GESTALT THERAPY; Fritz Perls

Gestalt therapy emerged from the clinical work of two German psycho­therapists, Frederick Salomon Perls, M.D., and Lore Perls, Ph.D. F.S. Perls, known to many of his students as Fritz, was trained as a psychiatrist.

Gestalt therapy had a variety of psychological and philosophical influences, and in addition was a response to the social forces of its day. Gestalt is a growth-oriented  therapeutic, relational approach to living and working with people which is holistic (mind/body/culture) present-centered, and related to existential therapy in its emphasis on personal responsibility for action, and on the valuing of the I-thou relationship in therapy. The Gestalt approach embraces a person's whole life experience - physical, psychological, intellectual, emotional, interpersonal and spiritual.

The Gestalt practitioner pursues a relationship with a client that is respectful and attuned to the immediacy of what presents between them. The focus is on describing and understanding the unique personal experience of the client rather than interpreting and generalizing about their experience. The Gestalt practitioner also offers a delicate balance of support and challenge in addressing the hopes and concerns of clients. Interventions involving both the Gestalt practitioner and the client explore different and more fulfilling ways for clients to live their lives.

POLARITY THERAPY; Dr Randolph Stone

"Energy is the real substance behind the appearance of matter and forms."

Polarity Therapy is a comprehensive health system developed by Randolph Stone, DO, DC, ND (1890-1981), involving energy-based bodywork, diet, exercise and self-awareness. It works with the Human Energy Field, electromagnetic patterns expressed in mental, emotional and physical experience. In Polarity Therapy, health is viewed as a reflection of the condition of the energy field, and therapeutic methods are designed to balance the field for health benefit.

Drawing information from a wide range of sources, Dr Stone found that the Human Energy Field is affected by touch, diet, movement, sound, attitudes, relationships, life experience, trauma and environmental factors. Since Polarity Therapy lends an energy-based perspective to all these subjects, the scope of Polarity practice is often very broad, with implications for health professionals in many therapeutic disciplines. As a result, Polarity has strong, mutually supportive connections to many other holistic health systems.

Basic characteristics of the Human Energy Field are described in many sources, both ancient and modern. For example, the term "Polarity" refers to the universal pulsation of expansion/contraction or repulsion/attraction known as Yang and Yin in Oriental therapies. Similarly, Polarity integrates the "Three Principles and Five Chakras" of Aryuvedic tradition, and has been called the modern manifestation of ancient Hermetic Philosophy. At the same time Polarity Therapy also enjoys rich ties to modern science, which has confirmed its essential theme of energetic relationship as the basis of all phenomena.

In the Polarity model, health is experienced when energy systems function in their natural state; energy flows smoothly without significant blockage or fixation. When energy is unbalanced, blocked or fixed due to stress or other factors, pain and disease arise. Blockages generally manifest in sequence from the subtle to the dense levels of the field. Polarity Therapy seeks to find the blockages and release energy to normal flow patterns, and to maintain the Energy Field in an open, flexible condition.

BODY HARMONY; Don McFarland

Body Harmony is the name given to an integrated approach to bodywork and life skills pioneered by Don McFarland. Now practiced around the world, Body Harmony incorporates many of the numerous techniques available for working with the body, mind and spirit but what makes it particularly effective is the way it incorporates these into a touch that listens to the whole being.   

Body Harmony therapists work from the understanding that each body knows what will help it heal and the skill is in ‘listening' in such a way that a body feels safe to share the stories of its life and to take the steps to achieve the healing. This gives access to the body's natural healing abilities, inner wisdom and self confidence so Body Harmony promotes healing and personal effectiveness in all areas of life.  

Body Harmony works on all aspects of being, from the deep physical structure to the meta physical components.  Body Harmony practitioners recognize that current knowledge about the interactions between the physical, emotional and energetic is only in its infancy, whereas our own body (structure, physical, emotional and metaphysical) understands what it needs but can get stuck in painful protective patterns and emotional cycles meaning it may need a helping hand or listening ear to enact the movement toward health and harmony.

Don McFarland has extensive experience as both student and colleague of numerous pioneers in the fields of bodywork, breath work, healing, psychology, sports and dance medicine and observed that whatever system was being applied to a client's body, that body itself had its own opinions on what was being done, and how it was it was being done. It also had its own way of making those opinions known. Consistently confirmed in his own practice, he saw the most easily made, effective and long lasting changes were being achieved by the bodywork practitioners who were open both to listening to, AND to being guided by these body responses.

