by Ken Winston Caine

Being constructively engaged in life is your responsibility. No one else can do it for you.

Being constructively engaged means having things you look forward to. Means you are actually seeking ways to bring more
  • Comfort
  • Joy
  • Beauty
  • Meaning
  • Humor
  • Love
  • Wonder, Respect and Awe
into your life.

Being constructively engaged also means that you are finding ways and means of pursuing and expressing your youniqueness and your:
• Constructive curiosities
• Positive personal perspectives
• Talents
• Special skills
• Personal strengths
• Finer qualities.

Clearly, you do this at varying levels at various times.

How aware are you of how and when those levels vary? Of what precipitates changes in them?

One way of increasing that awareness is to make a ritual of taking daily readings of your levels of comfort, joy, beauty, meaning, humor, love, wonder, respect and awe.

Be scientific about it.

Pretend you are viewing an array of meters and recording the data from them. Perhaps they resemble thermometers, or perhaps they have a needle that can sway from side to side on a round dial and point to various numbers, or perhaps they have colored fingers of light that can shoot up and down on a rectangular graph-like scale — like an audio mixing board or an equalizer.

Regardless of what your imaginary meters look like, make time to take a daily reading. And then, try this if you find that any particular levels are low:

1. Acknowledge that. Take a quiet moment and express gratitude to Spirit for allowing you to have this true awareness.

2. Thank Spirit for protecting you from fully experiencing “comfort” or “joy” or “beauty” or “meaning” or “humor” or “love” or “wonder, respect and awe” — whichever had low levels. Because some aspect of Spirit, of the Spirit that you carry within you and around you, of the Spirit that IS you, believes that it is serving you and upholding your desires by keeping you from fully experiencing these things. It believes it is doing what you want it to do and that it is watching out for your higher interests. Thank it for watching out for you.

3. Let it know that your needs have changed. Release it from its earlier responsibility. And give it permission to seek “comfort,” “love,” “joy,” whatever. Give it permission to find ways to boost those levels.

4. Begin to watch for ways in which this might be happening as you continue about your day.

This all may seem like strange instruction.

Oh really? you say. Why would I think that?

…continues below the following ‘aside’ article

ASIDE: The intentionally rough and open nature of it all

This is a rough piece of writing. A rough cut. It needs polish. Needs some reorganizing. Needs some tightening. Needs some trimming. And it will get it at some point — but probably not in Mind Body Spirit Journal. In Mind Body Spirit Journal you get some of my as-it-happens thinking, note-taking, ideas, observations, pointers, as well as (at least) a few more polished articles from time to time.

This is not “open source,” per se, but it is open development. You get to see the inner workings and watch and participate as the work develops. This is the adventure, not the destination.

This is the value and beauty of the Journal. It IS rough. It IS quick. It IS exploratory. And you get to talk back. You can comment or add to anything I write here. You get to catch my mistakes, as I make them, and correct them. And do. I’m counting on you. I don’t intentionally make mistakes, but when quick-journaling thoughts and concepts, I’m perfectly capable of expressing lapses of reason and flights of forgetfulness. Further, I don’t have a copyeditor and I don’t use a spellchecker. One is not built into WordPress (the publishing platform). Wish there was an automatic one that would check posts when I hit the “publish” button. Typo and spelling alerts and corrections are always welcome.

If you prefer super-organized, relatively carefully fact-checked, refined and polished presentations, then you’ll want to buy the books and courses and other offerings I develop. (That fine-tuning, that polishing, that crafting of courses and books and articles and other presentations is what I get paid for. Is how I make my living. Is how I support myself. Journaling is where it all begins. Is a key part of the creative process. And I’m letting you read over my shoulder as I create. Sometimes I will create with great finesse and aplomb. Sometimes I will write as the trained and experienced journalist that I am. And other times the writing will be as rough as the piece that this is an aside to.)

You don’t have to buy books and courses and so on to get the gist and essence of my work. If you’re willing to wade through the rough stuff and do the sorting, by digging through the Journal over time, as it develops, you will will be able to find presentations on nearly everything I find fascinating, useful or worth teaching and sharing. Some of it will be in summary form. Some of it will scattered pretty widely — you’ll find pieces in an article here, pieces in an article there. And I encourage you to participate in helping me develop it. Offer your wisdom. Offer your experiences. Offer your contrary or better thinking.

