 At many levels I oriented to such a huge shift in my physical being. As a child I spent a lot of time in the hospital and would sit for large parts of a day in secluded areas and be in direct contact and awareness of my immediate physical world without thought or distraction. I found comfort in the warmth of sunlight on bricks and could watch the movement of the sun and shadow across a wall or a desk.
I read later of similar experiences by phenomenologist and mystic Wilson Van Dusen as a child and understood the rapture of the poet Wordsworth in watching London awaken on a spring morning. I found an unexpected bond in being with people experiencing schizophrenia as a disorder of their being and an understanding of the importance of being of-the-land for Australian aboriginal people.
As my friend drove me through the wilderness of the First National Park on the one hour trip to the airport in Sydney I looked at the Sydney skyline in the distance with the Sydney Tower looking like a large needle. I enjoy this feeling of being in Australia where the largest city can be viewed from wilderness only a half hour from the city center.
I started to think about the possibility of this article as the plane took off, as I knew I had thirteen hours of flying across an ocean to reach San Francisco and the different leg room sizes of all the different airplanes. I engaged in a discussion with the stewardess about this. She agreed that some airlines pack people in . When we were all fed and most were asleep, I awoke to watch the guy at the window try to sleep with his feet up on the exit door. The slope was too much and while he could doze off for a while, his legs eventually started to relax and slip down the door to wake him up. He tried a new position augmented by a pillow pushed against the window to wedge his feet in.
Once in America, I hip-hopped across the country, and as I got on the plane in Colorado, I mused that if the air was contained and circulated within the plane, we'd be bringing air from Colorado to Cleveland. I remembered learning full Yogic breathing and how we tend not to use all our lungs, and I wondered if deep down inside my lungs there might be air from Australia. I began to realize the direct, tangible reality of being a physical presence and moving from one part of the world to the other, bringing with me some of the physicality of where I was.
This might seem a strange thought; however, I was reminded of the connectivity of the field while in therapy when I realized we were breathing each other's breath. As I sat on the plane, I thought about how, both as a physical reality and as a metaphor, we were all coming from different parts of the world to form a new configuration of the field and to breath each other's breath and to connect in ways that were within and beyond our individual awarenesses.
This awareness of a physical shift of person and breathe somehow amplified the shift in the field. While I could not bring with me the land I live on and the views I see and the air I breath, I could bring my little packet of mints bought in the airport at Sydney and share them with someone in Cleveland. At some level I felt a childish pleasure, like my early comfort of the sun on a brick wall, to experience a physical correlate of the multitude of diverse elements of field which were coming together in what my mind labeled a conference.
Suddenly, the stewardess called out my name, and I began to worry that something had happened back home. My heart beat harder. I didn't know what would happen next, and I became very alert. I put my hand up.
She said, "Mr. O'Neill, here's a note for you from two other passengers." I read a note from Joseph Handlon and Isabel Fredericson, the Co-Chairs of the Conference Program Committee, which told me they were on the plane. I turned around and saw two beautiful people waving to me further down the aisle. The conference had begun.
How do I convey the experience of that coming together of three hundred like-minded (and hearted) souls from across the world? The creation of a field of intense flux and aliveness, where the land that I belong to was one of human form which quickly shifted and moved and felt and thought and loved. Some people, like landforms, were familiar, like finding one's chair unexpectedly at an airport lounge, so I held them and hugged them and felt the comfort of a strange intimacy. This was not hard to do when the people I met again from the first conference were people such as Bob and Rita Resnick, Liv Estrup, Charlie Bowman, Susan Gregory, Jacques Djete Beugre, and Phil Brownell.
My mind flashed with so many images and feelings, times, places, and clear faces which looked at me with a direct alive awareness. I sensed a collective between, which was like the sunlight shining on the brick wall of my childhood. It may not seem like a compliment, yet each of these people became my landforms in a Country of Spirit (to quote Wilson Van Dusen), and worst still, were bricks in my sunlit brick wall.
This alive, shifting landform of people quickened in energy at the wonderful community meetings where I and so many others who were strangers to this land of America were welcomed. A point was made to include and highlight and applaud those who had traveled so far. Those community meetings, the underpinning and foundation that held and contained the lively figure of a conference, were undertaken with worry and strife and humor and love. I tingled as I connected to the passion of those who spoke, and in particular to the metaphor of love and passion used by Joe Melnick in talking about the Gestalt Review, followed by the equal passion of a woman who stepped forward to support him and who introduced herself as Sonia (March Nevis).
