I practice zen in the tradition of the Ordinary Mind Zen School. My teacher, Dr. Andrew Tootell, is encouraging me to present some guided meditations to a small group of practitioners who sit together on Zoom on Tuesday mornings. Below is the transcript of my second guided meditation, which I presented on Tuesday 23 March 2021 (an audio recording is also available). In this meditation, I continue my exploration of resonances between Zen and gestalt therapy, using Fritz Perls’ notion of “three zones of awareness” to explore different aspects of meditative awareness.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for having me again. It’s a pleasure for me to be doing this again. Please find your seat. Find your breath. Allow yourself to drop in, or to settle down in whatever way works for you.

A month ago, I spoke about resonances between Zen practice and gestalt therapy—I’m a gestalt therapist, so I’m interested in that—and this morning I’d like to continue with that theme. At the heart of both Zen and gestalt therapy is awareness—the cultivation and employment of awareness. But these traditions have different ways of approaching and directing awareness. In gestalt therapy, awareness aids the unfolding of a self: a self that’s flexible, responsive, spontaneous, and authentic. This kind of self may also emerge in Zen practice—hopefully it does—but it will most likely do so as a kind of outgrowth of an awareness that points beyond the self. In Zen, awareness moves beyond the self, it moves towards a recognition and an expression of emptiness and impermanence.

As I start to explore these ideas, stay in touch the quality of your own awareness. It might be moving towards my voice; it might be moving away from it. Maybe you can hear the cockatoos in the background as I talk. It might feel receptive, like it’s receiving my voice and other sounds. It’s probably moving in and out of thought. Maybe you’re directing your awareness somewhere, or holding it somewhere, like to the breath. There’s no need to change anything; just recognition is enough.

Fritz Perls, who was one of the founders of gestalt therapy—the most popular founder; a lot of people associate gestalt therapy with Fritz Perls—he liked to distinguish between three zones of awareness. There’s the inner zone, which is where awareness meets our embodied selves—visceral sensations, muscular tension or muscular relaxation, the embodied experience of emotions, the rise and fall of the breath—this is the inner zone of awareness. The outer zone is our awareness of the ways in which we make contact with the world—seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling—awareness of things that appear to be coming from the outside, this is the outer zone. And the middle zone comprises thinking, and all that goes along with thinking, all the different variations of thinking: emotional reactions, images, fantasies, concepts.

Perls acknowledged that this division into zones is artificial because ultimately there is no distinction between inner and outer, and this is an idea we’ll be familiar with in Zen as well. But in a relative sense—in the sense that most of us normally experience the world—it can sometimes be useful to make this division and to investigate these zones of awareness, to explore how they function, how the interact, how we inhabit them, how our particular forms of conditioning show up in each of them. So this is what I’m suggesting we do for the next little while: we explore and experiment with this idea of zones of awareness. And potentially—hopefully—we can learn something, maybe even find something that can inform our regular sitting practice.

So, let’s start with the inner zone of awareness. What does it feel like, right now, to inhabit the body? What do you notice? Perhaps you can fill the whole body with awareness. Maybe you feel drawn to letting your awareness rest in a particular area. Or maybe it feels more comfortable to move your awareness around. Do whatever feels most comfortable or engaging, but let’s stay with this with inner zone, with the body, for a few minutes.

As you stay with and inhabit this inner zone, see what you can notice about the quality of awareness itself. Is it bright or dull? Does it want to move or stay still? Is it drawn to certain corners of this inner zone? How comfortable do you feel with your awareness in this zone? Some people expend a lot of energy avoiding their bodies, so there can be resistance in some people to shining the light of awareness on this inner zone. We can be aware of the objects of awareness—in this case the body—and we can be aware of awareness as a process in itself: as a process that moves, that normally has a sense of agency associated with it, that meets resistance, that gets blocked, that sometimes flows freely, that can be clear or muddy, or bright or dull. Awareness of both content and process.

