THE FIELD OF SPIRITUALITY IN GESTALT THERAPY

“How can you go forward?

There is no place to go;
How will you leap?
You have no foot!
No one knows how far it is…

From nothingness to God.

As long as you cling to yourself
You will wander, right or left
Day and night, for a thousand years;
And when after all that effort,

You finally open your eyes
You will see your Self, through inherent defects
Wandering around itself like
The ox in the mill;

But if, once freed from yourself,
You finally get down to work
This door will open to you within two minutes.”

Hakin Sanai (11 cent)

This ‘reflection’ now, seems to me, very fitting for the December and January months because of the coming Christmas celebrations and New Year events. This celebration has a history of more than 2000 years.

Whatever we may think about Christmas, it is an important event of the birth of a Soul. The soul comes into incarnation with a purpose, with certain imprint (like a seed is implanted with a future tree). We can call it the destiny of the Soul. Then, the Soul aspires to enter the right environment to live out its destiny (purpose) that brought it to this world.

Fritz Perls, in his final years at Esalen CA, wanted to work primarily on dreams. He felt that dreams are the path to healthy integration of the Body-Mind-Soul. He knew that his own purpose in life was to develop a theory of healing that was Existential and integrating all the aspects of ‘holes’ in the personality in order to gain a fully mature individual.

Fritz died before his time (the soul went) and left a legacy that included aspects of Spirituality in the therapeutic work. However, his work in this area of therapy did not reach a full bloom.

The meaning of ‘Spirituality’ has many definitions; all depending on what orientation you are coming from or what introjects you have swallowed whole as you were growing up. However, the most simplistic definition of Spirituality would be the possibility of every human being to be able to find (access) an authentic contact with his or her full Being, commonly called GOD.

The Tree of Life

C.G. Jung spent all his life working on this phenomenon about how to integrate Mind and Spirit. He stated: “the intellect does indeed harm the soul when it dares to possess itself of the heritage of the Spirit. It is in no way fitted to do this, for Spirit is something higher than the intellect since it embraces the later and includes the feelings as well. It is the guiding principle of life that strives towards superhuman capacities” (Jung 1991, P. 338) He often advised his clients about the loss of Spirit during alcoholism (spirit) and the harmful consequences as a result.

In my own experiences as a therapist and educator, I found that the dynamic interrelation between BODY, MIND and SPIRIT are essential to enable people recover from any kind of life encounters and difficulties. I disagree with those who comment that Fritz Perls avoided spirituality in his development of Gestalt therapy. They say that he spoke about God as a great projection of Man’s omnipotent wishes. On the other side of the story is that Perls was ‘programmed’ against spirituality due to his violent and ultra conservative Jewish-German father and punishing mother. That led to his quick rebelliousness in his youth and a disdain of all authority. He observed that the various religious institutions focus mainly on preventing people from growing up and be authentic and free. Religions created beliefs based on faith that there is a “Great Father” in the sky who will reward the good (those who obey) and punish those who sinfully disobey.  

Working with dreams, Perls discovered that natural imagery, a sense of beauty, the flow of images without rationality that promoted wholeness and integration of the person leading towards the whole individual (individuation) and this, in his view, was a spiritual aspect of all human beings. Therefore it is a mistake to define Fritz as a denier because at the end of his life he declared himself as an Existentialist. He travelled around the world (looking for a place to settle) and met many great masters. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Allan Watts, Will Shutz and spent almost a year at a Zen meditation centre in Japan. He also was very aware of the work of Martin Buber. Perls developed his famous ‘hot seat’ method of working with clients based on Buber’s theory of I-Thou vs I-It relationship.

Born in Vienna, Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. In 1902, he became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, the central organ of the Zionist movement, although he later withdrew from organizational work in Zionism. In 1923, Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou), and in 1925, he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language.

In 1930, Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main.

Perls’ wife Lore (Laura in English), was a student of Buber and visited him frequently and Fritz also had meetings with Buber when he was in Frankfurt.

Fritz hinted at the notion of Spirituality early in his work as a psychoanalyst, for example, he stated:

“By far the most important extension of man’s potential has been the discovery of Rationalism, including logic and maths. Also the use of and misuse of fantasy; inventions put to constructive (medicine) and destructive means (wars). Art means to enrich and also to debase man’s relationship with beauty. Religious and moral codes to free and restrict man’s interaction appear to be a mixture of fantasy and rationality. The absoluteness of good and bad has to be categorically denied.”(Garbage Pail 1970.) We may guess that here Fritz is evolving the concept of the ‘Fertile Void’ where the idea of spirit is contained and the idea of God is an intellectual abstraction. Spiritually God is mentioned often in his writings as ‘Elan Vital’ or life energy.

These concepts were and still are often misinterpreted by many, as if Fritz had no idea of Spirit. However, he would agree with Buber that talking about God and thereby about any form of man’s spirituality does not get us very far in understanding the truth. People can carry on an endless debate (like the old philosophers did about ‘how many angels can fit on a pin of a needle’), or whether the idea of a God is a human need to have a ‘saviour’ thus introjecting some outside mystery to bring about goodness and punish the bad and so on and so on.

 I believe that Fritz would agree with Osho who said:

“Meaning comes through participation. Participate in Life; participate as deeply and as totally as possible. Risk all, for the sake of participation. If you want to know what dance is; don’t go to see a dancer – learn dancing, be a dancer; if you want to know (discover) anything- PARTICIPATE!”

