ABSTRACT
As you gaze out upon your world, the complex range of attitudes and beliefs that weave in and out of your story determine the way in which you perceive the world. This story did not form within a void, it formed upon the ground of a particular worldview, and there is a story behind your story. This is your paradigm. It is more than the view upon which we gaze. It is the ground upon which we stand to gaze, the way in which we gaze and the lens through which we see the world. All of which will determine the way in which our bodies reach out to our world and the way in which our world reaches out to us. The lens through which the vast majority of us in the West gaze upon our world is an individualistic lens. Our individualistic paradigm is the ground upon which we stand and as such forms our cultural worldview; experience cannot be felt or formed separate from our culture. From a gestalt field perspective we can never stand completely separate from our inherited assumptions. ‘We don’t just “have” a cultural tradition, or the paradigmatic assumptions that underlie it; rather, we inhabit these things and they inhabit us’ (Wheeler, 2000: 16). The paradigm upon which we stand not only determines our worldview but also our ‘world-blindness’.
