Author: braulitt

Gestalt Therapy: the art of closing cycles.

Model: Carlota Wetzel. Photo: Marc Wetzel.

Guía & Ocio Lleida, April 2005.

Healing.

Gestalt Therapy: the art of closing cycles.

Many of us have cycles in our lives that we don’t know how to put an end to. Traumatic events of childhood, some family trends, inadequacies or excesses in our upbringing, injustices, losses, and so on, which may cause future constraints, dependence and depression. Gestalt coaxes us to become conscious of our patterns, of the character we have created for ourselves, and helps us to close cycles properly. We are in front of a shop window and we see something we like. What happens when we focus our attention on that object? We see it, we appreciate it in the foreground, but behind it there is a background, a framework of thousands of things which may be there, or may be happening: there are many other things in the window, people inside the shop, people going by, a bus at the bus stop, two men talking at the corner… From the background, or from the structure, a shape has come forward which commands our attention and which stands in the foreground.

Gestalt therapy is based on this notion of background and shape to explain how we fulfil our needs. For example, somebody is thirsty. That is the shape: a need which has come to the forefront from the background. It is urgent to quench the thirst, which has appeared as a physical manifestation. Immediately the person becomes aware: “I am thirsty”. He hurries up and looks for water. Finally he finds it, drinks and quenches his thirst. The cycle, or “shape” of thirst has been closed. This explains very well this therapy. Gestalt means “shape or set-up”, and its aim is to help people to close cycles. But sometime the unfinished cycles are not that easy to close as for example quenching our thirst: some life cycles have not been closed, perhaps because we were children and we didn’t know how to do it. The difficulties found in childhood and the way they were confronted may cause the person to feel an inner emptiness which one does not know how to fill. Then constraints start, addictions, or a depression… there may be many symptoms. How do we close this cycle?

An experiential therapy.

In the Gestalt Therapy the patient does not simply talk about what is going on. The therapist asks the patient in the first place to bring his attention to the here and now, to his sensations, his body, his gestures. After that he may suggest a number of resources to name a feeling: “I feel a tightness in my chest”, says the patient. The therapist suggests to visualize that which is weighing him down. For example, it may be an enormous rock. The patient may give a voice to that rock. If it had a voice, what would it say? So, in the course of a Gestalt session, which is an experiential therapy, the patient is led to live such an experience, not just to talk about it. Because, when we talk we make speeches, ideology, on what is going on, and even if words are essential to integrate that which we are going through, we must be careful so that they don’t deviate us from that which is essential. Therefore, the therapist is also mindful of the way the patient if going through the experience. In Gestalt it is said that people take different positions to face life situations, but many times these positions are “forgeries” of what we really are. We have made up a character for ourselves which faces situations from a sense of justice, dictator like, complaining, aggressive, invading, victim… But are we really that way, or is it “convenient” for us to be that way? In this sense Gestalt suggests to the patient to become conscious of such patterns and to discover all the rolls, because once they are acknowledged, all the rolls become resources.

Therapy resources.

Let us imagine the case of a patient who still has strong feelings with respect to old childhood scenes in which his parents are implied. The “problem” is his parents are dead… How do you close this cycle? Some times it is a simple as to ask the patient to speak up all that he has bottled up for so many years (that is why he feels a tightness in his chest).

To this end, Gestalt uses several resources, all of them extremely inventive: psychodrama or expressive techniques, visualizations, guided imagination, or the technique of the hot chair and the empty chair, among many others.

In this way the patient may sit on the hot chair and put his father on the empty chair. It is time to tell him what he has not been able to say before. The patient pours out his heart… and then sits on the empty chair, taking his father’s place.

What would his father say? What was actually wrong? Perhaps things cannot be solved in one session, but the patient will have been able to see new angles and to lessen the weight. At this moment the shape looses energy and little by little goes to the background. Then the cycle is closed.

Text: Joan Garriga (director of Instituto Gestalt Barcelona).

Thrapies, workshops and training in Lleida: Coaching Lleida & Isuri Gestalt Lleida. Chus Borrell Feliu.
Translation: Loto Perrella.

Published on magazine Guía & Ocio Lleida. April 2005. No. 39. Pages 128-129.

Near Death Experiences. Testimonials: María Blázquez.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSt9sRNxDfQ

“YouTube” user profile: Más allá de la conciencia. Uploaded date on “YouTube“: Monday, July 8 of 2024. Duration: 52 minutes and 23 seconds. Language: Spanish.