I welcome you to purchase my books and materials. I want you to. I expect that you will. But I don’t require it and never will. In fact, as I roll out the Spirit of Wellness programs and courses, I intend to offer a public-access, sliding scale version so that ANYONE can afford to have access to the Spirit of Wellness essentials and practices. That version MAY consist simply of a course outline and guide to various articles in the Journal and on other sites, as well as a bit of additional support material. I’m still thinking through the exact shape that will take. And still working on the larger programs. First things first.
— kwc

Bear with me. This is evidence-based. There is strong science behind this. The take-a-reading and acknowledge and talk with “Spirit” essentially is a Gestalt process. It’s a process where you are conversing and negotiating with an inner part of your consciousness. Human consciousness, as you are probably aware, is quite complicated. It consists of many layers and parts. And some layers or parts of it are nearly always in conflict with others.

Ironically, the Protector part is frequently at odds with your true best interests.

That’s because the Protector believes everything it hears you say or think. And it listens, almost exclusively, to your self-talk, your inner talk, your “victim” talk, your “woe is me” talk, your destructive talk.

And it believes it. Thinks that is what you really mean and really want. And so it tries to please you by helping you manifest those things — or by keeping you from experiencing the 180-degree opposites of those things.

So, when you take a reading and realize that, for instance, you are not allowing a strong sense of beauty in your life today, thank that part of you that is doing this hard work, that is protecting you from experiencing beauty. Thank it for watching out for you so diligently. And let it know your needs have changed.

Do this. Just allow yourself this level of awareness of your inner workings and you’ll find your experience soon changes for the better.

My saying, “just allow yourself this level of awareness” may seem flip. Because when you are feeling overwhelmed — with pain or grief or anxiety or fear or anger or a seeming loss of control over your life and choices — you may find it difficult to focus energy on anything other than exponentiating your pain or grief or fear or anger or seeming loss of control over your life and choices. You may find it an almost impossible task to summon the energy and focus to:

1) Free yourself long enough to take an unbiased reading of the levels of
  • Comfort
  • Joy
  • Beauty
  • Meaning
  • Humor
  • Love
  • Wonder, Respect and Awe; and
  • Personal expressiveness
present in your environments and activity and awareness and thinking; and

2) Allow yourself permission to improve those levels.

Sometimes it seems as though you can become so invested in your pain, your grief, your anxiety, your fear, your anger, your seeming loss of control and choices that you become possessive of it and you don’t want to let it go. It’s yours damn it, and nobody is going to take it away from you.

And it’s particularly irritating — you may even feel as though your integrity is under attack — if someone suggests that perhaps you could loosen your grip just a little.

It’s at those exact moments that you can benefit the most from allowing yourself to take a quiet, focused, unbiased, true reading of your levels of comfort, joy, beauty, meaning, humor, love, wonder, respect and awe, and personal expressiveness.

Actual physical movement — moving, changing your posture, relaxing the tension in your body, moving into another environment, to a different room or outdoors — can help free you from the grip of destructive focus and let you move your focus, momentarily, to checking your levels of comfort, joy, beauty, meaning, humor, love, wonder, respect and awe, and personal expressiveness.

Just the process of acknowledging that those things exist in your life at varying levels from day to day can help shift your focus to constructive things to look forward to.

The Spirit of Wellness resides in a constructive forward focus.

Maxwell Maltz, M.D., taught of the importance of having a project that excites you to help you maintain constructive, forward focus, but a constructive forward focus need not be that big. In fact, it can be the most simple of pleasures.

For me, for instance, it can be something as simple as looking forward to two hours of a Prairie Home Companion on the radio Sunday nights and keeping that time sacred.

Pure indulgence. Pure pleasure. And something I can do regardless of the state of my physical being or worldly circumstances.

You must find ways to evoke, appreciate, share, discover comfort, joy, beauty, meaning, humor, love, wonder, respect and awe, and personal expressiveness — in tiny doses and in giant, super-sized doses. In the present moment and in the moments to come.

