Gestalt Therapy Institute of Los Angeles

09/09/2026

GTILA Presents: Somatic Gestalt with Masatsugu Momotake 百武 正嗣 🙌🏻

Saturday September 19
10:00AM-11:30AM PT
Zoom
Signup link 🔗 below 👇🏻

An Experiential demonstration of an integration of the Feldenkrais Method with Gestalt theory and approach.

This presentation will be a demonstration of an integration of the Feldenkrais Method with Gestalt theory and approach.

Feldenkrais noticed that a baby’s brain develops through the relationship between “movement” and “gravity.” The brain forms neural connections based on several principles. These principles are as follows:
1. Move slowly.
2. Move within a comfortable range.
3. Move while paying attention to the body.
4. Movement arises from the balance between gravity and the skeleton.
5. Enhance the ability to distinguish different parts of the body.

As adults, losing these principles can lead to anxiety, panic, hyperventilation, headaches, stiff shoulders, and lower back pain. To improve these symptoms, Feldenkrais lessons focus on learning to become aware again through movement of the body.

On the other hand, Gestalt therapy directs attention to bodily sensations. In modern education, emotions are considered functions of the brain that should be controlled. Indeed, emotions like sadness, joy, and anger exist in the language areas of the brain as words. However, their true meaning can only be realized when accompanied by bodily sensations. Promoting this awareness through attention to subtle movements and delicate sensations allows a person to return to their authentic self. Gestalt therapy bypasses imagination, interpretation, and analysis in the intermediate realm, focusing instead on the meanings of sensations and emotions experienced in the body:
1. What am I feeling right now?
2. What am I noticing?
3. How can existence be experienced?
4. How is the body negotiating with the world?

Somatic Gestalt aims to:
1. Focus on breathing.
2. Focus on muscle tension.
3. Focus on bodily feelings and emotions that cannot be expressed in words.
4. Remain in uncomfortable sensations or situations that are difficult to turn attention to. Through these experiences, one becomes exposed to a new world.

art by: Joshua Sandler

An Experiential demonstration of an integration of the Feldenkrais Method with Gestalt theory and approach. *With Polish Translation

08/13/2026

GTILA Presents: Art of Fascination and Belonging with Caroline Paltin, PhD

Saturday August 29
10:00-11:30am PT
Zoom eventbrite 🔗 👇🏻
FB 10% discount code: Facination10

An Experiential demonstration of Gestalt Life Focus Community Practice with Embodied Contact Through Art and Dialogue with Caroline Paltin.

Together with Erving Polster, I created the Mindful Life Focus Community, which provides a gathering to explore and attend to the lives we are living through dialogue, attention to arts, film literature and dance. Following Erv’s idea that “therapy is too good to be limited to the sick” We will experience how Life Focus practice creates space for rich exploration and curiosity about the lives we are living. We will demonstrate how fascination can be harnessed to amplify our awareness of the ordinary, gets us “on the conveyor belt” and restores a sense of the extraordinary nature of what we might otherwise experience as just living.

Through experiential and expressive activities, we will experience how use of arts guided by Gestalt practices, can amplify, illuminate, and energize; Create a sense of mutual shared fascination; Explore the need for both individuation and merger and the tension between; Bring awareness to fixed patterns and opportunity for shift in flow; Increase contact awareness of our reflexive and stuck processes, and how we meet others; Create opportunity for shared awareness of our ways of contacting, and fluid space to notice and move in fresh ways, bringing us more current with ourselves and our relational process.

While Life Focus is considered “beyond therapy” we will examine how it can be an adjunct to therapy, and at times, have therapeutic benefits without that being an intended focus.

Simple Supplies: Participants will need a brown grocery paper bag and scissors, pens or pencils, and white paper. May also use paint pastel or crayons or colored markers. Colored markers or colored pencils encouraged. No art skills necessary, this is process oriented, not product oriented.

Art

An Experiential demonstration of Gestalt Life Focus Community Practice with Embodied Contact Through Art and Dialogue with Caroline Paltin.