Gently let your focus move now to the outer zone of awareness, to the world around you, the world of which you are a part. How are you making contact with the world, right now? (This idea of “making contact” is one of the in ideas in gestalt therapy.) How is the world making contact with you, reaching out to you? Can you feel the atmosphere on your skin? Are you aware of sounds? Of smells? Of sights? Let’s spend a few minutes now allowing our awareness to inhabit this outer zone.

As you stay with this outer zone, again what do you notice about the quality of awareness itself? Maybe awareness here is lively, or bright, or sharp. Maybe awareness is in some way diminished, or numbed, or blocked, or on “automatic pilot”. See if your awareness has taken on different qualities since you shifted from the inner zone. And again, notice the objects of awareness, and notice what you can about awareness itself.

As we’ve been exploring the inner and outer zones of awareness, I imagine that all of us will have also been moving in and out of the middle zone, which is the zone of thought, thinking, imagination, fantasy, imagery, concepts. One of the risks in mediation practice is that we can develop an adversarial relationship to this zone of awareness. Thoughts can become the enemy of our practice. I used to learn from a meditation teacher, Jason Siff, who actually wrote a book called Thoughts are Not the Enemy, which is grounded in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, or, the Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness, a Pāli sutta. Jason observed that when people in our culture teach meditation practice based on the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, they almost always centre their practices on the first and second foundations of mindfulness, which are the body and sensations, respectively. Rarely do people centre their practice, or begin their practice, on the third foundation of mindfulness, cittānupassanā in Pāli, which we could translate as “mindfulness of mental states and thoughts”. This form of mindfulness involves remaining receptively aware of thinking—being open to thinking—and recognising the states of mind that underlie particular trains of thoughts, or particular reactions. So, let’s practice this for a few minutes: being receptively aware of thinking, being open to thinking, being curious about thinking. Let’s see if we can remain curious about this middle zone of awareness.

How does awareness operate in this middle zone? Is it possible for you to be aware of thoughts in the same way that you’re aware of the body and the world beyond the body? Are you able to be aware of thoughts as they’re occurring, or are you always looking back at thoughts, remembering thoughts that have just finished? We normally translate the word “sati” as “mindfulness,” which is a useful translation, it’s one we’re all used to. But many scholars of Pali texts point out that word “sati” derives from the verb “sarati,” which means “to remember” or “to recollect”. So, when we translate the word “sati” as “mindfulness”—with all of the connotations we’ve added to it about being in the “here and now”—we don’t preserve this connection with memory or recollection. Some of these scholars say that this connection to memory, this part of the word, is sometimes needed to make sense of particular passages in the early Buddhist texts. So, remain open to the idea that awareness in this middle zone may involve memory or recollection.

As we come to the end of this meditation, let’s take a minute to reflect on our exploration of the inner, outer, and middle zones of awareness, as they’re described in gestalt therapy. Let’s remember that these zones are nothing more than a useful fiction—we don’t have to hold onto them tightly or believe them to be “true”—they’re just designed to give us insight into our self-processes. And let’s note that in gestalt therapy, healthy functioning involves a fluid movement between the three zones—healthy functioning involves a fluid movement between all three zones—and that when awareness is functioning freely, when it’s moving fluidly, the middle zone of thinking moderates the connection between the inner and outer zones of awareness. Thinking is not a problem; it moderates our connection to the world, it helps us understand the world, it helps to connect us to the world.

Just before we finish, you might want to shake off this useful fiction—hopefully it’s been useful—you might want to shake it off and just return to a sense of open awareness for a minute, whatever that means for you, however you do that in your practice.

Traditionally, I’ve struggled to trust life’s natural unfolding. I’ve attempted to plan each step in advance, to bend the arc of events towards my own ends, and generally to impose my own understanding onto the world.

I’m slowly learning to “trust the process,” helped along greatly by gestalt therapy, Buddhist practice, and my children. Yet still there are areas of my life where I easily slip into untrusting ways.

