Gestalt Therapy – Past Pains and Current Relief

Am biased in a view that holds NLP as a phase transition from Gestalt Therapy. History records that Fritz Perls revived action pieces from a theory that may have died without practice. Martin Shepard records wilful encounters that accounted for this in interactions between Perls, Karen Horney and Wilhelm Reich.  

I particularly note the anchoring effect Dick McHugh chooses when he brings on the 'mindfulness' of contemplative practices to heighten the potential of the unused right-brain. The conjunction between 'use of self' and the 'here and now' experience is realized in the distinction that non-judgmental awareness is different from an evaluative introspection. Awareness increases chances for responsibility and ownership. Introspection can lead us to explain away things, and words fail us to 'experience' our feelings. This is the part of process for facilitators in groups to discern.

The mystical mind plunges each moment towards, Truth, God, Love,  and such depths whose mysteries are not to be 'solved' the way we address anxieties that block our awareness. In fact, approaching emotional intelligence through an empirical basis of neurology, may be an inefficient way of reaching a truth about our human essence that mystics have accessed for centuries. This is why I wished to know or learn from Masters as to how this dimension played out in the founding of Organisation Development (OD).

Dick’s delight in ‘feelings’ is in my opinion overindulged, for it does not offer the cognitive balance required to make headway in intervention. The meta-model of 'get out of your mind, and get into your senses' is possibly the reason for this. My inference comes from what I sensed as his selective neglect of the following in his approach. There have been topics that were not schematically laid out. They are to do with the levels of neurosis, as also the classification of blockages or avoidance. 

The introjection that participants are likely to have experienced would preclude their projections and their consequent transferences left unobserved and unattended during practice sessions. That boundaries get violated in ways that precipitate Confluence.  Retroflection  and even Deflection are anathema to those who would have gone solely by witnessing experiential learning, for it requires a discerning observer to be present and observe how the client holds up feelings in the moment.

In OD, Gestalt can easily be seen as co-evolution as opposed to traditional ‘diagnosis’ or the pathology of the organisational system. When reviewing the deeper purpose of 'competence' and 'commitment' that Argyris speaks about, I was fascinated that the wheel within the wheels that Gestalt’s grist for the mill grinds, is its stubborn anti-intellectualism. In Argyris’ analysis of dysfunction in organisations, reasoning about our behaviors is core.  Experiencing 'authenticity' may have been unfairly labelled as too 'touchy-feely' to be 'analysed' in learning loops. In fact, hard-nosed, result oriented expectations may have suppressed the expression of truth. I wonder often if this is what precipitated the pretence on which the pursuit of profits was made legitimate. 

Increasing our capacity to think critically about behaviors is in fact a way of reaching greater awareness. Introjection reduces awareness, evenas an overdose of curiosity may take away from the moment's splendor. Contact is an associated state of feelings that the body can signal, either as a twitch of a muscle, a tension in the calves or a vascular headache.

There are 21 books referred to us for reading beyond the Dick McHugh course experience. These include the works of Polster, Passons, Shepherd, John O Stevens, Simkin, Perls, Zinker, Nevis, Carl Rogers and Barry Stevens.

In terms of how the work is affecting me, I am currently reviewing my skills of discernment, presence and giving! Am also open to range of choices in consultative style - confrontation, elicitation, modeling and direct provocations, that may be useful in the moment, within a larger intervention process!



Am most taken on the by instrumentality of polarities for the figure and ground probabilities that they present for leadership transformations. The grey zone for me is this : The numbness of modern capitalist enterprise could easily be generalized as intellectual riff-raff of the left brain, when Gestaltists encourage losing the mind and coming to one's senses. In an age of awareness of plasticity of the brain, what categories can be easily retained as left and right brain in a working language that we can rely on?