04/20/2026

GTILA presents: The Language We Swim In: Why Words Matter in Gestalt Therapy with Steven A. Elkind, PhD

Saturday May 2, 2026
10:00AM-11:30AM PT
Use discount code: FB-Language
Zoom
🔗
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-language-we-swim-in-why-words-matter-in-gestalt-therapy-tickets-1978208005396?aff=oddtdtcreator

Description: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”— Friedrich Nietzsche. Gestalt therapy has long emphasized presence, awareness, and dialogue — yet each depends on language, the very medium through which we both connect and distort experience. This presentation explores how linguistic habits shape perception, organize the therapeutic field, and subtly define what is possible in relationship. Drawing on field theory, phenomenology, and Korzybski’s “map is not the territory”, Dr. Elkind examines how words structure the world we inhabit and how therapists can learn to speak in ways that better mirror process, movement, and participation. Participants will gain new insight into how language both reveals and limits awareness, and how refining our use of words can deepen contact, support self-regulation, and enliven the dialogic field.

Art

A presentation with Steven A. Elkind, PhD

03/27/2026

Join us for GTILA presents: “Therapeutic Presence, Dialogue and Co-Regulation in Troubled Times,” with Gestalt Therapists Charlie Bowman, LCSW and Peter Cole, LCSW.

Sunday April 12th 2026
10:00am-11:30am PST
Online zoom
🔗 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/therapeutic-presence-dialogue-and-co-regulation-in-troubled-times-tickets-1977548067504?aff=oddtdtcreator

In this presentation Gestalt Therapists Charlie Bowman, LCSW and Peter Cole, LCSW will discuss their recent article I Am Here: A Gestalt Perspective on Navigating Through Troubled Times scheduled to appear in the Spring 2026 issue of Gestalt Review. They will explore the impact of the U.S.’s current authoritarian political climate on the practice of psychotherapy. They will discuss the Mass Induction of Trauma, a concept they introduce in this paper and will examine how therapists and clients can work together toward co-regulation and hopefulness in these trying times. Drawing on theory and practice, including field theory and relational gestalt therapy theory, Charlie and Peter will outline ways to sustain therapeutic presence and healing in today’s challenging sociopolitical atmosphere

Art

03/18/2026

GTILA board members spotted in the wild! 👀

02/18/2026

Join us for GTILA Presents: Devotion, Ritual, and the Ground of Gestalt Therapy with Jordan Dann, MFA, LP, CIRT, SEP.

March 21, 2026
10:00AM-11:30AM PT
Zoom

Tickets Available on EventBrite

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/devotion-ritual-and-the-ground-of-gestalt-therapy-tickets-1978207618238?aff=oddtdtcreator

Discount code: FB-Ritual

Description: Gestalt therapy invites us to meet what is—fully, reverently, and with care. This workshop explores devotion not as dogma or sentiment, but as a disciplined, embodied orientation toward presence. Devotion in the therapeutic encounter arises through contact, humility, and human-to-human meeting—but also through the ritual structures that hold the work: our attendance to time, boundaries, beginnings and endings, the preparation of space, the rhythm of return, and the ongoing tending of the field. In both physical and virtual rooms, the therapist’s devotion is expressed in how we create and sustain the conditions for awareness. Every ritual gesture—lighting a candle, opening a laptop, arranging the chairs—can be understood as a way of saying “you matter; we matter.” Devotion, then, becomes a form of aesthetic and ethical care: attention to the relational, the environmental, and the temporal. Through dialogue, experiential practice, and reflection, we will explore how devotion and ritual together root Gestalt therapy in an ethic of presence, reverence, and responsibility—to self, other, and field.

