Embracing Change

By understanding the natural cycles of life

‘Her Journey’ original artwork by Gaia Orion and puzzle of the same image available for purchase by Stumpcraft

“Her life is a series of cycles within each other. She is experiencing, learning, growing each day as well as through monthly moon cycles, seasons passing and stages of life.”

About ‘Her Journey’ by Gaia Orion

As a Gestalt therapist, I am attuned to the natural rhythms of life. Everything is in a constant state of coming and going. The changing seasons reflect how we move through our lives, mirroring the natural way of existence. Each season brings unique qualities that parallel different phases of this cycle.

In spring, the emergence of new life from dormant seeds signals initiation and renewal. Summer, with its warmth and light, corresponds to periods of abundance and expansion when what is at its peak thrives and is most alive. Autumn delivers the harvest as nature begins to shed its leaves, reflecting a phase of contraction where what has formed is released, and what no longer serves is let go. Winter brings rest, introspection, and integration as nature slows, echoing an inward turn for integrating growth achieved. This cycle of seasons offers a structure through which to honor each phase of life with understanding and compassion.

As in nature, the contact cycle forms the basis of the Gestalt approach to living in harmony with the environment. The idea assumes that anything we want or need goes through a sequence of stages:

1. We are at rest and our field of consciousness is undifferentiated.¹

2. A need or want emerges and we begin to become differentiated – we may consider this an urge that arises (which could be registered as physical, psychological, or spiritual or a combination of any of these impulses). We may or may not be clear exactly what is needed before proceeding. However, our arousal points us toward external sources of possible fulfillment.

3. Our energy is now mobilized and we scan the field for possible sources of need satisfaction. Depending on the need, this endeavor may be a brief process or might require making inquiries of various kinds.

4. We choose one, under whatever constraints may be operating, and move towards it in order to get it.

5. We make contact with it and experience it.²

6. We judge it to be suitable or unsuitable and either continue with it or go back to step 3 for further scanning.³

7. Once contact is made we experience the blissful state of satisfaction.⁴

8. Afterwards we withdraw and our energy now goes inwards again, fully digesting or integrating the experience. This is considered growth. We are now ready for a new cycle to begin.

For example, as I am writing, I realize that my lips are dry and my mouth is parched. I get up, pour a glass of water and then return to writing. In response to my feeling of thirst, I shift my frame of awareness from my writing, to drinking water, and then back to my writing. The act of drinking water satisfies my thirst, which completes the Gestalt and I am free to return to my work without distraction.

In Gestalt therapy, life is considered to be a series of contact cycles as small as moment to moment and as broad as a life time, from birth to death. Good contact consists creative adjustments or becoming aware of the shifting insides, outsides, and ‘in between’ as life moves towards its choiceless completions. Good contact is the model of health in Gestalt therapy.

However, few of us actually move seamlessly through life. The following list indicates all the places where our energy can get stuck or where contact can become disturbed:

1. Some people have difficulty reaching a point of rest and may never do so.

2. Some people are not aware of their needs.

3. Some people cannot mobilize their energy.

4. Some people cannot make a choice between alternatives.

5. Some people cannot fully experience anything.

6. Some people cannot discriminate between what is good for them and what is not.

7. Some people cannot experience satisfaction.

8. Some people cannot withdraw.

Each of these points along the cycle suggests a pooling of energy which is a problem that comes with observable symptoms. In other words, unhealthy living results when one’s attention jumps from one figure to the other, without ever achieving wholeness.⁵

One clear example of this type of challenge is evident in our relationship with our phones. If we are working on something important and our phone sends us a non-urgent message, we can make a decision to ignore it and continue our work. However, if we allow ourselves to be distracted each time our phone makes a sound, we may never finish what we are doing. In essence, we are hung up somewhere on the Gestalt completion cycle. We have experienced an ‘interruption to contact.’

Healthy living requires us to attend flexibly and intentionally to the most crucial figure in our awareness, make good contact with it, and then decide whether to subsume it into a new Gestalt or reject it altogether.⁶ In this way, our narrow focus on ‘grasping’ parts of reality must be well balanced with our broad-based awareness of an overarching, interpenetrating whole.⁷

By familiarizing ourselves with the Gestalt cycle, we can better identify where our problem area is and help ourselves retrieve and grow the necessary aspects of the self to move on towards better contact, more aliveness, and greater fulfillment in relationship to reality as it is.⁸

A special thanks to Gaia Orion, Siri Olsen and Jasen Robillard for allowing me to use their works of art to illustrate my ideas. Siri Olsen has written up a blog post about “Her Journey” on Stumpcraft. I encourage you to check out Siri and Jasen’s puzzles as well. Jasen explains, "We want our puzzlers to realize that through careful and intentional curation of their attention, they can accomplish difficult tasks that are worthy of pursuit. Our craft is to create transformational works of art, connection, and meaning." I look forward to sharing more about Gestalt formation, puzzling and Stumpcraft in a future article.

1. Undifferentiated awareness or ‘ground’ in GT can be considered broad-based attention of the right hemisphere of the brain.

2. Our ‘grasping’ something for need fulfillment or ‘figure’ in GT can be considered narrow-focused attention of the left hemisphere of the brain.

3. In The Master and His Emissary Iain McGilchrist expresses this process of analysis and reality testing which consists of the ‘right, left, right’ hemispheric functioning as “all that is to be known must initially ‘presence’ to the right hemisphere (we have no other access); then be transferred to the left hemisphere so as to gain expression through re-presentation; and that re-presentation returned to the right hemisphere where it is either recognised for its consonance with the initial presencing and subsumed into a new Gestalt, or rejected.”

4. The way figure and ground hang together forms a Gestalt or a configuration which is how we organize our moments, our experiences, and create meaning.

5. In The Master and His Emissary McGilchrist considers this reductive, mechanistic, left-hemispheric attention as ‘left-hemispheric chauvinism.’ Moreover, David McIlory, in Understanding Iain McGilchrist's Worldview, explains: “In unhealthy individuals, groups, and societies, the move to isolate and manipulate is the primary move, and the left hemisphere creates a feedback loop that fails to acknowledge the reality of that which can be embraced but cannot be grasped, that which must be accepted but cannot be captured in words."

6. In Understanding Iain McGilchrist's Worldview, David McIlory points out: "McGilchrist’s argument is that healthy individuals, groups, and societies approach the world first via the right hemisphere, reacting to what is found there to form an impression of how everything links together; then the left hemisphere looks in detail at elements that can become objects of human action in isolation, and then the results of the left hemisphere’s inspection are returned to the right hemisphere where the individual elements are reintegrated into a more profound understanding of the whole.”

7. This careful calibration, identified by Jonathan Rowson as ‘The McGilchrist Manoeuvre,’ refers to “the hemispheric hypothesis developed in (Iain McGilchrist’s) The Master and his Emissary expressed as the ‘right, left, right’ functioning of our brains.”

8. In Dancing with the Present Moment, I suggest the concept of ‘right hemispheric midwifery’ to restore balance to the left-hemispheric attention that currently seems to dominate our minds. I use Gestalt therapy principles to illustrate this idea.