FROM A CANDLE FLAME AND A CHAIR TO ATTACHMENT, DETACHMENT, AND “BEGINNER’S MIND”

Gestalt! ISSN 1091-1766
The Working Corner
Victor Daniels, PhD

ABSTRACT     

Three meditative and awareness processes are briefly compared, and the dynamics of and uses of attention in meditation and in Gestalt Therapy are discussed, with special attention to those useful for trainees in the Gestalt process. Yogic concepts of attachment and nonattachment are translated into work with “holding on” and “letting go” in the gestalt process, and a technique trainees can use to remain centered and avoid enmeshment in the client’s emotions is described. The Zen concept of “Beginner’s Mind” is integrated with the scientific conception of “hypotheses” as a way to avoid premature commitment to potentially mistaken interpretations.

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The Gestalt Awareness Continuum, George Gurdjieff’s “Self-Remembering,” and the Yogic practice of cultivating “The Witness” in meditation all have in common the process of noticing what I’m doing as I do it. Reduced to its most basic form, this

is the essential meditative practice: Do nothing more than breathe, and be aware of my breathing as I do it. If I focus my awareness outside myself, I may light a candle, and simply watch the candle and its flame (very attentively, as if I were going to have to draw or paint it from memory just afterward). Whenever 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” it has drifted is a matter that’s important for me to think about, I may jot a word or two about it down on a scrap of paper that’s sitting by my side so I’ll remember to contemplate it later.

I sometimes think of Gestalt work as akin to meditating 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 attracted and engaged. But like the candle, if I notice that my attention is drifting off, I simply bring it back.

This metaphor is useful for beginning students of the Gestalt process, because thoughts like, “Am I doing it O.K.?” or “I wonder if my supervisor—or in a group, the other members of the group—think I’m doing it all right” often come up. When they do, that takes up part of the information-processing capacity of my mind, and leaves less attention available to focus on the client and be present with 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 okayness” and bring it back to hearing and noticing the client.

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

Yogic and Hindu spiritual traditions also make much of the concepts of “attachment” and “nonattachment.” Some Eastern teachers push this to an extreme that I think is not useful, 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 do 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 rest of it.) In Gestalt work, this concept translates 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 a healthy life as a rhythm of alternating contact and withdrawal, it is also a rhythm of alternating reaching out, holding on, and letting go.

These days when my mind drifts away from the candle flame of the person here before me, I often take it as a clue that the person is avoiding his or her real issue. At such times Fritz was sometimes quite blunt: “I’m bored.” While inevitably I sometimes form guesses about what underlies someone’s words or actions, I treat them as hypotheses, and check them out, and each time one does not check out, 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. I tend to be a little gentler: “I notice my mind drifting off. I wonder whether what you’re talking about is the issue that’s really troubling you?” Almost it always, it isn’t, and the person moves into what they really need to deal with.

In the process of facilitation, students sometimes ask, “How can I detach from the sometimes-overwhelming grief or rage or hopelessness or other feeling of the person who is working rather than getting caught up in it?

I have a little trick that helps with that. I tell them 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 the client’s experience, I move into the side of the chair that’s next to them, and lean over toward them, and may even use Richard Bandler and John Grinder’s technique of unobtrusively sitting in almost their own position and posture, to get a sense of what their life and world are like for them. But I can’t help pull somebody out of a hole if I fall in too. So as they start getting deeply into their feelings, and I’ve gotten a sense of what those are, I’ll move three or four inches into 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 chair itself, the physical object, is useful in helping me regulate my own emotional responses.

A last point I’ll mention here is Zen Roshi Shunryu Suzuki’s concept of “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 buy 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, we view the process as a voyage of discovery and help the client develop his or her self-awareness (like the Yogic concept of “the witness”) and come to his or her own realizations.

Victor Daniels, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Psychology,
Sonoma State University.