This is what feeds the spirit.

I use the term ‘Spirit’ liberally and interchangeabley to refer to the Spirit within, the Spirit in and around you, Greater Spirit, the Human Spirit, the Creative Spirit, the “Holy Spirit,” if you will, and more. They are all interwoven. They all intermingle. They are all a part of your sense of being and your consciousness.

Fritz Perls, the founder (with his wife, Laura,) of Gestalt theory and therapy did not invoke the concept of “Spirit” to teach his theory and process. He was a doctor of medicne and psychiatry and brilliant theorist and used the terminology of his profession and invented some of his own. And at times could be famously plain speaking. “Do your own thing” is a Perl-ism.

I am a doctor of wellness research and holistic spirituality and seek to use a contemporary and common terminology and try not to make up too much of my own.

We all have a sense of the spirit within us and within others, residing there sometimes restlessly, sometimes bubbling, sometimes brooding. We all have a sense of the spirit we carry around with us, of the spirit of a room when we enter it, and most of us have some sense of a Greater Spirit within, without, around and beyond us.

“Spirit.”

It’s everywhere, infuses everything and, to some degree, affects everything. You look for kindred spirits. You notice the the spirit that others carry with them, how it affects them and their environments and even their outcomes. The human spirit encompasses all of our surface and below-surface complexity.

Perls envisioned the human presence and personality and consciousness as consisting of many, many complex and often conflicting parts, all with unique understandings and motivations and all working simultaneously and many working at odds with one another.

What a fine mess we are, we humans!

Perls devoted much of his life to exploring and teaching ways for us to discover and integrate our many individual, and especially our many individual conflicting, parts. He invented a way for the various conflicting parts of our being to talk and negotiate with one another. He used a form of chair therapy, where you place two chairs facing each other and would move from chair to chair as you played different parts of your personality and engaged in conversations. Or as you imagined conversing with other people, you playing both roles: them and you.

(Perls also invented the “hotseat” used in Encounter Therapy of the late ’60s.)

I don’t use Perls’s precise lingo to share versions of his processes, and instead ask you to think simply in terms of “spirit.” But the social science is the same.

We all, no matter how smooth-running we may appear, are a mass of inner conflict. And much of it is deep beneath the surface.

Allowing yourself to accept that and to begin to recognize the inner conflict when you find evidence of it and to actually address the conflicting parts with respect and to even give them names and hold out-loud conversations with them, allows them to surface and allows you to befriend them and to enlist their aid in your march forward…

Crazy?

No.

It’s about negotiating sanity and meaning from the crazy morass of conflicts that each of us is.

Yet it may seem crazy at first. But this type of process was invented by a highly respected father of one branch of humanistic psychology and the literature of the social sciences is rich with more than 50 years of results and refinements and successful adapatations of it.

Gestalt therapy for psychological disorders can get deep and intense quickly and is meant to be cathartic and probably is best directed by a qualified therapist.

We, though, are operating on a much simpler level. We’re not interested in chasing deep-rooted psychological disorders. We’re dealing with the Spirit of Wellness and with the pursuit of living well; we’re exploring ways to fullfill your desire to live fully to your highest potential, regardless of circumstances.

So all you really need to know about Gestalt is that your Spirit is complex, comprised of many parts and some of those parts are in direct conflict. Some of those parts are hindering your progress toward living a full, pleasurable, meaningful life — and those parts are doing that because they believe that they have your highest interests at heart; believe they are serving you; believe they are doing what you want them to do.

Acknowledge them.

Praise them for their dedicated service, for their well-intended efforts. And release them from that responsibility. Allow them to play a new, more helpful role. Define that new role for them.

Play with this. You’ll find it liberating.

Further reading:

Fritz Perls Demonstrates Gestalt Therapy: a transcript

Stages of Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality by Frederick S. Perls, Ralph Hefferkine, Paul Goodman

Transforming Therapy by Gil Boyne — Clear instructions from a master therapist for bringing about rapid resolutions to even deeply entrenched problems

The Theory of Gestalt Therapy