Breathing Into Contact The Gestalt Journal, Fall 2000 (Excerpt) This essay is about attending to breathing in the practice of Gestalt therapy....What is the quality of the field that is perceptible when people attend to breathing? It is sometimes experienced as an expansion, a feeling of self exhaling into contact with the environment and of environment meeting self as air enters the body...It is an aware experience of id functioning.... In Gestalt Therapy, Paul Goodman wrote "The first step in therapy is contacting the breathing." Bringing this background function forward can promote energetic work in Gestalt therapy. My aim in this paper is both to illustrate and to provide an experience of how that may occur. I also want to discuss the historical connection between the breathwork modality founded by Elsa Gindler early in the twentieth century and the beginnings of Gestalt therapy.... Experiment... Breathing Awareness in Laura Perls' Work... Laura Perls and Elsa Gindler... Fritz Perls' Experience of Gindler's Work... Working with Clients' Awareness of Breathing in Gestalt Therapy... Therapists' Self Support through Aware Breathing... Conclusion The Gestalt Journal, Fall 2000