To this aim, the Gestalt therapist brings the client’s attention to ‘how’ their repetitive patterns are shaped rather than interpreting the past and asking ‘why’ questions. In the Gestalt view, it is awareness of what is happening in the present moment that heals us from the places we are stuck. The inherent capacity of individuals to redirect their misused or stuck energy toward lively engagement with the world forms the basis of the Gestalt method.
A Gestalt Therapy session may not resemble a ‘normal’ conversation or talk therapy session as many have come to know it. Gestalt therapy uses creativity as a means to shift reliance away from intellectual rationalizations toward a more intuitive approach where, trust in the inherent intelligence that is available in the moment to moment ebb and flow of life is gained. Drawing upon metaphor, bodily expression, verbal statements and other expressive approaches the Gestalt therapist develops experiments in which the client may explore the full range of their potential.
As the process unfolds, Gestalt will facilitate awareness of personal responsibility, how to avoid problems, finish unfinished matters and experience life with greater spontaneity and flexibility.
A Gestalt View on Self and Integration in Yoga
- Simone Moir
The cliché body is formed both by societal standards and personal negotiation with these standards. Effecting the conceptualization, posture, expression and movements of the person, embodiment of the cliché provides both support and suffocation of organismic regulation. In its current manifestation in North America, Yoga is, predominantly viewed by Westerners, as a body-based fitness practice that works on the physical system with added stress reducing outcomes. Even where Yogic practice is bastardized to fit the standards of western health regimens and disseminating of the philosophical view of Yoga is completely left out of the asana (physical postures) classes, Yoga practices presents a formidable challenge to the solidity of clichés that regulate the self.
As a system oriented towards growth, Yoga like Gestalt facilitates an individuals’ confrontation with layers of the personality through the use of frustration and support. In Yoga practice, a person encounters in an intimate and direct way, the limitations that the self-concepts and projections (namely the disassociation of the mind from the body) impose. Yoga destabilizes the cherished presupposition of a fixed self and directs the practitioner through cliché and role toward contact with the phobic and impasse layers of the personality.
For anyone spending hours at a time everyday of the week sitting in a chair, driving a car and using a computer mouse, it is not difficult to understand why Yoga asanas such as Parivritti Trikonasana (Revolved Triangle), Baddha Konasana (Cobblers Pose) and Eka Pada Rajakapotasana (King of Pigeons) prove vexing, humbling and overall frustrating. How close you can get your nose to your shin is that much more dumbfounding when it is accompanied by the prolific explications that a Yoga teacher may use. Terminology such as ‘Breathe into your kidneys’, ‘Stretch the skin from here to here’, ‘Find the line of energy that runs...’, ‘Ground the outer edge of the back foot’ or ‘Steady the gaze softly on the back of the eyeballs’ just to name a few, challenge our conceptions of the mind body relationship.
Despite the tortures the ego endures in the never-ending complexities of the asanas, Yoga practice introduces a student to principles, which support them in the process of deepening self-discovery. The primary principles that Yoga philosophy and teaching traditions offer as means of facilitating the student’s development of self-support.
In the Hatha Yoga of Indian tradition, students learned in direct relationship to a teacher one-on-one. The teacher would direct the students study dependent on the needs and arising conditions within the students practice. It can be assumed that Yoga teachers like Gestalt therapists were privy to the limitations of their student’s self-concepts and contact disturbances as demonstrated by how the asanas were performed. In the modern popularization of Yoga, this often overlooked fact of Yoga tradition leads to all kinds of heinous regimens and one-size-fits-all standardization that completely misrepresents Yoga’s quest for an authentic engagement with self and world.
Yoga is the practice of ‘beingness’, and as such lends itself to the phenomenological lens of Gestalt therapy. In the course of a Yoga practice session there are beginnings, middles and ends to each pose as well as each practice session. How a student approaches the phases of going into, staying in and coming out of an asana often reveals larger patterns of contact and avoidance. Similarly the ease with which a student goes into backbends (an outward focus and environmentally sensing) or forward bends (a more inward focus self sensing) also reflects patterns in relation to the flow of withdrawal and connection.