Another Near Death Experience (NDE).

This time we chat with María Blázquez, a person who, from a very young age, remembers this magical and transformative experience when experiencing a moment of absolute happiness and indescribable love.

Welcome to “Más allá de la conciencia” (“Beyond consciousness”).

Thank you for existing.

Information

Everyone has the right to an opinion and to be respected, even if their ideas are not the same.

Director: David Payá.
Edition: David Payá.
Guest: María Blázquez González.
Voice over: Eva Galera, María Blázquez González.

Post translation to English language: Núria Comas Viladrich.

Ennio d’Alba Interview

Introductory note

Ennio d’Alba’s spiritual system works on a number of regressions. But these regressions are not meant to find out if in the past we were Napoleon or Cleopatra (quite funnily, when doing a regression everybody find they were a famous character…). This is a regression where the person tries to establish, or re-establish, a fusion with their subconscious, which is the one to guide and to counsel in this life. To this end it is necessary to carry out several sessions, during which the instructor will lead us to another dimension, where we will receive information and advice which will be useful in our life, and which will lead us (if we so wish) to engage in a spiritual path.

There are many sorts of regression, and many masters, each one with his system and his purpose. The one pursued by Ennio d’Alba is unique, and in Spain the only person qualified and entitled to carry out these regressions is Loto Perrella, who worked many years with him in Barcelona assisting him during the sessions where she acted as translator, and in Rome where she travelled regularly. She also translated into Spanish his book “Il risveglio della divinità nell’uomo” (The awakening of divinity in man), and who was with him in his last days (2022).

Loto Perrella.
Barcelona. Tuesday, April 2, 2024.
https://radionicat.wordpress.com

Introduction

This short fascicle¹ is different from the others, because of the need which appeared when Ennio d’Alba entitled some of his disciples to perform as instructors of his method.

For the first time then the instructor had to answer his students’ questions who, rightfully, wanted to know who was Ennio d’Alba, from which schools came his teachings, which masters taught him: in short, which had been his spiritual path.

And so we asked Ennio d’Alba himself in an interview, which he kindly granted us, the information we had been asked, so as to be able to give exact answers.

This interview was registered on 18th February 2003, and this fascicle is the result.

Marinella Bonasso & Anna Maria Venturini

His life

Ennio Cafagna, whose mystical name is Ennio d’Alba, was born in Rome on 26th September 1926. He grew in a family which gave him an education in accordance with his time, with a great concern for his physical wellbeing but little attention to the sensitivity and psychological needs of the child.

He was an introverted child, he felt lonely and little understood by his strict parents who tried to subdue him even with bodily punishments, being his will already well developed, so he resorted to his imagination of which he was well-endowed. He was also very curious and unceasingly asking questions from everybody.

At school he does little, during the whole of primary school and the first two years of secondary school the teachers find no interest in a pupil which appears absentminded and they give him bad notes.

In that time, creative imagination and visualization were meaningless words, but that was the issue. The child however finds finally a teacher, an intelligent priest, who understands him and helps him to undertake his studies seriously.

At 12 he feels the need to read unusual books which will take him on a path he feels is his, and along which he still gropes along.

He feels an interest especially for yoga, of which he does also the exercises, and for theosophy. At that time in Rome it wasn’t easy to find that sort of books, only a few bookshops had them. He found one in Piazza Colonna and became a regular customer.

Those years flow peacefully, among friends and books, he likes girls, falls easily in love, and idealizes the recipient of his love.

Then the pursuits he had as a teenager become secondary in face of life’s priorities. He marries young and leaves Rome to settle in another town because of his work.

But his marriage does not work and there is a breakup.

This separation, with the disappointment and the pain it causes, is a very important feature in his life, it compels him to look inside and to take up again his inner quest.

His spiritual journey

At that time Ennio reads very much, he learns a lot from Eastern and Western philosophies, he takes interest in ancient mystery schools and in Hermetic Philosophy, and, “by chance” he finds in a magazine an ad of a Rosicrucian school which he immediately joins.

The school improves his esoteric and hermetic knowledge, but to attain the 12 initiations he must travel to Lugano at regular intervals.

In the meantime he meditates and in his meditation he gets in touch with Brunilde, his Subconscious, which in the first encounter appears to him dressed like a warrior and starts to guide him to recover ancient initiations from past lives, and to suggest the stages which, along many years and with many successive modifications, will become the “spiritual” path which we know at present.

