Images, Perception and Gestalt Therapy

In this piece, I bring together a vivid experience from a long Buddhist retreat seven years ago with a much more ordinary image: my living room, where I’m writing now. Along the way I’ll explore images, perception, and how they connect with my practice of therapy. I hope you’ll stay with me.

A Mountain Shrine: Amitabha over the Sea

I’m about six weeks into a four-month retreat in the mountains of Spain. I’m in the middle of my ordination retreat – the retreat in which I’m being ordained into the Buddhist community that I’m part of.

I’m meditating, as I have been doing quite a lot during this retreat. I’m doing a meditation practice called sadhana – a kind of ritualised visualisation practice. In particular, I’m doing the Amitabha Sadhana, the Buddha of Infinite Light. Amitabha is a red Buddha who represents infinite love and compassion. They’re also associated with meditation.

In the practice, I visualise Amitabha over a vast ocean at dusk. They are sitting on a huge red lotus. I silently chant their mantra to myself as I invoke them. As I chant, I gradually build up the image of Amitabha in my mind. The mantra is:

Om Amidivi Hri

I’m doing this meditation in the same way that I’ve done many times before, but this time it feels different. The image of Amitabha is much more vivid. It seems more alive, more vibrant. The gently undulating waves shimmering with light. The sky a deep blue but darkening. I can hear the sea.

As the practice continues, Amitabha rains blessings through the crown of my head. The light descends through my body and comes to rest at my heart.

Weeks of silence have stripped me bare. I feel thinner – not physically, but existentially – as though my skin is less of a boundary, more like a gossamer. In that state, the light feels like a balm: pleasure, relief, an immense letting-go. I can actually sense this warm light descending.

Following the blessing, the Buddha is absorbed back into the deep-blue sky. I’m left with the setting sun over the sea – a gentle ripple on the waves – and something else, so hard to express yet so deeply felt. Even now, writing these words years later, I still have an embodied sense of the feeling.

There was also this sense of melancholy. I had an embodied sense of the impermanence of all things. I felt somewhere at the bottom of my being that everything has to end. My life, all our lives, are like that sunset: so beautiful and yet so brief; disappearing almost in the same moment that it comes into being.

This was not fantasy; it was a living presence. I could see the shimmer on the waves. I could hear the sea. And it felt that by meditating on this image, by being with this image, I was in contact with a deep truth. I realised that, on some level, I am vulnerable. And it’s that vulnerability that connects me with everything else in existence. Indeed what emerged for me was a deep feeling of compassion. I had the paradoxical feeling of both being alone and also connected. But it’s not as if I had to think that, to work it out. There was something about contemplating this red Buddha in my mind that struck my heart directly.

And as the sun disappeared completely, the sea was plunged into darkness. It no longer felt open or serene. It became vast, cold, impersonal – a presence too large to understand.

Both truths somehow coexist – sadness and gladness, connection and aloneness. Through the act of meditation – of staying with this image – I found myself not torn between them, but in contact with both. And the communication was direct and unmediated.

And yet, reflecting on this now, I wonder what this experience – and other similar experiences I have had through meditation, through dreams, in moments of grief or beauty, moments where reality seems changed – means.

The Living-Room Test

Years later, that retreat image still colours how I see the world – even in the most ordinary places, like my living room.

Take a moment to look around the space you’re in. What do you see?

I’m sitting in my living room at home. I see a world of things – solid, stable objects that I assume exist in particular ways: Books. My dog. Paintings. Walls. A plant on the windowsill. A rug under my feet. A cup on the table.

And I notice there’s a whole array of things I don’t see. I don’t see ghosts, or spirits, or gods. I don’t see any red Buddhas over the sea. I carry a strong – almost unshakable – sense of what is real and what is not. Books and dogs are real. Ghosts and gods are not real.

The things I count as real seem to exist outside me; out there in what I call the world, a world of independent objects laid out in space, unfolding in time. And as I look around, something else happens quietly and automatically: I start naming what I see – dog, book, chair, shelf – and sorting them into categories. Some things feel natural, alive – like the plant on the table, or my dog lying on a chair, gently breathing. Others feel different – hard, functional, man-made: the table, the radiator, the chair I’m sitting on.

These ways of framing the world arrive to me unbidden. I don’t think them; they think me. Beneath it all sits a subtle but constant split: there’s me – this ambiguous centre of experience somewhere behind my eyes – and there’s everything else out there. A bright line dividing subject from object, self from world.

All this seems obvious, and most of the time it works: I can get stuff done. Having these assumptions enables me to live my life.

But reflecting on these two very different visions, something in me begins to wonder: what if there’s more here than I normally allow myself to feel? If I slow down, if I soften my gaze, the room changes – slightly. Everything that seemed so solid and stable now feels more alive: it seems to shimmer.

From Mythic to Modern: How We Learn to See

Most of us are trained to see the world through a very particular lens. It divides reality into inner and outer, mind and matter, imagination and fact. It has helped us build astonishing things – map the stars, cure disease, launch spacecraft. But it also casts a shadow: a creeping sense of disconnection, an ache for meaning.

Sometimes I wonder: were those luminous moments I’ve had – during meditation, or grief, or beauty – just sparks in a lifeless machine? Or are they real in a different way?

