Gestalt Awareness Practice

After Dick (Richard Price) died, I realized that many of the people who had studied with him considered him their teacher and were taking aspects of his work into their own careers, saying that they did gestalt practice. Dick was not into controlling things—he wouldn’t even use the term “training”—so policing the use of this term wouldn’t have been appropriate.

At the same time, certain aspects of Dick’s teaching were so intrinsic to his approach that I wanted a term that would be reserved for situations in which those particular aspects were maintained.

These included:

• Working from an educational community model, not a medical model
• Seeing each person as the expert on their own experience
• Recognizing that the exploring person initiates, and the “leader” reflects
• Trust process, follow process, stay out of the way
• No analysis, advice, or coercion

These elements were what encouraged me to take gestalt practice as my life path. With Dick gone, and others using the banner in various ways, I wanted a specific name that signaled that these guidelines would remain central in the teaching and practice. So, Gestalt Awareness Practice became the name of my work.

Dick and I co-led gestalt practice workshops for more than a decade before he died. He never got around to writing a book—or even a paper. I transcribed what he taught and formulated it into charts and other documents that we used in our groups. After his death, I continued to articulate what he had taught and demonstrated, developing structures that hopefully communicate those same principles.

Whatever I might claim as my own innovations are so deeply rooted in his way of being that it is difficult to say what is mine and what was his. In this archive, the documents I created while we worked together will appear in the gestalt practice room. The Gestalt Awareness Practice archive will contain what I generated with him and beyond.

Christine Price