Brunilde watches over him, for many years she is his master, because Ennio, exceptionally, and contrary to what it has been for all of us, never had a human master to shorten his journey. From her he is also inspired to write the poems which he starts to publish.

On Brunilde’s advice he chooses his mystical name, which substitutes his own according to custom, to operate in the spiritual field.

On one occasion, Ennio is at Alba, in Piedmont. Suddenly he is aware, on the cathedral façade, of the image of the four Evangelists under the shape of their respective token animals, each one symbolizing one of the four constellations which make up the “great fixed cross” of astrology: Aquarius, Leo, Ox (Taurus), Scorpio, whose symbol is the Eagle. In Italian their first letters make the name ALBA.

The Evangelists are also the symbol of the four elements: air, fire, water and earth, these elements are also represented by each of the Hebrew letters which make the name of Jahve. As a symbol it is a full image of Creation, and then he understands the reason of his name, that Brunilde suggested.

In those days he lectures, he organizes seminars where they also practice visualization, and tries to spread what he has learned, that now has become an intimate part of him.

He also writes some of his notebooks², and starts his first book, “Il Risveglio della divinità nell’uomo”³, which later will be translated into German and later into Spanish, and later the second part of it.

Also in that time he gets in touch with some shaman masters (in flesh and blood this time) and, even if he thinks that that is not the best way for the westerners’ frame of mind, he learns useful teachings from them.

In Lugano Ennio reaches the 12th degree, that is the last Rosicrucian initiation and, on that occasion, he meets his personal Master.

The Master looks at him as if searching his soul, he looks fixedly into his eyes and then disappears, leaving him disappointed, wrongly believing he has not been accepted.

He discusses the matter with his instructors and realizes that none of them has ever reached that standard. The Master he saw is an utter stranger to him and only later, “by chance” will he see his picture together with other Masters in a book on a bookstall… of course he buys it.

It is the master Lahiri Mahasaya, a disciple of Babaji, who lived in the East, and who keeps appearing to him also later, taking turns with the other masters in the picture.

Now his Rosicrucian path is finished. It has given him mainly a cultural training, as the esoteric teachings of the school have been few, excluding the initiation rituals which, however, were not explained. There was much pageant and little essence.

But these things have sparked off in him a sort of spring and, chiefly, have taken him to Switzerland.

Lugano is a set point in his route, his Master has done so as to have him arrive at the right moment.

“I met the right persons”, says Ennio, “I went to the right places,… everything started there. I met a lady who smoothed the way for me and introduced me to the right persons. Everything was born there.”

She introduces him to people in Locarno, people who help him to start the first sessions as an instructor, always individual one, to test on others the route which his Subconscious had him do in the past.

Also through the people he meets in Switzerland he gets in touch with an American esoteric association called BOTA, the “Builders of the Adytum”, that is the Builders of the Inner Temple, and, on their request, he starts translating for the Italian students the lectures that the association sends to its French students.

He carries out this job in a short time, as they have asked him. It is an exhausting job but it improves his knowledge of the four hermetic sciences: Alchemy, Tarot, Cabala and Astrology, and this helps him to put together the several pieces of the esoteric-hermetic outlook of the world.

In those years Ennio is not yet what is considered a “realized master”, that is the step from his personal Master to the Cosmic Master, with the following identification with Him, has not yet taken place. But helping others quickens his route.

Finally, at seventy, Ennio is a Master.

Thanks to his interest, originally cultural but which came from deep within, to his studies, to his meditation supported by an iron will to carry on, without any help from an outer instructor, he has been able to carry out his task in this incarnation, the last one as a human being. Now he can also show to others, fully, the initiation route on the “Spiritual Path”.

⁴

And now
that I have
completed this life
I look at myself
as from the outside
and marvel
at the Great Work
carried out in me
thanks to You, My Lord.
It is a huge and powerful building,
eternal and immortal,
a god among mortals
present in several worlds
to manifest, in Thy Service,
Your Glory in creation
to be able to heal and harmonize all,
eliminating dullness
from human minds,
the only present disorder on this earth
among so much order in the universe.

Notes:

^{1 2} “I Quaderni” by Ennio d’Alba, printed by him. “I Quaderni” are a support to personal sessions. There are 42 of them.

³ Ennio d’Alba – “El despertar de la divinidad en el hombre” (Volume 1). Spanish translation. Barcelona, Ediciones Abraxas, 2000. Volume 2: not translated.

⁴ The poem is by Ennio d’Alba.