2024: Gaie Houston “The Enormity of Now”

NOW is the starting point of Gestalt, a psychotherapy sometimes described as the psychology of the obvious.  This present moment, now, can seem so obvious as not to need a mention.  Gaie invited those present to let in the enormity, the complexity and the frailty of this most present and exciting, this transient, magical and loaded reality.

The day provided an opportunity for everyone to enjoy and even intensify their awareness. Fritz Perls spoke of awareness as a glow arising within. The bombardment of information we are subject to for much of our waking life is more like a hurricane blowing out the embers than a perception giving space for a glow to form.  

Perls once wrote:

 Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Freud and Einstein started with the structure of events and kept up the primary contact with the non-verbal world, verbalising only a posteriori what they had found.  How different is the approach of most of us.  We start with words.

The lecture provided an opportunity to travel behind and below words for part of one day of our lives, and do whatever talking we need to do in simpler words than Perls used to make his salutary comment. Together we created a peaceful and nurturing present.

The Afternoon Session

In the afternoon, Gaie facilitated an experiential exploration of issues raised in the lecture.

About Gaie Houston

Gaie read English language and literature at Oxford. She first studied group behaviour with National Training Laboratories in the USA. She is now Emerita Adviser to the Gestalt Centre, London, with whom she has worked over the last forty years. Gaie has taught supervision and supervised since 1980.
She is on the editorial boards of The Gestalt Review, USA; The British Gestalt Journal; and, until its demise in 2024, Self and Society: Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

Gaie has written nine books on group and individual psychotherapy, and eighteen plays, many for BBC Radio, and some for theatre. She has co-presented several television series on behaviour in small groups and on sexual behaviour. She has been a local Councillor and directed opera in Italy.

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