Research and writing are such areas. I’m skilled at conceptualising and planning research and writing projects. These skills certainly have benefits—for example, I doubt I could have completed a PhD thesis without them. But at times these skills have stifled other important capacities, such as creativity and spontaneity.

In 2019 and 2020, I was challenged to bring a deeper level of trust to the research process as I participated in a co-designed research project focused on supporting children and families with complex needs. Co-design is a methodology designed to include people with relevant lived experiences (e.g., of living with mental health difficulties) as equal partners with professionals in the conceptualisation, design, and development of projects or organisational processes.

To stay true to this methodology, I needed to relax my desire to maintain control over the project. As I write in the research paper that emerged from this project:

I’ve authored and co-authored lots of papers over the years, but this one stands out to me as a testament to, and reminder of, what’s possible when I get out of the way and make room for emergence, novelty, and the unexpected.

In this project, I worked with Jason Tyndale, a trans man with lived experience of mental health difficulties, Jackie Amos, a psychiatrist and gestalt therapist, and Lydia Trowse, the Child and Family Partnership Coordinator at Emerging Minds.

Emerging Minds have recently released two podcasts (which can be found here and here) in which Jason, Jackie, Lydia, and I discuss co-design, our research project, and the lessons we learned along the way. I may well be biased, but I believe these podcasts are well worth a listen!

I practice zen in the tradition of the Ordinary Mind Zen School. My teacher, Dr. Andrew Tootell, is encouraging me to present some guided meditations to a small group of practitioners who sit together on Zoom on Tuesday mornings. Below is the transcript of my first guided meditation, which I presented on Tuesday 23 February 2021. In this meditation, I highlight some of the similarities between zazen and what in gestalt therapy is called the paradoxical theory of change. In future guided meditations, I hope to continue exploring the intersections and resonances between zen and gestalt therapy.

In this guided meditation, I’m going to talk about dukkha, which is often translated as “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness”. I’ll talk about sitting with dukkha in our meditation, and about the paradoxical way in which dukkha can become a source of healing, and growth, and wisdom in our lives, if we let it.

So, please sit comfortably. Find your seat. Settle into whatever posture works best for you. Settle into the breath. Settle into the body. Be aware of the body breathing in and out on its own for a couple of minutes.

Sometimes when we sit in meditation we might find ourselves feeling centred, feeling present to the world around us, feeling settled, and at peace with how things are. If your experience is like this this morning, then please enjoy that, and go with it, and just let my words wash over you.

Other times when we sit we might become aware of some form of contraction, of resistance, of tension, of dissatisfaction. We’ll be aware of the ways in which we’re cut off from being with life as it is. And if you’re anything like me, this will be what most of your sitting practice is about. This is dukkha. We don’t have to look far for dukkha. To be human is to experience dukkha. And very often when we sit, sit in meditation, our meditation is to sit with dukkha.

So, as we sit with some awareness of this body and this breath, let’s also try bring awareness to any tension or contraction or dissatisfaction. Where are we resisting? Where are we tightening? Where are we holding on? It might be obvious, or it might be subtle.

Dukkha, tension, dissatisfaction might be manifesting in thoughts. “I’m not doing it right”. “I’m ready to finish”. “I wish I didn’t think so much”. Whatever variety of dukkha comes up for you in your thoughts. A lot of our thinking can be a kind of resistance, in one way or another.

Tension or contraction might be showing up in our feeling tone. We might just have a basic feeling of wanting to move way from something, wanting to move away from where we are. Or a sense of wanting to move towards something. Sometimes that sense can be very free-floating or nebulous.

It’s likely that tension or contraction is in some way manifesting in the body. I’ve always liked what Joko Beck said about the “icy couch”—I’m imagine some, or many, of you will have read that part of her book—about how dukkha gets lodged in the very fabric of our bodies. About forms of contraction and holding on that are so close to us and so pervasive that we easily miss them; it’s just what our bodies feel like most of the time.

