Your what and how are everything
Paying attention to what you're paying attention to actively shapes how you live your life
Hi there, I hope you’re well.Before we head into the post, I just want to say thank you for allowing this Substack to be more sporadic than I initially set out for. I hope you can still sense that the ethos is the same even if the frequency is not! This post today is focussed more on Gestalt and how intention is so much more than setting a goal. On January 4th I’m going to be holding a Gestalt and Yoga workshop ‘Illuminating Intention’, the first time I’ve explicitly brought the two together in a class! We’ll explore Gestalt’s Cycle of Experience to uncover your heartfelt intention for the next five years, and how your focus in your Yoga practice is an integral part of bringing your intention to life. For more detailed information about the workshop, visit https://www.sensesbeyond.com/workshops
Meander
I’ve said it many times, and I’ve been asked it even more times: “What is your intention for today’s session?” After a bit of deliberation I often arrive at peace, because who doesn’t want to feel more peaceful? But I don’t feel satisfied, there’s something distinctly lacking, something I can hold on to that feels authentic, so I’ve plucked from expectation. ‘Peace’ feels a bit “well, I’m doing Yoga so I ought to feel more peaceful at the end of it.”
It was John O’Donohue who brought me to question the nebulousness of intention. In his crystal and sharp vision that shone a light on the doubtful fluffiness of my own, he writes in Anam Cara:
‘Phenomenology has shown us that all consciousness is consciousness of something. The world is never simply there outside of us. Our intentionality constructs it…we construct our world so naturally that we are unaware that we are doing this every moment…Our intentionality constructs the landscapes of our inner world.’
Phenomenology is the second pillar of three in Gestalt and can simply be referred to as the what and how. I must interrupt myself here with this disclaimer: I write ’simply’ with some trepidation because phenomenology, which is dealing with the nature of experience and consciousness can be anything but simple and I still get tripped out by it. If this is your first or tenth time reading about phenomenology and you don’t understand what I’m about to write entirely, this is completely normal and may also be influenced by how I’m relating to the subject.
Ok, back to what I was writing. Phenomenology is the second pillar of three in Gestalt (Field Theory and Dialogue the two other pillars) and can simply be referred to as the what and how. What is it that is happening right now and how it is for this to happen within us. It is our experience.
For those in the UK, you may remember the gameshow Catchphrase where the host would ask the contender to say what they saw, and the contender would, in varying degrees of collective agreement, say what the progressing image was creating, describing the ‘what’. This is what I think of with phenomenology. In the therapy room we add the ‘how’, it’s the client’s awareness of what they are sensing, and how it is for them to be sensing this, which may go along the lines of “What is it that you’re aware of right now? How is it to be aware of this? What are your experiencing?”
A Gestalt therapist isn’t really concerned whether something is objectively accurate but rather paying close attention to the subjective experience of the client, because it is their experience that informs who they in relationship to their loved ones, strangers, the world, to everything.
What we sense and how we sense are continually informing one another. Right now I’m looking out at the wintering trees, some are clinging to their dead leaves, some have shed what’s no longer needed, and I feel, in this moment, calmed by the cycles of change. Change for me, in this moment, has a gracious beauty. Yet this perspective may not be true someone else who looks at the trees losing their leaves. What I am seeing shapes what I am experiencing, and how I experience will shape what I will see and on and on and on.
The ‘how’ is not just made up rising and falling feelings, but filled with our hopes, fears, beliefs, values. It is in the how that our past and future coalesce in the now, for there’s always the pull of what was and what will be exerting a force on us in any given moment. We are not robots. So, to take my example of the trees losing their leaves: I have grown up where my life situation has changed quite rapidly many a time, there’s been no fixed path laid out, but rather a do-whatever-you-like kinda thing. So change is expected which can both excite and frighten me depending on my particular circumstances in the moment.
In Gestalt, what is ‘figural’ or illuminated for the me by the trees losing their leaves is change. For others it may be death, ageing, decay, or something else. This points to intentionality and what it is I am directing my attention towards as I look at the tree. What is it I’m bringing my awareness to and what effect does this have on me? What is brought up that is directly and indirectly related to the tree? Beyond the tree as an example, this same question is true, as John O’Donohue highlights, to our inner world, the mental images, emotions, and thoughts; intentionality is anything that we relate to, whether it’s outside the boundary of our body or within.
Consciousness, in the view of phenomenology, is about how we are relating to the world and ourselves and the how is what we have a choice over.
Which brings me back to ‘What is your intention for today’s session?’.
Our intention contains both a desired outcome and what we choose to focus on to serve this outcome, our intentionality, our how. Setting an intention in one domain of our lives, such as family or professional, doesn’t stand alone from the rest of our life, but is deeply woven into all aspects of our life as we are whole. It is this separating that can cause our intentions to go awry: We don’t see that the experience of intention (see the Gestalt Cycle of Experience) is laced with golden threads, ingredients, that run through all parts of our irrefutably connected life.
If I decide that peaceful is in fact how I really want to feel, then how will I cultivate this? What am I going to bring my attention to? How will I sustain and nourish this attention? Where else in my life do the ingredients of my intention show up? I don’t have to doggedly go after these questions, yet I want to hold on to the sincerity of my intention. In the three hour January workshop ‘Illuminating Intention’, we’ll explore Gestalt, the Cycle of Experience to uncover your heartfelt intention for the next five years, and how your focus in your Yoga practice is an integral part of bringing your intention to life. For more detailed information about the workshop, visit https://www.sensesbeyond.com/workshops
Illuminating Intention
Saturday 4th January 2025
10am - 1pm
Studio 17, Heaton Moor
£40
To end Meander but not the post with John O’Donohue:
There is such an intimate connection between the way we look at things and what we actually discover. If you can learn to look at yourself and your life in a gentle, creative, and adventurous way, you will be eternally surprised at what you find.
Wonder
Notice how everything that you are aware of is always in relationship to something, how you’re always relating whether to your inner life or your environment. What is it like to look at something right now and become aware of how this object has some impact on you? What feelings come up? Can you look at this thing from a different perspective? I’m inspired by this inquiry as I looked at my coffee. It’s the afternoon now, and the coffee is bringing up feelings of being wired. This morning, my coffee brought up a feeling of motivation, an excitement for what I was about to do. I’m experiencing that coffee means different things to me depending on the time of day, how I experience a seemingly fixed object is always changing.
Reflect
The engine of intention is beginnings and, therefore, endings. It is the latter that can so often place a stubborn obstacle on the road ahead, yet only if we choose to be consumed by the dread of ending. What if we acknowledge the ending, and free up energy to embrace the adventure of the beginning? For the last time in today’s post, but definitely not in my Substack, here’s John O’Donohue:
FOR A NEW BEGINNING
by John O’Donohue
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
