We honor and remember Cyndy Sheldon, M.S.W. Cyndy died May 11th 2021. Gestalt therapist in her heart, part Navajo in her soul, Cyndy’s life and work is of special meaning to us as it travels decades of Gestalt therapy, from it’s infancy in the United States to the present time. Cyndy and her fellow travelers, with great energy, intelligence and joy supported and nurtured the beginnings – The Gestalt Institute of San Francisco joined it’s sister ships The New York Institute and The Cleveland Institute – sponsoring workshops with Frederick Perls and many other great talents in the budding Human Potential movement. I give you this one thought to keep I am with you still – I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sunlight on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning’s hush, I am the swift, uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not think of me as gone – I am with you still – in each new dawn. This was the “unincorporated Territory” of Gestalt therapy. There were no organized training programs, no “tracks,” no certificates. Groups brought in teachers, mentors, workshop leaders. Some good, some not so good. Excitement was high. It was a good time to be alive. Cyndy’s friends and associates and trainees remember her here: From Victor Daniels: ABOUT CYNDI SHELDON Cyndy Sheldon was a lovely gentle soul who practiced the classical style of Gestalt therapy that was dominant at Esalen Institute in the old days and at the original San Francisco Gestalt Institute. Her warm manner was supportive when appropriate and confrontive when necessary. I knew her at the S.F. Institute and then through several years of connecting at the Southwest Gestalt meetings. She was a living refutation of the assertion by some that the brilliant working process Fritz developed and his sometimes-abrasive personality were one and the same. She artfully combined the theory and methods of classical Gestalt work with her own way of being-in-the-world that was dramatically different from that of Fritz, while never putting down his work or the work or ideas of other practitioners whose styles differed from her own. I will miss her, and I am sure that so willl many others whose lives she touched. -- Victor Daniels Victor Daniels, Ph.D. Emeritus Professor, Sonoma State University From Frank Rubenfeld I first met Cindy in 1973 when I joined the faculty of the Gestalt Institute of San Francisco. After she moved to Washington, we would re-connect at Gestalt and Humanistic Psych conferences. Always a pleasure. She lived the life and walked the talk of a Gestalt teacher and practitioner, and did so in her own unique way. I will miss her. Just to keep things clear. We were the founders and early members of the Gestalt Institute of San Francisco .. in the nineties, Morgan Goodlander formed “the San Francisco Gestalt Institute.” We asked him to pick another name, but he refused. The good new is: the heart and soul of Gestalt remain very much alive in the Bay Area in the form of both the Integral Counseling Center ( the Gestalt training clinic at the California Institute of Integral Studies), and some of its graduates who formed the Bay Area Gestalt Institute about six years ago. The Bay Area Gestalt Institute https://www.bagisf.org/san-francisco Lu Grey, a graduate of the Gestalt Institute of San Francisco, led the Integral Counseling Center at CIIS for many years . John Smolowe and myself were part of the faculty for more than ten years.. The trainees during the early 2000s are now running the Center and doing a great job. Debbie Stone has been the director for these past two years, and Vicki Spears is the assistant Director. They have continued the program on line during the past year. The training is for real, and incorporates Interpersonal and intersectional facets that we didn’t get into back in the seventies. -- Frank Rubenfeld From Selma Ciornai: CYNDY SHELDON, co-founder of The Gestalt Institute of San Francisco - the 3rd Gestalt Institute in the US, died this month, on May 11th . She was my teacher at the Institute, my psychotherapist for 2,3 years , a feminist, family therapist who trained with Virginia Satir , and was very close to Fritz Perls who asked her to start a Gestalt Institute in San Francisco. Always interested in different cultures, she worked for several years with the Navajo Indians in the US and lived for a while near Puebla in Mexico. She published 2 books and gave recently (January 2021) an interview to the project Humans of Gestalt. We met few times after I left the US, in San Francisco and at AAGT´s conferences We´ve been in closer contact this last month and I feel very moved by her death. She told me calmly that she knew she didn´t have much time left. Her interviews, books etc can be seen seen in her site www.cyndysheldon.com. Lately she spoke about egalitarian gender relations in Gestalt therapy. At a time in which confrontative work was very common in Gestalt, she was always very supportive. She was a admirable woman. Wonderful trainer and a role model for me while I lived in San Francisco. you´ll be always in my heart Cyndy. – Selma Yes, Molly , you may put my words about Cindy in the memorial . In fact I am very touched that she did a movement to reach out for me in her last month of life…. She sent me her interviews, wrote that she didn´t have much time to live….. she wrote 5 or 5 long emails from April 4th to April 21th…. From Cyndy: She had Leukemia …. In her own words: Selma, Good to hear from you. I am very sick leukemia or related illness……I’m in good company as Jim Simkin, Jack Downing and Jerry Kogan died of this… I’m ok leaving soon, and actually had the best class I’ve taught in years yesterday with one of my two zoom classes. I have found wonderful ways to work on zoom, which I thought was impossible. – Cyndy, April 19th From Michael Vincent Miller Cyndy Sheldon was a woman with a large and generous soul and thereby a woman thoroughly capable of loving others. It always mattered to her to give herself to an effort to bring out the best in the people she worked with, whether friends, patients, students, or colleagues. Because of these qualities she played an important role in people’s lives wherever she lived and worked. She certainly played a dramatic role in my life. When I first met Cyndy, she was still Cyndy Werthman, meaning that she was still married to my best friend at the time, Carl Werthman. This was in Berkeley, California, where I was a graduate student in English at U. C. Berkeley, and Carl was on his way to teaching sociology at the same university. It was the 1960s, and Carl and I were both very involved in the politics of the student left on and off the campus fighting for civil rights and an end to the war in Vietnam. Cyndy was up to something quite different, I didn’t understand what exactly, until one day she said to me that I had to experience the work of this extraordinary man who was training her in an unusual form of psychotherapy. When Cyndy was excited by something, she wanted to share it. The extraordinary man turned to be Fritz Perls, and Cyndy’s training turned out to be taking place in a group of Northern California therapists that Perls was teaching both in San Francisco and Esalen. Somehow Cyndy managed to get permission for me to participate, which I did including a turn on the famous “hot seat.” And that was it for me. From that time forward I was headed for a different life than I had thus far envisioned. I continued training with Perls and other in Gestalt therapy, I changed from working on my doctorate in English to finishing one in psychology and sociology at a different university. And though I taught literature for a few years, eventually I went into private practice of Gestalt therapy and eventually training people in it. And that has been my career for more than forty years, thanks to Cyndy! Alas, Cyndy, I saw you very infrequently after you moved to Arizona and Washington, and I moved first to Boston and finally to New York—only here and there we met a few times at conferences. I think I never thanked you deeply enough to really let you know that you changed my life in such a fundamental way. Now I can only thank you by letting everyone else know who reads this and the other memorial writings telling the world what a significant and influential life you lived. – Michael Vincent Miller New York, NY and Santa Fe, NM [email protected] From Jerry Rothstein As for some lines for Cyndy's remembrance, simpler is better for me: In the founding days of the San Francisco Gestalt Institute, Cyndy was an essential element of the core. She brought curiosity, perspective, confusion, courage, humour and a lot of nourishment to the effort. She and Janie Rhyne easily balanced out the men's energies (still trying to be dominant) while waiting for the power of Gestalt ideas to really enter their work.