So, I encourage you to just be aware for a few minutes of any kind of holding on in the body: any tension, any pain, no matter how subtle or familiar it feels. What would it be like for you to rest into the icy couch right now?

Let your attention move around the body, if that feels like the right thing to do. There might be places where tension often shows up: maybe the belly, or the jaw, shoulders, neck, maybe in the face. Wherever tension shows up for you. There’s no need to release the tension, if you find it. Just allow it to be.

We’re just sitting with our dukkha, however coarse it is, however subtle it is. If we can just sit with our dukkha, just letting it be, not trying to change it, creating a space of acceptance for it, then maybe we can create the conditions for growth and change in our lives.

I practise gestalt therapy, and in gestalt therapy the theory of change—which is like the explanation for how psychotherapy actually helps people—is called the paradoxical theory of change. The paradoxical theory of change says that change occurs when we become what we are, not when we try to become something we aren’t.

I’ll now read you a quote by Arnold Beisser, who first articulated the paradoxical theory of change (and please excuse the old-fashioned gendered pronouns in this quote). He said,

By rejecting the role of change agent, we make change possible.

Arnold Beisser, the man who wrote this quote, knew about staying with dukkha. He was in his mid-twenties, he’d just finished his medical training, he was a nationally ranked tennis player the US, when he was suddenly paralysed from the neck down by polio. He lived for years in an iron lung. That’s a very tough way to learn about the paradoxical path of embracing dukkha. None of us are in iron lungs, but I’m sure we’ve all walked tough paths at times in our lives as well. We’re all presented with dukkha in our lives. We’re all presented with dukkha in our meditation practice.

Change occurs when we become what we are, not when we try to become something we aren’t. There are obvious parallels between the paradoxical theory of change and our zen practice. Becoming what we are when we practice often means making space for dukkha, or becoming dukkha. When we encounter tension and contraction in our sitting, we can try to escape it, we can try to change it, or transcend it in some way, and maybe we’d have some success in doing that. But then, ultimately, we’d be trying to be something that we’re not in that moment. We’d be dividing against ourselves. Dividing the whole.

Or, we can become more fully ourselves. We can reject the role of change agent. I like that line, maybe that’s why I’m repeating it a bit. I like to think about it in terms of my psychotherapy practice, and I like to think about it in terms of my zen practice: rejecting the role of change agent. We can let the dukkha be. We can become the dukkha. We can rest back on the icy couch, to use that metaphor again.

So, let’s sit in silence for a few more minutes and just let ourselves be. If there’s resistance, let the resistance be there as part of the whole. If there’s tension or contraction, welcome it in, let it be there as part of the whole that is you, in this moment, this morning.

Dr. Kamila Biały is a gestalt therapist and sociologist from Poland. She’s on the leadership team of New Gestalt Voices and is one of the two founders and facilitators of the excellent Humans of Gestalt project. I see Kamila as part of a new generation of gestalt therapists who are calling on the gestalt therapy community to better acknowledge the political and social contexts in which we practice, to make justice and equality more figural in our work. I talked to Kamila in preparation for a podcast we’ll be recording in February 2021. The transcript of our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Rhys: I’m soon going to be doing an episode with you on New Gestalt Voices Radio and the topic is intergenerational dynamics. I’m hoping you can tell me about why you’re interested in this topic.

Kamila: Yeah, I’m thinking about what triggered me into thinking about this topic. I guess it was through taking part in different gestalt community meetings. And what I’ve been observing is that generally it was the senior therapists talking and it was difficult for the young people to bring in their ideas, or even just to be there, present. This is just an impression I’ve had. For example, at one of these recent meetings, the new Board was to be formed and the senior therapists are simply getting too old, or they’ve already been on the Board and are basically fed up with it, and there was this pressure on young people to be part of it. And some of these young people, it was their first time in this meeting. And it was like, “Oh, maybe you’ll come and join, it’s lots of fun”. And I could see that there’s no actual connection. There’s this need to “pass the torch,” so to speak, but it’s so clumsy.

