I help people develop their own personal awareness in my therapy sessions. It is part of my Gestalt therapy rooted applications and process when helping clients grow.  This said, however, I was recently asked if there are any Gestalt rooted practices someone could do at home to help develop their own self-awareness. Well, of course, there are!

What I really like people to start with at home is a concentration technique.  There are four steps to this process, which are as follows; First- start with maintaining the sense of actuality. This means you concentrate on your here and now.  Don’t disassociate to stress or daydreams. If you’re sitting in a quite room, try to remain (mentally) in the quite room and not lost in thought.

Next, realize that you are living the experience – acting it, observing it, suffering it, resisting it.  If your mind keeps wandering away from the quite room, understand this is happening and then ask yourself why your mind keeps trying to leave the room. Will it suffer from being in the present? Will it resist it because you may be forced to deal with the stillness of the here and now?  The follow-up step to this is to attend to all experiences, whether internal or external, the abstract as well as the concrete, to those that you ‘wish’ for and to those that you deliberately produce. It is key to take responsibility for them all, including your blocks and symptoms.

The final step is to verbalize what you are feeling out-loud and to yourself. Try something like, ‘Now I am aware that I can’t keep my mind still and in this room, I realize that I am overly stressed about money. I can’t stop worrying about it. Money is causing me to stress and causing me harm. I’m going to take action now by……”

Of course, all this takes practice. I can help you. Make sure to click and connect with me for personalized help and deeper work.