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The Seven Steps of Menschitude and the Gestalt Cycle
The 7 Steps of Menschitude are based on Gestalt Therapy's Gestalt Awareness-Excitement-Contact Cycle. This cycle is a model for the steps we go through in order to know what we need and to get our needs met. The Cycle looks like this:
As you can see, there are 7 steps/stages in the Cycle: Sensation, Awareness, Mobilization of Energy, Action, Contact, Satiety, and Withdrawal.
Important tips about the Stages:
• The stages are not discrete and separate.
• This Cycle is only a map. It is not the territory it describes. The stages are not mutually-exclusive of one another, and there may be many unfolding needs going on at the same time. Nothing about this should be taken as if it was written in stone.
• We don’t move mechanically from stage to stage.
• The stages build upon one another, and there is much messiness in the whole process.
• For example, our Sensing what is happening leads to Awareness of what we need, but Sensing continues to operate during Awareness, and then both continue during Mobilization of Energy, and so on, each stage’s flow nested into the entire unfolding flow of stages.
• You can use this as a 7-day-a-week structure for working on your emotional, cognitive, sensory, interpersonal, and existential issues. Just remember that each day, while you may progress beyond previous days’ stages, you will still use the functions of those prior stages, integrated (hopefully) within one another.
• Or, you can work creatively, as you please, with any or all of the stages at any time.
• If you think of the Gestalt Cycle and its stages as concrete, unchangeable things, you may get locked into a rigid way of thinking about what it describes, and you could miss the flow and poetry of awareness and experience that the model only-clumsily describes. Flexibility, fluidity, flow, and transformation are incredibly-important concepts, and treating aspects of the ongoing flow of Consciousness as concrete, unchangeable things can lead to frustrating stucknesses.
Polarities:
At each stage of the Cycle, we have a task to do. We bring to each task more or less ability to accomplish it.
We think of the range of abilities needed to accomplish tasks as “polarities”, with each end of the polarity describing extremes of these abilities.
For example, in the Sensation stage of the cycle, the important task is to use our 5 senses, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching, as well as the inner senses of body awareness. One polarity in Sensation is Numbness vs. Hypersensitivity. That is, how well do we notice sensations, do we miss important sensory cues, or, on the other end of the polarity, do we feel bombarded by sensations in ways that either confuse or overwhelm us.
No location on any polarity is necessarily bad, and all are useful in some circumstances:
It helps to be moderately-sensitive to hunger pangs, so we can begin to do the necessary steps to get food and eat before we get hangry.
On the other hand, if we have been captured by terrorists who torture us for information or sport, Numbness may be a very helpful ability.
Conversely, if we are in a battle zone, Hypersensitivity may help us stay alert to subtle signs of danger, but a liability when we return to the relative-safety of a peaceful society.
In the Gestalt model of healthy functioning:
The goal is not a particular location on any of the polarities within the stages.
The goal is flexibility and range, the ability to respond to novel and different situations with the best use of any particular location on the polarities.
Thus, we are always working to expand our response-ability, whatever the stage of the cycle we are in.
The kind of a person who has the ability to respond to many types of situations with different tools and approaches, with a broad and creative sense of humanity, could be described in one simple Yiddish word: “Mensch”
Menschitude
In this work, we seek to expand our respons-ability, our Menschitude, to see our unskilled, inflexible, or unconscious areas, so that we can wake up, and be alive, where once we sleep-walked through the moment.
However, because this work is constructed around a stage model, it will be easy to slip into striving for some imaginary ideal or image of who you should be. You might try to be the best Mensch who ever lived, the Menschiest Mensch in all of Mensch-history. As soon as we start wanting to be better or live better, we can fall into the trap of trying to rid ourselves of parts of us that don’t fit the ideal we imagine.
In many spiritual traditions and models of development, a goal is set that sits atop a tradition’s ladder, as the peak which one should reach. It might be “the Arhat” in the Buddhist tradition, or “the Saint” in the Christian, “the Tzadik” in Judaism, or “the Ihsan” in Islam. Properly-understood, these are complex constructs, but popularly-grasped and taught, they can become idealized, Higher-Self personas towards which the adherents on their path strive.
This vertical path upward of spiritual development is sometimes accompanied by a dissing of lower rungs of the ladder, such that large parts of us are seen as immature, sinful, ignorant, or impure.
This kind of spiritual striving can seem remarkably pure, but also painfully self-damning. If we neglect or shame our “lower” parts, it can take a heavy toll on our ability to manage and reduce suffering in our everyday lives, as we try to repress or deny our “lower selves”.
In the worlds of existentialism, Gestalt Therapy, Pathwork, and Shamanic exploration, there is an appreciation of a model of spiritual growth that incorporates the “lower selves”, allowing for a fuller, more-whole image of living the best of our humanity.
So, rather than striving to be some sort of idealized figure, healthy functioning is characterized by the broadest possible integration of all parts of us, such that we can respond to the widest variety of situations with flexibility, versatility, nimbleness, and attentiveness. We aim for wholeness, rather than sanitized holiness.
As your ability to respond flexibly to different situations expands, you will become, more and more, a Mensch For All Seasons (*See also: “Renaissance Mensch”, “Mensch-Of-All-Trades”, and “Mensch Of A Thousand Faces”).
We use this concept of Menschitude, or Menschiness, (or, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing, El Menscherino-ness), to bring this more-wholistic model of health into a fleshier frame. When you say a person is a Mensch, you are saying they are a whole person, the total package, a well-rounded, emotionally-authentic, thoughtful, reflective, loving, regular-gal-or-guy-or-nonbinary, someone you can trust to be flowing with what’s best in the long, hard journey of life.