Rhys: There’s a disconnect between the values of the older and younger generations?

Kamila: Yes, exactly. For example, in a recent meeting an idea was brought in to make an organisational statement about the ecological crises. “What’s our general opinion about that as an organisation?” And then the voices started to appear, critical voices: “I don’t know if this is a political organisation,” and so on. You know, people started to differentiate. And if we’re speaking about values, I feel kind of like a generational representative. And I felt, “People! We need to somehow unite on this issue!” And the senior therapists were saying, “I don’t like to be pushed into it, this confluence, where we need to have one opinion”. So, after reflecting on this I was starting to think that having common ground is perceived as confluence, and some people feel the need to differentiate, to individualise. But from my perspective, we’re fed up with differentiation, with individualism. We want to feel some community! To belong! Of course, differentiation is an important process, but I felt angry and lost because I was so surprised that people were so resistant to simply say, “This is an urgent issue”.

Rhys: It sounds like one of the generational differences you’re identifying is the extent to which therapy is politicised, is a political process versus a personal process. And another one is the extent to which people are willing to tolerate individualism. I think that early gestalt therapy was highly individualistic, and there’s obviously been a big turn away from that with the relational movement. But I still think that individualism is very difficult to uproot.

Kamila: Yes, isn’t it.

Rhys: You know what also comes up for me are things that I read about and I see—I’m not on social media anymore, so I feel like I see this stuff less—but there’s a lot of talk around “cancel culture” and people being “de-platformed,” and there has emerged in some progressive quarters of our generation over the last 10 years a mentality of, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”. It seems black and white. And I wonder if some of the older gestalt therapists are reacting to this that they see in the younger generation.

Kamila: Hmm, interesting. I’m not much on social media either. I’m aware of this mostly with my sociology colleagues, who are mainly leftists. So it’s difficult for me to be part of their groupings because they’re so radical. This is funny because I’m aware of those dynamics when it comes to my sociology circles—it’s hard for me to identify with them—whereas with gestalt therapists of this younger generation, I feel part of it, even though we are so focused on ecology, racism, LGBT issues. It’s as if it looks different from the inside.

Rhys: I’m thinking about you wanting to make a statement about the ecology. I feel that gestalt therapy has traditionally had a big emphasis on uncertainty and “not knowing”. But I want to say, “Well, what about conviction, aren’t there times when we need to have conviction about things, to hold particular values?” For example, we might want to hold firm values around the biosphere, or having an anti-racist approach, or whatever. There might be reasons to move away from uncertainty around such issues. We might want to land on values and hold onto them. So, I’m wondering how we bring these values into our work while also cultivating uncertainty, which is obviously valuable. How do we strike a balance? I don’t want to be doing politics, or doing sociology, in therapy. But I also recognise that we in some ways we can’t avoid doing politics.

Kamila: Yes, this is reminding me something that happened recently. A senior gestalt figure joined us, and from the first moments of meeting him, I like him as a person, but I don’t like his ideas. So, I was really angry with him, and in one of the meetings, I was trying to show him “Hey, you’re a known person in the gestalt community. You’re an authority, you write books. This has some importance.” And he said, “No, it’s important only what’s here, between you and me, how you feel”. It was interesting for me to have this kind of conflict with him and trying to show him “There’s power here, whether you want it or not”. And, ironically, some weeks later, in the same context, I had to own my power as a recognisable person in the gestalt community with regard to my peers who know me from Humans and NGV projects.

