Restoring Balance
shifting our attention can change the world
"We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are." — Anaïs Nin
As a psychotherapist, I spend most of my day helping people navigate the pickles they find themselves in - their pain, their fear, their suffering. My approach to helping them is rooted in exploring their meaning-making: How do they perceive their world? How do they interact with their environment? How do they approach the difficulties they face?
This inquiry is at the heart of embodied relationality, a term I use to describe a way of being that restores our sense of belonging to the larger field of life. My method for helping clients explore these questions is grounded in Gestalt Awareness Practice, which teaches that meaning arises from the relationship between figure and ground - the interplay between what we focus on and the broader context in which it appears. For example, a child running down the sidewalk crying alone is perceived differently than a child running toward its mother for comfort. The background shifts the meaning entirely.
Many of my clients suffer because their configurations, or Gestalts, are no longer useful to them. They need to make a “creative adjustment” - a shift in their figure/ground relationship. This is where I come in. I facilitate experiments in which they explore shifting their attention, expanding their awareness, and developing new ways of relating to their experiences. This work can be both playful and deeply challenging, as these patterns are often embedded in our being, formed in early life when making sense of an imperfect parenting environment was essential for survival.
We are collectively facing a similar challenge. My Substack began 16 months ago with an observation about the Liminal Web: Where are all the women? A simple question with profound implications. But its significance only emerges when placed in its proper context. The Liminal Web, while just a sliver of the internet, reflects a broader pattern, one that shapes not only our institutions and systems but also our very perception of reality. We are living at a moment of exponential growth reaching planetary limits, with the only solutions on the table veering dangerously toward authoritarianism by men. This isn’t just a political, economic and ecological crisis; it’s a crisis of perception.
We must no longer be afraid to name what we see: our predominant paradigm favors narrow, focused attention (figure) with little appreciation for the context from which it arises (ground). In other words, our figure/ground relationship is distorted. This isn’t just an abstract problem - it’s embedded in how we relate to one another and the world around us. Studies show that men tend to favor narrow, object-oriented attention (curious about things), while women lean toward broad-based, relational attention (interest in connections between people).1 The issue is not that one mode of attention is better than the other, but that a world ruled primarily by one mode of perception has led us to this crisis. We need to repair this imbalance, bringing both forms of attention into better alignment.
This imbalance is more than just cognitive; it’s deeply woven into how we structure our systems, how we make decisions, and even how we define agency. Addressing the metacrisis requires not just new policies or innovations, but a fundamental shift in how we perceive and relate. The dominant narrative of individualism and control must give way to a more nuanced understanding of interdependence and creative communion. The mature feminine spirit - rooted in care, responsiveness, and an appreciation of context - is not a counterforce to the mature masculine spirit but its necessary complement.
I encourage us to cultivate our broad-based awareness, develop greater agency in what we attend to, and ultimately, play a more active role in shaping the world we belong to.
Because the way we pay attention determines the future we create.
Scientific evidence suggests differences in the wiring of female and male brains, particularly in structures associated with the default mode network (self-reflection), striatum (motor planning), and limbic system (emotional regulation). These results seem to map onto the research which indicates differences in what women and men prefer to pay attention to.