But not a “perfect Mensch”. Mensches are flawed, broken, vulnerable, hearty, earnest, earthy, divine, funny, loyal, and loving, able to appreciate a wonderful meal, a moment of Nirvana, a juicy fuck, an impassioned fight for social justice, and a trippy Magritte. We work at our paths imperfectly, haltingly, enthusiastically, joyfully, sometimes miserably, but, increasingly, clearly.
Mindful Awareness:
Start easy, and you are good.
Start good, and you are easy.
--Anonymous
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye
--William Butler Yeats
Mindful consciousness is learning to watch, not just with our eyes, but with all of our senses.
Mindfulness training is like learning to play an instrument, only the instrument is your entire Consciousness. You don’t begin learning the piano by playing Beethoven, you begin, simply, by practicing scales. In Mindfulness, the same applies.
All of our mindful practices begin with the simple act of seeing what is there, bare and plain on the surface. In Buddhism, this is called Beginner’s Mind, and no matter how experienced we become in our practice, we always ground ourselves in the bare attention to the moment.
As you work on this, if you feel yourself frustrated and lost in murky, complex ideas, back away and return awareness to the raw, bare, present moment. It will never fail to bring you back to center.
Let go again and again of any idea of working hard at this, of bearing down, of forcing yourself through some ordeal of self-improvement. When a toddler walks into a playroom full of crayons, paper, toys, dolls, and blocks, she doesn’t think, “What shall I work on, so I can learn and get better?” No! She is drawn by curiosity to pick up a crayon and start drawing, or a doll to talk to or feed, or blocks to stack, her attention drawing her along into spontaneous play.
We learn by letting our attention draw us into engagement with our world, our interest and our fascination pulling us along.
So, play in these stages. Mindfulness should not taste like medicine! Good mindfulness should be alive, awake, and embraceable. Mindfulness begins with our fascination with our world of experience, our LOVE of this living moment!!!! LOVE, LOVE, LOVE comes in at the eyes, it begins with clear open seeing, sensing, fueled by our raw, pristine interest in just what the heck is going on RIGHT NOW!
“Life is Suffering” or “The Unbearable Tsuris of Being”:
Tsuris: n. (Yiddish): trouble, difficulty, as in “My rotten kids give me plenty tsuris” and “Nobody Knows The Tsuris I’ve Seen!”(Famous blues standard).
A large variety of psychological problems that humans experience arise from a common source, a generic sense of “not-alrightness”, which may manifest as anxiety, anger, depression, or loneliness. This is experienced as emotional distress and, interpersonally, as alienation or conflict.
All of us, to some degree, suffer from this basic distress. As the great Mensch, Guatama Buddha, put it, simply, “Life is Suffering”, although he called that suffering by its Pali name, “Dukkha”. So, what did Buddha mean by “Life is Tsuris” and how could he possibly have arrived at that statement when he wasn’t even Jewish?
What Buddha meant by this fatalistic-sounding pronouncement, was that it is the human condition to experience anxiety within ourselves and disconnection from one another.
Why?
Let’s Give A Warm Round of Applause for………The Ego!!!:
The Mindfulness Ego is the sum total of our learned patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior.
This is not the Freudian Ego, which is a basic manager program that balances our primitive Id drives with the demands and standards of the societal Super Ego.
It’s also not the Ego we think of when we say someone’s an egomaniac.
When we are born, our consciousness is made up of an undeveloped collection of functions or potentials. We can see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and feel, but we aren’t able to intentionally focus these sensory functions. Our experience was described by psychologist William James thusly, “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion”.
As we develop, to survive and adapt, we learn to use our sensory functions, our emerging cognitive functions (thought, language, imagination, memory, anticipation), and our muscular functions to navigate our world, to get what we need, and to establish a social identity.
We learn to respond to our given name, to coordinate our muscles with gravity in order to stand and walk, to manipulate ourselves and others to our sole or mutual advantage, and to perform many other complex functions that help us survive in the world. All of these functions have a place and an effective use. Pretty intelligent design, right?
But, there is a catch: The more we develop and use these functions, the more we identify with them. That is, rather than handling these functions as tools for survival, we develop the idea that we are these functions, we make an Identity out of them. We don’t use these tools, we become them.
For example, we define ourselves based on our memories, cobbled together experiences that become our biography. This biography is not truth, but interpretive story, sculpted by our mind.
Whether we build the story more on painful or on pleasurable memories, the story is still not us in truth right now.
“I” am not my memory of certain life events, or ideas, or pictures of me.
“I” am living, breathing, Awareness right now, and right now, and right now.
When we forget that we are living awareness in this moment, and we become hypnotically fascinated by the “I” of our dramatic stories, we become stuck in these dramas, painful and pleasurable. Like all characters in drama, we see ourselves in terms of good and evil, heroic and cowardly, important and insignificant, all the opposites that make drama dramatic.
So, we paint lives for ourselves that are full of suffering, close calls, catastrophic tragedies, momentary triumphs, and heartbreaking losses. And while it is true that many moments in our lives are poignant, beautiful, sad, joyous, and daunting, it is the inability to flow through and out of these momentary dramas that creates neurosis, stagnation, and the deadly habits of stereotyped living.
The 7 Steps to Menschitude are designed to help you see where you are stagnant, stuck, or restricted by Ego, and to help you expand your range beyond the stereotyped Identity that you have developed.
So, now that you have learned some basics, click here to learn about:
the meaning and function of each stage,
the challenges of navigating each,
helpful practices for exploring and working on where you struggle with each,
the deeper or more-abstract meaning of these stages.
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