Art by

02/17/2026

Join us for GTILA Presents: Chairwork Psychotherapy: Using the Four Dialogues in Clinical Practice with Amanda Garcia Torres, LMHC, and Scott Kellogg, PhD

Feb 28, 2026
10:00AM-11:30AM PT
Zoom

Tickets Available on EventBrite
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chairwork-psychotherapy-using-the-four-dialogues-in-clinical-practice-tickets-1978074437892?aff=oddtdtcreator

Description: Within Gestalt therapy, addiction and trauma are not seen as isolated pathologies but as expressions of the field—creative adjustments that emerge in response to disconnection, overwhelm, and unmet relational needs. In this Gestalt Salon, we will explore how a relational and field-sensitive perspective allows us to meet these experiences with compassion, curiosity, and embodied awareness.

Rather than reducing addiction to a behavior or diagnosis, this conversation invites us to consider it as a movement toward restoration and contact—a spontaneous attempt by the organism–environment field to regain balance. Drawing from Field Theory, Relational Gestalt practice, and Polyvagal-informed awareness, we’ll reflect together on how therapeutic presence, co-regulation, and somatic attunement open possibilities for healing and integration.

Together we will explore:
– Addiction and trauma as field phenomena rather than intrapsychic dysfunctions.
– How the relational stance of the therapist supports contact, co-regulation, and embodied safety.
– How somatic and nervous system awareness enhances field sensitivity and deepens presence.
– The application of the Compassionate Relational Gestalt Trauma Model (CRGTM) within the living field of therapy.

Art by 🎨

01/27/2026

GTILA Presents: Integrating Somatic, Polyvagal, and Gestalt Approaches with Rafael Cortina

Eventbrite 🔗 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/healing-addiction-trauma-through-a-compassionate-relational-lens-tickets-1977524823982?aff=oddtdtcreator

Use discount code - FB-Rafael

Within Gestalt therapy, addiction and trauma are not seen as isolated pathologies but as expressions of the field—creative adjustments that emerge in response to disconnection, overwhelm, and unmet relational needs. In this Gestalt Salon, we will explore how a relational and field-sensitive perspective allows us to meet these experiences with compassion, curiosity, and embodied awareness.

Rather than reducing addiction to a behavior or diagnosis, this conversation invites us to consider it as a movement toward restoration and contact—a spontaneous attempt by the organism–environment field to regain balance. Drawing from Field Theory, Relational Gestalt practice, and Polyvagal-informed awareness, we’ll reflect together on how therapeutic presence, co-regulation, and somatic attunement open possibilities for healing and integration.

Together we will explore:
* Addiction and trauma as field phenomena rather than intrapsychic dysfunctions.
* How the relational stance of the therapist supports contact, co-regulation, and embodied safety.
* How somatic and nervous system awareness enhances field sensitivity and deepens presence.
* The application of the Compassionate Relational Gestalt Trauma Model (CRGTM) within the living field of therapy

Art 🙏🏻

12/21/2025

On January 24th, 2026at 10am pst The Gestalt Therapy Institute of Los Angeles (GTILA) is kicking off our 2026 season of educational salons with this important offering -

GTILA Presents: Expanding Awareness And Promoting Contact Across Differences In Polarized Times: Getting From Me To We with Deborah L. Plummer, PhD and Jon Frew PhD, ABPP

Description: What can we, as members of the Gestalt community in the US and globally, do to address the deep divisions that exist in places where we live, work, serve, worship and socialize? How do we effectively work with and relate to those with whom we vehemently disagree? How do we learn to support ourselves and others to live cohesively with ambiguity and uncertainty? In this seminar, innovative and viable concepts including radical respect, a relational model for managing the dynamics of differences, and developing a “Me to We Mindset”, all rooted in essential Gestalt concepts such as field theory, phenomenological inquiry and dialogue, will be presented. Together, we will explore and practice deep listening for bidirectional understanding of the beliefs, history, experiences, worldviews, perceptions, values, attitudes, and motivations of others. We will integrate this Me to We characteristic as an example of the intersection and blending of Gestalt therapy’s three fundamental philosophical foundations. The Salon will end by turning conversation into action as participants complete the statement, “Moving forward I will…”

10% discount code: FB-Awareness

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanding-awareness-and-promoting-contact-across-differences-tickets-1977746790891?aff=oddtdtcreator

Art -