Developed from this, Body Harmony uses a usually gentle, non-invasive but responsive touch to encourage the whole being to release trauma and injury, increase energy flow and expand its movement; actively involving the individual as a participant in their own healing.  To achieve this, elements of many body work, healing and related methods from around the world may be recognizable within a session. The stories the body tells through indicators like movement and stillness, changes in breathing or in tensions and pulses under the practitioner's hand prompt and guide their application. No technique is applied in isolation ‘because it's good for you', nor is anything imposed.

According to client willingness and desire, Body Harmony can relieve stress and tension, relieve aches and pains and restore natural body movement so improving function, posture and presentation. It can accelerate physical and emotional healing and resolve issues held in the body to allow enhanced health, harmony, vitality and communication, increased success and prosperity, and improved interpersonal relationships.

COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS; Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), was a Swiss psychiatrist, one of the founding fathers of modern depth psychology and founder of the school of analytical psychology. He proposed and developed the concepts of the extroverted and introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. The issues that he dealt with arose from his personal experiences. For many years Jung felt as if he had two separate personalities. One introverted and the other extroverted. This interplay resulted in his study of integration and wholeness. Jung's most famous concept, the collective unconscious, has had a deep influence not only on psychology but also on philosophy and the arts. Jung developed his own theories systematically under the name of Analytical Psychology.

In many ways, Jung can be considered the 'father' of humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Along with Freud's "personal unconscious," Jung felt that he had discovered evidence for a "collective unconscious" shared by all human beings. While the personal unconscious is organized by complexes (i.e., Oedipal complex), the collective unconscious is characterized by "archetypes," "instinctual patterns of behavior and perception," which can be traced in dreams and myths. Joseph Campbell influenced by Jung, traced archetypal patterns in the mythologies of all cultures. Jung, in general, placed less emphasis on the sexual drives, since he felt the unconscious is driven by the process of "individuation," a drive toward wholeness and balance between the contrary forces of the psyche through the "transcendent function." Like the humanistic psychologists would argue, Jung felt that the unconscious is also a source of health and vitality rather than simply pathological forces. However, Jung also felt that the unconscious holds the potential for evil as well as good.

For Jung, the structures of the psyche are organized by unseen archetypal forces. He used many of the same terms as Freud, such as ego and unconscious, but they hold a different meaning when considered in the light of Jung's whole theory. The major structures of the psyche for Jung include the ego, which is comprised of the persona and the shadow. The persona is the 'mask' which the person presents the world, while the shadow holds the parts of the self which the person feels ashamed and guilty about. In men, the anima represents the feminine aspects of the psyche, while the animus represents the masculine aspects of the psyche in women. The whole of the archetypal organization of the person, for Jung, is called the Self, the unity of the whole towards which the individuation process strives for balance and harmony.

Jung believed that symbol creation was a key in understanding human nature. Symbol, as defined by Jung, is the best possible expression for something essentially unknown. He wanted to investigate the similarity of symbols that are located in different religious, mythological, and magical systems, which occur in many cultures and time periods. To account for these similar symbols occurring across different cultures and time periods he suggested the existence of two layers of the unconscious psyche. The first of the two layers was the personal unconscious. It contains what the individual has acquired in his or her life, but has been forgotten or repressed. The second layer is the collective unconscious, which contains the memory traces common to all humankind. These experiences form archetypes. These are innate predispositions to experience and symbolize certain situations in a distinct way. There are many archetypes such as having parents, finding a mate, having children, and confronting death. Very complex archetypes are found in all mythological and religious systems. Near the end of his life Jung added that the deepest layers of the unconscious function independently of the laws of space, time and causality. This is what gives rise to paranormal phenomena. The introvert and the extrovert are the main components of personality according to Jung. The introvert is quiet, withdrawn and interested in ideas rather than people. While the extrovert is outgoing and socially oriented. For Jung a person that had a healthy personality can realize these opposite tendencies within himself/herself and can express each. Dreams serve to compensate for any neglected parts of the personality.

NLP;(Neuro Linguistic Programming) Richard Bandler and John Grinder

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) was initially created in 1975 by Richard Bandler and John Grinder and studies the structure of how humans think and experience the world. Richard Bandler and John Grinder began modeling and duplicating the "magical results" of a few top communicators and therapists. Some of the first people to be studied included Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, gestalt therapist Fritz Perls and family therapist Virginia Satir.  From these models, techniques for quickly and effectively changing thoughts, behaviors and beliefs that limit you have been developed, commonly known as NLP. Since then, many others have contributed to the growth and development of the field.

