To focus my awareness outside myself, I might light a candle, and watch it very attentively, as if I were going to have to draw or paint it from memory just afterward. When I notice that my attention has drifted off somewhere else, I gently "pick it up" and set it back down on the candle flame. If the "somewhere else" is a matter that's important for me to contemplate, I may jot down word about it on a scrap of paper so I'll remember to think about it later.

Sometimes I think of Gestalt work as akin to meditation on a candle flame. The person who is working is the candle, and I keep my attention intently focused on him or her. In one sense that's easier than meditating, because a person is inherently more interesting than a candle, with more to keep my attention engaged. But like the candle, if I notice that my attention is drifting off, I simply bring it back.

This metaphor is useful for Gestalt trainees, because thoughts such as, "Am I doing O.K.?" or "I wonder if my supervisor (or in a group, the other members of the group) thinks I'm doing all right?" often come up. When they do, that takes up part of the information-processing capacity of the brain, and leaves less attention available to focus on the client and be present in the process. So a trainee who notices that he or she is doing that can simply pick up his or her attention that's drifted into "concern about satisfactory work" and bring it back to hearing and noticing the client.

(At times, of course, a more assertive move to keep out distractions may be useful. I recall being in a training workshop with Miriam Polster many years ago and when she came into the room to watch me facilitate, about 75% of my attention went into concern with her opinion. After about three minutes of that, I turned my chair so that I couldn't see her, and then I was just fine.)

These days when my mind drifts away from the person here before me, I often take it as a clue that she's avoiding her real issue. At such times Fritz could be quite blunt: "I'm bored." I tend to be a little gentler: "I notice my mind drifting off. I wonder whether you're talking about what's really troubling you?" Almost it always, it isn't, and the person moves into what they truly need to deal with.

Yogic and Hindu spiritual traditions also make much of the concepts of "attachment" and "nonattachment." Some Eastern teachers push this to an extreme, asserting that we should detach from everything. Personally, I see no great value in detaching from, for instance, my feelings of love for my family. Nonetheless, many of our attachments indeed contribute to unnecessary suffering. Buddha declared that about a third of our suffering is an inevitable part of the human condition, but we ourselves create the other two thirds of it.

In Gestalt work, this concept can be translated into asking what someone is holding on to that he or she would do better to let go of. That "what" might be a person, a life pattern, or an idea about the way things are. For instance, a woman whose father died when she was young and whose stepfather left after a few years might be holding on to a foreboding that every time she gets close to a man he'll leave, so she sabotages every relationship she gets into as soon as it gets deep enough to trigger that panic button.

In such cases, exaggerating the holding on, going deeply into it, and exploring its emotional, mental, and behavioral dimensions may be needed before she can begin to let go. Then she can free herself from that old pattern and begin to make, ironically, a healthy emotional "attachment." Just as Fritz described healthy life as a rhythm of alternating contact and withdrawal, it is also a rhythm of alternating reaching out, holding, and letting go.

In the process of facilitation, students sometimes ask, "How can I detach from the sometimes-overwhelming grief, rage, hopelessness or other feeling of the client, rather than getting caught up in it? I can't help pull somebody out of a hole if I've fallen in there with them."

I like to say that while my chair appears to be just a few inches wider than I am, actually it's very, very wide. Early in the work, when I want to feel myself into a person's experience, I may move into the side of the chair that's next to them, and lean over toward them, and even use Richard Bandler and John Grinder's technique of unobtrusively sitting in almost exactly their posture, to get a sense of what their life and world are like. Then as they start getting deeply into their feelings, and I have a sense of what those feelings are, I'll move over three or four inches to the opposite side of the chair, physically distancing myself so that I can feel my own center and be in my own space. My use of the physical object of the chair itself is a useful "meditative" centering technique that helps me regulate my emotional responses.

Another useful spiritual concept is Zen master Roshi Shunryu Suzuki's term, "Beginner's Mind." He said, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few." Gestalt work requires a never-ending renewal of Beginner's Mind, no matter how expert we become. That was the great error of orthodox psychoanalysis: assuming I know more about what's occurring with a person than I really do--and then telling them what's going on with them and expecting them to believe it. (Interestingly enough, that's almost exactly how R.D. Laing described what parents do to their children in schizophrenogenic families.) In Gestalt work, by contrast, while inevitably I form guesses about what underlies someone's words or actions, I treat them as hypotheses and check them out. Some are right, some wrong. Each time one does not check out, I return to the Beginner's Mind of being present with what the person is feeling and doing now, while also being ready to respond to whatever comes up next.

This column is devoted to sharing and discussing aspects of working technique (and sometimes theory) used in the Gestalt process. If you've developed a useful addition to Gestalt work that you'd like to share, or know of an old technique or idea that you think has been neglected, please send it in and if it fits, we'll print it, giving you full credit for your contribution.

Call for Papers for Gestalt!:

We are always looking for good writing, interesting developments to share with the Global Gestalt community, and ways of sharing the wealth of Gestalt therapy with a wider audience. If you have an idea for an article, a piece of news, or if you have a bug in your bonnet and need to unload with a letter to the editor, please contact Philip Brownell, Sr. Editor, to discuss it (phil@g-gej.org).

Authors will find useful information at the Masthead for the journal, located at http://www.g-gej.org/masthead.