Gestalt Awareness Practice is a form - nonanalytic, noncoercive, nonjudgmental - derived from the work of Fritz Perls and influenced by Buddhist practice. The work integrates ways of personal clearing and development that are both ancient and modern. To the extent that awareness is made primary, Gestalt Awareness Practice has a strong relationship to some forms of meditation. Emotional and energetic release and rebalancing are also allowed and encouraged.
The emphasis is intrapersonal rather than interpersonal. Participants are not patients but persons actively consenting to explore in awareness. The leader functions to reflect, clarify, and respect whatever emerges in this process. The aim is unfoldment, wholeness, and growth, rather than adjustment, cure, or accomplishment.
Richard created this description of Gestalt Practice in the early 1970s when Fritz Perls encouraged him to begin offering gestalt workshops. Over the next 15 years, he taught and practiced this approach, primarily at Esalen Institute, where he was a co-founder and director. He and his wife, Christine Price, developed the work together until he died in 1985.
Here are further notes about that gestalt practice:
Nonanalytic, noncoercive, nonjudgmental
The process focuses on contacting experience rather than explaining it, and it is an open-ended exploration. Nowhere to go, nothing to do - other than be with whatever is, moment to moment.
Fritz Perls, Buddhist Practice, Pema Chodron, Wilhelm Reich, and Richard Price
Our study and exploration of awareness and presence will refer to these teachers and teachings and how they inform what Dick developed.
Personal clearing and development
We can attend to both clearing and cultivating. Clearing involves becoming aware of and eventually letting go of what no longer serves us as an evolving organism. Cultivating means resources can be discovered and nurtured with awareness.
Ancient and modern
If it’s an approach that enhances awareness and presence in any realm, we may explore it.
Awareness made primary (relative to action)
Increasing the quality of awareness and the ability to be present is the primary goal of Gestalt Awareness Practice. We can individually check out Fritz Perls’ assertion that awareness itself is healing and discover the nature of action that arises when we are informed by a deeper awareness.
Strong relationship to some forms of meditation
Gestalt Awareness Practice itself is a form of meditation that allows for active expression. Like many other meditative approaches, awareness of breathing is central, and the practice is most rewarding when integrated into daily life. This is ultimately a spiritual practice.
Similar to some Reichian work
As in Reichian work, experimenting with breathing, sounding, and moving as forms of vital expression is allowed and encouraged. Physical and energetic awareness is emphasized, the wisdom of the body is recognized, impulse is noticed and sometimes followed, and patterns of holding as well as the possibilities of release are explored.
Emphasis is intrapersonal rather than interpersonal
Attending to the direct experience of ourselves and our environment is given precedence over interpersonal exploration, although that may be included. When supporting or witnessing others, self-awareness is encouraged, while offering advice, analysis, interpretation or judgment of another’s experience is strongly discouraged.
Participants are not patients but persons actively consenting to explore in awareness
This is not based on a therapeutic or medical model: no diagnosis, no cure. This is art, sport, and human unfoldment. You are the expert in your experience and responsible for your choices during the process.
The teacher functions to reflect, clarify, and respect whatever emerges in this process
The teacher/reflector offers their presence, their encouragement, and their curiosity as part of the exploration. The teacher/reflector witnesses, mirrors, supports, sometimes coaches, and is an active student of this practice, also.
The aim is unfoldment, wholeness, and growth, rather than adjustment, cure, or accomplishment
"If it's broke, don't fix it." Rather than trying to change, the aim is to meet “what is” with a deep listening and aloha spirit. We practice meeting what we notice with patience, kindness, curiosity, and humor, allowing change to emerge out of that process. This in itself is a radical change for most of us. Rather than trying to make the ocean of experience flat and even, this is a practice of learning to surf the ups and downs of our inner and outer life, - and maybe, in time, enjoy the ride.
Recommended reading:
Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape
Fritz Perls: The Gestalt Approach and Eye-Witness to Therapy
(This book can be read free online)