Today, NLP is widely used in business to improve management, sales and achievement/performance, inter-personal skills; in education to better understand learning styles, develop rapport with students and parents and to aid in motivation; and of course, NLP is a profound set of tools for personal development.

FAMILY SYSTEMS; Alice Miller

Born in Poland in 1923, Miller was educated and lives in Switzerland. World-renowned therapist Alice Miller has devoted a lifetime to studying the cruelties inflicted on children. She studied philosophy, sociology, and psychology and took her doctorate in 1953. She completed her psychoanalytic training in Zurich, and as a practicing psychoanalyst she has been involved in teaching and training for more than 20 years. Her goal now is to inform future parents and former victims about the disastrous consequences of child abuse.

Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away. However, as adults, most abused children will suffer (and let others suffer) from these injuries. Some victims of this dynamic of violence can - deformed into hangmen - take revenge even on whole nations and become willing executors to horrible dictators like Hitler and other cruel leaders. Beaten children learn very early the violence they endured, which they may glorify and apply later as parents by believing that they deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love. They don't know that the only reason for the punishments, which they have to endure, is the fact that their parents themselves endured and learned violence without being able to question it. Later, the adults, once abused children, beat - without intending it - their own children and often feel grateful to their parents who mistreated them when they were small and defenseless.

In one of her books “The Body Never Lies” Miller goes further, investigating the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the adult body. Using numerous case histories gleaned from her practice, as well as examining the biographical stories of celebrated writers such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others, Miller shows how a child's emotional traumas, repressed humiliation, and bottled rage can manifest themselves as serious adult health problems. In discussing the lives of these literary giants, Miller explores the known or, in some cases, unknown traumas that haunted each author's childhood. More important, Miller connects the writers' painful childhoods with their later afflictions, which included depression, anorexia, cancer, and even insanity.

While examining everything from parental spanking to sexual abuse and emotional blackmail, Miller exposes the societal pressures that converge to harm children. She explains that we have so many societal mechanisms to prevent us from feeling anger or rage against our parents that we tend never to confront our own feelings. To combat the debilitating effects of such jarring and often contradictory emotions, Miller explores the benefits of using a therapist as an "Enlightened Witness" to reaffirm the patient's repressed reactions to a forgotten childhood experience.

FAMILY THERAPY; Virginia Satir

Virginia Satir is one of the key figures in the development of family therapy. She is referred to as "The Mother of Family System Therapy". Virginia Satir stayed at the forefront of human growth and family therapy until her death in 1988. Virginia was internationally recognized for her creativity in the practice of family therapy. Based on conviction that people are capable of continued growth, change and new understanding, her goal was to improve relationships and communication within the family unit. She believed that a healthy family life involved an open and reciprocal sharing of affection, feelings, and love.

Virginia Satir, the founder of the Satir model, believed that therapy is an intense experience with the inner Self. The therapist helps and encourages people not only to accept and deal with the pain and problems, but also to accept and live an inner joy and peace of mind. Satir taught her students that people learn beliefs from their family but that as adults these beliefs may no longer be useful to the individual. Being afraid to take a risk or letting fear stifle a person are ways of thinking and feeling that no longer serve that person's best interests.

Virginia was known for her special warmth and for her remarkable insight into human communication and self-esteem. For almost 50 years, Virginia Satir worked to help others to better realize their full human potentials. She believed that this involved a healing process of becoming aware of and connecting with our inner selves and then of contacting others from this center. During her lifetime, Virginia conducted hundreds of workshops and seminars around the world, which featured her classic communication stances and her "Human Validation Process Model". She focused on personal growth and health, rather than illness and pathology, and provided the environment in which individuals and families could develop and flourish. Virginia believed firmly that human beings across our planet are all connected. It was her conviction that healing of the human spirit and reaching out to connect with others through the universal life force, of which she believed we are all a part, is essential to world peace. She was well-known for describing family roles, such as "the rescuer" or "the placator," that function to constrain relationships and interactions in families. (Nichols & Schwartz, 1998. Family Therapy; Concepts and Methods. 4^th ed. Allyn & Bacon).

