Awareness: enlivening, empowering & healing

The topic I have chosen to write on – the Gestalt concept of awareness – carries a lot of personal meaning for me. Early in high school I was running my own little awareness experiment: I would challenge myself to stay present and notice how many clothes of a particular color I could spot on people throughout the day, often forgetting all about the challenge until a few days later. In college  I resolved to stop whatever I was doing for a moment, and check in how I was feeling whenever I heard a phone ring. It was only years later, however, that I began integrating awareness into my daily life as an ongoing practice, and discovered that instead of using it to “detach” myself as some schools of meditation prescribe, I could instead utilize awareness to enliven myself, to bring myself more fully into the process of living as I experience and create it moment-to-moment. 

I made this possible by committing zealously to the practice of Radical Honesty and implementing on a daily basis its teachings to ground myself in the present moment, take responsibility for all of my experience, and challenge myself with completing unfinished business, staying with difficult emotions and communicating in a direct and vulnerable manner. A year into this I had made significant progress in how I related to myself and others, and as I discovered that the creator of Radical Honesty, Dr. Brad Blanton, was a gestalt therapist taught by Fritz Perls, I found my way into the Bulgarian Gestalt Therapy Institute.

What is “awareness”?

Awareness is a central notion in Gestalt therapy which enhances both clients’ and therapists’ presence in the here and now, while also serving as a tool for self-discovery, therapeutic intervention and healing. Simkin (1970) explains this foundational concept in the following way: “awareness is the capacity to focus, to attend. Thinking is not awareness, feeling is not awareness, sensing is not awareness. I need awareness to be in touch, to know that I am sensing or feeling or thinking”. Whereas moment-to-moment I am experiencing various internal and external stimuli, through guiding my awareness I can choose what to attend to, and bring consciousness into. For example, by the mere fact of being alive, I know that breathing is happening within me. However, until I pay attention to the process of breathing, it is happening automatically. Once I start noticing my breath, and thus become aware of it, I gain information about my emotional state in the moment, and I can take responsibility and choose my further actions – to take deeper, slower breaths to self-regulate, for instancе. 

In Gestalt Therapy awareness is both an objective, and a tool of the therapeutic process: on one hand we seek to support our clients to amplify their self-awareness, and on the other we utilize clients’ expanding awareness to aid other goals of the therapy such as developing self-responsibility and facilitating integration between inner states and behavior, polarities, ambivalences and inner conflicts, as well as enhancing productive and fulfilling contact with the environment (Passons, 1975). Unlike an insight which constitutes an occasional occurrence, awareness is “an ongoing process, readily available at all times (…) a refreshing and revitalizing experience” (Polster and Polster, 1973, as cited by Passons, 1975). At the same time, awareness is a skill to be developed and continuously exercised. As Fritz Perls states: “much of what you are only dimly aware and almost unaware can be brought into awareness by giving it the requisite amount of attention and interest” (Perls et al., 1951, p. 97). 

Practicing awareness

Importantly, awareness is only available in the present moment, here and now. The past and the future are experienced in the here and now through memory or fantasy (projecting into the future). In Perls’ words: 

Whatever is actual is, as regards time, always in the present. Whatever happened in the past was actual then, just as whatever occurs in the future will be actual at that time, but what is actual — and thus all that you can be aware of — must be in the present. (p. 32, Perls, 1947 as cited by Passons, 1975).

Passons (1975) clarifies that the concept of “now” so prominent in Gestalt therapy portrays not a singular identifiable moment, but an unstoppable and continuously changing stream of passing nows: “The now is over in a flash and followed by yet another, into infinity” (Passons, 1975, p. 22). To this end, it is not enough to glance at our current moment experiences intermittently as this prevents us from fully connecting with and experiencing the continuity of our existence and the flow of time:

Just as the now flows, so must the awareness of it. The blinking eye cannot be aware of the flow of water. Rather, it sees a series of jerky thrusts. Similarly, being aware of one’s now means staying aware of one’s flow. To glance at it momentarily does not afford the opportunity to get close enough to experience it in process (Passons, 1975, p. 22).

In order to truly engage with and understand our present experience, we need to develop deep, continuous awareness of what we are doing and how we are doing it, flowing with the stream of experience. “The ideal therapy”, Perls declares, “should be restricted to the here and now and the communication between therapist and patient” (Perls, 2012, p. 174). It has been useful for me to observe how at times conversations in my Gestalt training group have shifted into deflection. Whenever a participant or trainer proposed that this might be happening, we usually returned to the present moment and discovered unspoken emotions or resistance concealed by the deflection. 

