About Gary Sherman

“It is our state of consciousness that is ultimately responsible for the quality of our lives and the world we inhabit. Therefore, it is vitally important that we elevate our lives by exploring and developing new patterns of learning about ourselves and our nature as consciousness. I am committed to exploring our deepest human potential and supporting our ever-evolving nature and the world we collectively create.”
Gary Sherman

Gary ShermanGary Sherman has been a psychotherapist and teacher of meditation and self-awareness for over thirty-five years. He began his professional career with a graduate degree in Clinical Social Work from the University of Southern California. He co-founded the Humanistic Psychological Center, a private counseling center in Los Angeles, California that provided psychological services to the general public. Recognizing a greater dimension to human consciousness than his western training provided, Gary began a life-long study of meditation and spiritual practice. After moving to the San Francisco Bay area, Gary intensified his study of meditation with a small group of researchers, who shared his interest in the exploration of expanded consciousness, inner states, and their usefulness in understanding and transforming the quality of one's life. Throughout his 30-year private practice, Gary provided education and psychological counseling to individuals, families and couples with a broad range of behavioral, emotional, existential, marriage and work related issues. In 2003 he co-founded the Creative Awareness Project in Palo Alto, California.

While sitting in meditation one morning with his wife, Ellen Miller, Gary found himself in an expanded and rarified state of consciousness. While in this state, he felt the impulse to speak. Surrendering to the impulse, he began to speak and deliver a body of experiential knowledge intended to create in its practitioner a perceptual integration, a shift to a new level of consciousness. From this body of knowledge, Gary has designed and delivered classes, workshops and programs teaching self-awareness, expanded perception and inner growth.

Currently, Gary is an educator and teacher, who is committed to exploring our deepest human potential and translating the results into practical knowledge that can be used to elevate our lives. His present work embodies the educational process, called Perceptual Integration that he developed for training others in becoming self-aware.

Perceptual Integration

Perceptual Integration is an educational framework that reveals the mechanics of awakening and develops the whole person. It engages participants in skillfully designed learning experiences that are gentle, self directed, and experiential in focus. Emphasis is placed on the playful use of self-awareness and the ability to bring attention to the moment. It is a framework for learning that explores the mechanics that lie beneath concepts and ideas, and embraces the authenticity of direct experience.

Three primary skills are emphasized: (1) Taking control of our attention (2) Grounding in the fact of the body and (3) Releasing from the fiction of the mind. See my book, Perceptual Integration: The Mechanics of Awakening.

By taking control of our attention, we are able to locate our point of perception, which is grounded in the here and now. From this vantage point, we recognize the point of emergent experience as perceptual in nature and are in a position to receive feedback about the nature and form of our present state of being. This grounded presence enables us to discover and explore the subtle energy fields and larger states of consciousness that are available through the fact of the body.

Because the body never moves out of the present moment, the fact of the body is the ground from which we can travel into thought or into the world and yet still return to ourselves. It is the doorway through which we can experience larger, more expanded states of consciousness that are the source of the vision, inspiration and revelation that guides us through our lives.

From this more expanded experience of the self, we are able to stabilize our state of being by releasing ourselves from the fiction of the mind and its inherent capacity to build narrative story and mental images that can dominate our experience and diminish our self-awareness.

Each of these skills represents a shift in consciousness which, when practiced together, produces a perceptual shift to a new state of being. These three skills represent a specific, conscious process that produces a deeper and more expanded self-awareness. We gain access to our thoughts, feelings and intuitive promptings, as well as to higher energy states that bring a sense of grace, calm, and revelatory insight to our behavior, choices, and performance within the circumstances of our lives.

Since this training addresses the perceptual center through which we interpret reality, all areas of living are enhanced. Mood, self-acceptance, higher intuitive faculties and creativity all contribute to effective work, grace in relationship, and an informed wisdom in meeting the demands inherent in daily life. When our thought process, body of sensations and feelings, and energetic experiences are brought into alignment, we are then able to receive them as a cooperative process, one that is unifying and perceptually integrated.