Satir helped people to reshape their way of problem solving into more positive ways. In working with a client, Satir was careful to be at their level either bending herself down or lifting a child up. Both eye contact and physical touching were important to her methods as was using a sense of humor. She was very aware of subtle, nonverbal cues both from the clients and in her own communication with them. She was known as a strong communicator and was very careful in what words she chose to use. Above all other therapists, Satir's was the most powerful voice to wholeheartedly support the importance of love and nurturance as being the most important healing aspects of therapy.

Honored for her innovative work in human relations, Virginia shared her insights with people throughout the world through books, workshops and training seminars. Virginia Satir's first book, Conjoint Family Therapy, published in 1964, remains a classic in the field and has been translated into several languages. She authored or co-authored eleven other books, among them Peoplemaking in 1972 and The New Peoplemaking in 1988, both of which have enjoyed large international audiences.

INNER CHILD; John Bradshaw      (Click here for Inner Child Workshop Information)

John Bradshaw has been called "America's leading personal growth expert." John Bradshaw has become a primary figure in the contemporary self-help movement
particularly in the fields of family systems, co-dependency, and addictions and recovery. He has written five New York Times bestsellers, Bradshaw On: The Family, Healing the Shame That Binds You, Homecoming, Creating Love, and Family Secrets. John pioneered the concept of the "Inner Child" and brought the term "dysfunctional family" into the mainstream. He has touched and changed millions of lives through his books, television series, and his lectures and workshops around the country.

John has lived everything he writes about. Born in Houston, Texas, into a troubled family, abandoned by his alcoholic father, he became a high academic achiever who was also an out-of-control teenager. He completed his education in Canada, where he studied for the Roman Catholic priesthood, earning three degrees from the University of Toronto. During the past twenty-five years he has worked as a counselor, theologian, management consultant, and public speaker, becoming one of the primary figures in the contemporary self-help movement. His message is quite profound yet simple. “I'm convinced that unless I know and understand the family system from which I came, I can't understand my true self and the society I live in. What has been said about cultural history is true of individuals: If we do not know our familial history, we are most likely to repeat it.”

 
EMOTIONS; Candace Pert

Candace Pert is an American neuroscientist and pharmacologist. Her groundbreaking book is Molecules of Emotion, the science behind mind and body medicine, published by Simon and Schuster. In this book she explores the question;Why do we feel the way we feel?

Until recently, Emotion was virtually impossible to define. The kinds of questions that needed to be answered include: how emotion is manifest, how memory and emotion interact, whether emotion is concrete (real) or conceptual (a construct), if concrete, how emotion acts in the body, and how unexpressed emotion is stored.  How do our thoughts and emotions affect our health? Are our bodies and minds distinct from each other or do they function together as parts of an interconnected system? 

Candace Pert, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist whose extraordinary career provides startling and decisive answers to these and other challenging questions that scientists and philosophers have pondered for centuries. For Dr. Pert, the mind is not just in the brain, it is also in the body. The vehicle that the mind and body use to communicate with each other is the chemistry of emotion. The chemicals in question are molecules, short chains of amino acids called peptides and receptors, that she believes to be the "biochemical correlate of emotion.” The peptides can be found in your brain, but also in your stomach, your muscles, your glands and all your major organs, sending messages back and forth. After decades of research, Dr. Pert is finally able to make clear how emotion creates the bridge between mind and body.

Her pioneering research on how the chemicals inside our bodies form a dynamic information network, linking mind and body, is not only provocative, it is revolutionary. By establishing the biomolecular basis for our emotions and explaining these new scientific developments in a clear and accessible way, Dr. Pert empowers us to understand ourselves, our feelings, and the connection between our minds and our bodies -- or bodyminds -- in ways we could never have imagined before. From explaining how there is a scientific basis to popular wisdom about phenomena such as 'gut feelings,' to making recent breakthroughs in cancer and AIDS research, Dr. Pert provides us with an intellectual adventure of the highest order.

Molecules of Emotion is a landmark work, full of insight and wisdom and possessing that rare power to change the way we see the world and ourselves. Dr. Pert's striking conclusion that it is our emotions and their biological components that establish the crucial link between mind and body does not, however, serve to repudiate modern medicine's gains; rather, her findings complement existing techniques by offering a new scientific understanding of the power of our minds and our feelings to affect our health and well-being. 

Dr. Pert explains that perception and awareness play a vital part in health and longevity. She is able to explain how her research bridges the mind and body gap that is sadly prevalent in modern traditional medicine. Her views on mind-body cellular communication mesh well with the concepts of energy held by many alternative therapies, and she is now, not surprisingly, a popular lecturer on the wellness circuit. Her book describes an eight-part program for a healthy lifestyle, and she has appended an extensive list of alternative medicine resources.  For all of those who have sought out complementary medicine, this book will confirm what you have long suspected: that alternative approaches to health do work. Dr. Pert explains why.