Spiritual Strength - the Richard McHugh SJ way

Tools of the Spirit are an experience. Also subtitled "Pathways to the Realization of Universal Innocence," it is based on a workshop authored by Robert Dilts and Robert McDonald. The original concept is that there are aids, (prayer, meditation, singing, dancing, parables, rituals and blessings), that bring us more in harmony with the "larger Mind" and "the larger nervous system" of which we are a part. The authors see NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), as a tool to achieve those ends. Richard McHugh (Dick) goes further than this. In fact, he brings to fuse his ‘awareness’ paradigm, partly informed by his Vipasana experience under Goenkaji and partly from his days at Sadhana with Tony D’Mello. Dick does not pretend to know what he does not. So he does not go to the koans or Confucian outgrowth from Buddhist thoughts. He merely stresses bodily delight in awareness through meditative postures endured in silences such as that of Vipasana.

Rev. Richard McHugh SJ, PhD, Master of NLP

What Dick does is to reinforce our connection with larger systems of which we are a part. These include family, profession, community, and the global system. When he does so, he is in the least bit eulogizing Christ, and in fact, chastises Christians for not understanding Christ as someone who asked us to love others as we loved ourselves. that is knowing ourselves more deeply. Experiencing fully, without self-judgment, arrogance or suppression of our sexual energy, Dick leads participants through bodily sensation and kinesthetic movement. We begin to know our limits, appreciate our intentions, the strengths and perception of others. We gradually develop the acuity and the receptiveness to experience grace as unmerited mercy. 


Forgiveness, says Dick, is the ability to give with compassion as we would have given before the hurt. This is possible if in a state of awareness, we can dissociate the feeling from the thought of being hurt. Meaning is to be made, such that we are not attached to the feelings that stifle us from the past. Meaning is to be made in the moment. And meaning is made because we receive it. We receive it only when we allow the unconscious to do its work. We do not know exactly how it works, in the classical scientific traditions of explanation. That is the choice of human discretion we have. The more we resist, the more it will persist. The more we accept it, the more we transform ourselves. 

It is quite tempting to give a procedural rundown of the experience. In fact, that is the easier part. Most practical however would be to refer the original book by the Roberts – Macdonald and Dilts. http://amzn.to/HczXZU . I would rather surrender to the spirits at work within the confines of dignity and beauty. While the rational in me may seek to find coherence in propositional logic, the nature of the proposition of spirituality is incomplete without intuitive inference and the inter-subjective unity in the experience. Empirical evidence is therefore not a direct perception, but as Hindu mystics augur - an atyadhmik atman at work. The self becomes the observer of the self. Perhaps, that is why the individual needs the community and vice-versa. Perhaps, when emotions help us acknowledge interconnectedness through individuals, we realise companionship as a trustful resource in spiritual journeying.


Expressions here are therefore apparently muted, though they come largely from deep realizations of what Dick gives insights in. It is only to the few therefore that the phenomenon of death will seem remote from spirituality.  There are the modern day equivalent of miracles, that Dick facilitates in participant discovery of themselves. His interpretation of dreams and the near instant therapeutic kinesthetic invitation he provides a clear sign of process at work. The Death towards Love, is Spirituality. Love is a decision, and not a basic emotion. That is the paradox many in psychology and philosophy have tried to unravel. Below are some of my insights at the workshop.

1.   A wish could be a fantasy, alright. A want is more concrete. A wish can challenge the Giver. A want can honor the giver. Ask with care.

2.   In Pain, there's a beauty that that endures, as pain passes over. In Suffering, the attachment endures, as the mind fights Reality.

3.   Wisdom comes from forever and the depths of Eternity, just as Meaning comes from the Moment as a gift of the Present time.

4.   Mercy is a compassion that overrides fear, as in a disregard for conventions so as to be in service of the heart. It leads to spiritual wholeness.

5.   Forgiving is to give as you would have given graciously before the hurt. Understanding is awareness of pointless attachment, unmerited mercy

6.   Spiritual presence is like a cosmic perspective through the awareness that you and I are specs of dust that in turn hold the universe.