Often misinterpreted as a system of imposed restraint and withdrawal from the environment, Yoga’s intention is to strengthen the connection to ones own ability to nurture themself and foster intimacy with the self as the basis for relating to the environment. Yoga asana practice fosters this intimacy by making shifts in the stuck figure ground relationships of mind, body and environment. Yoga does this both literally and physically, as in headstand, were a new point of view is undeniable and more subtly by directing the focus of attention away from conceptualization and toward perception of sensations and awareness in the present.
Aside from the novelty of Yogic practices, the most important tool of Yoga upon which all other principles rely is the innate ability to be mindful. Mindfulness involves slowing down and narrowing in on parts of experience to become more intimately aware of them. This kind of concentration sharpens awareness of boundaries between figure and ground and at more subtle levels of practice the interrogation of these boundaries gives rise to the theoretical understanding as well as the visceral experience of nondualism.
In dualism the mind actively creates a sense of separation and isolation between the self ‘in here’ and the object ‘out there’ by fabricating a story of self that has continuity and solidity. From the early yogic text The Rg Veda comes this quote; "I do not know just who or what I am; I wander about concealed and wrapped in thought."
From these observations of the ‘deluded’ self, Yoga philosophy developed systems of inquiry to search out ‘authentic’ experience. In Yoga, mindfulness is first cultivated by watching sensations in the body then, the sensations of breath and proceeds by attending to the quality of physical movement, cognitive processes and the creation of imagery and symbolic visualizations. In a manner similar to the Gestalt metaphor of ‘peeling the onion’, this process seeks to dissolve the experience of an outer environment into the object of concentration and as one becomes familiar with the object of concentration, an integrating process unfolds, where perceptions of inner and outer collapse into one another and a state that could be described as present, available and open replaces dualistic fixations.
"A sense of 'security'...is given by clinging to the status quo, one's past achieved adjustments...new excitement threatens to shake this security to pieces...[In reality] there is no such thing as true security, for then the self would be a fixity...where the self has power to draw on, it has precisely no sense of security. It has perhaps a sense or readiness...A sense of adequacy and power grows as the particular problem is met...new possibilities are found in it and things surprisingly fall into place." — Perls, Herfferline and Goodman
The meticulousness of mindfulness teachings is often misunderstood in the Judeo-Christian context as regulation. When dualistic underpinnings such as right/wrong, good/ bad take hold, punishment is the inevitable result. Teaching Yoga in the context of this culture’s predilections demands attunement to this common misunderstanding. Gestalt theory has much to contribute to the way Yoga is taught. A Gestalt analysis of introjection, assimilation and integration would be of great assistance to Yoga practitioners in addressing these issues.
Hatha Yoga is one of the many branches of Yoga practice and phlilosophy and is best typified by the physical practices of asana (postures) and pranayama (breathing). The aim of Hatha (Ha Sun + Tha Moon) is the integration of opposing forces. Hatha Yoga assumes a movement of knowledge from the gross body to more and more subtle states of bodymind. What is first experienced in concrete ways by moving the limbs, and isolating certain muscle groups, is then refined to the movements of the breath and other less tangible forms of sensation and conceptual thought.
In their Yoga practice, students learn to recognize polarities ie; expansion & contraction, grounding & lifting, restriction & freedom, inhalation & exhalation and gain greater tolerance for dualistic tensions. Experienced in this visceral way, the inherent support of opposing forces can be assimilated into a greater whole.
As we gain awareness of ourselves through Yoga, we also open ourselves up to truths about the state of our body, being and life situation. This new view while more expansive can be painful and our habitual responses to pain will kick in. In fleeing painful experiences, we tend to create more judgments and criticisms about who, why and where we are at and develop negative predictions about what we are capable of dealing with. At a certain point, the Hatha Yoga student develops many questions about what to do with the critical thoughts, obsessive drives, lack of energy, avoidance and punitive or undermining voices that arise within their Yoga practice. Sorting through introjected ideas, projected parts of self and retroflected emotions demands close relationship to a teacher or others with a practice as developed as their own and further study and contemplation of Yoga philosophy.
Yoga seeks freedom from the disatifaction-satisfaction cycle we know best as our perpetual clinging to ‘me’ and ‘mine’. Without the underpinnings of the ethical dimensions of Yoga philosophy, yoga practice will remain individualistic and cliché in scope. Inquiry into the relational dimension of Yoga Philosophy can provide essential support to healthy interdependence and wholeness.