As a trainer in Authentic Relating, I love to give my workshop participants an exercise which usually yields both touching encounters and rich personal insights. In this exercise participants sit facing each other and take turns speaking using the prompt “Being here with you, I notice…”. We do this following preliminary group work in getting grounded in the present moment, as well as distinguishing what we can be aware of. The result is that the majority of participants report having conversations that they perceive as intimate and energizing beyond the scope of their ordinary interactions. I also like this exercise because it is one that people can bring back into their lives either by offering their loved ones to do it together as a shared activity, or by adjusting the prompt as they see fit and integrating it into their daily interactions with others. 

Perls (1969) identifies three areas of awareness which he calls the inner, outer and middle zones. In simple terms, the inner zone of awareness refers to the sensations in the body such as muscular tension or relaxation, heartbeat and breathing, warmth and cold, tingling, pressure, pain, etc. The outer zone includes sensory data collected through the so called contact functions: hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, moving (Joyce and Sills, 2014). The middle zone includes the mental processes such as thinking, evaluating, interpreting, imagining, remembering, anticipating, etc., and acts as a mediator through which we make sense of internal and external stimuli (Joyce and Sills, 2014, p.34). 

Joyce and Sills (2014, p.33) warn against falsely interpreting this model to mean that there is a division between internal and external experiencing, highlighting the wholeness of awareness and the interconnectedness and interdependence between the zones. Still, as someone who has spent the majority of her life in her head (and miserable!), I value this conceptualization, and utilize it to help myself and others gain awareness of much more than the contents of the mind. When teaching embodied awareness, I lead various activities inviting participants to go beyond their stories and interpretations, and to notice the sensations present in their bodies, as well as sensory inputs they are noticing in the moment. In the span of a few training days I frequently observe teenagers’ and adults’ growing capacity to notice and report a wider range of physical sensations in their bodies than what they were initially able to observe and tolerate. 

Personal responsibility and resistance

An important function of developing awareness is the resulting ability to cultivate a sense of self-responsibility. Even though our experience is a process of co-creation, of “constant shaping and being shaped” as a consequence of being in the world with others (Joyce and Sills, 2014, p.79), taking ownership over one’s life supports the individual in becoming more aware of the influences upon her, and empowers her to exchange her limiting beliefs with aspirational ones, to own her experience and live with authenticity and integrity. By raising his awareness of his physical sensations, his language and fantasies, the individual “can now see he is producing his difficulties, he can see what his present difficulties are, and he can help himself to solve them in the present, in the here and now” (Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, 1951, p.63). Furthermore, through developing his awareness skills, the gestalt therapy client can elevate himself from a patient to “an active partner in the work”, an informal trainee in psychotherapy who will sooner or later “proceed without help — for here, as everywhere else in medicine, natura sanat non medicus, it is only oneself (in the environment) that can cure oneself ” (Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, 1951, p.x) 

Even though nurturing one’s sense of self-responsibility is typically an empowering experience, as I can personally testify, it has been observed that clients frequently escape from experiencing the present by going into the past or the future “looking for so-called causes and explanations and other avoidances of responsibility” (Perls, 1969, p.14). According to Perls (1969), returning to past stories is characteristic of those who resist taking responsibility for themselves, and instead look for scapegoats to blame their present-day misfortunes on (Perls, 1969). Tragically, refusing self-responsibility leaves them empty handed, as they forfeit the opportunity to shape their lives to their own liking: “These people fail to realize that, despite what has happened in the past, their present life is their own, and it is now their own responsibility to remedy their shortcomings” (Perls, 1969, p. 208). Even though we may acknowledge that some ways of resisting awareness and responsibility are counterproductive to one’s efforts to improve their quality of life, their close relationships and so forth, “attacking” and attempting to “dissolve” resistances and defenses may be futile and prevent the client from accessing the wisdom hidden behind the resistance:

An enormous amount of energy and previous creative decision is invested in the resistances and modes of repression. Then to bypass the resistances, or “attack” them, means that the patient will end up by being less than when he came, although freer in certain respects (Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, 1951, p.x).