I was so touched that I stood up in front of the community and said, "I have a lover in Australia (the Australian Gestalt Journal) and I now feel the passion of this lover in America, as we reach and hold hands and look at each other."
At the break I went out to shop, and, as I wandered through a lady's underwear store to buy a present for my wife, I was confronted by a woman.
"I want to talk to you. I hear you are my husband's lover."
I felt caught up in some weird dream in an underwear shop in Cleveland so far from home. "Look, I'm from Australia. I don t even know you."
"No. It's you. You're my husband's lover."
Somehow, the juxtaposition of my potential homosexuality along with those fervent accusations of that strange woman in a lingerie shop caused my mind to spin like wheels caught in wed mud. It didn't t help that the sales woman was looking on with a mixture of what appeared to be interest and concern.
I felt that my nationality and living so far away was the only and best argument. "No. Look, you've obviously mixed me up with someone else, and I'm from Australia!"
The woman started to smile. "Hi. I'm Joe's wife."
The workshops and the presentations followed in due course, and the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland hosted a most spectacular dinner dance celebration.
One of the strongest and most lively figures to emerge in this conference, however, was that a clear international voice was heard coupled to the honoring of the role America has played in shaping and contributing to the initial formation of Gestalt therapy. This was particularly evident in the welcome by Joseph Handlon and Isabel Fredericson when they introduced Selma Ciornai (Brazil), Jacques Djete Beugre (Africa), and Sean Gaffney (Europe). Their keynote panel presentation was titled "Reaching Out-Reaching In: Voices from Three Continents." To paraphrase Sean, Gestalt therapy began in Europe, came to America and returned to Europe. It's time it came back to America. This theme continued with the video presentation by Bob Resnick and Tom Cavdarovski when the entire conference listened to Gestalt therapy trainees in Eastern Europe talk of the humanizing impact of Gestalt therapy in their work and lives. Many people in the audience cried.
A final, personal impact for me happened when I attended the workshop on the last day, "Adding Women's Voices: Feminism and Gestalt Therapy," presented by M'lou Caring, Cynthia Cook, Gail Feinstein, Iris Fodor, Alice Gerstman, Susan Jurkowski, Maria Kirchener, and Ruth Wolfert. I discovered here in this workshop another important shift in the landform of Gestalt therapy, and a place that I also felt at home.
The workshop began by creating a receptive awareness in body and breath through a guided breathing and imagery exercise. I became very conscious of being male and of being the only male in the room full of women. This became particularly the case when someone said, "Now imagine your vagina and breath into your vagina."
There were a few little giggles around the room, which I experienced as a warm acknowledgment of my maleness and the Seinfield-like humor of a man sitting in a women's group. As we progressed, I associated this experience with the sacredness that Australian aboriginal people give to men's business and women's business, and I was very conscious of the way I was being included in women's business.
Initially, the group focused on the impact of words in Gestalt texts and how the eschewed use of the male pronoun can lead to a blurred boundary wherein stereotypes can be confluently assimilated. I felt the impact physically of these eschewed stereotypes when the pronouns where changed. As we all talked and cried and shared our experiences, I realized that here was people's business - a conjoint honoring of the difference between men and women while using this difference to support each other in our uniqueness and commonality.
On the Sunday afternoon when nearly everyone had left, I wandered around the grand ball room and felt as empty as the room itself. I looked at the policemen setting up for the next conference and wondered if they would enjoy themselves as much as we had. When I hugged Charlie Bowman in the foyer, I realized how quickly the human landform had changed when I looked around to see numerous policemen looking somewhat suspiciously at two men hugging with passion in the middle of the Cleveland Hilton. On the way home I stopped at Los Angeles for two days and decided to stay at a hotel despite the generous offer from Bob and Rita Resnick to stay with them. I felt a need for space and withdrawal to recover from the intensity of this experience. The hotel room was empty and cold like the ballroom in Cleveland. No familiar landscape, even though I'd enjoyed my stay here last time.
I rang up Rita. "Rita, can I come home?"
"Sure!" |
