“Here and Now”

To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness

– Fritz Perls

Psychology is not only about Freud or Freudian, but most of its theories found their roots in Psychoanalysis. One of Freudian that developed other concept of psychotherapy is Fritz Perls. Fritz Perls is a German born Psychotherapist that (after a brief and unsatisfactory encounter with Freud) begin to work on “Gestalt Therapy”. Gestalt Therapy is a form of psychotherapy that relates to the process of human perception and works on a basic concept of the Gestalt approach which highlights more the process (what is taking place) and not the content (what is said about it). The stress is on what is happening, considered and felt right now rather than on what took place, might, could or should happen (definition taken from here).

To Perls, the most important thing to have a healthy mental state is being here and now, we need to gain our awareness of what we are experiencing and doing now. The power is in the present because the past is gone and the future has not yet happening. We cannot live our life if we keep reliving the past or worrying about the future. We need to move on from the past, and if there is something wrong in our past, based on gestalt therapy, we can not solve the problem just by trying to explain what we felt at that time but we have to re-enacting the past into the present. Role playing is often happen in a gestalt therapy so that we could reliving the distress situation and understand what is happening and also what we feel. Problems come from an unfinished business, the feeling that are unexpressed in the past. We might have to relive the feeling and understand it in order to be here and now. Living the moment (in gestalt theory) is much more helpful than just describe it in a detached way.

So, have you been here and now?

This post is a respond for Kak Ama’s

GESTALT PRAYER

“I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.”

(Fritz Perls, 1969)