What is Gestalt Awareness Practice?
It’s a form of Gestalt group process that prioritizes nonverbal expression and attunement over verbal expression and intellectualization. GAP offers a template for exploring the subtleties of attunement and attachment that often go offline when our intellectual capacities dominate our zones of awareness.
How did I learn about Gestalt Awareness Process?
Gestalt Awareness Process was part of my training experience in advanced Gestalt therapy techniques at the Gestalt Institute of the Rockies. It was a crucial experiential piece of my development as a Gestalt therapist.
A Psychotherapy Group without the Pathology
While GAP can be a type of psychotherapy group, it is not specifically designed to treat a given diagnosis. Rather, the model is a radical shift toward playfully encountering our somatic information and a co-social expression of that information.
What’s the benefit if not for a diagnosis?
GAP participants often find the experience to be a form of meditative shift away from analysis and a radical return to presence. While analysis and the intellect are crucial parts of our day-to-day functioning, they can become overstimulated when lacking a solid grounding in presence, attunement, and attachment (processes that activate our primal brain more than our intellectual brain). GAP is not anti-intellectual, but it offers a break from the neural tones of intellectualization.
Why Glen Loves Gestalt Awareness Process
It helped me get beneath the words and thoughts of myself and relationships to a deeper form of connection based on experiences rather than concepts. It’s a bootcamp in attuning to myself and others. I got to strengthen those internal processes in such a radical space that I could bring this neural tone of attunement outside of the GAP group into other relationships and instances where my own presence is challenged.
My hope is that you can find this too.
If you’re interested, please reach out. I’m forming groups based on a few different topics and I’ll choose times based on common preferences. Click the bottom below for whichever group you’re most interested in to sign up.