No Enemy: Empathy, inspiration and neurodiversity with Peri Mackintosh

You are warmly invited to join us for the British Gestalt Journal’s Spring 2026 Seminar Day — an online gathering for practitioners across all modalities, trainees, and anyone curious about deepening their relational work.

Working effectively with neurodiversity requires a fundamental commitment to empathy. Empathy is crucial to forming and maintaining the therapeutic alliance, and therapists face the challenge of maintaining empathy when difficult relational experiences arise and threaten to block empathic connection. Embracing and opening to these challenges, however, inspires creative energy and takes us beyond our usual frame and limitations.

This workshop will introduce the contemplative practice of No Enemy and builds on relational neuroscience and the psychology of inspiration. We will explore a relational approach of non-opposition that honours the client's unique inner world, to empower intrinsic motivation for creative change.

About Peri Mackintosh

Peri is a senior psychotherapist at the National Autism Unit at the Bethlem Royal Hospital. He has over 40 years’ experience of working with people with severe and complex mental illness and autistic conditions. He specialises in working with people who are less verbal.

He studied at the Laban Centre for Movement Studies and the London Contemporary Dance School and has performed, choreographed and composed for theatre and television.

Peri pioneered the use of mindfulness-based movement and music orientated therapeutic workshops in residential mental health units in the early 1980s and has decades of experience of meditation, mindfulness, martial arts and embodied awareness practices.

A black belt, Peri trained and taught Aikido and Kashima Shin Ryu sword work for over 25 years in Japan, USA and Norway. He has also studied Tai Chi and Alexander Technique and developed the movement and voice practice Freeforming, an embodied relational mindfulness practice that integrates elements of Gestalt therapy, Zen, Aikido and the improvisatory arts.

He has written chapters and articles on embodied relational approaches and was a contributing author to Guidance for identification and treatment of individuals with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder based upon expert consensus. BioMed Central Medicine 18, 146 (2020)

About British Gestalt Journal

Founded in 1991, the British Gestalt Journal is now the longest running publication of its kind in the world. It is an international peer-reviewed journal which publishes articles, reports, interviews, reviews, news, and information on all aspects of Gestalt theory and related applications. Contributors include well known and widely published Gestalt authors and practitioners as well as emergent writers of all ages and experience.

For updates, notices and more events, visit britishgestaltjournal.com

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If the event fee isn't accessible for you right now, please get in touch by emailing admin@britishgestaltjournal.com — we’re committed to ensuring no one is excluded due to financial barriers.