John Cleese assures us on his YouTube video that creativity is not something you do, it is a way of being. As Gestalt therapists we are gifted with a vocation that invites us at our best to be relaxed and open and available to play. (Our worst being when we get bound by our introjects about wanting to help, wanting to be our best, wanting to know). I have found the greatest support to my creativity is in the theory of the field – containing and defining what we call our connection, providing a sometimes unseen but ever present context for our emergent thoughts, images and sensations with each other. The field relieves us of, in Barry Stevens’ words, our potency to push the river, and shows us how we are in fact already drowning in that river hand in hand.
To be creative is to be always drowning and breathing at the same moment together. It is living at the zero point. Fritz Perls called Friedlander a “guru” when they met at coffee houses and in painters’ lofts in the late 1920’s, having been inspired by the theory of creative indifference. This theory once used by us to represent a moment between two chairs, now offers itself at every moment… called the space between, when therapist opens completely to what is to come from our interaction with our client. Our “new” embodied relational Gestalt is a movement from unknown to unknown and arises between every intervention.
The cues that spark our creativity are present in every moment of shift between you and me. This may be a shift in breath, in skin, in eye movement, where attention goes missing, and is located in the ineffable mystery of feeling-knowing. This attentional willingness to return over and over again to zero, to not knowing, yields the magic of creativity that is given to artists and poets when they yield themselves to the creative void. It requires a degree of openness in our skin surface, in our state of relaxation, sans expectation, without the readiness that has not been part of everyday human living since we were hunters and gatherers and understood our survival depended on listening, smelling, sensing. Today the poets and painters are the inheritors of this way of living. There is a reason Gestalt therapy is now called an aesthetic – our meeting with our client is the canvas of our craft, where we and our client are the paint and the canvas both, co-creating each other following each stroke. My old teacher Jorge used to jokingly say Gestaltists were fear-junkies. Now we can say we are lovers of surprise. Like the river that never is in the same place we leap from wave to wave together – this is the creative life.
The artist takes their inspiration into creative form and is co-creator with their medium, or with an invisible audience. We are co-creators from the start. Gestalt teaches introverts and solitude lovers to play. The partnering within the therapy session produces mutual evolution, by a continuing process of stepping in and out of the creative void, making something and the something changes us, doorway after doorway, pathway after pathway. The field, the relational space, guarantees that the path is the only one to answer the client’s request of us. Parallel process imbues our work – it is no accident where we go, we don’t have to direct the work, we only have to rest in our cognitive frame long enough between leaps to reflect on its form and to satisfy our brain’s pattern of making sense. The product of our work doesn’t hang on the wall or sit in a book for long. The movement into our zero point is the process of creation itself, each destruction guarantees a new creation. Our therapy at its best is always refreshing and new.
Since its inception Gestalt therapy has asked us to not polarize – to be in the middle zone between ugly and beautiful, cruel and kind, yield and fight, deny and accept. Gestalt asks us to accept our part in the process of death into life into death. In this way Gestalt asks us to be more than what we imagine it is to be human by being part of the embodied universe. What Gestalt celebrates is that only when we are able to sense the violence and creativity of the field, do we have the courage to play in it. The nightmare that is currently described as our world is created and co-created as static pattern. At least this idea is what as a Gestalt therapist gives me comfort.
Each time I enter the zero point with you, we are aligning with creation itself. With each next arising, there is hope that a small shift and response has done something to the universe that has never happened before. Here’s to taking 2020 back to zero!
Jay Tropianskaia, Director of Training
Copyright December 2019