Rhys: I see this is an example of where the “I-Thou approach,” if I can call it that, leaves a bit of a vacuum because there’s not much room in that approach for considering power and privilege. And if we’re talking about a younger generation of gestalt therapists, that’s something we’re interested in, power and privilege. And maybe that’s a key difference between the older generation and younger generation. Definitely the older generation were trying to undermine certain kinds of power relationships. For example, we can go back to that idea of “cultivated uncertainty,” which I see as an attempt to undermine traditional power relationships, especially as they were in psychoanalysis, where the analyst had the power of interpretation and the analysand was like a powerless recipient of that. But what strikes me about that is that a position of uncertainty might be very good at undermining power differentials in an individual setting, but it says nothing about broader structures of power. It’s looking at the movement of power between you and I in this individual setting, but it doesn’t talk about how I might be enacting all different kinds of power because of my social position or the privileges I’ve enjoyed.

Kamila: Yes, the “I-Thou” approach might in specific situations in a therapeutic setting be considered as oppressive, especially when a client’s experience is infiltrated by power relations and this is figural for them, this is their phenomenology; an asymmetry, not a dialogue of equal partners. Regarding our generation’s need for conviction, I fully agree: we have not been raised in a stable, prosperous society; our life is necessarily individualised. We get involved in ephemeral projects partly because it’s creative, but partly because there’s no other option. These are not the times of life-long employment. We were brought up in a world starting to get disillusioned by democracy and other “grand narratives”. That said, we need to hold particular values, we need to support our togetherness. And this is a challenge since we are, as I said, so necessarily differentiated—think, for example, of identity politics and social movements some of us are part of.

Dr. Kamila Biały is a gestalt therapist and sociologist from Poland. She’s on the leadership team of New Gestalt Voices and is one of the two founders and facilitators of the excellent Humans of Gestalt project. I see Kamila as part of a new generation of gestalt therapists who are calling on the gestalt therapy community to better acknowledge the political and social contexts in which we practice, to make justice and equality more figural in our work. I talked to Kamila in preparation for a podcast we’ll be recording in February 2021. The transcript of our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Rhys: I’m soon going to be doing an episode with you on New Gestalt Voices Radio and the topic is intergenerational dynamics. I’m hoping you can tell me about why you’re interested in this topic.

Kamila: Yeah, I’m thinking about what triggered me into thinking about this topic. I guess it was through taking part in different gestalt community meetings. And what I’ve been observing is that generally it was the senior therapists talking and it was difficult for the young people to bring in their ideas, or even just to be there, present. This is just an impression I’ve had. For example, at one of these recent meetings, the new Board was to be formed and the senior therapists are simply getting too old, or they’ve already been on the Board and are basically fed up with it, and there was this pressure on young people to be part of it. And some of these young people, it was their first time in this meeting. And it was like, “Oh, maybe you’ll come and join, it’s lots of fun”. And I could see that there’s no actual connection. There’s this need to “pass the torch,” so to speak, but it’s so clumsy.

Rhys: There’s a disconnect between the values of the older and younger generations?

Kamila: Yes, exactly. For example, in a recent meeting an idea was brought in to make an organisational statement about the ecological crises. “What’s our general opinion about that as an organisation?” And then the voices started to appear, critical voices: “I don’t know if this is a political organisation,” and so on. You know, people started to differentiate. And if we’re speaking about values, I feel kind of like a generational representative. And I felt, “People! We need to somehow unite on this issue!” And the senior therapists were saying, “I don’t like to be pushed into it, this confluence, where we need to have one opinion”. So, after reflecting on this I was starting to think that having common ground is perceived as confluence, and some people feel the need to differentiate, to individualise. But from my perspective, we’re fed up with differentiation, with individualism. We want to feel some community! To belong! Of course, differentiation is an important process, but I felt angry and lost because I was so surprised that people were so resistant to simply say, “This is an urgent issue”.

Rhys: It sounds like one of the generational differences you’re identifying is the extent to which therapy is politicised, is a political process versus a personal process. And another one is the extent to which people are willing to tolerate individualism. I think that early gestalt therapy was highly individualistic, and there’s obviously been a big turn away from that with the relational movement. But I still think that individualism is very difficult to uproot.

