of the group as an environment. In a process group, too, we may explore in depth an issue or concern that one participant brings when needed. At other times, we experiment with different ways of relating to one another.
4. What Actually Happens in a Process Group
A process group has no predetermined theme and no rule that people take turns giving their views. It begins when someone quietly speaks about something on their mind right now, or something happening inside them.
What they say may move someone else, and an exchange may begin between the two of them, or the whole group may be enveloped in a shared stillness.
For example, suppose that while A is talking about relationships at work, B, who has been listening, says, “Listening to you, I felt a little angry.” Hearing this, A falls silent for a while. What is happening inside A at that moment? How is B experiencing A’s silence? And what is resonating in the bodies of the other participants listening around them?
What matters is not hurling our feelings at each other. What is happening in me as I engage with the other person, and how is it showing up in our relationship? We look carefully at that process.
At times the whole group may fall silent, or differences of opinion may come into relief. All of these are important experiences of what is happening in that place. The facilitator attends to individual experiences and to the movement of the group as a whole, and as needed offers questions or suggests experiments in dialogue.
5. How Should I Take Part?
There is no need at all to have a special experience or to speak well. While turning your attention to yourself, simply be there and try engaging with others. In doing so, we value the following:
- Noticing your own experience: As you speak and as you listen, turn your awareness to what is happening in your body and mind.
- Engaging directly with other participants: Try speaking not only to the facilitator but to the other participants on screen or in the room.
- Speaking from your own experience: Rather than analyzing or evaluating the other person, try conveying your own experience: “I felt this,” “This is how it looked to me.”
- Valuing differences and discomfort: Opinions and feelings do not need to match. Silence, confusion, and tension are treated just as they are, as part of what is happening in the group.
- Choosing for yourself: Speaking, not speaking, trying something: all of this is yours to decide.
“I don’t know,” “I don’t feel anything,” “I just want to listen for now”: these states, too, are important experiences. You are free to decline an experiment that is suggested, or to stop partway. And to keep the setting safe, we share two agreements: not taking other participants’ personal stories outside the group, and resting rather than pushing yourself if you feel strong distress.
6. Bringing Together “Zazen” and the “Group” in Zen Gestalt
In Zen Gestalt, we move back and forth between Zazen and the process group as one continuous practice.
In Zazen, in stillness, we turn our attention to the breath, bodily sensations, and movements of the mind, and observe what is happening within us.
In the process group, we observe the more dynamic experiences that arise in relationship with others, and how they change.
A body that was quiet while sitting alone suddenly begins to tense at a single word from someone. A subtle stirring that arose in relationship with others first takes shape in words or form when we sit quietly in the next period of Zazen.
What matters is neither rigidly holding on to the stillness of Zazen within the group, nor forcibly erasing through Zazen the conflicts that arose in the group. It is simply to notice the phenomena arising in both settings, and to value the process of that experience just as it is.
What Zen Gestalt aims for is to notice what is happening in you, not to be carried along by your usual automatic reactions, and to become able to choose for yourself how to act. Through this movement back and forth between Zazen and the group, we let this practice of awareness quietly take root in everyday life.
References
For those who would like to learn more about the theory of Gestalt therapy and the practice of process groups. There is no need to read them beforehand.
- Yontef, G., & Jacobs, L. (2011). Gestalt Therapy. In Current Psychotherapies.
- Feder, B., & Frew, J. (Eds.). (2008). Beyond the Hot Seat Revisited: Gestalt Approaches to Group.
- Cole, P. H., & Reese, D. (2018). New Directions in Gestalt Group Therapy: Relational Ground, Authentic Self.
- Bloom, D. (2013). A Quest for Gestalt Therapy Group Process: Group Process as Self Process.