Gestalt Cycle of Experience - Sensation

I'm writing a monthly series of articles exploring the Gestalt Cycle of Experience, a theoretical map used in Gestalt Therapy to describe the process by which needs, emotions and interests come into awareness and are satisfied. You can read the introductory post that provides an overview of the whole thing here. This month we are going to look at initial stage of this process, 'sensation'.

The sensation element of the cycle invites us to pay attention to felt experience. What can be sensed? We will have all learned about our 5 senses as children (taste, touch, sight, hearing, smell). In recent years, neuroscientist and other researchers have described further senses of proprioception (sense of the body in space), a vestibular sense (sense of movement and balance) and interoception (capacity to sense within the interiority of the body). Taking all of these together, humans can be exquisitely sensitive and in touch with lots of information about themselves and their environment at once, often this is all going on without us knowing much about it.

In the cycle of experience, we are interested in what rises up out of this continual stream of experience of sensory data in the form of an emerging need, want, feeling or interest. In very basic terms, I could walk past a bakery and not really notice the smell and sights and carry on, or I could walk past it and be completely distracted, mouth watering and buying something before I know what I'm doing. The difference possibly being whether or not I had already had breakfast! My hunger looking to be sated making me more available and suggestible to the sights and smells of the bakery.

In this example, I'm emphasising the interrelation between the self and the environment. The interest in the bakery is the product of a moment in time, a particular context, associations and set of conditions. Change these and the response can be different. In another version of the same example, perhaps I always end of buying something at the bakery just because I'm enticed by the smell and the sights, but I'm not even hungry! In this case, I'm out of touch with my actual experience (sensations) and acting habitually, or possibly in response to another experience I'm unaware of, e.g. anxiety, loneliness etc and whatever association I have around food as a way of self soothing.

Feeling and sensing what there is to feel in our embodied experience can take a bit of slowing down. What we do and how we respond in life can become habitual and rote, as if there are rules or ways of doing things that we just follow. In this stage of the cycle of experience the idea is to notice that something is arising, make some space for it with an attitude of curiosity and from there the rest of the cycle can move the benefit of more fulsome awareness. Without being tuned in to our felt experience our awareness and any subsequent action can be at odds with what we are truly needing. Or, can be caught in a habit of overriding deeper needs and feelings.

In the case of sensation, our capacity to sense and feel can be blocked or numbed through over busyness, alcohol, overeating, or more subtle internalised messages preferencing thought and logic and disavowing felt bodily experience. Similarly, the extent to which we have learned to focus on ourselves and our own needs, compared to others will impact the degree to which we are tuned in to our own sensate experience.

As you are probably picking up this cycle of experience, whilst appearing quite simple, is way of trying to describe a highly multilayered and non-linear aspect of being human.

If you're interested to develop this aspect of your being and experiencing simple things like remembering you are your whole body, not just your thoughts and mind can be a good start. Spending time throughout the day noticing the signals coming from your body can help to build a relationship with sensing, for example taking care of basic bodily needs and not ignoring them. Getting up and moving after being sat for a long time to let energy move and wake up the senses. Noticing the soft touch of the atmosphere on the skin or whatever else there is to sense in the moment.

This sensing can deepen, beyond physiological needs, to the rise and fall of energy, the feeling tone of emotion, of yes and no, want/don't want. All of this supporting a sense of self. Not an idea or thought about who we are, but an actual embodied and felt reality of the expression of our being in the present moment.

Next time we will look at awareness, where meaning begins to focus the rising energy towards whatever is of interest.

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