Do we treat physical conditions from an emotional point of view or vice versa?  Dr. Pert says," I honestly cannot differentiate the physical from the mental, vice versa. The answer is you simultaneously do both, because they're flip sides of the same thing... I think a key word is balance, but I do feel that the meditation if possible twice a day in some kind of ritualized and not free-form could be the cornerstone of a fitness program, along with exercise, which many studies have shown is the critical anti-aging variable in all kinds of animals and human beings."

Western medicine may say "it is all in your head" means that whatever is bothering a patient is therefore not important or real. According to Dr. Pert, the paradigm has got to shift. Even if it was entirely mental, thinking it's all in your head shows no awareness of the new research, suggesting the consciousness is a body-mind wide phenomenon. 

Dr. Pert believes emotions are the key to our physiology -- to coordinating all parts into a harmonious whole. It's the total qualities that engage different systems to act in a coordinated fashion. There's a historical denial of the importance of emotions in our culture, unfortunately. But the direct effects of shifts in consciousness on physical well-being are being studied.

In Molecules of Emotion you can read about the history of discovery of the various  neuropeptides and what parts of the body they are in, and what roles they play in physiology, intertwined with personal reminisces. Candace Pert teaches the interrelatedness of body and mind in reachable scientific terms. She's an inspiration to all of us in her never-ending quest for truth and wholeness in our bodyminds. Her book reads like a novel with the exception of a highly technical ending with a quick, but brief section on what steps you can take to help yourself. 

Masculine & Feminine

The Feminine and Masculine do not mean ‘woman’ and ‘man’, they are universal forces that exist within man and woman .(yin/yang).. and also exist within things and even geographical places. The Eastern spiritual traditions have for millennia observed that the masculine and feminine and co-creative forces that co-exist and cannot work in balance and harmony without the other. Within the western analytical tradition of Carl Jung and the work of mythologists such as Joseph Campbell, these two universal forces where deeply understood as archetypes and described in terms of anima and animus. In fact, Jung’s definition of spiritual growth within the individual related to the need to develop and integrate both of the male and female components of the human psyche in order to create a balanced, healthy individual.

So, what are the qualities of the Feminine and Masculine?…

Remember that we have both of these energies within us and as you read this, whether you are a man or a woman, you will identify with each of the qualities inherent within both of these forces.

Feminine: Is the force of life itself, It is the light of the divine and is therefore radiant, shines and glows and it is that part of us that wants to be seen. It is the force of attraction; of opening or closing to love and expanding or contracting in giving love. It is a force that is constantly shifting and changing, and at times it is wild, chaotic, unpredictable and destructive and sometimes it is nurturing, warm and life giving. The feminine is at home in the ebb and flow of life; in sensuality, sexuality, in receptivity and in the body. It is always seeks to feel full. The feminine is the flow of life, the seasons and cycles and the natural elements. It is rejuvenation, beauty and bountifulness and it is feeling/emotions, sensitivity, intuition and inherent bodily wisdom. Her domain is energy and bodily celebration. In relationships her greatest fear is rejection which compels her to love deeply and the feminine challenge is to stay open in the heart and in the body, no matter what she is the feeling.

 Masculine: Is the God force of Consciousness. It is at home outside of life in the domain if nothingness/emptiness and is the force of the unchanging, ever present witnessing consciousness. It is a presence that exists as truth, clarity and freedom and views life from an observational and transcendental position. The masculine is involved in a mission, a search or a project and functions in a world of tasks and goals. It grows through challenge and quest. It is directional, purposeful, one-pointed and relentless in it’s search for meaning. It stands outside of emotions, in thoughts and in knowledge and it’s greatest fear is failure, which compels the masculine to problem solve, fix it and seek solutions. In love, the masculine is either entering more deeply or pulling away to be free.

As we increase our awareness of these two dynamic forces, we can begin to understand that they actually work together to create sexual polarity and therefore, sexual attraction within our relationships. Putting these principles into practice reveals a revolutionary way to experience love and intimacy within our relationships. We can grow and evolve our relationships into unions that are deeply passionate, spiritual and sexually fulfilling and are completely committed to love.

( see workshops page for offerings of seminars and group work that teach these principles)