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11th Conference of the European Association for the Gestalt Therapy - EAGT
The heART of connecting Co-creating individuals and communities
I am sitting on the Domburg beach (Walcheren, The Netherlands). The sun is shining, the seagulls screeching in the air, looking for food. In the distance I hear the surf. There is almost no wind and the waves roll gently over the sand. Curious as they are. They are not alone. They take everything with them. Striking are the remnants of our prosperity. I am thinking about the foreword for the website... The shifting sand slips through my fingers like the time eludes me. The sand becomes a metaphor for my experience of today's society. It slips through my fingers and becomes a whole again with the beach and without knowing with which granules I have had contact. Add a little water to the sand and the sand can be shaped into a sand castle, a mermaid or a race car. I leave my footprints behind as every human leaves their footprints behind in this society. When I look back, my mermaid has vanished in the sea and the beach is again as it was. All these thoughts bring me to the theme of the conference, which is:
The heART of connecting Co-creating individuals and communities
The art involves our heart, which means our passion, our availability to feel, to plunge into life, to meet novelty and feel alive and inspired.
This all is not an individualistic process: contact is our immediate reality, so art and passion are consequences of connection. Connection is the result of a contact process. But also: the assimilation of our contacts is the way we can feel connected and belong to a community. This is crucial in our time as we’re living in a liquid society, like sand on a beach, implying specific difficulty and a need of
belonging. The heART of connecting collects all these concepts that are fundamental in contemporary Gestalt therapy.
Let us connect to these concepts at the 11th EAGT conference! I invite you wholeheartedly to attend to the conference and I look forward to connecting with you in Krakow.
Bas Lokerse
President ad interim EAGT