Kamila: Yes, isn’t it.

Rhys: You know what also comes up for me are things that I read about and I see—I’m not on social media anymore, so I feel like I see this stuff less—but there’s a lot of talk around “cancel culture” and people being “de-platformed,” and there has emerged in some progressive quarters of our generation over the last 10 years a mentality of, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”. It seems black and white. And I wonder if some of the older gestalt therapists are reacting to this that they see in the younger generation.

Kamila: Hmm, interesting. I’m not much on social media either. I’m aware of this mostly with my sociology colleagues, who are mainly leftists. So it’s difficult for me to be part of their groupings because they’re so radical. This is funny because I’m aware of those dynamics when it comes to my sociology circles—it’s hard for me to identify with them—whereas with gestalt therapists of this younger generation, I feel part of it, even though we are so focused on ecology, racism, LGBT issues. It’s as if it looks different from the inside.

Rhys: I’m thinking about you wanting to make a statement about the ecology. I feel that gestalt therapy has traditionally had a big emphasis on uncertainty and “not knowing”. But I want to say, “Well, what about conviction, aren’t there times when we need to have conviction about things, to hold particular values?” For example, we might want to hold firm values around the biosphere, or having an anti-racist approach, or whatever. There might be reasons to move away from uncertainty around such issues. We might want to land on values and hold onto them. So, I’m wondering how we bring these values into our work while also cultivating uncertainty, which is obviously valuable. How do we strike a balance? I don’t want to be doing politics, or doing sociology, in therapy. But I also recognise that we in some ways we can’t avoid doing politics.

Kamila: Yes, this is reminding me something that happened recently. A senior gestalt figure joined us, and from the first moments of meeting him, I like him as a person, but I don’t like his ideas. So, I was really angry with him, and in one of the meetings, I was trying to show him “Hey, you’re a known person in the gestalt community. You’re an authority, you write books. This has some importance.” And he said, “No, it’s important only what’s here, between you and me, how you feel”. It was interesting for me to have this kind of conflict with him and trying to show him “There’s power here, whether you want it or not”. And, ironically, some weeks later, in the same context, I had to own my power as a recognisable person in the gestalt community with regard to my peers who know me from Humans and NGV projects.

Rhys: I see this is an example of where the “I-Thou approach,” if I can call it that, leaves a bit of a vacuum because there’s not much room in that approach for considering power and privilege. And if we’re talking about a younger generation of gestalt therapists, that’s something we’re interested in, power and privilege. And maybe that’s a key difference between the older generation and younger generation. Definitely the older generation were trying to undermine certain kinds of power relationships. For example, we can go back to that idea of “cultivated uncertainty,” which I see as an attempt to undermine traditional power relationships, especially as they were in psychoanalysis, where the analyst had the power of interpretation and the analysand was like a powerless recipient of that. But what strikes me about that is that a position of uncertainty might be very good at undermining power differentials in an individual setting, but it says nothing about broader structures of power. It’s looking at the movement of power between you and I in this individual setting, but it doesn’t talk about how I might be enacting all different kinds of power because of my social position or the privileges I’ve enjoyed.

Kamila: Yes, the “I-Thou” approach might in specific situations in a therapeutic setting be considered as oppressive, especially when a client’s experience is infiltrated by power relations and this is figural for them, this is their phenomenology; an asymmetry, not a dialogue of equal partners. Regarding our generation’s need for conviction, I fully agree: we have not been raised in a stable, prosperous society; our life is necessarily individualised. We get involved in ephemeral projects partly because it’s creative, but partly because there’s no other option. These are not the times of life-long employment. We were brought up in a world starting to get disillusioned by democracy and other “grand narratives”. That said, we need to hold particular values, we need to support our togetherness. And this is a challenge since we are, as I said, so necessarily differentiated—think, for example, of identity politics and social movements some of us are part of.