As I reflect, there is genuine appreciation of the levels of neurological learning, from the environment, behaviors, capabilities, values,  right to the identity. Robert Dilts adaptation of Gregory Bateson's gift from anthropology is a constant reminder of the great intellectual traditions from California. Tools of the spirit, in fact raises us from our own unconscious to the spiritual vision we have for ourselves. 

However, being in the moment, as in Dick’s workshop; I also saw different levels of intent and their manifestations. There were those stuck in analytical freeze. There were others consumed in unworked anchors like those for the need for recognition, fame and the limelight. Others were making journeys from their gender-based roles and learning to move from their deep to the shallows of feelings between masculinity and femininity. The youthfully unattached were curious of their evolving identity, and those who had worn many a life-battle coming to terms with their unrealized identities. 


Perhaps beyond the realm of the personally deepened visions, most people will remember the visually registered symbols that were in the public domain. e.g. A young priest, a young teacher of chemistry and a seasoned nun seemed to agree in a conspiracy of sorts to make Dick’s image and their association with him an unabashedly exclusive veneration. Much against Dick’s known preference for a non-public image, he was photographed in various angles and postures and striking lines of his utterances imprinted in designer bookmarks. First placed on seats on the last day of the seminar, it was next offered as a commercial package. Before the deal was made public, an elderly mother went from chair to chair collecting every single bookmark for herself. It was like each one had their magic card of poker that could deal no higher wild card on the table of the ones playing the game.

The fixation to personalities abounds in our world. I am reminded of a story narrated by Osho Rajneesh. A painter in his Ashram was told to stop painting breasts of women as he needed to mature. Breasts were a fixation in Rajneesh’s opinion, meant for ‘breakfast’ time in life! So the painter went and revised his approach. He had the figure of Rajneesh in the middle – well pronounced, and around this central figure – breasts and breasts and breasts.

Maturation towards inner development is no cakewalk. It is in this week, I realised Dick’s larger mercy, his coming from the space of Spiritual Wholeness, enmeshing his shadows and self-parenting himself past a bi-polar mother and a very misunderstood father of great spiritual resource….His holding cancer of the prostrate as his bodily guest, and ridding himself of the Jesuit cassock for pyjamas that signified his collapsed anchors with the wisdom of India. That is the Mind with the Heart we know, now already at age 82. His willingness to be the child in using mindful sarcasm and the maturity of drawing out others from their child-like state to experience their evolving adulthood, is testimony to a living example of the theory at work. His scholarly sense comes from the distilled understanding of the phase transition that Gestalt theorists missed in their evolution. In hindsight, he feels that had the Gestalt giants like Fritz Perls lived longer, they would have discovered NLP themselves.

He had to contend with a class size of 69 participants and 3 more on his team at our Bangalore session in the last week of March 2012. The march of technology in our environment makes it difficult for Dick to stress his wants in service of the Heart as he would have done in an alternate life-space. His unmerited mercy is a surrender in which the book-marker threesome would feel victors of a feat proximate to their idea of spiritual glory. The keepers of bookmarks in his name have an image; they would get visual anchors to glean through. 


Hopefully, the books they read would also merit attention. Else, I can assure you that the effect of the workshop is enough to ignore the book for a long long while. As of the first day after the workshop - the imprint I have is such that I would think a 5 day course with a day's break in between each would allow for requisite immersion and integration within the self. It is the experience here that is the intelligence and not the abstracted code of reference as in a machine manual! 

Analytical intelligence is seldom a predictor of spiritual wholeness. Besides, there's no place as spirituality that can celebrate the vitality of death, for its inherent lessons of honor and humility. If you see a man willing to laugh at himself, he has a greater chance of being humble and spiritual. This is even more possible because, each of us is innocent. Each of us can learn. Each of us can experience putting to use our creativity from the depth of our unconscious. Judgment is the end in analysis. It is suspended for learning of our greater ultimate selves.


Joy be with you.

