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Community Groups Foster Personal and Social Improvement
- Dr Erving Polster
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Dr Erving Polster, the director of The Gestalt Training Center in San Diego inspires practitioners and change makers to take their talents and energy into our communities and establish a tradition that supports people in “life focus” groups” that inspire the creation of an enlightened and greater sense of belonging to societies evolving awareness.
Electronic communications has opened to society a wide opportunity for the expansion of life focus into a communal force for relational connectedness. In a variety of applications of “life focus” we see a large range of purposes and a need for people to join together to focus on how they are living their lives.
At one extreme people are searching for the answers to ethereal unknowns, such as life after death, extrasensory communication, or foretelling the future: these pursuits inspire people to transcend familiar observational limits. At a more common level there is a clearer ground in direct observation. People at this level explore experiences: their fears, their guiding beliefs, their experiences of pleasure, adventure and dismay: their bodily sensations—the everyday happenings in people’s lives.
We also see this “life focus” integrated in the religions, poetry and novels that clarify personal themes such as love contradiction tragedy and survival. All of this is part of a human mission: to probe the nature of existence.
Sheryl says, “Probing the nature of existence sounds much like why I decided to write my second book, The Living Spirit: Answers for Healing and Infinite love to address the silent lonely moments of most people’s lives where they are unable to tap into, or know exactly why they made certain choices, or how to find love prosperity health and peace… Sheryl wrote….. “Many choose to believe it is life circumstances that are at the root of the destruction of so many fine plans, intentions and opportunities. I believe it is the perception of limitation and self-doubt not our circumstances which destroys dreams and thwarts wonderful Ideas……… “ What we focus our thoughts, time and energy on—whether knowingly or unknowingly, whether positively or negatively, whether lovingly or hatefully—sets up a ripple of interaction with other people, places and events that ultimately brings these possibilities into reality…The Universal energetic forces of life are there for us to access, but our life choices and actions, not God, actually create our inner and outer experiences.”
Part of the message of Beyond Therapy is that choices are daring declarations that we are masters of our own fate. As we known choices affect our lives and now more than ever our society prides itself on self-determination and as Jean-Paul Sartre said…We are our choice. J.K. Rowling said “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words: it is expressed in the choices one makes.”
Dr. Polster goes on to say that, “Never can we be aware of all that is going on; our attention skills are overmatched by the continual input from an irrepressible flood of happenings. We can live very well with that fluid process, making the most of what matters to us, steeped in an effervescent universe while much of what enters us eludes awareness.. Everything just keeps on going speedily forward that we set aside the raw material for a lifetime of personal stories which remain in the background. Except for special conversational opportunity that is where the raw material of life experiences remains, impactful only in the mystical sense that everything matters.
The formation of Life Focus Community Groups which are vehicles to help people get off the conveyor belt of worldly insistence so that they may be free to understand and assimilate what is happening in the broad landscape of their minds. These groups enable catch-up opportunities on a continuing basis: they provide designs for people to revisit life themes that color their journey and they restore disconnected sources of personal enablement and affirmation.
While the psychotherapeutic intention was originally to dissolve the sources of psychological trouble, the method of talking between a client and a therapist allowed for the illumination and markers of one’s lifetime and established a new dimension of “life focus” to pay attention to one’s life as a indispensable compliment to understanding human nature and personal growth towards enlightenment or the enchantment of life as a continuous perhaps eternal journey of change and refinement.
Conversations lead us to ordinary awareness and a respect for how well a life is being lived focusing on success rather than failure, and the good in life, rather than the fears. The adventure of enhanced life focus was a search for personal improvement and honoring life as it is now as our illusions, beliefs or patterns, might lead us to believe.
With life focus we are able to examine conflicting purposes, to wonder about our place in our children’s lives, to weigh a good balance between work and play, to be alert for connecting with our friends and community. These themes of living are the source of psychotherapeutic attention, but they are also simply part of a continuing personal attention. Little difference between curing people and enlightening them it seems..