I have grown to greatly appreciate the resistance which frequently appears in the process of cultivating and practicing awareness, and I have come to understand my own defenses as “active expressions of vitality, however neurotic they may be in the total Picture” (Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, 1951, p.x). I recently had an interpersonal situation in which I felt unprecedented anger for two days: my heartbeat was rapid for hours, my thinking generated an unstoppable stream of judgements, and at the same time I resisted expressing my anger to the person I was angry at, despite her invitations to hear me. Acknowledging that historically I have had a hard time accessing my anger and expressing it, I allowed myself to stay with my resistance and my anger despite the great discomfort I was experiencing, emotionally and physically. I gave myself time to feel myself, to not rush to get to the sadness behind the rage despite experiencing pressure from the other person to get over my anger. Eventually, I did process and release a lot of my anger and sadness in contact with the other, and managed to reconnect. More important for me, however, was my new experience in noticing and standing up for my need to give myself time to be angry and upset, holding my boundaries, and giving myself permission to close off and keep distance. I imagine that my sacred anger meant to keep me safe which I had lost access to a long time ago was revived and strengthened in the process. 

Thanks to my gestalt training as I was facilitating multiple authentic relating group programs this summer, I noticed that my capacity to hold space for people to experience and express whatever is alive in them has greatly expanded, as has my ability to accept and respect their ways of behavior and avoidance while simultaneously supporting them to increase their awareness of how they are creating their experience. As Perls, Hefferline and Goodman (1951) suggest: “we do not ask the patient not to censor, but to concentrate on how he censors, withdraws, falls silent, with what muscles, images, or blanks. Thus a bridge is made for him to begin to feel himself actively repressing, and then he can himself begin to relax the repression” (p.x).

Awareness as healing

As previously mentioned, ongoing awareness is often revitalizing and empowering, however, the premise of Gestalt therapy is that it is also “by and of itself… curative” (Perls, 1969, p.17). For healing to take place, the process of therapy should not be limited to mere verbalizing or reminiscing. Instead, awareness should “draw on the energy of present organic need and a present environmental help” (Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, 1951, p.x), meaning the client needs to situate herself in the present moment, and be supported to discover and access her available resources, internal and external.

With the help of my personal gestalt therapist I recently uncovered something that I had hidden from myself so sophisticatedly that I am astonished with the inner workings of my mind. In June following two embodied awareness training programs organized by me and led by a Radical Honesty trainer who I like and respect, I missed an important deadline to extend the length of the project including multiple other training programs. As a result, I was forced to organize four 7-day workshops with only a few days in between, and I ended up exhausting myself physically and emotionally. As I spoke about the missed deadline with my therapist weeks later when I was close to burn out, I related my forgetting of the deadline to events that surrounded it: my first psychedelic retreat, a festival I went to the following week, my birthday… However, my therapist provoked me to go beyond these rational explanations: “How did you resist the deadline?”, she asked. I found this line of conversation intriguing, and I had no idea how to respond. I am usually one to strictly obey deadlines. I have developed an expertise in being “the good student”, and for the most part I like it. 

As my therapist patiently worked with me through this, things started to entangle: I suddenly remembered that I was currently angry at my colleague, the Radical Honesty trainer, for a conversation that followed another unlikely mistake that I made. I was then able to access memories of various situations in which I was displeased with my colleague, some of which I had expressed and some not – this, my therapist suggested, could have built up and led me to unconsciously sabotage our work, although practically I was only sabotaging myself. Gaining awareness of the resistance I had towards working with this colleague and the unconscious ways in which I was acting out this resistance relaxed the tension I felt in my body while recalling the past difficulties in this relationship, and allowed me to consider a richer array of possible ways forward. 

There is much more to be said about the concept of awareness, its applications in therapy and daily life, its many benefits. Having changed my life through practicing awareness on a daily basis, I am committed to spreading embodied awareness tools in and out of the therapy sphere, to those who have the resources needed to engage in long-term therapy, as well as those who may never set foot in a therapist’s office. 

Bibliography:

• Joyce, P., & Sills, C. (2014). Skills in Gestalt counselling & psychotherapy. SAGE.
• Passons, W. R. (1975). Gestalt approaches in counseling. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 
• Perls, F.S., Hefferline, R.E. and Goodman, P. (1951) Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Dell, New York.
• Perls, F.S. (1969) Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Real People Press, Lafayette