Book Review - COVERT Processes at Work (Robert Marshak)

Covert Processes at Work – Managing the Five Hidden Dimensions of Organisational Change by Robert J Marshak (2006) Berrett-Koehler Publishers, CA.

‘Covert’ is an English word that signifies secrecy. Somehow, in common parlance, it has acquired the monstrosity of being negative, almost sinister. Hence, the motivations to read a book like “Covert Processes at Work” could be investigative intent, confrontative mission or plain exploration. The author of the book Robert J Marshak (Bob) is however a scholar from Washington at the American University and a practitioner of Organisation Development (OD), considered by many experts in the field to be a worthy successor to the legacy of the grey-beards in the profession. Ed Schein, the originator of process consultation, and a legend in OD himself, wrote the foreword to this book.

So what could then be the motives of the author? After all, this is the first book of its nature, and as co-creator of the Dealing with Covert Processes Workshop, Bob’s incisive thinking has acquired a pulpit like pedestal for those affected by and interested in organisational dynamics. Judith Katz along with Bob provide an interpretive model in their workshops that span the classical units of analyses frames – individual, group, organisational and societal. The focal system could be viewed through a prism of Lessons Learnt in Childhood, Beliefs, Assumptions and Values, Formal Theories or Explicit Systems of Thought, Paradigms and Cultures. The end of the prism that is delightfully insightful is the spectrum it addresses from the subconscious to the superconscious –

1.       Questionable, Illegitimate and unacceptable;

2.       Legitimate, proper and Acceptable; and

3.       Too good to be True

Bob unfolds a closely woven integration in a singular scheme of all hidden organisational dynamics. He asks the question “What do all types of covert processes have in common and what can you do about them?” The book reveals answers to this principal inquiry in a manner that resembles Bob’s synthetic prowess during diagnosis of complex organisational issues. These are teased through for us into repressed processes, denied processes, overt processes, unexpressed processes and untapped processes. At a certain level such elegance and simplicity may seem inconspicuous in its relatedness to a diagnostic scheme; unless the initiated mind cuts through to the inherent profundity it entails. So how is the book itself organized?

Chapters 1 and 2 lay the foundation to the scheme. The author goes on to highlight how and why paying attention to the overt alone does not yield sufficiency in outcomes. He introduces six covert dimensions in Chapter 1, namely – ‘out-of-everyday-awareness’ issues such as – Reasons, Politics, Inspirations, Emotions, Mindsets and Psychodynamics. He then presents the integration of these in a framework he calls the Covert Processes Model in Chapter 2. With this the reader could get to ‘how to go about seeing what is not there’ in the next chapter.

Chapter 3 presents and explains a formula for diagnosing covert processes. It offers a method – if you will - on developing hunches. It is principally about diagnoses of covert issues. There’s magic of cognition in that theorization that is best read than reviewed here. Chapter 4 is an extension of the diagnostic theme, although the primary treatment here is on communication, intentionally symbolic or unintentional. Here is where the reader delights in the paradox that implies that we should explore symbolic messages literally and literal messages symbolically. We’ve known from conventional change theory about private and public withdrawal of participants in organisational change. Symbolic communications serve as early indicators of these symptoms (symbols). Some may refer to such uncovering as consumptive knowledge.

Practice or action based themes commence in Chapter 5. The significance of such nuanced practice considerations stand starkly in the potential that fears, untested assumptions, unconscious reactions and under-the-table dealings of members have during organisational change. Practice is about reaching change effectiveness by using the basic 5 keys in this chapter to unleash hidden creativity, removing unspoken blocks, altering mindsets, and giving voice to ‘unspeakable’ visions of greatness as Bob terms them. Scholars may classify this section to be the mark of procedural knowledge.

Chapter 6 is an extension of Chapter 5 with special focus on engagement strategies to manage covert dynamics. Bob calls it ‘putting things on the table’ – by establishing legitimacy, creating enabling conditions, being strategic and using subtlety through astute judgment.

