The relationship is already here.
Steven Harper on embodied compassion, Gestalt practice and the living world.
Compassion is often approached through language and thought: something we understand, cultivate or offer. Steven Harper is interested in what happens when compassion involves the whole organism — body, feeling, attention and relationship.
His work in Gestalt practice and wilderness settings also asks us to reconsider where the boundaries of that relationship lie. What begins as awareness of our own experience can extend towards another person, and beyond the human world into place, ecology and belonging.
Amy Finlay-Jones spoke with Steven about embodied compassion, the intelligence of the organism, why he resists the idea that humans need to “reconnect” with nature, and the kind of practice he believes this moment asks of us.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Let’s begin with Gestalt practice. What is it?
Steven: Gestalt practice, at its base, is an awareness practice. In that way it shares something with many wisdom traditions: we start with awareness, specifically awareness of what is.
As that awareness grows, more choices become available to us. We begin to behave a little less from habit and older ways of being in the world, and become more able to step into new possibilities.
The theme we’ve been exploring together is embodied compassion. What does that mean to you?
Steven: My experience is that when many people become curious about developing compassion, they go very quickly to the head. Perhaps over time they begin to come down into the heart.
For me, embodied compassion includes the whole organism. It includes the belly, the heart and our cognitive capacities. I believe it also includes something more ineffable — almost inviting the cells of the body, the tissues and the organs, the whole organism, into a state of compassion.
When that happens, language and emotion can arise from within the experience itself. There is a sense that the wisdom of the organism begins to light up.
That has a different quality from the compassion practices I first encountered, which often felt as though I were working from the top down. This can also work from the bottom up.
Gestalt practice often begins with awareness of our own experience. How does that extend into relationship?
Steven: Gestalt practice often starts with the intrapersonal: me with me.
From there it can move into the interpersonal: me with another.
And there is also the possibility of relationship with something beyond the human, or greater than the human, often referred to as the transpersonal.
For me, Gestalt practice begins with this internal terrain that we might loosely call the self. Then we extend awareness into the relational human world, and eventually beyond that into the more-than-human world.
The more-than-human world is an important part of your work, particularly in your wilderness immersions. Why does nature matter?
Steven: Here I would borrow from wisdom traditions across the planet.
Humans have been going into nature to go inward since long before the written word. Across cultures and continents, people continue to enter the natural world as a way of encountering themselves and something larger than themselves.
For me, it is about relating to something beyond the human world. And I think one of the most direct entries into that — something we can perceptually feel rather than having to imagine — is to go outside, make contact with the natural world and notice what happens.
Some paths towards the transpersonal can remain mental constructs or cognitive ideas that never quite become perceptually felt.
Nature offers another avenue because it calls our whole organism into wakefulness.
There is also something important in moving beyond the idea that we are separate from nature and need to somehow establish a connection with it.
We are not separate from nature. We are nature.
The relationship is already here.
I am nature.
In natural environments, the whole organism is invited into a larger felt sense of who we are, beyond the identity we ordinarily take ourselves to be.
When we first began imagining our SOMA retreat, we both felt that this kind of practice mattered particularly now. Why do you think that is?
Steven: At some very basic level, I hope that the human experiment on this planet continues.
There are moments when I genuinely wonder about that. We are living amid enormous division, with many difficult issues before us.
I believe we are being called to step into a different way of being human.
That means stepping, to some degree, beyond what we already know. Perhaps beyond some of our comfort, too, so that we can meet what is arising.
Rather than turning away from division and the major challenges we face, can we develop the capacity to turn towards them?
I believe that capacity requires practice.
It requires our capacity to engage the belly, the heart and the head.
Right now, with so much divisiveness around us, the heart may be one of our primary vehicles. Can I begin to open my heart and soften enough to meet what is here? Can I find the courage to show up for what is happening?
The roots of courage take us back to the heart.
So the question becomes: can I find the courage to show up, and the courage to change myself and my behaviour, so that I can meet all that is arising?
Steven and Amy co-facilitated the SOMA Retreat in August, 2026. For details of future SOMA Retreats, please sign up to the DEYA Retreats newsletter.
