Gestalt Quotes

“To live in the way of the Gestalt:
1. Live now. Concern yourself with the present before the past or the future.
2. Live here. Deal with what is present rather than with what is absent.
3. Stop imagining. Experience the real.
4. Stop unnecessary thinking. Rather, taste and see.
5. Express rather than manipulate, explain, justify, or judge.
6. Give in to unpleasantness and pain just as to pleasure. Do not restrict your awareness.
7. Accept no "should" or "must" other than your own. Adore no idol.
8. Take full responsibility for your actions, feelings, and thoughts.
9. Accept being as you are.”
― Claudio Naranjo

“Things change as they are discovered.”
― Joel Latner, The Gestalt Therapy Book: A holistic guide to the theory, principles, and techniques of Gestalt therapy developed by Frederick S. Perls and others

“To be aware is to be responsible. In Gestalt therapy, this word is used in two ways. First, we are responsible if we are aware of what is happening to us. To take responsibility means, in part, to embrace our existence as it occurs. The other and related meaning of responsibility is that we own up to our acts, impulses, and feelings. We identify with them, accepting all of what we do as ours.
These are distinct and different meanings. We are responsible for things we clearly do - for being angry, or obstinate, or irresponsible; for breaking dishes and giving gifts. We are responsible as well for the injuries inflicted on us, and the presents we receive, for what is done to us. Here we are responsible for our part in the event - for the pain we feel and the taking of the gift. When it rains, we get wet. While we didn't make it rain, we are responsible for being wet. We are also responsible for our middle mode experiences, for the things we participate in and give ourselves to. We do not make ourselves love, or hate, but they are the feelings we have. We are responsible for having those feelings, not because we caused them to be, but because they are our existence at this moment.”
― Joel Latner, The Gestalt Therapy Book: A holistic guide to the theory, principles, and techniques of Gestalt therapy developed by Frederick S. Perls and others

“Unfortunately, the two hemispheres of our brain have become separated, and no longer function as a holistic gestalt.”
― Laurence Galian, Beyond Duality: The Art of Transcendence

“The flexibility of the human mind - its ability to flip frames, shift gestalts, or reconstruct events – is a wondrous talent. But it makes it difficult to predict how person will think and talk about a given situation. When I hit a wall with the stick, am I affecting the stick by moving it to the wall, or affecting the wall using the stick as an instrument?”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Gestalt means whole, and so are you.”
― Jan Deelstra, Escaping the Chrysalis: Introduction to Gestalt Techniques for Self-Esteem Transformation

“Each of us is a “cell” of the Absolute Mind. If we can expand our minds, we can tune into Absolute Mind, the Mind of God. We ourselves, if we can harness Absolute Mind, can become God.”
― Michael Faust, God Genesis

“I contemplate a tree.
I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.
I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the suckling of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air - and the growing itself in its darkness.”
― Martin Buber

“from the foreword by Dan Bloom:
It[this book] is a call for us gestalt therapists to welcome our patients as fellow beings-in the embodied life-word where we meet in a "primordial contact," that is, in an "embodied perception" that makes knowing one anotehr, contact one another, possible. Kennedy inevitably takes this a step further. [it is in the trust of this meeting that the healing happens. It is this dialogic contact in their shared world, an embodied meeting, that heals not only the client but the therapist also.”
― Desmond Kennedy, Healing Perception

“Die zwiebelartige Gestalt des Bewusstseins drückt zwar zum einen verschiedene Bewusstseinszustände aus, zeigt aber gleichzeitig, dass alle Zustände untrennbar verbunden und Teil einer Einheit sind.”
― Sarina Samaya, Radikal verbunden: Über traumatisierende Herrschaft und den spirituellen Aktivismus als Brücke zwischen sozio-politischem Aufdecken und mitfühlender Bezogenheit

“... a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’.
To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three
dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The whole is less than the sum of its assholes.”
― Brian Spellman, We have our difference in common 2.

“Life would be easier if we surrounded ourselves only with people like us. But we would never learn to enjoy conflict and tension, which are essential for intellectual growth.”
― Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly

“Reich’s genius birthed tools we’ve yet to fully grasp: his character armor and muscular armoring concepts seeded ego psychology, body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy (Fritz Perls), bioenergetic analysis (Alexander Lowen), primal therapy (Arthur Janov), and the Radix of Charles R. Kelley. Beyond these, his mind-body vision ripples through newer somatic therapies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Somatic Experiencing (Peter A. Levine), healing trauma via bodily sensations; Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden), merging somatic and cognitive trauma work; Core Energetics (John Pierrakos), blending bioenergetics with spirit; Hakomi Therapy (Ron Kurtz), mindful body-centered discovery; Bodynamic Analysis (Lisbeth Marcher), trauma through body-mind interplay; and Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®, David Berceli), freeing tension with neurogenic tremors.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion