Gestalt at Esalen

Practices to cultivate embodied, present-moment awareness toward radical aliveness.

Fritz Perls in a Gestalt session.

Gestalt arrived at Esalen in the early sixties with the provocative methods (in some views, the bullying) of Fritz Perls. The Gestalt psychology model emerged a century ago as a research-based program to study the human mind, focusing on attention, intention, and the hidden processes of human perception. Gestalt therapy then grew out of this theory base around the mid-century with its characteristic emphases on present emotional and body experience, desire and challenge, and meaning-making in relationship.

Gestalt was relational from the start — from its most basic commitment to the dynamics of its famous “figure-ground” relationship to the influence of social dynamics on individual experience. Perls, who made Esalen his home and lab until 1969, however, took the model in perhaps a rigidly individualistic direction, leading to the neglect of relationship, commitment, and care. He was deeply marked by his own experiences as a refugee from European fascism in the 1930s and ’40s, which influenced his focus on self-assertion and resistance to conformism and social pressure. Perls often used body experience and role-play to unlock old, out-of-date adaptations and out-of-awareness interpersonal habits and styles.

Fritz Perls leads a staff exercise on the Esalen lawn, 1966.

“I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.” This was Fritz’s
belief system. It reflected the ’60s-era emphasis on personal responsibility and the importance of living authentically, as opposed to conforming to external standards or expectations.

Dick Price in a Gestalt session in what is now the Fritz House.

A corrective reassessment of the model was then championed by a new generation of Gestalt-trained teachers, including Gordon Wheeler, a leading author and teacher of this movement, who brought these new emphases to Esalen in the ’90s. They complemented and fit well with co-founder Dick Price’s adaptation of Gestalt therapy into “Gestalt process” — a community-based model for open mutual exploration of awareness, presence, responsibility, and emotional learning.

“Dick would offer a community open seat in the afternoon two or three times a week. I walked into an open seat session and was completely captivated by the way he was being with the person sitting next to him. It was the level of presence that he brought but also this feeling of acceptance. Whatever the person said or did, Dick was okay with and curious about. He didn’t have an agenda for where the session was supposed to go, what they were supposed to say or do, or how they were supposed to be. He took the suffering he experienced in the psychiatric institution he had been in, and used what happened to him to help other people.” — Dorothy Charles, Gestalt facilitator and Esalen faculty.

Gordon Wheeler co-facilitates a Gestalt practice.

Today, relational Gestalt therapy has spread across the world, inspiring and influencing many or most of the contemporary present-centered and emotion-based therapy models, as well as providing the basic brain/mind model of challenge, adaptation, and habituation underlying the contemporary revolution in cognitive neuroscience. The model’s influence is felt as well in the flourishing fields of social/emotional learning, emotional intelligence, and holistic education, and Esalen is committed to furthering its reach through our public programs, invitational symposia, and research-and-practice conferences.