Gestalt, Personality and Life
Since my last blog, I have been very involved in speaking and giving presentations. A few days ago I gave a presentation on Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy. In 1983 I became a Gestalt therapist through the Gestalt Institute of New Orleans by (founder/director) Anne Teachworth. To this day I utilize many methods of Gestalt therapy and in combination with the understanding of personality. I believe the marriage of Gestalt and understanding the biological basis of personality creates the most powerful medium for change and self actualization to date!
In researching Fritz’s life I found 2 very powerful quotes one by his wife Laura Perls, and one by Fritz himself. In fact, when I was 14 years old, long before I knew about Gestalt therapy, I had a poster in my bedroom with what has now become known as the “Gestalt prayer”. I was amazed and somewhat in awe that Fritz Perlz had begun to influence the course of my life without me having an understanding of who he was and where I was heading!
Here is the ” Gestalt prayer” that I had posted for years:
I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
and you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.
Personally, I don’t have many regrets in my life, but I had one this week when I was reminded that I had missed an opportunity to meet Laura Perls when was she was still alive at the Gestalt Institute of New York.
Because Gestalt therapy focuses on awareness, I have personally experienced incredible mental, emotional and spiritual growth over the last 30 years (accelerated of course, with the addition of an understanding of personality); but the beauty and power of Gestalt is so eloquently summed up in a quote by Laura Perls (from her book “Gestalt Therapy Now”) that I found at a website posted in memory of her contribution to humanity.
…Real creativeness, in my experience, is inextricably linked with the awareness of mortality. The sharper this awareness, the greater the urge to bring forth something new, to participate in the infinitely continuing creativeness in nature, This is what makes out of sex, love; out of the herd, society; out of wheat and fruit, bread and wine; and out of sound, music. This is what makes life livable and incidentally makes therapy possible.
…Gestalt therapy, with its emphasis on immediate awareness and involvement, offers a method for developing the necessary support for a self-continuing creative adjustment which is the only way of coping with the experience of dying and, therefore, of living.
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