The Body Politic
“The Jungian view of completing our own individuation, where we will achieve the completion of the threads we are currently working on in our life, allows us to complete a Gestalt, or achieve the goals of one part of a complex psycho-sociological whole. … If we chose to make contact with this aspect of our lived experience we would be the fish who has leaped out of the water, gained an awareness of the water, and can now navigate the currents more effectively.”
— Vijay Ramanathan
What this current social landscape needs is precise language to offer direction in how to connect our present-centered awareness and our current authentic lived experiences. Gestalt psychology gives us the tools to confront what’s blocking us from present-centered awareness and offers some avenues for releasing the persistent energies that block contact at this moment. “No individual is self-sufficient; the individual can exist only in an environmental field” (Perls, 1989, p. 16). The principal vehicle by which we make contact is our bodies. We can raise awareness of what’s encoded in our bodies and discover its origins in the overlapping environmental field. In order for me to address the phenomena of racially motivated violence, we must see how this infiltrates all of our minds. Centuries of systemic racism have been written in all bodies, regardless of the individual’s skin tone. Resmaa Menaken addresses this when he writes about the encoding of white supremacy in both white and dark-skinned bodies in the book My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. This revelation was a familiar shock to me, both surprising and at the same time known.
This entry will investigate some of the tools available to deepen somatic awareness and uproot the imprint of systemic oppression in our bodies. One avenue is to draw from a Gestalt intervention, to cultivate “wu-hsin (or idealessness), which consists, as Watts puts it, of ‘the ability to retain one’s normal and everyday consciousness and at the same time let go of it” (Naranjo, 2000, p. 23). As immersed and invested as we are in our ongoing psychodramas informed by the narratives we tell ourselves, we would need to develop a witness consciousness in order to gain the perspective needed for true present-centered contact. Buddhists refer to one aspect of our blindness to the moment as shengpa, ‘the hook’ that captures our attention pulling us towards some psychological current, like water rapids driving us away from the moment with extreme power. Stella Resnick illustrates a possible remedy with the analogy of the fish who lacks awareness of the water in which it is immersed, due to a lack of perspective. The goal “is simply to get the person to see the whole process clearly, without the blindness caused by taking parts of it for granted” (Resnick, 1975, p, 225).
The crossroads between Analytical and Gestalt Psychology is enactment, when “we experience primarily the personal unconscious: those conflicts and difficulties (as well as untapped capabilities) that are specifically our own, having risen from our particular life history. Enactment of transpersonal, archetypal contents, on the other hand, constitutes a ritual” (Smith, et al., 1997, p. 95). Ritual, in this context, is one intervention to implement the Gestalt approach to perform an action from witness consciousness. The Jungian view of completing our own individuation, where we will achieve the completion of the threads we are currently working on in our life, allows us to complete a Gestalt, or achieve the goals of one part of a complex psycho-sociological whole. We can choose, through the Gestalt principles of awareness, responsibility, and actuality, to raise our awareness of the ubiquitous nature of racism, take responsibility for all of our actions that perpetuate systemic violence, and confront the actuality of our experience as individuals. This is how to close a Gestalt and achieve wholeness in our lives at the same time. If we chose to make contact with this aspect of our lived experience we would be the fish who has leaped out of the water, gained an awareness of the water, and can now navigate the currents more effectively.
I was deeply affected by the material I read in Focusing: How to gain direct access to your body’s knowledge by Eugene Gendlin. I began to understand the philosophical concept of ‘follow your heart’, in this case, the ‘heart’ being representative of your body. The body, as led by the heart chakra, is an embodiment of a wealth of knowledge. When we develop a felt sense of what’s going on beneath the surface through the methodology he prescribes, we are able to understand what the felt senses are feeling beyond what our mind tells us we are feeling. There’s often a disconnect between what our mind tells us is the problem and our felt experience of the problem. When conjoined together we see that “thinking in the usual way can be objectively true and powerful. But, when put in touch with what the body already knows and lives, it becomes vastly more powerful” (Gendlin, 2003, p. 165). When we give spaciousness to our felt bodily experience we allow processes to percolate that otherwise would be glazed over or shut down.
We are taught certain warnings from our parents and therefore take down the trauma of many generations of our lineage. For example, the lens through which many of us growing up in a certain before-time, learned was not to trust strangers and not to talk to strangers on the internet. Today, we arrange rides from companies that exist entirely on the internet and while this may be a commonplace experience there’s a felt sense that must be overcome, especially when this practice started a decade or so ago. When we hear news stories about people being assaulted or kidnapped we incite these ingrained lessons that have roots in our bodies if we’ve learned them at a young age. We must follow our body’s inner knowing but at the same time we have to process the experiences as we can using a “clean” approach to processing trauma. When we experience a “hijack” or our brain from our “lizard brain” we can practice the five anchors. I often find connecting with the body and seeing where the scars are and how they move through the body can be helpful.
Another, perhaps more salient example, is when dealing with law enforcement agents, police officers, or other authorities. We, as a culture, have inundated ourselves with messaging around police violence, and sometimes, especially for nonwhites, these encounters can be fraught with tension when you view the encounter through a certain lens. The lens through which we view the world informs our lived experience and this is in turn informed by intergenerational knowledge from experiences of our ancestors and family. In this, there are “two opposing forces– … The first is your body’s natural urge to settle and relax. The second is your body’s equally natural urge to protect itself. This can manifest as activation, an urge to move. It can also appear as constriction. .. it’s not that settling is good and activation is bad. Your body needs to be able to do either one, based on the needs at the moment” (Menakem, 2017, p. 179-180). Navigating the process of protection and settling is the process of self-regulation. The body cannot stay in a hyper-aroused state and must relax and settle. But neither can it rest in hypo-aroused where the body is lazy and lethargic. In this place, the body cannot protect itself when a threat appears.
When we contemplate the ideology of white supremacy or other racist perspectives we see that they exist in our environment and that everything we embody is produced by our environment. “There is nothing in our minds that does not come from the environment, but there is nothing in the environment for which there is not an organismic need, physical or psychological. These must be digested and mastered if they are to become truly our own, truly a part of our personality” (Perls, 1989, p. 33). We must own the parts of us that serve us and discard those that no longer serve us. In order to do so, we must root them out in the body by raising our awareness of our somatic experiences and directly accessing the knowledge contained within the body. The projecting body “makes the world a battleground on which his private conflicts must be fought out” (Perls, 1989, p. 37). For this reason, we must take up the battles our ancestors have left unfinished. This is the only way to live an authentic and full life that is guided by the highest self as represented by the heart, compassion for ourselves, our environment, and our neighbors; this is the Sacred Feminine that is alive and well in our bodies.
Gendlin, E. T. (2003). Focusing: How to gain direct access to your body's knowledge. Rider.
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother's hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and Bodies. Penguin Books.
Naranjo, C. (2000). Gestalt therapy: The attitude and practice of an atheoretical experientialism. Crown House Pub.
Perls, F. (1989). The gestalt approach and eye witness to therapy. Science & Behavior Books.
Resnick, S. (1975). Gestalt therapy as a meditative practice. In J. Stevens (Ed.), Gestalt Is (pp 223-228). Moab: Real People Press.
Smith, E., Lathrop, D. D., Whitmont, E. C., & Kaufmann, Y. (1997). Gestalt Therapy and Jungian Psychology. In Growing edge of gestalt therapy (pp. 85–107). essay, Brunner Mazel.