Sheryl Says as a medium /energy practitioner readings that I do before meeting a client give them a greater awareness of their true being as a soul born to explore a physical life and show them how they are interacting with goals and intentions, health happiness and their pursuit of freedom from fear negativity bringing it to joy and well being. Often from the reading my clients realize where they are functioning in accordance with their needs: that certain perceptions or patterns from childhood may no longer be applicable to their life now. Ultimately they heal themselves by changing thoughts and actions and remembering the larger framework of their spiritual and physical realities as they gather a greater acceptance of themselves.
Dr Polster says, two of life’s most prominent of these splits of the mind are the split between the hidden and manifest experience, and the split between the observer and the observed.
The manifest aspect of the mind is composed of all the experiences that are on life’s surface: the things we say see and want. Split from this background of events which are no longer part of our awareness but close to the surface that they remain near to life’s ongoing story. The second of the splits is between the observer and the observed, another inner duet we all live with. This is the split between the self who acts and the one who looks inside to observe the actor. This double mind, disjunctive though it may sometimes be, is always seeking unity because the observer and the observed each contribute to the whole person.
A fundamental question to ask or think about would be whether we have directed our lives or whether the things we did in our lives just happened. Conversations that illuminate how people handle similar situations and may approach them very differently, like the man who was fired and forced to start his own business, and the successful doctor who retired early to pursue many other interests. As they listen to each story the planned and unplanned, they are able to process and perceive a new dimension of understanding about what they already know about their lives, and to understand life in a new way.
Life focus in art such as movies museums lectures and educational classes while they portray lives of other people, we are still able to find common ground with much of the conceived world. While the experiences are vicarious for many readers, there is a meeting point along two dimensions. That’s what the artist does: evokes the reader’s own sensibility about the experience of living.
What I am proposing in creating life focus groups in the community is to another way to rise beyond the natural attraction to creating change. The huge number of religious congregations is another familiar ground for the exercise of life focus. What draws all the people…they simply like to come..They like to be affirmed and part of a community and deepen their sense of what it means to be alive to be entertained, to have cosmic mysteries explained, to hear inspirational music, to follow tradition.
Given the belief that life focus is one of those innate needs to understand humanity, we must create the most promising formats for a beneficial satisfaction of this need. We are only on the cusp of knowing the details of a desirable format, but the mental health professions are well positioned to design them. The Life Focus Community groups build on the same sort of enchantment with the life process as is evident in ordinary conversation, the arts and religion. Participants come together not so much to address what is wrong with them as to explore what their lives are about.
Life focus in terms of integration with conversation, the arts and religion, and community groups, allow us to go beyond mere personal stories of the Conscious and Unconscious, reasons for our actions, and address more generalized themes such as how we manage our time, the ups and downs of loyalty, the relationship between love and dependency, the rigors of discipline. Such themes humanizes each person’s own private experiences and makes it easier to reveal them.
The Life Focus Community group has a number of characteristics that foster its implications of microcosm.
- Groups provide access to a special place time and frame of mind helping participants to know their own lives in new ways.
- People feel a brightened sense of the world at large when they join together with other people in concrete representation of it…like people in bars theatres lectures ballgames concerts and conventions…part of a larger entity not just a private experience. Community groups help us stretch beyond immediacy and live more fully.
- The Convergence of Minds into a simultaneous attention to a shared theme combines individual and communal experiences….Like our national election there is enrichment in everybody paying attention to the same theme????
- The content is broad highlighting feelings sensations memories fantasies and perspectives important both universally and individually.( emotions such as jealousy misunderstanding hilarity or ambition)
- The group incorporates music poetry lectures films and real life stories to give lyrical attraction to the human experience they address issues personal and also vital to the world outside the self.
Dr. Erv Polster author of Beyond Therapy has shared an innovative approach to group and social improvements in our communities and through the role of “life focus” shows how this approach and movement and a wealth of specific exercises and instructions for program design are an indivisible complement to just simply living.
