Life in Exile

Life in exile is quite a challenging task: you have to restart your practice in a new environment, to learn new rules of living and working there, culture, language and make new connections… The list of urgent tasks is quite long but the most challenging in war time is building trust among people. Who are those around me? Who is trustworthy and who is not? How to find my people – these are the most difficult issues for those coming from the field of oppression, persecution and missiles. Many basic humanistic concepts are experienced differently in wartime.

Nowadays we practice in the field full of ruptures at the contact boundary with the environment as survival modes. Something strange is going on with the field producing the figures of anger, mistrust and loneliness, taking our energy away from life and creativity. We feel exhausted from wars, losses and other traumas; our engine has no power to keep going… How do we bring something new to these processes? We are thinking about how to explore ways to repair the contact with the environment and to become aware of what is missing to raise fertility in the field. 

We are migrants our entire life. Our first migration is from the mother’s womb to the world, then from one place to the other, from our current role to a new one, from one person to the other and so on, non-stop during the whole of our life until the very last migration when we leave this world… And every time we migrate it is first of all about loss and then about something, somebody new, maybe interesting, and sometimes even exciting.

And gestalt therapy is the therapy of migrants. Fritz and Lora Perls, the founders of gestalt, migrated all their lives...