Participate!

Those who trained in Gestalt therapy since it begun some 45 years ago are aware that Gestalt is a holistic approach. It is an approach that encourages the individual to experience fully. Not just intellectually or rationally but include Body, Mind and Spirit and become that experience!

Whatever happens in a therapy session (or any human encounter) is clear that we are relating on a deeper spiritual level and that is where the healing happens. We learn about Awareness, here and now, liberation from defences, discovery of self in the world, presence, authenticity, all of this is concerned with deep spirituality.

Every human being is a combination of three energies: Instinctual, intellectual and intuitive. Energy has a fundamental principle about its functioning. It has to move – movement is its nature. However, instinct is infallible; the heart beats, the breathing goes, all essential life is unconscious because it has to function without the intellect(thinking) interfering with it. Intellect is fallible because it has no experience about life, it only accumulates information. Intuition opens doors to wisdom inherited from existence – it is our consciousness, our very being. We can experience all three if we are aware.

One vivid example of that sense of deep spirituality I experienced some years ago within our Gestalt training group in Brisbane. [1]One woman who has revealed her history of being badly treated by her mother when she was 7, developed severe shakings after her mother died. She also had panic feelings and her body would go into spasms. As a young woman, she tried to calm herself with alcohol and later went to counselling but without any positive results.

I offered to work with her in the group and she readily agreed. I then invited her to show us the shakings she often experienced and she quickly entered in some sort of trance – her body begun to shake and sounds came out of her mouth that were hard to understand. I suggested that when she could, she may stop. Her ability to control herself was amazing to us all and after calming herself, I suggested that she take a piece of butcher paper (A3) and write the words she spoke earlier on the paper. The list of words that came out were some sort of accusations like: “you are bad”, “you are evil”, ‘the devil is in you” and so on. Reading the words she started to cry and the group fell totally silent. After some moments, I suggested we all go to the local park with the paper and then I invited her to burn that paper and we all stood around her in support. One group member offered to light the paper with a match but it did not work and then I suggested that the client light it herself and the paper started to burn.

 As the paper burned, the words written on it started to turn black and suddenly the black burning paper showed a symbolic Black Hand shape emerging and the disappearing in the fire and finally turning into ashes. Everybody was mesmerised by this event and after I suggested that each person take a handful of the ashes and spread them around a tree. At that exact moment, a [2]black dog appeared and sniffed around the ashes and then was gone before anybody could notice where he has gone. We were all amazed and silently aware of some spirit energy present in our midst. After the group ended that weekend, it was almost a month that I checked with our participant in the burning ritual and [3]she said that her shakings have ended since that weekend workshop.

Ancient and current traditional shamans are very clear about this phenomenon. They call it The Spirit medicine. It is described as a state of awareness in which people recognise their union with all creation without losing the Self – the observer. Shamanism is not a religion but a way of understanding our Spirit self and its relation to Creation and not the Creator. It is our intuitive way of creating healing, beauty and harmony with everything.

This is the aim of all therapy and Gestalt therapy in particular. It integrates the spiritual and the intellectual including the feelings that connect knowledge of science and philosophy. Today we can easily gain knowledge with one click of the computer mouse but neither science, information data nor religions can explain fully our ‘journey’ as an individual.

Most therapists have encountered C. G. Jung and his work on the Archetypes and the notion of the collective unconscious. Jung writes about the wounded hero archetype and how we heal by way of our early hurts. People can't accomplish what they want to accomplish because they have inner pain that's driving them crazy, so they seek a psychologist. Here, you immediately encounter two different approaches. One is: "I've got a problem that stops me from getting on with my life, so I want to seek a therapist to fix it, to help me to get on with my life." And that is one approach to psychology. The other is: "I've got a pain. I need to understand where this pain comes from." This is the beginning of the inner journey. And this is when psychology, particularly in the spiritual tradition to which Jung belongs is also an opening to the unconscious, to the inner, intuitive world.

So in my example, the woman was hurt by her mother and her pain was so intense that produced a psychosomatic reaction taking her into spasms and shakes. While performing the ritual with the support of the group; in my opinion, supported by my professional experience, her unconscious created the symbol of the Black Hand and the Dog – both are elements of helpers and guides out of her pain.

Jung said: “Collective unconscious lies beyond the conceptual limitations of individual human consciousness, and thus cannot possibly be encompassed by them. We cannot, therefore, make controlled experiments to prove the existence of the collective unconscious, for the psyche of man, holistically conceived, cannot be brought under laboratory conditions without doing violence to its nature”. In this respect, psychology may be compared to astronomy, the phenomena of which also cannot be enclosed within a controlled setting. The heavenly bodies must be observed where they exist in the natural universe, under their own conditions, rather than under conditions we might propose to set for them.

Fritz used to say “we write our own script” and that statement I translate into “we create our own mythology”; our personal myth can set our little experience in daily life into a larger context that brings meaning and purpose of who we are and what is life all about. Our ‘script’ is written by our inner Self and that is our Spirit connected with the Universal Spirit.

“Have you ever asked yourself:

"What am I searching for?”

 

[1] Details of the client are confidential

[2] Archetypes Collective unconscious.

[3] Before she had therapy sessions for several years.