Carl Jung once said: “In psychic life, as everywhere in our experience, all things that act are actual, regardless of the names man chooses to bestow on them.”

In other words, if something moves us, shapes us, speaks to us, then it belongs to reality: the Buddha dissolving into the sky, the sea as death, the beauty, the grief.

Why Imagination Matters in Buddhist Practice

Buddhist practice encourages us to question not only our thoughts, but the very shape of perception itself. It suggests that we can completely transform ourselves and, through this transformation, we also transform the reality around us.

The opening lines of the Dhammapada, an ancient Buddhist text, say:

“Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows even as the cart-wheel follows the hoof of the ox drawing the cart.

Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never departs.”

But what does it mean to say that experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind and produced by mind?

Well, in one sense, it’s saying that if we become more mindful, kinder, more generous, then this makes us happier but also makes others happier. This is what is meant by the line: “If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never departs.”

But I think it’s also saying something else as well. It’s saying that when we have a mind that is more loving, more compassionate, more appreciative, we see the beauty, the love, the compassion in the world much more readily. This is what is meant by the Buddhist idea of karma.

There can be a misconception that karma is like some kind of divine justice – if we do something nasty then something nasty will happen to us. But in Buddhism it’s simpler and more intimate than that: our minds are coloured by how we’ve used them in the past.

If we have harboured hatreds and resentments, then there is a greater chance that we will experience hatred and resentment in the future. And vice versa. If we have cultivated mindfulness, love, compassion in the past then we are more likely to experience those kinds of mental states in the future.

Ultimately, we are not passive recipients of the world. We co-create it with our minds. In fact, you could say that we co-create it with our imaginations.

My Buddhist practice has taught me that perception – how we experience the world and the sense we make of it – is shapeable. Indeed, we are constantly shaping it with our imagination. And this is affected by how we have used our minds before.

Looking around the room I’m sat in right now, I wonder if there is more here than I usually realise. In fact, I know there is.

We can train our imaginations; we can tune them as instruments of perception. We can learn to see ourselves, others, and the world in ways that bring more beauty, more love, a wider variety of dimensions, and more meaning.

The Buddha’s Animated World

As practice deepens, we may naturally respond differently to life around us. We become more sensitive to the world as alive.

Consider the life of the Buddha: a homeless wanderer in India. A man moving through forests, plains, and jungles, exposed to birdsong, wind, and starlight. The Pali suttas describe him in communion with devas – subtle “gods” or luminous beings – and earth spirits, and he famously called upon the earth goddess before his awakening and entered divine realms in meditation.

I’m not saying we should revive spirit-worship, but the Buddha lived in an animated world. He cultivated a capacity to sense into his surroundings and empathise with the world as a living being.

Pagan and animist cultures, past and present, see the world as inhabited – mountains, rivers, animals, even stones carry presence. And attention must be paid to them if life is to flow well.

Given the ecological crisis we face, perhaps we need to rediscover this imaginative empathy with one another and with the more-than-human world. 

Staying with the Image

Let’s return to that retreat moment – the light, the sea, the setting sun. There is a way of being with such images that doesn’t reduce them to symbols or dismiss them as fantasy. Instead, we attend to them; gently, curiously, with respect.

I meditate on Amitabha frequently, attending to what is happening in my physiology and heart as I do. The point is not to analyse the image, but to let it speak to me – to commune with it.

Images in Therapy: Keeping Paradigms Open

And this all has a relevance for the practice of therapy. James Hillman, the archetypal psychologist, has said that “the soul is constituted by images” – images that mediate between the human psyche and “everything else.” Hillman cautioned therapists against translating images into abstract concepts or diagnostic labels. To honour the soul, we must stay with the image itself, letting its colours, textures, and atmospheres work on us.

Gestalt therapy shares this spirit. For example, if a client says to me that they feel like a small animal trapped in a cage, we might explore in what ways they feel like a rabbit or a cage. What does it feel like to be small and have fur? What might their bars be keeping out or keeping in? If we stay with the image, then does it change? Where might it lead to?

In this way, therapy becomes an imaginal practice – one that keeps many paradigms open at once: mythic, symbolic, bodily, relational. Images aren’t ornamental; they are carriers of experience.

When we allow them into the room – whether the heat of passion, the heaviness of grief, or the blackness of depression – they can guide the process with a wisdom no theory alone can match.

And the same can happen here – at the kitchen table, in the middle of your day. You notice how your shoulders relax when sunlight touches the wall. I notice the beauty of the flowers in the garden and I feel connected to something beyond the tight confines of my own self-concern. When we stay with such images, they become guides.

Conclusion: Tuning the Lens

Practice – whether that is Buddhist practice or therapeutic practice – can show me that perception is not fixed. We are not passive observers of the world; we are participants.

When we tune the lens – when we look with kindness, curiosity – something opens. Likewise, if we look through the lens of anger, resentment, jealousy, well, that changes reality, too.

So notice the images that move you, what brings you alive, what you respond to. Work with them. Let them guide how you speak, how you touch the world, how you walk.

This is the kind of work I love to do in therapy: staying with the images, atmospheres and bodily feelings that arise in your life – whether in dreams, memories, moments of beauty or pain – and letting them speak. If you’re curious about exploring your own inner images, and how they might guide you towards a more connected, meaningful life, it’s something we can explore together in therapy.