In fact, by the time I reached this part of the book several alternate or related theories whizzed through my mind. Prominent among them are that of Gestalt – the figure and ground aspects of sensory perception, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming  – the symbolic representations that language throws up to be opposed skillfully for their violations – whether they be universal generalizations, simple deletions, modal operators of necessity, presuppositions or lack of referential index. I would be delighted to integrate such ‘use of self’ into the diagnostic scheme that the Covert Process model holds out.

In quite organic connect Chapter 7 follows with how to recognize or rethink interventions. The significance of figure and ground come alive in the prominence Bob accords to the focal system that blocks it from seeing or sensing important issues. Hence the inferential consequence of rethinking and reframing interventions follows. In such a schema, the unity of awareness in purpose of intervention as shared between change facilitator and client system helps lay relevant ground rules that foster legitimacy and safety for change participants.

Chapter 8 is an extension of Chapter 7, in that it is about Reframing. The difference here is not so much about change in focal system beliefs, as much as it is about change in the way something would be interpreted in the system’s context. Bob quotes a giant’s intervention in such a scheme, when Edie Seashore says ‘Up until now”…i.e. if someone on behalf of the organisation says, “That is not possible here; there’s no way that can be done” Edie would say “Up until now”. This example suggests the spirit of reframing in that the dignity of the speaker is preserved, and the challenge is about the thinking process. 6 ways of addressing reframing are discussed in this chapter – primarily from a change facilitator’s point of view.

Chapter 9 is about Rethinking Organisational Politics. The seasoned reader may in fact consider this as a special case of reframing! However what is revealed is Bob’s own take from his own ‘prism’. Dealing with both political and management frames, Bob reveals another aspect of his synthetic mind. They hover around decision arenas, degree of participation, decision rounds (how many iterations), required degree of agreement, access to information, reciprocity, expected styles and types of sanctions. The dimensions he frames are as under.

1. Who decides
2. Decision Process
3. Time-frame
4. Nature of Change
5. Purpose of Change
6. How others are seen

Chapters 7, 8 and 9, are in my opinion, the author’s special contribution to the discipline of Organisation Development. It is here that his insights emerge like the nectar in the air that the nose never sniffed without being trained to do so. The savant and the processual components of behavioral sciences weaves into the book here like a stitch through an ailing body part, and quite like the integrative spirit of Eastern ‘wholeness’ in remedy despite the origin of analytical and almost partitive western diagnostic temperament. Like the good architect working to a plan, he elevates the foundation in Chapters 1 to 3, and raises the edifice deftly thereafter with structural material that houses the diagnostic and the interventionist aspects of classical Organisation Development.

Chapter 10 on Managing Covert processes is like the canopy or the rotunda to the book’s architecture. Written partly like an epilogue, or a good teacher’s summary (the OD practitioner’s Humanistic orientation); it is especially useful for the reader who takes the trouble of going through this book’s organisation. The telling punch is that premise from which the book begins – ‘remember that organisations are both rational and political systems’. The mitigation is however a phased collapsing of both these anchors through humane challenge, conscious judgment, multiple levels of diagnoses, clarity of purpose and  requisite thinking to suit the political thinking of the system when one frames reality.

Perhaps Bob’s pronouncement of psychological safety issues is a shade deeper than the consideration of ethics in such art of change management. If there were one more dimension he could have addressed deeply in the scheme – that would be it – ‘ethics’ as frames of reference in covert processes. Else, this book is compactly done, integrating complexity of theme with lucidity in explanation; elevating abstractions that are grounded in real case examples and theorizing to the extent that it holds out a qualitative promise from tireless and methodical application. It aids concrete grasp for the phenomenologically inclined reader; especially for the one in search of a product of evolved thinking in organisational dynamics. Ed Schein puts it well in the foreword when he says, that ‘in this book finally we have a coherent approach’ to all of what we hurriedly label as hidden agendas, unconscious desires, elephants-under-the-table, latent functions and shared tacit assumptions that seldom get to the table. No more as ‘covert’ as the title first suggested?